What makes an experience a pleasure or a pain? This question, which is important in both ethics and philosophy of mind, has usually received one of two answers. First, it has been suggested that there is a certain quality of the experience itself – often called a hedonic tone – that accounts for its hedonic status.Footnote ¹ Pleasures all share a positive hedonic tone; pains are experiences with a negative hedonic tone. The standard objection to this view, thought to be decisive by most contemporary writers on the subject, is that there simply is no such thing as hedonic tone – that is, no internal experiential feature common to all pleasures and to all pains.

This has led many philosophers to believe that the hedonic status of an experience is a function not of its intrinsic ‘feel’, but of how we respond to it. Pleasures are defined as those mental states that are in some sense liked or pursued for their own sake, while pains are those mental states that are correspondingly disliked or avoided.Footnote ² Apart from this, they need not have anything in common.

In this article, I argue that this move to preferential and motivational accounts of pleasure and pain is unwarranted. First, as I explain in sections I and II, the hedonic tone view has been dismissed too quickly: there is no clear introspective or neuroscientific evidence that pleasures do not share a phenomenal quality. Second, even if it should turn out that they do not, that does not imply that pleasure must be analysed in terms of liking or motivation. In section III, I try to show that doing so yields a view that is phenomenologically implausible and forces us to make some quite controversial normative claims. A better response is to say that there is more than one positive hedonic tone and more than one negative hedonic tone. What the tones have in common is only their intrinsic positivity or negativity. This yields a normative and pluralistic hedonic tone view that has generally been overlooked in the literature, but appears to be a perfectly possible and even reasonably plausible account of pleasure and pain. I describe it more carefully in the final sections of the article.

Before I turn to these matters, however, I need to say a few words to clarify the question which the theories just mentioned are trying to answer. In everyday language, the words ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’ are paradigmatically used to describe certain sensory experiences, such as orgasms and headaches. In the philosophical discussion of which this article is a part, however, they are typically used in a broader sense, in which they refer to all experiences that are (in some sense to be discussed in the following sections) positive or negative in their own right.Footnote ³ For this reason, some writers have thought that we should instead rely on the terms ‘enjoyment’ and ‘suffering’.Footnote ⁴ This suggestion clearly has some merit, and I will often follow it. However, to avoid repetition, I will also use the traditional ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’. For the sake of simplicity I will sometimes formulate my arguments only in terms of pleasure or only in terms of pain. I do, however, intend them to apply to both negative and positive hedonic states.

Somewhat confusingly, there is also another phenomenon discussed by philosophers under the heading of ‘pain’ (sometimes with the prefixes ‘sensory’ or ‘physical’ added). Human beings and most other animals are equipped with specific nerve-endings, so-called nociceptors, which respond to stimuli that tend to cause tissue damage. This is simply a separate sensory capacity, and – just as we find with all the other sensory modalities (such as sight, hearing, touch, heat, etc.) – it involves a particular sensory phenomenal quality. There is something common to experiences of pinpricks, toothaches and muscle cramps that is lacking in other unpleasant sensory experiences such as nausea or smelling rotten meat. Let us call the sensory quality of nociception pain_n and pain in the sense of suffering pain_s. Pain_n is in most cases accompanied by pain_s; otherwise we would of course not refer to them by the same word. The correlation is not perfect, however. Mild pain_n, such as you may experience during a massage, often does not lead to pain_s; it may even be pleasant. Moreover, there are people who, due to brain damage, appear capable of experiencing intense pain_n without any pain_s at all.Footnote ⁵ Pain_n is, in other words, not essentially hedonically negative. That is why it makes sense to say that sensations of pain need not be painful, or that someone might enjoy feeling pain. In the rest of the article, the term ‘pain’ refers only to pain_s.Footnote ⁶

I. THE MONISTIC HEDONIC TONE VIEW

According to the hedonic tone view, pleasant experiences all contain a phenomenal quality referred to as positive hedonic tone, while the defining characteristic of painful experiences is considered to be, as one might expect, their negative hedonic tone. The most common form of the hedonic tone viewFootnote ⁷ – and the one that critics almost exclusively have focused on – is monistic: there is only one hedonically positive phenomenal quality and only one negative. In this section, my aim is to describe and clarify this doctrine.

It is important not to confuse the positive and negative hedonic tones with any particular bodily sensation, perception, thought, volition or emotion. Supporters of the view accept that as long as we are talking about these kinds of mental states, we will indeed fail to find one that is shared by all pleasures and all pains. Rather, the idea is that all pleasant experiences – whatever sensations, perception, thoughts, volitions and emotions they are composed of – contain a further ingredient that makes them feel good: the positive hedonic tone. Hedonic tone is, in other words, conceived of as ‘something ‘over and above’ (other) emotive, conative and cognitive parts of the experience’.Footnote ⁸ This further ‘something’ has been described as a kind of ‘glow’ or ‘aura’ that ‘pervades’ the experience.Footnote ⁹ Of course we cannot take this too literally. Supporters of the hedonic tone view admit that it is impossible to give a reductive or non-metaphorical analysis of the phenomenon of hedonic tone; it is conceived of as, in C. D. Broad's words, a quality ‘which we cannot define but are perfectly acquainted with’.Footnote ¹⁰

Hedonic tones are thought to have the ability to accompany all sorts of (what would otherwise be) non-hedonic mental states. They are not just attributes or effects of bodily sensations. Thus, non-sensory experiences like laughing at a joke, thinking about a philosophical problem or helping someone you care about can all contain positive (or negative) hedonic tone and so constitute enjoyment (or suffering).Footnote ¹¹

According to one version of the hedonic tone view, defended by Karl Duncker, hedonic tone only exists as an ‘aspect’ of otherwise non-hedonic elements of consciousness. It is never an independent ‘unit of experience’ in the way that a thought or a sensation is. For instance, when a person enjoys being tickled, the pleasure will not be a separate mental event, but only an aspect or tone of the tickling sensation.Footnote ¹² This view has some plausibility when it comes to simple sensory pleasures. In these cases it is very difficult to distinguish phenomenologically between the sensory and hedonic elements of the experience, and it may seem as if the latter could not exist apart from the former. However, there are cases where there seems to be no correlation between our hedonic level and any particular thought, sensation or emotion: we simply find ourselves feeling generally good or bad. As an extreme example, people report experiencing ‘pure pleasure’ after taking certain drugs. Until we are given an explanation of what this kind of apparently free-floating enjoyment or suffering is a mere aspect of, we should probably be sceptical of Duncker's version of the hedonic tone view. Also, the very notion of a mental quality being a mere aspect that cannot exist on its own seems to require some elaboration.

