psychological hedonism

psychological hedonism, in philosophical psychology, the view that all human action is ultimately motivated by desires for pleasure and the avoidance of pain. It has been espoused by a variety of distinguished thinkers, including Epicurus, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill, and important discussions of it can also be found in works by Plato, Aristotle, Joseph Butler, G.E. Moore, and Henry Sidgwick.

Because its defenders generally assume that agents are motivated only by the prospect of their own pleasures and pains, psychological hedonism is a form of psychological egoism. Psychological egoism is a broader notion, however, since one can hold that human actions are exclusively self-interested without insisting that self-interest always reduces to matters of pleasure and pain. As an empirical thesis about human motivation, psychological hedonism is logically distinct from claims about the value of desires. It is thus distinct from axiological or normative hedonism, the view that only pleasure has intrinsic value, and from ethical hedonism, the view that pleasure-producing actions are morally right.

Psychological hedonists tend to construe “pleasure” very broadly, so as to include all positive feelings or experiences, such as joy, satisfaction, ecstasy, contentment, bliss, and so forth. Likewise, “pain” is typically understood so as to include all negative feelings or experiences, such as aches, discomfort, fear, guilt, anxiousness, regret, and so forth. Even construing pleasure and pain widely, however, it is implausible to think that all acts successfully produce pleasure or reduce pain. People are often mistaken about what will achieve those results, and, in some cases, aiming at pleasure is actually counterproductive (the so-called paradox of hedonism). Consequently, psychological hedonism is usually put forward as a claim about what agents believe or take to be pleasure-producing and pain-reducing.

Hedonists tend to assume that agents attempt to maximize their net pleasure over pain. They need not deny that agents frequently benefit others, however, since the thesis can be preserved by holding that other-benefiting actions are nonetheless hedonistically motivated. Hedonism itself is neutral as to which kinds of actions are means to pleasure and about which kinds of experiences are pleasurable.

Psychological hedonism is usually defended by appealing to observations of human behaviour, together with an implicit challenge to find alternative models of action that are equally explanatory and yet do not collapse into the hedonistic account. It would be refuted, however, by a clear case of non-hedonistic motivation. Standard counterexamples include the soldier on the battlefield who gives up his life to save comrades and the sacrifices of parents for their children. Hedonists usually respond to such examples by redescribing apparently altruistic motivations in hedonistically egoistic terms. The soldier, for example, may be said to have acted so as to avoid a lifetime of remorse. The fact that such redescriptions are possible, however, does not in itself make them plausible. Hedonists may also insist that attempting to obtain pleasure or avoid pain is simply part of what it is for something to be a motive. That move, however, transforms what purports to be a factual claim about human motivation into a trivial definitional truth.