Chapter III: EMPIRICAL HEDONISM (continued)

1. To get a clearer view of this method, let us consider objections tending to show its inherent impracticability: as, first, that “pleasure as feeling cannot be conceived,” and that a “sum of pleasures is intrinsically unmeaning”: 131-134

2. that transient pleasures cannot satisfy; and that the predominance of self-love tends to defeat its own end: 134-138

3. that the habit of introspectively comparing pleasures is unfavourable to pleasure: 138-140

4. that any quantitative comparison of pleasures and pains is vague and uncertain, even in the case of our own past experiences: 140-144

5. that it also tends to be different at different times: especially through variations in the present state of the person performing the comparison: 144-146

6. that, in fact, the supposed definite commensurability of pleasures is an unverifiable assumption: 146-147

7. that there is a similar liability to error in appropriating the experience of others; and in inferring future pleasures from past. 147-150

CHAPTER IV

OBJECTIVE HEDONISM AND COMMON SENSE

1. It may seem that the judgments of Common Sense respecting the Sources of Happiness offer a refuge from the uncertainties of Empirical Hedonism: but there are several fundamental defects in this refuge; 151-153

2. and these judgments when closely examined are found to be perplexingly inconsistent. 153-158

3. Still we may derive from them a certain amount of practical guidance. 158-161

CHAPTER V

HAPPINESS AND DUTY

1. It has been thought possible to prove on empirical grounds that one’s greatest happiness is always attained by the performance of duty. 162-163

2. But no such complete coincidence seems to result from a consideration either of the Legal Sanctions of Duty: 163-166

3. or of the Social Sanctions: 166-170

4. or of the Internal Sanctions: even if we consider not merely isolated acts of duty, but a virtuous life as a whole. 170-175

CHAPTER VI

DEDUCTIVE HEDONISM

1. Hedonistic Method must ultimately rest on facts of empirical observation: but it might become largely deductive, through scientific knowledge of the causes of pleasure and pain: 176-180

2. but we have no practically available general theory of these causes, either psychophysical, 180-190

3. or biological. 190-192

4. Nor can the principle of ‘increasing life,’ or that of ‘aiming at self-development,’ or that of ‘giving free play to impulse,’ be so defined as to afford us any practical guidance to the end of Egoism, without falling back on the empirical comparison of pleasures and pains. 192-195

BOOK III

INTUITIONISM