Abstract
I intend to outline here some philosophical theories of the nature of pleasure, and in turn some philosophical arguments concerning the value of pleasure, in the hope that doing so will aid in the assessment of attitudes towards the use of drugs to produce or enhance pleasure. In particular, a significant source of the support for continuing strong legal prohibitions on the use of drugs merely for pleasure is the common public attitude that such use is bad. Is there any sound basis for this disapproval of pleasure that is produced by drug use, and if so what can that basis be? And more specifically, is there any sound basis for the disapproval of the use of drugs for pleasure in itself, as opposed to disapproval because of other consequences such use has, or may be thought to have?
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References and Notes
Gilbert Ryle in The Concept of Mind, London, Hutchinson & Co., 1949, criticized extensively the view that pleasure is some kind of sensation or feeling, and few recent philosophers have defended a form of the property of conscious experience theory. J. J. C. Smart in An Outline of Utilitarian Ethics, Carlton, Melbourne University Press,. 1961, reprinted in a revised edition in J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1973, seems committed to such a view. Other philosophers, such as J. C. B. Gosling, Pleasure and Desire, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1969, and Anthony Kenny, Action, Emotion and Will, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963, argue that there is one sense of pleasure in which it is a sensation, but that not all pleasure is a sensation. Part of this theory’s importance is that probably most ordinary persons implicitly hold some version of it, and so it in turn underlies such persons’ attitudes towards the use of drugs for pleasure.
Among the more extensive discussions of pleasure sympathetic to some form of the preference theory are J. L. Cowan, Pleasure and Pain, New York, St. Martins Press, 1968, and D. L. Perry, The Concept of Pleasure, The Hague, Mouton, 1967. An excellent, shorter review of alternative theories of pleasure is William Alston, “Pleasure,” in Paul Edwards, ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, New York, Macmillan, 1967.
Smart and Williams, p. 19.
John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, S. Gorovitz, ed., Indianapolis, BobbsMerrill, 1971, pp. 18–19.
For readers unfamiliar with the philosophical literature and positions on the mind-body problem, two useful starting points are Richard Taylor, Metaphysics, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall, 1963, Chapters 1–3, and the entry, “The Mind-Body Problem,” by Jerome Schaffer in Paul Edwards, ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, New York, Macmillan, 1967.
Taylor and Schaffer also contain introductory discussions of materialism and physicalism.
For a general discussion and evaluation of ethical hedonism, see Richard Brandt, Ethical Theory, Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, 1959, Chapter 12, 13.
Smart and Williams, p. 25.
Mill, pp. 19–21. A contemporary defense of hedonism that employs the distinction between different quality pleasures is Rem Edwards, Pleasures and Pains: A Theory of Qualitative Hedonism, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1979.
A recent statement and defense of a happiness theory of the good for persons can be found in Richard Brandt, A Theory of the Good and the Right, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1979.
A recent statement and defense of the desire theory of the good for persons can be found in John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1971, Ch. 7.
See, for example, the criticisms of desire theories made by Brandt, Good and the Right, pp. 247–253.
Systematic statements and defenses of perfectionist theories are difficult to find in recent philosophical literature. Nevertheless, many persons are committed to some form of perfectionist theory, as I have construed such theories in the text, by their substantive views about the good for persons. For example, anyone who holds that it is good for a person not to read pornography and not to engage in exploitative personal relations, even if that person desires to or is made happy by doing so, is committed to what I have called a perfectionist theory.
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Brock, D.W. (1984). The Use of Drugs for Pleasure. In: Murray, T.H., Gaylin, W., Macklin, R. (eds) Feeling Good and Doing Better. Contemporary Issues in Biomedicine, Ethics, and Society. Humana Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-5168-2_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-5168-2_6
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