It seems more promising, then, to suppose that pleasure is some sort of independent ‘unit of experience’, or a mental kind in its own right, rather than just an aspect of other mental states.Footnote ¹³ This is also, apparently, the picture suggested by various findings in psychology and neuroscience.Footnote ¹⁴ If hedonic tone is a separate and distinctive phenomenal category in this sense, it might actually be a bit misleading to refer to it as a tone in the first place. Fred Feldman thinks we should call it a ‘distinctive feeling’ and reserve the label ‘hedonic tone view’ for accounts of Duncker's type.Footnote ¹⁵ This is a sensible terminological proposal. For the sake of simplicity, however, I will take ‘hedonic tone view’ to cover both these understandings of pleasure. (This is also what the proponents of the view seem to do.) In the context of this article, what they have in common is much more important that what sets them apart. They both claim that there is a specific phenomenal quality or feel that is found in all pleasant and in all painful experiences, and it is this claim I will be evaluating in the next section.

A given mental event need not always be accompanied by the same hedonic tone. For instance, I sometimes enjoy eating olives and sometimes do not. Some people seem never to enjoy it, while others enjoy it much more than I do. The explanation of this phenomenon does not have to be that there are different gustatory sensations involved. It could simply be that one and the same sensation results in different hedonic tones across persons or across time.

In particular, it should be noted that nociception, or pain_n, as I called it above, is not always accompanied by negative hedonic tone. Some authors have failed to distinguish between pain_n and pain_s, and inferred from the fact that pain_n is not intrinsically hedonically bad that no phenomenal state is intrinsically hedonically bad. Thus they have, prematurely, dismissed the hedonic tone view.Footnote ¹⁶

The generation of hedonic tone should be understood as an involuntary, non-cognitive and purely causal process. Hedonic tone must not be confused with any kind of explicit or implicit conceptual evaluation of the other elements of the experience. It is merely a feel. When I enjoy eating olives, I am not committed to any claim whatsoever about the qualities of the gustatory sensations involved. All I am doing is feeling good. Also, we should not, as we sometimes do, say that the taste itself becomes pleasant. Strictly speaking, the only thing that is pleasant is positive hedonic tone.

We often say that pleasures have objects: I may enjoy or take pleasure in, say, a beautiful view. A supporter of the hedonic tone view could take these expressions at face value and hold that hedonic tones are intentional mental states. However, he may also think that they are just convenient ways of speaking that should not be taken literally. The visual sensations and the positive hedonic tone occur simultaneously in consciousness, and we experience them as intertwined on a phenomenological level, but the sensations still need not be the object of the hedonic tone. Perhaps they just cause it. Of course we may also be thinking or making judgements where the visual sensations figure as an object. These judgments and thoughts may even be the cause of the positive hedonic tone in the first place. Furthermore, the hedonic tone can influence our cognitive processes in various ways, for instance by making us think ‘this is pleasant’. But considered in itself the hedonic tone could just be there, and not about any other part of the experience. Even if we assume that Duncker's view is right and that the positive hedonic tone is merely an aspect of the thought, this aspect itself presumably does not have to be intentional. I leave these questions about intentionality open; they are too complicated to discuss here and the general plausibility of the hedonic tone view does not seem to depend on precisely how they are answered.

Supporters of the hedonic tone view acknowledge that we often make conceptual evaluations of our experiences. But this is not what makes the experiences pleasant or unpleasant in the first place. (For instance, an animal could be in a positive hedonic state even if it didn't have the capacity to form attitudes towards its own experiences, as long as it has experiences with the right phenomenal quality.) The connection goes in the opposite direction: we (typically) evaluate experiences positively because of their pleasantness and negatively because of their unpleasantness. Also, we are normally strongly motivated to prolong pleasant experiences and to escape from painful ones. But according to the hedonic tone view, this motivation is an effect of the hedonic status of the experience, and not constitutive of it. If, because of some psychological malfunctioning (severe depression, for instance), an experience with a negative hedonic tone does not generate any motive to escape it, it can still be a perfectly genuine pain.

The notion of ‘liking’, which often makes its appearance in discussions of pleasure, is dangerously ambiguous. Sometimes it is just another word for enjoying and may refer to the kind of non-conceptual, objectless feeling good hedonic tone is supposed to be. For instance, the neuroscientist Kent Berridge has argued, based on an impressive body of evidence, that pleasure should be understood as a kind of ‘liking’, rather than ‘wanting’. This liking is, by itself, ‘simply a triggered affective state – there is no object of desire or incentive target’.Footnote ¹⁷ On the other hand, as we will see, some philosophers talk about hedonic liking as a kind of conceptual evaluation or propositional pro-attitude.

If one overlooks this ambiguity, the hedonic tone view may seem very implausible.Footnote ¹⁸ For instance, David Sobel finds it hard to believe that someone experiencing positive hedonic tone would be in a pleasant state even if he did not like the phenomenal quality of this state.Footnote ¹⁹ It would of course be absurd to claim that an experience could be pleasant even if it was not liked in the sense that it was enjoyed. However, the hedonic tone view does not have this implication. What it says is that an experience could be pleasant even if there is no positive conceptual judgment or pro-attitude directed towards it. And while this may of course turn out to be mistaken, it is at least not obviously mistaken.

