Over the last few threads in which I’ve participated substantially (here, here, and here), I’ve been pushed to look more and more into a conception of ethics that I’ve been developing for quite some time. A conception I’ve temporarily labelled as “life-as-experience,” which I contrast with the “life-as-survival” view I attribute to David Kelley1, among others – where “life-as” refers to my understanding of what “life” in “life as the standard of value” means.
I hold that Kelley, et al., contend that Rand truly means that survival is the standard of value; whereas I think this fails to express Rand’s full meaning, and moreover fails to express the truth of ethics, which is that it is not survival alone which is the standard of value, but “life as it is experienced.” By “experience,” I primarily mean as it is characterized by pleasures and pains.
I’m not yet ready to try to describe this idea in full. I have not yet settled on a terminology. I haven’t satisfied myself that I even understand what I’m driving at, in totality, let alone thought the whole thing through in all of its application. I don’t know whether I will finally accept this burgeoning concept or modify it substantially or discard it altogether. I don’t know whether I will come to find that it still fits with Rand’s ethics (though so far I think this is the case), or whether it will finally constitute a breach with Objectivism and the emergence of some new philosophy more reflective of reality.
This thread, then, is an attempt to try to “think out loud” about some of these issues – it is an “exploration,” rather than an argument (though arguments for or against my position are welcome in response). Specifically, I would like to explore the relationship between pleasure and value. It is my current position that there is a a deep and abiding relationship between the two. One that is under-realized and consequently underappreciated, or even absent from the stated ethical reasoning of other Objectivists. (I have even seen some Objectivists display what I would call hostility, or suspicion at the least, against the pursuit of pleasure.2 I believe that this sort of attitude is deeply misplaced.)
One of the key confusions that often plagues this sort of topic, I find, is that “pleasure” can refer to a variety of experiences. Eventually I mean to speak to all that sort of thing “pleasure” represents, in totality, but first and foremost we should consider pleasure in its most basic sense: a positive physical sensation. This is the pleasure of the taste of good food, or the soft caress of satin sheets, or the cooling of the skin from a breeze on a hot day, or the whole-body lightning of orgasm.
In the first place, we should wonder whether there is any relationship at all between such pleasure and value. Value is, as always, “that which one acts to gain and/or keep,” but it is more to the point to ask whether there is any relationship between pleasure and that which a rational man values: value consonant with Rand’s conception of ethics, holding “life as the standard of value.”
I say that there is. Moreover that Rand was aware of this, describing this relationship thusly (in “The Objectivist Ethics”):
Quote
Now in what manner does a human being discover the concept of “value”? By what means does he first become aware of the issue of “good or evil” in its simplest form? By means of the physical sensations of pleasure or pain. Just as sensations are the first step of the development of a human consciousness in the realm of cognition, so they are its first step in the realm of evaluation.
The capacity to experience pleasure or pain is innate in a man’s body; it is part of his nature, part of the kind of entity he is. He has no choice about it, and he has no choice about the standard that determines what will make him experience the physical sensation of pleasure or of pain. What is that standard? His life.
Consider first that this observation implies that it is pleasure (i.e. physical pleasure) which allows a man to have some conception – any conception at all – of “the good.” It is through the experience of such pleasure that teaches man to discern good from evil (which finds its corresponding analogue in physical pain).
Now, this cannot be the end point of ethics. Moreover, the standard Rand refers to in that final sentence (His life.) is not describing the full standard of the Objectivist Ethics, where “life is the standard of value.” If it were, then ethics would be as simple as equating pleasure to good and pain to evil: Objectivism would be hedonistic.
What we come to learn, however, is that some things our “natural standard” pronounces good (which is to say, that which we find physically pleasurable of our nature) will lead, in time, to pain and death. Even that which is very pleasurable, should it ultimately lead to pain and death, cannot be “the good,” then, as we come to understand it conceptually, abstracting away from our experience of temporary, momentary pleasures – which, remember, is our source of the very concept of “the good” in the first place.
How would this operate in a person? Rand describes the experience of pleasure/pain as the “first step in the realm of evaluation.” Well, what are the subsequent steps? And where do they lead?
Consider a child. Or a baby. There are pleasure and pain for the baby (“innate,” as Rand has it), and though the baby has no conceptual understanding of it initially, what these sensations communicate are the launch points for “good” and “evil.” Pleasure is the good, it is what is desired, it is what is wanted, it is what is valued. And pain is not simply the lack of such pleasure, or a “neutral” state, but it is a negative analogue to pleasure. (Pain is no less “real” for that, and matters just as much as any other fact… despite any admirable sense of life which may eventually inspire a man to act as though some pain is “less important” than a corresponding pleasure). Pain is thus the evil, it is what is shunned, what is avoided, and I believe it sensible to say that it is disvalued in consequence.
