Perspectives On "Proving" That Pleasure is "The Good"

Quote from Nate

Bailey's Fragment 10 alludes to Epicurus having declared HΔONH ("pleasure") to be TAΓAΘON or “the good”.

The Tetrapharmakos also indicates that TAΓAΘON ("the good") is HΔONH ("pleasure").

Athanaeus seems to record Epicurus as identifying TAΓAΘON ("the good") with HΔONH ("pleasure") in Deipnosophists (U67). Diogenes Laërtius also documents this attestation in Lives of Eminent Philosophers.

Seneca records Epicurus as having written HIC SVMMVM BONVM VOLVPTAS EST, “here our highest good is pleasure” (Letters To Lucilius 21.10). Lucretius also employs the phrase BONVM SVMMVM in De Rerum Natura, Book VI.

In his Epistle to Menoikeus, Epicurus declares HΔONH ("pleasure") to be the ΠPOTON AΓAΘON the "first good". Interestingly, he later declares TO MEΓIΣTON AΓAΘON ΦPONHΣIΣ, that "the greatest” or “highest good” is “prudence” (or “practical wisdom”). Epicurus also describes ΦPONHΣIΣ ("prudence") as being the APXH, the "beginning" or "foundation". Incidentally, he also identifies HΔONH ("pleasure") as both the APXHN ("beginning") and TEΛOΣ ("end").

In KD7, Epicurus refers to AΣΦAΛEIAN (“security”) as a ΦΥΣEΩΣ AΓAΘΟΝ (“natural good”). Similarly, in KD6 (among a variety of translations), he describes any means by which to acquire ΘAPPEIN (“confidence” or “the assurance of safety”) from or between people as being a ΦΥΣΙΝ […] AΓAΘΟΝ (also translated as a “natural good”).

Philodemus contrasts the general ideas of TΩN AΓAΘΩN with TΩN KAKΩN or “the good” with “ill” (U38); of interest, later, Usener translates Philodemus’ phrase TON XPHΣTON (tón khrēstón) as “the good” (U180).

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I just read Philodemus' treatise "On Death" and found an instance of the phrase TO MEΓIΣTON AΓAΘON (19.1). Throughout the treatise, he alludes to the pursuit and enjoyment of TOY KPATIΣTON BIOY, or "the best life" (38.14).

Adjective

κρᾰ́τῐστος (kratistos) m (feminine κρᾰτῐ́στη, neuter κρᾰ́τῐστον); first/second declension

superlative degree of ᾰ̓γᾰθός (agathós): best

superlative degree of κρατύς (kratús) strongest, mightiest, most powerful

Usage notes

Used as the superlative of ᾰ̓γᾰθός (agathós), along with ἄρῐστος (áristos) and βέλτῐστος (béltistos).

all of these points have been mentioned but...

• Pleasure is something we don't need to reason to determine it's worth, the experience of pleasure shows that by it's very presence in us.

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8. No pleasure is in itself evil, but the things which produce certain pleasures entail annoyances many times greater than the pleasures themselves.

• All choices we make ultimately move toward our pleasure. Whether we choose rightly is another issue.
• To be asked "why would you want to experience pleasure" is almost redundant, it's like being asked why do you want to have fresh air or why do you want functioning mind.
• We don't need to be convinced of pleasure, rather we are usually taught that pleasure is bad and some other thing is good.

Overall, pleasure just has a terrible reputation, for some reason even non religious friends of mine do not desire to admit pleasure is the highest good. Sometimes they exchange the word with happiness, wellbeing, fulfillment etc.. Sometimes it's the all encompassing "good person" alternative.

All these quasi Christian and Stoic influencers in the world don't help either, Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, Russell Brand etc...have such a large affect on the younger generations 18-45 and commonly preach pleasure is bad. Anyway small tangent.

Quote from Eoghan Gardiner

Anyway small tangent.

