HKB
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Often appears with: pleasure, pain, and the good life · the passions and the emotions · reason and the intellect · justice as a virtue · good and evil · duty, conscience, and obligation · courage and cowardice · will, choice, and freedom · virtue as love or pride · vice as humility or hatred · types of pleasures · truthfulness and lying
Usually: argument (6) · detachment (5) · censure (2) · curiosity (2) · commentary or gloss (1) · list or catalogue (1) · reflection (1) · indignation (1) · skepticism (1)
“Whether an idea has its seat and source in the understanding or not, if it can only determine the choice by presupposing a feeling of pleasure in the subject, it follows that its capability of determining the choice depends altogether on the nature of the inner sense.” Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason · observation
“Things then are good or evil, only in reference to pleasure or pain. That we call GOOD, which is apt to cause or increase pleasure, or diminish pain in us; or else to procure or preserve us the possession of any other good or absence of any evil. And, on the contrary, we name that EVIL which is apt to produce or increase any pain, or diminish any pleasure in us; or else to procure us any evil, or deprive us of any good.” John Locke, An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 1 · insight
Locke defines pleasure and pain as basic ideas known by experience, then claims good and evil are only relative to pleasure and pain, which ground the passions like love.
OF MODES OF PLEASURE AND PAIN. 1. Pleasure and Pain, simple Ideas. AMONGST the simple ideas which we receive both from sensation and reflection, PAIN and PLEASURE are two very considerable ones. For as in the body there is sensation barely in itself, or accompanied with pain or pleasure, so the thought or perception of the mind is simply so, or else accompanied also with pleasure or pain, delight or trouble, call i…
Locke argues that happiness alone moves desire, defining happiness and misery as the extremes of what we take as good or evil by their relation to pleasure and pain.
45. Why the greatest Good is not always desired. This, I think, any one may observe in himself and others,—That the greater visible good does not always raise men’s desires in proportion to the greatness it appears, and is acknowledged, to have: though every little trouble moves us, and sets us on work to get rid of it. The reason whereof is evident from the nature of our happiness and misery itself. All present pai…
Locke explains that sensation-based knowledge is reliable enough for life, even if not as certain as demonstration, and criticizes extreme skepticism by distinguishing dream-like doubt from practical evidence.
For we cannot act anything but by our faculties; nor talk of knowledge itself, but by the help of those faculties which are fitted to apprehend even what knowledge is. But besides the assurance we have from our senses themselves, that they do not err in the information they give us of the existence of things without us, when they are affected by them, we are further confirmed in this assurance by other concurrent re…
He offers supporting reasons for sensation’s role in knowing external existence: we only get sense-ideas through appropriate organs, sensations differ from memory, and pleasure or pain tracks actual objects.
6. III. Thirdly, Because Pleasure or Pain, which accompanies actual Sensation, accompanies not the returning of those Ideas without the external Objects. Add to this, that many of those ideas are PRODUCED IN US WITH PAIN, which afterwards we remember without the least offence. Thus, the pain of heat or cold, when the idea of it is revived in our minds, gives us no disturbance; which, when felt, was very troublesome;…
Marcus lists ways the soul does violence to itself: becoming vexed, turning toward harming others, being ruled by pleasure or pain, being insincere, and acting thoughtlessly without a purpose aimed at rational law.
of any man's testimony. Be cheerful also, and seek not external help nor the tranquillity which others give. A man then must stand erect, not be kept erect by others. 6. If thou findest in human life anything better than justice, truth, temperance, fortitude, and, in a word, anything better than thy own mind's self-satisfaction in the things which it enables thee to do according to right reason, and in the condition…
In explaining natural virtues and vices, Hume proposes that pleasure and pain are the mind’s chief springs, and that virtue corresponds to qualities producing love or pride.
SECT. I OF THE ORIGIN OF THE NATURAL VIRTUES AND VICES We come now to the examination of such virtues and vices as are entirely natural, and have no dependance on the artifice and contrivance of men. The examination of these will conclude this system of morals. The chief spring or actuating principle of the human mind is pleasure or pain; and when these sensations are removed, both from our thought and feeling, we …
Socrates rejects the idea that pleasure is simply the absence of pain, distinguishes neutral “rest” from real pleasure, and illustrates it with examples like health, illness relief, smell, and anticipations of future pains and pleasures.
True. And there is a neutral state which is neither pleasure nor pain? There is. A state which is intermediate, and a sort of repose of the soul about either—that is what you mean? Yes. You remember what people say when they are sick? What do they say? That after all nothing is pleasanter than health. But then they never knew this to be the greatest of pleasures until they were ill. Yes, I know, he said. And…
Kant argues that practical principles grounded in objects of desire are empirical and cannot yield practical laws, since pleasure and pain can only be known through experience and vary among rational beings.
{BOOK*1|CHAPTER*1 ^paragraph 30} It is surprising that men, otherwise acute, can think it possible to distinguish between higher and lower desires, according as the ideas which are connected with the feeling of pleasure have their origin in the senses or in the understanding; for when we inquire what are the determining grounds of desire, and place them in some expected pleasantness, it is of no consequence whence t…
He uses German word distinctions to separate “well/ill” as conditions of feeling from “good/evil” as rational determinations of the will, illustrating this with Stoic pain and legal punishment examples.
{BOOK*1|CHAPTER*2 ^paragraph 5} The German language has the good fortune to possess expressions which do not allow this difference to be overlooked. It possesses two very distinct concepts and especially distinct expressions for that which the Latins express by a single word, bonum. For bonum it has das Gute [good], and das Wohl [well, weal], for malum das Bose [evil], and das Ubel [ill, bad], or das Well [woe]. So …