II. THE HETEROGENEITY OBJECTION

Many authors have rejected the monistic hedonic tone view. The reason they all cite is the lack of a particular experiential quality common to all pleasures and to all pains.Footnote ²⁰ Is this so-called heterogeneity objection correct? I am not sure. Compare the pleasure of eating chocolate with the enjoyment of a rigorous and fruitful philosophical discussion, and with the pleasure of feeling loved. Clearly the non-hedonic elements of these experiences are irreducibly different. There is no particular thought, sensation or emotion common to all of them. But could it nevertheless be true that they include the same positive hedonic tone? Is the pleasure itself constant across the various pleasant conscious states? Could perhaps the firing of the very same neurons be responsible for the enjoyable character of all these experiences?

I find this a very difficult question. My own attempts to answer it through introspection have so far been inconclusive. To illustrate, consider two activities that I sometimes find pleasant and sometimes hedonically neutral: listening to Beethoven and playing football. It does seem to me as if there is some elusive further ingredient or ‘aura’ added in the cases where I enjoy these things. I am not, however, able to say that it is the same ingredient in both cases. But this is not sufficient to discredit the hedonic tone view. Positive hedonic tone does not have to be an easily isolable and identifiable part of our experiences. Perhaps it is, on a phenomenological level, fused together with the non-hedonic elements of experience to such an extent that it is difficult to recognize across pleasant experiences.

A stronger claim, which would discredit the hedonic tone view, is that we do have a clear introspective overview over what pleasant experiences consist in, and it turns out that the common hedonic tone is not there. I find, however, that I lack this kind of overview.Footnote ²¹

In most of the literature on this topic we find little help beyond mere assertion: some philosophers claim to know through direct self-observation that their pleasant experiences all have the same hedonic tone and others that they don't.Footnote ²² The only proper argument for the heterogeneity of pleasure that I am aware of is epistemic. It runs like this:

1. (1) When experiencing pleasure while being engaged in two simultaneous activities, we typically know immediately which activity is (more) pleasant.

2. (2) However, if all pleasant experiences had the same hedonic tone, we could not know this immediately. We would know the total amount of positive hedonic tone, but not how much of it is caused by which activity.

3. (3) Therefore, the monistic hedonic tone view is false.

As Fred Feldman puts it, if you are eating peanuts and drinking beer, you do not have to perform any experiments in order to decide which taste is more pleasant: you know that immediately. But if the two tastes generate exactly the same kind of pleasant feeling, it would seem impossible to know through introspection alone how much of the positive hedonic tone you are experiencing comes from the beer-drinking and how much comes from the peanut-eating. Hence there must be something wrong with the thesis that all pleasure is phenomenally homogeneous.Footnote ²³

The problem with this argument is its first premise. It is far from obvious that we have non-inferential knowledge of how different activities or sensations affect our hedonic level. A large number of psychological studies have shown that human beings tend to make mistakes when explaining the basis of their preferences and emotions, and that our self-knowledge is often much more indirect than the phenomenology suggests. It should not come as a surprise if something similar is true in the case of hedonic attributions. (In fact, there is evidence suggesting that it is.Footnote ²⁴) Perhaps we identify the pleasantness of an activity not by direct introspection, but by noticing how our hedonic level co-varies with the stimuli we are exposed to. This opens the door to hedonic misattribution, since correlation is not always the result of causation. Of course in some cases the correlation is so close that there is not much room for error. In Feldman's case, for instance, there would be an increase in positive hedonic tone during each time you feel the taste of the beer. The same would happen when you eat some peanuts. You would judge which taste is more pleasant by noticing which bump in the hedonic level is higher. (This process would of course have to be automatic; I do not mean to suggest that we go through explicit reasoning in these cases.) On the other hand, if we assume that there are no changes in the hedonic level at all – that every instant of the beer-drinking and peanut-eating experience is equally pleasant – and that you cannot rely on previous hedonic experiences with these activities, it becomes much more doubtful whether you would be able to make immediate judgments about which taste you are enjoying more.

Another example will illustrate this. Let's say that a mountain climber has just reached his summit and starts enjoying the physical relaxation, the feeling of accomplishment and the beautiful view. His hedonic level is at a constant high level for the next five minutes. It seems to me that in this case – and others like it – it may very well be impossible to know, through direct introspection, how much the various elements of the experience contribute to the total enjoyment experienced.

It seems, then, that neither direct introspection nor epistemological considerations clearly count against the monistic hedonic tone view. At this point, it might be tempting to look to neuroscience for help. Of course it is by no means clear what philosophical conclusions would follow from there being just one hedonic mechanism (or several different hedonic mechanisms) in the brain. However, I will not go into that question now, since the facts are not in yet. We do not currently have anything resembling a complete understanding of the neural basis for pleasure and pain.Footnote ²⁵

In sum, it looks to me as if there aren't any decisive objections to the monistic hedonic tone view. Of course, saying that we do not know that the view is false is not saying that we know that it is true. The introspective evidence may be insufficient for falsification, but it hardly provides clear and direct support. Nor is there, as far as I know, any other kind of positive argument for this account of pleasure and pain to be found in the literature. Thus, we are certainly in a position where it is worth asking what the alternative would be.

III. LIKING AND MOTIVATION

Almost all of the writers who have rejected the hedonic tone view have thought that pleasures should instead be characterized as experiences which we like or are motivated to seek for their own sake.Footnote ²⁶ Sometimes these views are characterized as externalism, with the hedonic tone view being correspondingly labelled internalism. In the same vein, some authors say that we must decide whether pleasantness is extrinsic or intrinsic to the experience.Footnote ²⁷ I think these terms may be somewhat misleading. First, as we have seen, hedonic tone is not supposed to be internal to the sensations, thoughts or feelings that are part of a conscious state, but only internal to the pleasant experience as a whole. Second, even if you do not think there is such a thing as hedonic tone, you do not have to say that the favourable response that generates pleasure (whatever it is) is external to the pleasant experience. Fred Feldman, for instance, argues that pleasure should be understood as a propositional pro-attitude.Footnote ²⁸ This attitude simply is pleasure. It is intrinsic to pleasant experiences in exactly the same way as hedonic tone is supposed to be.