Not so small -- that perspective dominates the world and it's easy to give in to it and retreat into nihilism in the face of it. In fact I'd say it would be impossible not to do so if you couldn't identify at least some number of allies in your life against it.

Quote from Eoghan Gardiner

Overall, pleasure just has a terrible reputation, for some reason even non religious friends of mine do not desire to admit pleasure is the highest good.

Perhaps this is because when first impulses are followed instead of the wise consideration of choices and avoidances, an individual may end up with a unpleasant result.

Another question: does desire cause one to be "blinded" or unable to clearly observe reality?

Desire is a motivator (both a feeling and a thought) to take a specific action when we believe that what we do will result in pleasure and enjoyment. Pleasure is just an end result when life-serving human needs are met. Yet desire and pleasure get all tangled up. (There is still more introspection which I myself need to do on this).

Quote from Kalosyni

Quote from Eoghan Gardiner

Overall, pleasure just has a terrible reputation, for some reason even non religious friends of mine do not desire to admit pleasure is the highest good.

Perhaps this is because when first impulses are followed instead of the wise consideration of choices and avoidances, an individual may end up with a unpleasant result.

Great point. What happens is after a good length of time choosing pleasures which lead to more pains, the person grows disillusioned. They are then introduced to Stoicism\Islam\Christianity\newage\Buddhism and because of the many restrictions of those belief systems it leads to a life of less pain and overall more pleasure due to the removal of the pleasures which led to greater pains (whatever they were for the person)

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5. It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living pleasantly. Whenever any one of these is lacking, when, for instance, the person is not able to live wisely, though he lives well and justly, it is impossible for him to live a pleasant life.

Most of these beliefs also lead to practicing some form of Virtue Ethics (8 fold path, Decalogue, Shariah etc..) which makes life more pleasurable or is conducive to long term pleasure.

I guess what I am trying to say is that they are beguiled by the belief system when really all that has happened is they are more careful with their hedonic calculation.

According to Professor Sharon Street, in her chapter “Nothing ‘Really’ Matters, but That’s Not What Matters” from Does Anything Really Matter? Essays on Parfit on Objectivity (Oxford University Press, 2017), the attempt to prove that pleasure is the good rests on a mistaken metaethical assumption—namely, that normative truths must be robustly attitude-independent in order to be real or meaningful. Street argues that this demand, central to Derek Parfit’s non-naturalist realism, is both conceptually confused and unnecessary for normative thought.

From Street’s constructivist or Humean antirealist standpoint, evaluative truths like “pleasure is good” do not stand or fall by whether they correspond to some metaphysically independent normative realm. Rather, their truth is constituted within the context of a deliberating agent’s practical standpoint. On this view, to say “pleasure is the good” is to say something from within a framework of evaluative commitments, not to assert a metaphysical fact discoverable apart from those commitments.

Thus, the question “Can you prove that pleasure is the good?” is, on her account, ill-formed. There is no external, neutral court of appeal by which such a claim could be vindicated once and for all. What we can do is examine whether valuing pleasure survives critical scrutiny within our web of normative attitudes—whether it is what we find, on reflection, we are most deeply committed to. If it is, then pleasure is the good—from that standpoint. And Street insists that this is all that normativity requires.

Importantly, Street’s evolutionary debunking argument bolsters this view. If our evaluative dispositions—such as the tendency to value pleasure and avoid pain—are products of evolutionary forces, then it becomes implausible to think they are tracking mind-independent normative truths. We are not, in her analogy, consulting a “cosmic truth detector”; we are engaging in a deeply human process of constructing what matters to us. Trying to prove that pleasure is good by appeal to some robustly independent truth is epistemically circular: it assumes what it seeks to justify.

In sum, Street’s chapter argues that we do not need to prove that pleasure is objectively the good in order for it to matter. The normative authority of pleasure emerges not from correspondence with an independent moral realm, but from its reflective endorsement within our evaluative standpoint. As she puts it, the fear that “nothing really matters” misunderstands what mattering is. The fact that things matter to us, in ways that withstand our most serious reflection, is what mattering consists in—and that is enough.

