Utilitarianism, hedonism, and desert: essays in moral philosophy

Perhaps the greatest source of confusion about hedonism is this: Some philosophers think that pleasure is a special sort of sensation. Moore and many others have assumed that to get pleasure is to feel a certain something—a special, indefinable, phenomenologically uniform sensation—the feeling of “pleasure itself.” These philosophers quite naturally assume that hedonism is the view that this feeling is the fundamental bearer of positive intrinsic value.

The remarkable fact is that there simply is no such feeling. Feelings of the most disparate sorts may correctly be called “pleasures.” Sidgwick, Broad, Ryle, Brandt, and many others have made this clear. The implication is obvious: If we take hedonism to be the view that this uniform sensation is the sole bearer of positive intrinsic value, then we are driven to the conclusion that nothing intrinsically good has ever happened!