I think it is better to say that the crucial issue at stake in the debate is what role liking and motivation should be granted in the philosophical analysis of pleasure. Are they only common effects of pleasure, as supporters of the hedonic tone view would say, or are they essential ingredients or preconditions? For the sake of simplicity I will (mostly) talk about liking in this section, but I intend the discussion to apply to the motivational view as well.

The claim to consider, then, is that pleasure is constituted or brought about by liking. This idea certainly has some initial plausibility. However, I will argue that, once it is clarified so as to constitute an independent alternative to the hedonic tone view, it seems much less attractive.

First of all, we must be careful not to imagine that the liking itself has an intrinsically pleasant phenomenal feel. That would take us back to the notion of hedonic tone, which, as I have said, can be described as a particularly primitive form of liking.Footnote ²⁹ Thus, when we say that liking the taste of strawberries makes eating them pleasant, for instance, we must not be imagining that the taste causes a non-conceptual feel of pleasure with which it is phenomenologically intertwined. We must be thinking of something that is somehow more cognitive in nature.

Fred Feldman's propositional attitude is clearly such an alternative to the notion of hedonic tone. The attitude is supposed to be on a par with other propositional attitudes such as belief and hope. It is not characterized by any intrinsic ‘feel’, but by involving a certain (not further definable) stance towards some state of affairs.Footnote ³⁰ There may be other and more plausible understandings of hedonic liking, but the important point for now is to remember that it must be distinct from the kind of non-conceptual enjoying that hedonic tone is supposed to be.

Second, we must not, of course, imagine that the liking is based on hedonic tone. Hedonic preferences cannot simply be reports or effects of a pleasantness that is already there, as the supporters of the hedonic tone view would say they are. That would not give us an independent account of pleasure.Footnote ³¹ Rather, the preferences must be responsible for generating the pleasure in the first place: until there is liking, there is no pleasantness at all.

As long as we keep these points in mind, it does not seem that the notion of liking will yield a complete and satisfactory analysis of pleasure and pain. In order to see this, consider the following example. When I stare at a white wall, I usually experience a hedonically neutral state. Let's say that a person has exactly the same sensory experience when staring at a white wall. Because his brain is wired in an unusual way, however, this experience generates a positive propositional attitude. The attitude itself does not have any intrinsically good feel. Nor does it change the sensations of whiteness or provide them with a positive hedonic tone (there is no such thing). The person is experiencing exactly what I am experiencing when staring at a white wall, with the addition of a propositional pro-attitude that has no intrinsically good feel. If Feldman's analysis is correct, this qualifies as a perfectly genuine pleasure.

Imagine another person who experiences exactly the same sensory qualities when staring at the white wall. Because his brain is wired in an unusual way, this experience generates a negative propositional attitude. The attitude itself does not have any intrinsically bad feel. Nor does it change the sensations of whiteness or provide them with a negative hedonic tone (there is no such thing). The person is experiencing exactly what I am experiencing when staring at a white wall, with the addition of a negative propositional attitude that does not have any intrinsically bad feel. If Feldman's analysis is correct, this qualifies as a perfectly genuine pain.

Something seems to be missing from this picture. It is tempting to say that Feldman has left out the joy of pleasure and the awfulness of pain.Footnote ³² There clearly is no joy or awfulness to be found in the sensations of white, since they have no inherent hedonic properties and can be met with both pleasure and pain. The mere having of a valenced propositional attitude cannot be sufficient to bring about hedonic states, since there are also non-hedonic pro- and con-attitudes. Feldman cannot claim that his hedonic propositional attitudes have a characteristic joyous or awful phenomenal feel, since they are not supposed to be distinguished from other propositional attitudes by the way they feel. Since Feldman does not give any positive account of what does distinguish hedonic propositional attitudes from other attitudes, it remains difficult to see why we should think that what the two persons in the examples are experiencing would instantiate enjoyment and suffering.

It might be thought that we should not reject Feldman's theory just because it gives what appears to be the wrong answer in some imaginary and rather bizarre cases. However, the real problem is that, on Feldman's view, all pleasure and pain must be like this. There can be no difference in principle between having a positive attitude towards sensations of white and having the same attitude towards the taste of chocolate or feelings of fear. It cannot be said that the latter mental states have some kind of attractive or unattractive experiential quality, or that they merit a certain attitude because of how they feel, or that we would (dis)like them if we were just thinking clearly. Doing so would be relying on a prior notion of (un)pleasantness – presumably something like a hedonic tone. Feldman is committed to holding that any experience is, considered apart from the attitude taken towards them, just as hedonically neutral as staring at a white wall usually is to me. If a propositional attitude is not sufficient to make staring at a white wall pleasant, it will not be sufficient to make any other experience pleasant, either.

Perhaps there is a more direct way of grasping the implausibility of the attitudinal view. The next time you experience enjoyment or suffering, see if you can find anything in the experience that resembles a response that is different from a hedonic tone and responsible for turning an otherwise hedonically neutral conscious state into a pleasure or a pain. I suspect that you will fail. The hedonic quality of the experience is just there, in the brute and immediate way in which the hedonic tone view says it is. As Stuart Rachels says: ‘When you twist your ankle or jam your finger, the experience itself seems to hurt; the unpleasantness seems to be right there in it.’Footnote ³³

Until now I have been discussing whether the preferential view is able to account for the phenomenological character of hedonic states. Most philosophers believe that pleasure – at least under normal circumstances – is intrinsically good, or worth having for its own sake, while pain is intrinsically bad, or worth avoiding for its own sake.Footnote ³⁴ I suspect that all parties to the present debate would agree with this claim. In the rest of this section, I will argue that, on the preferential view, the claim leads us to make certain further claims about value, and that this may be an additional reason for being sceptical of the view.

More precisely, it seems that if liking has the capacity of producing intrinsic value when directed at experiences, it must also have this capacity when directed at other states of affairs. (And we do, of course, have pro-attitudes towards all sorts of things.) There would thus be no good reason for denying that my having a pro-attitude towards, say, philosophical knowledge or being kind to others also constitutes a state of affairs with intrinsic value.