Quote from DistantLaughter

From Street’s constructivist or Humean antirealist standpoint, evaluative truths like “pleasure is good” do not stand or fall by whether they correspond to some metaphysically independent normative realm.

That statement and much of the rest of the information you've presented there DL jumps out at me as needing emphasis and expansion. We're not talking here about applying that simply to "Pleasure is the good" but to any assertion which seeks to assert the existence of a "metaphysically independent normative realm." That's what Epicurean physics rejects by rejecting the possibility of divine order or any argument by design. As stated in the rest of your summary, the test is a matter of determining "what matters to us."

I'd say that's essential to understand about Epicuru's "canon of truth" -- it's not an attempt to be a "cosmic truth detector" because there is no cosmic divine truth as any supernatural theory or religion asserts to exist. There's only "what matters to us" and that's where we need to focus all our effort.

Sharon Street’s critique in “Nothing ‘Really’ Matters, but That’s Not What Matters” is not merely directed at the attempt to prove that pleasure is the good, but at any metaethical framework that assumes real normativity must be grounded in a metaphysically independent, attitude-transcendent realm. This assumption—central to Derek Parfit’s non-naturalist realism—is, for Street, both conceptually misguided and unnecessary for meaningful ethical thought. From her constructivist standpoint, what matters is not what’s true from nowhere, but what withstands scrutiny from within our own reflective evaluative outlook.

This is where her thought strikingly converges with the Epicurean rejection of cosmic teleology. Like Street, Epicurus denies the existence of any divine or supernatural moral order that human beings must detect or conform to. Epicurean physics, with its insistence on atomism and the absence of providential design, closes the door on moral realism of the theistic or Platonic kind. What replaces it is a focus on our faculties—aisthēsis (sensation), pathē (feeling), and prolepsis (preconception)—and the recognition that our criteria for truth and value lie within us, not in some cosmic blueprint. In both systems, normativity is human-centered and constructed, not discovered in a realm beyond.

Street’s analogy—that we are not using a “cosmic truth detector” but are instead building a framework of what matters to us—is deeply consonant with the Epicurean “canon of truth.” Epicurus’s emphasis on sensation, feeling, and preconception as the criteria for knowledge is not an attempt to uncover eternal, mind-independent truths, but a method for navigating the world as it appears to us, in ways that are grounded in human nature and conducive to our flourishing. For both thinkers, the idea of some moral truth existing independently of what humans actually care about is not just superfluous—it is a misunderstanding of what it means for something to matter at all.

Maybe neuro science will prove it someday.

Can there be anything "good" without a positiv affection ? Isn´t that ( positive affection / pleasure ) and the desire for that, what differentiates us against robots ?

When Pleasure/Pain is the core of all personal values than it is the only intrinsic good. But yes we must separate Pleasure and the consequences that have to be evaluated separately against further Pleasure/Pain.

The Stoic say that Virtue leads always to good things, Pleasure not. For that the separation is crucial. With this analysis I can see, that the statement "Virtue is always good, Pleasure not " has this problems:

1. That it is just a defintion (tautalogy) ( Virtue (the good) leads to good things/outcomes )

2. Good things / outcomes are externals for Stoics so cannot be good (in their own definition) so Virtue leads only to no-goods (indifferents/externals)

3. When Virtue is good because it always leads to good outcomes, than there is a differentiation between Virtue and "Good", so 2 separate things and Virtue gets good because of the outcomes (= what makes Virtue instrumentally and valuable only because of the outcomes)

4. And how do we value "good things/outcomes" ? With affection, feelings, so we judge everything with our feelings, in the core with Pleasure / Pain and also we judge their consequences with Pleasure/Pain.

Thats currently my prove that Pleasure is the supreme intrinsic good and not Virtue which is the greates instrumental good with its core phronesis (prudence ) and philia (friendship) which both are the basics for every ethic / moral. In my Opinion