Shelly Kagan and Leonard Katz have offered versions of hedonism that aspire to occupy a middle position between the view that pleasure is a unitary sensation and the view that pleasure is, as Sidgwick put it, desirable consciousness. Thus they hope to offer a hedonistic account of well-being that does not mistakenly suppose that pleasure is a special kind of tingle, yet to offer a sharp alternative to desire-based accounts. I argue that they have not identified a coherent middle position.

Utilitarianism faces a difficulty in that what are typically regarded as natural goods seem to have possible occurrences that strike most people as morally reprehensible, yet which according to the theory must be taken to add to the good in the world. Thus, totake a recent treatment of the problem by Geoffrey Scarre, it would seem that even sadistic pleasures must contribute to human happiness and thus morally offset the concomitant suffering of the victim. Scarre has offered a defence of (...) utilitarianism, arguing that in fact such pleasures will undermine the self-respect that is required for happiness. In this paper I argue that a partial undermining is plausible but leaves the problem untouched, while a complete undermining can be established only by a stipulation that is unmotivated from a utilitarian point of view. (shrink)