Feldman is perfectly willing to accept this implication of his view. His propositional pro-attitude can be directed not just towards one's own mental states, but towards any kind of object. One might, for instance, like the fact that the world is at peace, and this liking would (provided it is equally intense) bring about just as much value as a liking of the taste of chocolate or the feeling of being loved.Footnote ³⁵

Derek Parfit believes, like Feldman, that pleasure should be understood in terms of liking.Footnote ³⁶ However, he does not want to say that liking always generates intrinsic value; apparently, it does so only when directed at one's own occurrent mental states. There is nothing inconsistent in this view. However, it seems unacceptably arbitrary. It is like the view that liking only generates intrinsic value when the object of the liking is yellow.

Of course Parfit could try to provide some explanation for why hedonic likings have this special status. One possibility would be that there is something about (some) experiences that merits liking and is absent in other objects. However, it is hard to see what that could be other than intrinsic pleasantness, or positive hedonic tone.Footnote ³⁷ Alternatively, Parfit may think that there is something special about hedonic liking itself, compared to liking with other objects. An obvious suggestion would be that hedonic liking feels good. But that would, again, rely on a prior, like-independent notion of pleasantness. Apart from these possibilities, how could hedonic liking be different from other kinds of liking? Parfit doesn't tell us.Footnote ³⁸

I conclude, then, that those who want to analyse pleasure in terms of a pro-attitude will have to accept that there will be intrinsic value also when the attitude is directed at non-experiential objects.Footnote ³⁹ Many philosophers, including Parfit himself, have, however, criticized the idea that one can bring about or instantiate intrinsic value simply by liking or desiring something.Footnote ⁴⁰ Trying to show that this criticism is well founded would be much too extensive a task for this article. I will, therefore, be content to point out that the preferentialist and motivational accounts of pleasure force us to make some quite controversial claims about value.Footnote ⁴¹

IV. THE PLURALISTIC HEDONIC TONE VIEW

If the standard alternative to the monistic hedonic tone view is not very attractive, are we then forced to side with the minority after all and insist that there must be a common phenomenal ingredient in hedonic experiences? This conclusion would be too hasty. It is simply a mistake to think that the heterogeneity objection, if valid, shows that experiences cannot have hedonic tone.

The monistic hedonic tone view is composed of two distinct claims:

1. (1) Experiences are made pleasant or painful by their phenomenal qualities.

2. (2) There is just one pleasant phenomenal quality and one painful phenomenal quality.

These claims are logically independent. There is nothing intrinsic to the idea of a hedonic tone that necessitates hedonic monism. In other words, the natural response to the heterogeneity objection would seem to be to discard (2) and not (1). Instead of rejecting the hedonic tone view as such, one should move on to discuss pluralistic versions of it. However, the authors who have made the heterogeneity objection have – without any explicit discussion or justification – taken their objection to disprove (1).Footnote ⁴² Even those who have acknowledged that there are difficulties facing the alternatives have thought that accepting heterogeneity must lead to a rejection of the hedonic tone view. Chris Heathwood, for instance, admits that it is ‘counterintuitive’ to say that a sensory experience is pleasant because it is desired, and not desired because it is pleasant, but he ends up biting the bullet since he thinks the alternative would be the (according to him even more counterintuitive) thesis that all pleasures are homogeneous.Footnote ⁴³

Let us, then, have a closer look at the pluralist version of the hedonic tone view. It is important to distinguish between two forms of pluralism. One, which we may call moderate, was suggested by C. D. Broad and has subsequently been defended by T. L. S. Sprigge and Roger Crisp.Footnote ⁴⁴ According to this view, positive hedonic tone is not a single homogeneous phenomenal feel, but rather a phenomenal kind or genus, with members that are irreducibly different, yet at the same time united by a common experiential core. Pleasure is thus supposed to be analogous to a phenomenological kind such as colour sensations: these sensations are also irreducibly different (compare an experience of red and blue, for instance), while at the same time sharing a common basic phenomenology. As Crisp puts it,

For all I know, this form of pluralism could be the correct account of hedonic states. However, I doubt that it will satisfy the authors who have insisted on the heterogeneity of pleasure. These authors are not only saying that some aspects of some pleasures are irreducibly different, which is what Crisp and Sprigge are willing to accept. They also make the stronger claim that there is absolutely no phenomenal property that is shared by all pleasant experiences: they really have nothing phenomenal in common.Footnote ⁴⁶ And this of course conflicts with the idea that there is ‘something it is like to be experiencing enjoyment’, i.e. a phenomenal core common to all pleasures.

It seems, then, that the hedonic tone view must be formulated in a more radically pluralistic fashion in order to please the believers in the heterogeneity of pleasure. We would have to say that there are positive hedonic tones that have no shared phenomenal properties at all; they simply feel completely different. Let us call this the strongly pluralistic version of the hedonic tone view.

This strong form of pluralism raises an obvious question: if pleasures are not united by a particular phenomenal feel or core, how do we explain why we refer to them by the same term? What do the positive hedonic tones have in common? The only plausible answer I can think of is that they are all positive. Somewhat more precisely, positive hedonic tones are those phenomenal qualities that are intrinsically good due to how they feel. Negative hedonic tones would be those phenomenal qualities that are, in the same sense, bad.

The idea is thus that hedonic states are united by having certain normative properties. It is possible that Sidgwick had something along these lines in mind when he defined pleasure as ‘a feeling which, when experienced by intelligent beings, is at least implicitly apprehended as desirable’.Footnote ⁴⁷ The normative, strongly pluralistic version of the hedonic tone view is also briefly suggested as a solution to the heterogeneity problem in an article by Stuart Rachels.Footnote ⁴⁸ Apart from that it has not, as far as I know, been defended anywhere in the (relatively large) literature on pleasure and pain. In fact, with the exception of an objection from Roger Crisp to which I will return in the next section, it has not even been discussed. In the rest of this article, I will elaborate on the view and try to show that it is worthy of more philosophical attention.

