Hedonism

To put it at its simplest, hedonism—and thus, the related issues of hedonistic thought and hedonist behavior—concerns the constant pursuit of pleasure and happiness, which are taken to be the only worthwhile outcomes of any process of thinking or any bout of action. Hedonism is thus a philosophy and a way of being in the world that adheres firmly to the belief that pleasure and happiness are the ultimate and most important pursuits of any individual and indeed of humanity itself. This has significant implications, therefore, for the pleasure- and happiness-seeking pursuits of individuals within the context of global consumer cultures, specifically as it is the very promise of the arrival of these properties that is often seen to motivate consumer behavior. Before reflecting more on this, however, there is a rich and varied tradition of hedonistic thought that is instructive for us here.

Perhaps still the most widely known doctrine of hedonism—although neither proponent is likely to have agreed with that label—is expressed in the philosophical writings of the nineteenth-century British thinkers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. One of the most celebrated figures in the history of liberalism, Mill advocated “one very simple principle” that provides the foundation for the liberal idea of the private realm of freedom guaranteed to the individual. In sum, he argues, the state is only permitted to exercise power of the individual in order that it may prevent the consequences of his actions causing harm to others. This is significant because Mill believed that, if left to their own devices, individuals would go about pursuing their own good in their own way, and thus it is the pursuit of personal happiness and pleasure that guides individuals as they go about the business of their everyday lives.

Linked to this assumption is the claim that individuals have the capacity to exercise free choices, guided solely by their belief in making those choices based on the perceived chances of obtaining pleasure and happiness. In this way, individuals use their freedom of choice to seek the betterment of themselves, and thus, taken together, individuals pursuing their own good in their own way lends itself to an overall social process that is able to deliver the perfectibility of mankind. Crucially, then, what is motivating human thought and action is the pursuit of pleasure and happiness, which when translated into a collection of individual pursuits of pleasure and happiness are ultimately beneficial to society as a whole. Before Mill, Bentham offered a rather simpler calculation that of the importance of “the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.” As such, both individuals and governments ought to be guided in their thoughts and actions by a single, dominant concern, which is to quantitatively calculate the most efficient way of achieving the maximum level of happiness for the maximum number of people. If this is realized in practice, so the theory goes, then it will be possible to achieve the greatest total amount of happiness in a given society. Although there are nuanced differences between the two approaches outlined, each is clearly informed by the logic of hedonism: that pleasure and happiness ought rightly to be the only worthwhile concern of any thought or action.

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