Hedonia
Authors: Vittersø Joar 
Published: February 2025

Hedonia is strictly speaking about pleasure and this chapter starts with reviewing that concept. The wellbeing literature defines pleasure in a variety of ways; it can, for instance, refer to a bodily sensation, a kind of feeling, an attitude, or an overarching referent for positive affect. The most stringent conceptualization of pleasure is offered in affective neuroscience. Most neuroscientists consider pleasure to be a specific attribute of a feeling state, a mental and evaluative property that tells an organism that it is functioning well, that the current situation is in harmony, and no urgent task needs to be taken care of right now. On this view, pleasure is a spontaneous valuation mechanism that gives us a rough idea about what is good in our lives. Hedonism refers to several philosophical theories that identify pleasure (and the absence of pain) as the only intrinsic—or noninstrumental—value in human life, and that being well means to maximizing pleasure (and minimizing pain). Some hedonic-oriented philosophers speak of enjoyment and suffering rather than pleasure and pain, but it is unclear what is meant by these terms. The lack of conceptual consensus poses a problem for hedonism since the different approaches do not agree on what a hedonist is supposed to maximize. Other objections against hedonism have been raised. One regards the so-called philosophy of swine debate, which can be explained as follows. If the amount of pleasure is quantified as an integral of the intensity and duration of pleasure, an extremely long life filled with low-intensity pleasure will outperform a short life of intense pleasure. Hence, if pleasure maximization is the only good, the life of a primitive organism experiencing barely noticeable pleasure during a time span of 1000 years must be better than the life of an extremely pleasant, but only 70 years long, human life. These numbers are arbitrary, but for a unidimensional feeling quality, there will always be a cutoff between intensity and duration. Only by introducing a distinction between higher and lower pleasures could John Stuart Mill solve the problem and argue that “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied” (Mill, 2001, p. 9). However, with two qualitatively distinct pleasures, the maximization argument vanishes. Another objection against hedonism pursues Nozick’s notion of an experience machine. The machine offers to lock you up in a tank that is programmed to give you all the imaginable experiences you wish for. The downside is that you must stay in the machine for the rest of your life. Although the experience machine is a playful idea, it has not had the devastating effect on hedonism that Nozick hoped for. There are simply too many alternative ways of interpreting the thought experiment to make it useful. Hedonism was born long before the biological and social sciences. Today, confronted with modern knowledge, it is difficult to see this old doctrine as anything but an anachronism. A scientific understanding of pleasure and other valuation mechanisms is inconsistent with the idea that pleasure (net of pain) is the only noninstrumental value in life. The chapter ends by exploring the concept of hedonic wellbeing (HWB). HWB was introduced as a synonym for SWB and is defined as a combination of high life satisfaction, more positive affect, and less negative affect. Objections have been raised against the inclusion of life satisfaction as a component of a hedonic term, and some researchers therefore restrict HWB to be a composite of positive affect and negative affect. The humanistic theory of wellbeing uses the term HWB as the common name for two wellbeing indicators, referred to as harmony feelings (tranquility, contentment, happiness, and high pleasure) and spontaneous judgments (life satisfaction, domain satisfactions, and the presence of meaning in life).