Experiences can be good because of their consequences, and also in aesthetic and perfectionist ways. Perhaps it is beautiful or noble to experience existential angst, for instance. However, what makes an experience pleasant – according to the present view – is that it is good simply in virtue of how it feels, or what it is like to have it. Importantly, the phenomenal quality is not just judged to be good. If we made that the criterion, the pleasantness of an experience would not depend on how it feels, but on our reaction to the feeling, and we would face problems analogous to those discussed in section III. The positive hedonic tones would have to be intrinsically good due to how they feel.

The notion of intrinsic goodness is controversial. Some authors prefer to talk about well-being when discussing or defending the normative importance of hedonic states.Footnote ⁴⁹ In order to please these authors, we could instead say that pleasures are those experiences that by themselves and due to how they feel make the person experiencing them better off. Also, it has been argued that the concept of value is reducible to the concept of a reason for action: to say that something is intrinsically good is simply to claim that there is a reason to promote or protect it for its own sake.Footnote ⁵⁰ On this view, it would be most perspicuous to say that pleasures are those experiences that there is a non-instrumental, desire-independent reason to seek for their own sake due to how they feel. I see no reason to attempt to decide between these vocabularies here, since doing so would raise complicated metaethical questions, and since it would seem that a normative version of the hedonic tone view could be formulated whichever we adopt. For the sake of simplicity, I will mostly stick to axiological terms in my discussion.

Sidgwick's view seems to be that an experience must not only be desirable as a feeling in order to be pleasant; it must also somehow be ‘apprehended’ as desirable.Footnote ⁵¹ It is very implausible to require that the experience of a good phenomenal quality must always be followed by actual apprehension in order to constitute pleasure. Many activities are most pleasant precisely when we become completely absorbed by them and do not stop to reflect or evaluate. Perhaps what Sidgwick requires is only hypothetical apprehension: pleasant experiences are those that would be found desirable if evaluated by their owner. An obvious problem with this view is that infants and many animals presumably lack the ability to apprehend experiential goodness, but we tend to be fairly confident that they can experience pleasure. This problem can be avoided by yet another refinement: we could say that an experience is pleasant if a person who had the capability to judge phenomenal goodness accurately would apprehend it as phenomenally good. Maybe this is how we are to understand Sidgwick's insistence that the apprehenders must be ‘intelligent beings’. But if it is, it would seem that the talk about apprehension is doing no real work in his definition. He could (and should) simply have said that pleasures are those experiences that are intrinsically desirable considered merely as feelings.

There are, as far as I can see, no other roles that apprehension of phenomenal goodness could plausibly be thought to play in the generation of hedonic states. Thus, I believe that a supporter of the normative hedonic tone view should insist that being good due to how it feels is a sufficient (as well as necessary) condition for an experience to be pleasant. This is, at any rate, the version of the view I will be discussing in the remainder of the article.

Whatever the significance of apprehension is taken to be, it is clear that the normative hedonic tone view excludes the possibility of a preferentialist or desire-based analysis of goodness. If we claim that positive hedonic tones are those that are good due to how they feel, and that what is good is what in some sense is or would be preferred or desired, then we are in fact saying that mental states are pleasant if and only if they are preferred or desired, and so the strongly pluralistic hedonic tone view collapses into a version of the preferential or motivational account of pleasure and pain. In other words, the normative hedonic tone view presupposes that the phenomenal qualities that we call positive hedonic tones have intrinsic value independently of our desires, preferences and evaluations concerning them.

It is also doubtful whether the normative hedonic tone view is compatible with a naturalistic account of goodness. A naturalist cannot claim that positive hedonic tones are united by possessing some very special non-natural and irreducibly normative property. He would have to maintain that the goodness of the positive hedonic states is a purely natural phenomenon. However, if we want to appeal to experiential goodness in order to solve the hedonic unity problem, then experiential goodness could not merely be the disjunctive property of being one of the positive hedonic tones. It is not particularly helpful to be told that positive hedonic tones are those phenomenal qualities that are good due to how they feel, and that being phenomenally good amounts to being one of the positive hedonic tones. Those states that are experientially good would have to share some specific natural property. Since they have, ex hypothesi, no common phenomenal ingredient, any solution to this problem would have to appeal not to the way they feel, but to something else – presumably a relation to our preferences, motives or evaluative beliefs. We would, once more, have abandoned the hedonic tone view.

It seems, then, that the property that, according to the normative hedonic tone view, unites pleasant and painful experiences must in some sense be irreducibly normative. It is not identical with any purely natural or factual properties of hedonic states.Footnote ⁵² This of course raises the question of how we are to understand the relationship between the factual and normative properties of pleasures and pains. Let me mention two possibilities.

Many moral philosophers hold the general view that descriptive and normative properties are metaphysically distinct. Still, they believe that the latter are somehow consequent on the former. If we apply this outlook to hedonic values, we get the result that even though hedonic states are good or bad because of the way they feel, it is still possible to describe the feelings, or at least think about them, while remaining agnostic about their normative status. Several authors have expressed this view. According to Thomas Scanlon, for instance, ‘natural’ facts such as ‘that a thing is pleasant’ may ‘provide the grounds’ for conclusions about reasons for action, but ‘judging that these facts obtain need not involve explicitly drawing these conclusions’.Footnote ⁵³ In a similar vein, C. I. Lewis suggests that we first ‘describe the given [experiential] content in other respects than value’ and then ‘make shift to evaluate it from that description’.Footnote ⁵⁴

On this view, pleasures are intrinsically good in the same way that many other things are thought to be intrinsically good. One might of course wonder why precisely those phenomenal qualities that we refer to as positive hedonic tones have the capacity to ground goodness. The answer would have to be that this is just a brute normative fact. All value pluralists would, apparently, have to make a concession of this kind sooner or later. And while value pluralism is a doctrine with which many moral philosophers disagree on substantive grounds, few would deny that it is at least a coherent outlook.