The baby grows and matures. With experience and development comes the understanding that certain things cause pleasure and others cause pain. Concrete values follow suit, as the baby comes to value those things that bring pleasure and disvalue those that bring pain. Such simple associations develop and grow into childhood and can persist well beyond, into adolescence or even adulthood. The young child will, more than likely, not wish to go to the dentist. The young child sees no good in it, whatever lecture he hears, because for him the dentist is simply a bringer of pain. The young child wishes instead to eat ice cream, morning, noon and night. Ice cream is pleasurable, and the young child cannot conceive of even the mid-range consequences of overeating ice cream, let alone the long-term effects of habitual poor eating. Those long-term effects have no reality whatever to him.
But as the child grows, and acquires perspective (and continues to gain experience, and continues to develop mentally), he may come to see the sense in putting down the ice cream from time to time and going to the dentist. He understands that his forbearance from eating ice cream comes at the cost of some “good” now (i.e. pleasure), but will help him to avoid even greater “evils” (pains) to come. So, too, the dentist, such that eventually the mild pain of a regular cleaning may be borne for the sake of avoiding worse pains later, or to continue to enjoy the pleasures that having healthy teeth affords. It may be, in time, that the child can pronounce going to the dentist as “good” and eating too much ice cream as “evil” (though “bad” is more likely, but amounts to the same) – just as an adult might – because he finally and thoroughly understands the actual relationship these activities have with pleasure and pain, long-term.
As I’m describing it, it is not that man acquires some perspective which completely divorces pleasure from “the good” (or pain from evil), but that he comes to understand that the simple equation of pleasure to good (which is natural, “innate”) will not serve him long-term, because it will lead to far more pain than pleasure. If he would like to have more pleasures as he lives, and fewer pains, then he must learn to value accordingly.
These are the “next steps” of evaluation.
But is it the last step? Is it ever the case that good and evil stand free and clear from pleasure and pain? (For instance, does the final conception of “life as the standard of value” have anything at all to do with pleasure and pain, apart from heritage? Or are they utterly separate by that point, such that one may evaluate “good,” qua the Objectivist Ethics, without ever any need to consider such pleasures or pains, or even reference them?)
I will most likely approach this question more substantively in a later post, but for now, let me introduce another quote from Rand (per the Lexicon, from “Our Cultural Value-Deprivation” in The Objectivist, 4/66; and please note Rand’s use of the term “experience” here, which obviously predates my own adoption of the term to express my meaning, but was wholly independent of it, as I was completely unaware of this quote at the time):
Quote
The form in which man experiences the reality of his values is pleasure . . . . A chronic lack of pleasure, of any enjoyable, rewarding or stimulating experiences, produces a slow, gradual, day-by-day erosion of man’s emotional vitality, which he may ignore or repress, but which is recorded by the relentless computer of his subconscious mechanism that registers an ebbing flow, then a trickle, then a few last drops of fuel—until the day when his inner motor stops and he wonders desperately why he has no desire to go on, unable to find any definable cause of his hopeless, chronic sense of exhaustion.
I am open to the interpretation of other intelligent, rational minds (as I always strive to be), but this suggests to me that the relationship between pleasure and “the good,” or value more generally, is not just that pleasure provides some initial spark for evaluation, before they go their separate ways… but that there is an ongoing, vital relationship between them.
I would go so far as to say that a life without pleasure (again: this is “just” physical pleasure in my current usage, though I mean to argue that there is also a vital relationship between such physical pleasures and those of the corresponding cognitive/emotional/spiritual kind – including happiness) is not worth living. The consequence of a life filled with pain is something else entirely, and far, far worse.
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- Kelley’s written position is a convenient way to address what I consider to be a widespread understanding (or misunderstanding) of the Objectivist Ethics, where he’s written (in The Logical Structure of Objectivism):
Quote
Although Ayn Rand made it clear that she meant her morality to ensure a rich, fully human life, it is the bare fundamental alternative of survival versus death that stands at the root of all values.
Several admirers of Rand’s approach to ethics have debated the sense in which survival can serve the most basic criterion of ethics. Here we have argued that survival is the literal alternative of life versus death, existence versus nonexistence.
- The pursuit of pleasure can sometimes be misread as “hedonism,” but these two things are not – or need not necessarily be, at least – the same thing. Hedonism is, as Rand writes, “the doctrine which holds that the good is whatever gives you pleasure and, therefore, pleasure is the standard of morality.” Yet it is possible to reject the idea that “the good is whatever gives you pleasure” and that “pleasure is the standard of morality,” while still wanting to experience some particular pleasure consonant with life, with man’s nature, and with a rational standard of morality.
Pursuing such a pleasure, even for the sake of that pleasure alone, is not “hedonistic” but life-affirming.
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