Was Epicurus a Psychological Hedonist, an Ethical Hedonist, Both, or Neither?

This question has been formally debated both within the EpicureanFriends.com community and in the academic philosophical literature. At the time of this writing our most significant thread on this topic is here. The material in this FAQ answer is written to assist you in forming your own opinion. The answer matters practically, because - at least in the view of some - it shapes how we understand the entire enterprise of Epicurean philosophy.

Defining the Terms

Psychological hedonism is a descriptive thesis: the claim that all human beings are, as a matter of psychological fact, always ultimately motivated by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain — whether they admit it or not. It makes no claim about what people should do. On this view, everyone who does anything — including the Stoic who claims to be motivated by virtue alone — is ultimately seeking something they find pleasurable.

Ethical hedonism is a normative or prescriptive thesis: the claim that pleasure ought to be the goal of human action, and that actions are good insofar as they produce pleasure and bad insofar as they produce pain. It says nothing about whether people actually pursue pleasure in all their actions. It is perfectly consistent with ethical hedonism to hold that people frequently and disastrously fail to pursue pleasure — that they pursue virtue for its own sake, or submit to divine command — and that philosophy is needed to correct these errors.

The two theses are logically independent. You can hold ethical hedonism without holding psychological hedonism, and vice versa. The question of which Epicurus held — or whether he held both — is precisely what divides the commentators.

The Case for Psychological Hedonism

The central argument for the psychological reading begins with what scholars call the cradle argument. Epicurus appeals repeatedly to the behavior of young animals and human infants as evidence for his hedonism — the fact that all creatures, from birth, "rush toward pleasure and flee from pain without any reasoning" (Diogenes Laertius). The argument is that if Epicurus were making only a normative claim, the behavior of infants would be irrelevant evidence; they cannot deliberate about what they ought to do. The fact that he uses their behavior as evidence for his position suggests an empirical, psychological claim.

Raphael Woolf's 2004 paper in Phronesis — "What Kind of Hedonist Was Epicurus?" — is the most focused scholarly defense of the psychological reading, arguing that Principal Doctrine 25 is best read as an affirmation that whatever people claim their goals to be, their actual behavior will continue tracking nature's goal of pleasure. Emily Austin, in Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life (Oxford University Press, 2023), also defends a version of the psychological reading, holding that Epicurus grounded his ethics in facts about what living creatures actually pursue by nature.

The Case for Ethical Hedonism

The most powerful argument for the ethical reading is the one John Cooper makes in "Pleasure and Desire in Epicurus" (Reason and Emotion, Princeton University Press, 1999): if Epicurus's ethical theory turns out to be solely one of psychological hedonism, then it is not an ethical theory. It is a descriptive theory about human motivation, and nothing more. If people inevitably and always pursue pleasure whether they want to or not, the injunction to pursue pleasure becomes vacuous — you don't need philosophy to tell you what you're going to do anyway.

Larry J. Waggle, in "Epicurus: Psychological or Ethical Hedonist?" (Revista de Filosofía, 2007), reinforces this point with a methodological argument: the Letter to Menoeceus is full of prescriptive language — "we must practice," "we must reckon," "we must refer every choice and avoidance" — none of which would make sense if the agent were determined by nature to pursue pleasure regardless. The prescriptive language requires the possibility of choosing otherwise.

Julia Annas, in The Morality of Happiness (Oxford University Press, 1993), treats Epicurus primarily as an ethical theorist in the normative sense, showing how his account of pleasure as the final end participates in the same structure as Aristotle's account of eudaimonia: it specifies what the good life consists in, not a mechanism that compels behavior. Gosling and Taylor, in The Greeks on Pleasure (Oxford University Press, 1982), add that the Epicurean distinction between kinetic and katastematic pleasures — and the complex calculus by which some pleasures are to be avoided because they produce greater pain — presupposes genuine deliberative agency that psychological hedonism cannot accommodate.

What the Cradle Argument Actually Proves

The most important evidence for the psychological reading is the cradle argument, but two very different things might be meant by it:

Reading One: The young of all species pursue pleasure — this is evidence that pleasure is the call of nature, and therefore the right standard. The psychological fact that all creatures naturally pursue pleasure is what justifies the ethical norm. Nature itself has identified pleasure as the genuine good.

Reading Two: Everyone pursues what they think of as pleasure whether they admit it or not — including the Stoic who claims virtue alone. The psychological claim is the strong one: all adult behavior is likewise ultimately pleasure-directed.

Reading One is considerably more defensible. The appeal to infants and animals does genuine philosophical work: it establishes that pleasure is not an arbitrary cultural preference but a feature of how living creatures are constituted by nature, making it the natural standard for evaluation. Reading Two faces the serious problem that if every action is "really" about pleasure at some deep level, the claim becomes unfalsifiable and the concept of pleasure loses any determinate content. The ascetic who renounces bodily pleasure and the libertine who pursues it are both "really" pursuing pleasure — but this explains nothing.

A longer version of this document can be found at EpicurusToday.com.

Key scholarly works: John M. Cooper, "Pleasure and Desire in Epicurus," in Reason and Emotion (Princeton University Press, 1999); Raphael Woolf, "What Kind of Hedonist Was Epicurus?" Phronesis 49 (2004); Larry J. Waggle, "Epicurus: Psychological or Ethical Hedonist?" Revista de Filosofía 25 (2007); Julia Annas, The Morality of Happiness (Oxford University Press, 1993); J.C.B. Gosling and C.C.W. Taylor, The Greeks on Pleasure (Oxford University Press, 1982). A full treatment of this question, with extended scholarly analysis, is available in the article "Was Epicurus a Psychological Hedonist, an Ethical Hedonist, Both, or Neither?" at EpicurusToday.com.