Some authors believe that the standard account of the relationship between factual and normative properties breaks down in the case of pleasure and pain. The badness of pain is not, they argue, some metaphysically separable consequence of its phenomenal quality. Rather, the badness somehow just is the phenomenal quality; pain literally feels as if it shouldn't be experienced. Hedonic states are factual and irreducibly normative at the same time. Joseph Mendola endorses this view when he claims that:

Christine Korsgaard tells us that ‘the utilitarian [she presumably means the hedonist] claims that pleasures and pains are facts which are also values, a place where the natural and normative are one’.Footnote ⁵⁶

This account has some intuitive plausibility. (Perhaps it appears somewhat extraordinary when considered in a cool and hedonically neutral hour, but try again the next time you experience intense suffering.) However, unless it is going to bring us back to a monistic (or only moderately pluralistic) form of the hedonic tone view, we would have to claim that hedonic tones not only have irreducibly different phenomenal feels, but also that there are irreducibly different forms of value. Though it is more controversial than the one discussed above, this kind of value pluralism, too, has its adherents.Footnote ⁵⁷ (Those who defend it may not have thought that there is more than one form of phenomenal goodness, but if the general idea is plausible, there doesn't seem to be anything preventing us from applying it also within the hedonic field.) One might not find this account very attractive on theoretical grounds such as simplicity, and one might worry about how it could account for quantitative comparisons of hedonic value. In response, it could be said that we are led to accept this view by the nature of our experiences whether it is elegant or not, and that it is not given a priori that our hedonic value comparisons are generally well founded.

I am not going to attempt to decide between these perspectives on hedonic value, since the task of doing so would be too extensive for this article. Hopefully the reader will find at least one of them promising. Before I end this section, I should, however, point out that there are many further normative questions about pleasure and pain on which the strongly pluralistic hedonic tone view can remain neutral. For instance, a supporter of the view could claim that there is only a reason to promote one's own hedonic level, that hedonic reasons are strictly impartial, or that the truth lies somewhere in between. Also, the view only asserts that pleasures are intrinsically valuable when considered as isolated phenomenal states. It is compatible with the possibility that the picture is more complicated when the phenomenal states occur in conjunction with other states of affairs. As examples, one might hold that it is, on the whole, better to derive positive hedonic tone from listening to Beethoven than from playing football, or that the taking of pleasure in the fact that other people suffer constitutes an organic whole with negative value.

V. OBJECTIONS

In this section, I discuss some possible objections to the normative strongly pluralistic hedonic tone view. The most obvious worry is perhaps that it seems perfectly coherent to deny that pleasure is good and pain is bad. Famously, the question ‘it is pleasant, but is it good?’ has an open feel to it. However, if pleasures are in fact (partly) constituted by a form of goodness, this question should apparently be completely closed.

This objection would be fatal if the strongly pluralistic hedonic tone view is taken as a straightforward analysis of our pre-theoretical concepts of pleasure and pain. However, it should not be. The idea is not that whenever a person correctly describes an experience as pleasant, he is consciously and explicitly declaring it to be good for its own sake. Rather, it is that we have grouped hedonic states together without a clear idea of what actually unites them, and that philosophical reflection then reveals the common ingredient to be intrinsic phenomenal (dis)value. Of course, if we have put all the good phenomenal feels together under the heading of pleasure, we must in some sense have apprehended or responded to their goodness. However, we need not have done so at a conscious or conceptual level. As an analogy, consider how people who do not know musical theory still may be able to distinguish between tonal and atonal music.

Furthermore, the normative hedonic tone view need not strike one as, once it is formulated, obviously correct. The reader is unlikely to exclaim suddenly: ‘Yes, that is what I was doing all the time!’ The view will, I suspect, only seem plausible (if at all) after some reflection, and in particular after considering the problems facing the alternatives.

It might seem extravagant to claim that people do not generally know what they are doing when using a word as common as ‘pleasure’, and that we needn't even be able to recognize immediately the correct criteria for pleasantness when we are presented with them. However, the persistent disagreement between supporters of the monistic hedonic tone view, the preferentialist view and the motivational view is sufficient to show that this is precisely what we should expect. We really do lack a clear idea of what we are talking about when we talk in hedonic terms; this is why philosophers have found it so hard to agree on the nature of pleasure and pain in the first place.

Thus, the following questions all have, at least initially, an open feel to them:

Surely the fact that these questions all seem open does not show that all the standard views on pleasure and pain must be wrong. What counts is how things seem after reflection, not before.

One might justify the claim that the question about the goodness of pleasure is open not by an appeal to our pre-theoretical concepts, but by insisting that those things that we call pleasures are not in fact good at all. If this latter claim is correct, the normative hedonic tone view must obviously be mistaken.

In order to assess this threat, we need to be clear about what is meant by denying the intrinsic (dis)value of hedonic states. First, one might think that pleasures have a particular phenomenal quality, and that this phenomenal quality is not inherently valuable. However, claiming that there is such a quality is tantamount to asserting that the monistic version of the hedonic tone view is correct, and if so there is of course no need to consider pluralistic alternatives in the first place. This kind of denial of the intrinsic importance of hedonic states thus fails to constitute an independent objection to the pluralistic view.

Second, some authors hold that pain is not intrinsically bad because they think that pain is nothing over and above a mental quality that we dislike or are motivated to avoid, and that desires and preferences are not independent grounds of value or reasons for action. For instance, Richard Kraut justifies his rejection of the intrinsic badness of pain with the claim that ‘even though we all want to avoid pain, [. . . w]e don't notice any characteristic of pain that makes it worthy of avoidance; we just hate the way it feels.’Footnote ⁵⁸ I have, however, argued that those mental states which our hedonic terms refer to cannot be adequately analysed in the way Kraut presupposes. If they could, there would, once more, be no point in discussing a pluralist version of the hedonic tone view in the first place.

Third, a critic could claim that even if pleasures are in some sense inherently positive as experiences go, they are not good in the sense of being intrinsic values. The fact that something is good as a phenomenal state need not mean that it is worth seeking, just as the fact that a poem is good considered as a work of art need not mean that it makes the world a better place. Perhaps, in the final account, it doesn't matter whether we feel good or bad. It is not clear to me that this notion of intrinsic phenomenal goodness that is not intrinsic value makes sense. However, if it does, the pluralistic hedonic tone view could simply be reformulated: pleasant experiences are phenomenally heterogeneous, but united by being good as judged by phenomenal standards.

In order to have an independent and decisive objection to the pluralistic hedonic tone view, one would have to show that no phenomenal state is, in any way, intrinsically positive or negative, without presupposing the correctness of a non-phenomenal account of pleasure and pain. One could of course simply deny that the hedonic tones appear to have any form of intrinsic (dis)value. I am not aware of any claims of this kind in the literature. I take it that those who would deny that hedonic tones are intrinsically good or bad would not deny that they appear to be. They would, rather, claim that appearances are misleading. Though this claim could be justified in various ways, the typical line of thought would be that the notion of intrinsic value employed by the normative hedonic tone view is objectionably queer and mysterious, and that there is a debunking explanation of normative appearances that is preferable on this count.Footnote ⁵⁹ Let me make a brief response.

I do not think it is possible to explain away the queerness of the normative properties that, according to the view under discussion, unite hedonic states. Whether one thinks of them as something that supervenes on the phenomenal feels or something that is a feature of the feels themselves, they would indeed be very different from all the ordinary natural properties that we take the things around us to possess. However, that does not automatically entail that the alternative is any less mysterious. There is not exactly an abundance of clear and well-founded accounts of how the intuitions that pleasure is good and pain is bad go wrong. We cannot simply assume that if a projectivist, debunking account is available in the case of certain other values (such as perhaps aesthetic values) it must also be plausible when it comes to the value of one's own phenomenal states. In fact, the very idea of a projectivist account of the belief in the intrinsic value of pleasure seems misguided, since pleasure is our most basic subjective response. It is not as if we react to pleasure with some further, non-hedonic emotion that could explain why we mistakenly find pleasure valuable. At any rate, if the argument from queerness is to give us good reason to doubt that there are phenomenal states with intrinsic value, we need some detailed and convincing story about how it comes to seem to many people that there are. While I do not want to deny that there could be such a story, I do want to deny that any philosopher has ever presented one.Footnote ⁶⁰

One could object to the normative hedonic tone view not on the ground that pleasures are not good due to how they feel, but on the ground that something could be good due to how it feels without being a pleasure. If this is correct, having intrinsic phenomenal value could not be a sufficient condition for being pleasant, and so the normative view fails as a complete account of the nature of hedonic states.

This objection could take two forms. First, one could point to actual experiences that are phenomenally good and yet not pleasures. Second, one could insist that a given phenomenal feel could have been intrinsically good and yet not appropriately labelled pleasant. I am not aware of any convincing example of the first kind. Keep in mind that the experience would have to be good only due to how it feels, and not for some other reason (such as being a display of human perfection), and that it would have to be good in itself, and not just good in virtue of its consequences or its participation in an organic whole.

Roger Crisp is a hedonist and so agrees with me on this point, but he appears to make an objection to the normative hedonic tone view of the second kind. He accepts that it makes sense to propose a strongly pluralistic theory of experiential well-being: two experiences with no phenomenal features in common could still both be good for the person experiencing them due to how they feel. For instance, we could subscribe to a view according to which ‘well-being consists only in feeling warm and hearing the sound of a buzzing bee, i.e. that these are the only experiences good for people because of how they feel’.Footnote ⁶¹ However, he thinks that these experiences could still fail to be hedonically good, or enjoyable. This leaves an appeal to a particular enjoyable feel as the only way of drawing the line between enjoyable experiences and other experiences that are good because of the way they feel. As he says, if we amend the theory ‘to claim that what is good for people about these experiences is that they feel good, then we appear to be back with a monistic form of internalism about enjoyment’.Footnote ⁶²

To be sure, our pre-theoretical understanding of the concept of enjoyment does not exclude the possibility that the experience of hearing a buzzing bee could be good due to how it feels without being enjoyable. (Crisp blurs the distinctions somewhat by treating ‘enjoyment’ as synonymous with ‘feeling good’: it is unclear what is meant by saying that an experience could be intrinsically good due to how it feels without being good due to feeling good.) However, as I have said, this pre-theoretical understanding is radically incomplete. In order to refute a view on the nature of enjoyment, it is not enough to point out that something the view entails to be impossible is not obviously so. One needs to show that what the view entails to be impossible seems perfectly possible even on reflection.

How would we know that hearing the sound of a buzzing bee could be good due to how it feels and yet fail to be recognizable as an episode of enjoyment? One possibility is, of course, that we are convinced that there is a phenomenological feel common to all enjoyment, and that the experience of hearing a buzzing bee would lack this feel. Perhaps all Crisp wants to do in the quoted passage is to assert his conviction that there is a phenomenal core common to all enjoyment. However, the interesting question, and the one I am discussing in this section, is whether a normative account of hedonic states is a plausible alternative given that these states are completely phenomenally heterogeneous. In order to make the objection stick in this context as well, it would have to be the case that even if some of our actual enjoyable experiences are entirely phenomenally different, we have some positive reason to think that if hearing a buzzing bee (or some other experience) had been good due to how it feels, we would lack any propensity to describe it as pleasant.

I am not sure what this reason would be. Admittedly, it is not exactly easy to imagine that the auditory quality of hearing a buzzing bee could, without any changes or additions, be inherently enjoyable. But I do not find it any less difficult to imagine that it could be intrinsically good in virtue of how it feels. We have, I submit, no understanding of how a normative claim like that could have been correct. It is like the idea that woollen sweaters could have been intrinsically valuable in virtue of being sweaters made of wool. Consequently, we cannot claim to know all that much about the imagined phenomenal goodness of this auditory quality. In particular, it seems that we cannot, given that the heterogeneity objection is correct, know that the goodness would not be recognizable as hedonic.