Against “Why Epicureans and Utilitarians are wrong…” by Figs in Winter
A Refutation of a Stoic by an Epicurean
Massimo Pigliucci, who writes as Figs in Winter, is a Stoic. And well, he couldn’t call himself a Stoic if he didn’t dunk on Epicureans from time to time.
As a Stoic, Pigliucci rejects Hedonism in all its forms, including Epicureanism and writes against them in his story entitled “Why Epicureans and Utilitarians are wrong: on the axiology of pain and pleasure.”
I’m careful in naming my retort as an Epicurean. I’m not against Stoics. I’m not against Figs in Winter. I am against this story because the arguments that Pigliucci uses in it are flawed and the conclusions he draws from it are false.
Before making his argument, Pigliucci outlines the differences between various Hedonist schools, of which Epicureanism is one. He lays out the evolution of Hedonism from Aristippus to Epicurus in Ancient Greece and then introduces Utilitarian thinkers Jeremy Bentham and J.S. Mill, who were inspired by the Greeks and Epicurus in particular.
The Greek hedonistic philosopher Aristippus believed that pleasure was good and pain was bad. So, we should avoid pain as much as possible and enjoy as much pleasure as possible. Live only for the present. Suck up as much pleasure in life right here, right now.
Pigliucci rejects this argument, and he’s right to. He then goes on to list the contributions that Epicurus, Bentham and Mill all subsequently made, explaining in brief how the idea of Hedonism evolved from thinker to thinker.
But here’s the thing. When he’s arguing against Hedonism it’s this first form by Aristippus that he’s arguing with. The objections he makes wouldn’t make sense to an Epicurean or Utilitarian.
For instance, when he uses an anecdote to show that feelings are unreliable this story only addresses Cyrenaic Hedonism, not any of the others.
“[…] [A] woman, was on a first date and she didn’t think it was going too well. At some point, though, she felt “butterflies” to her stomach, the kind of sensation she usually associated with excitement. She thought, hmm, maybe this date is going better than I realized, or so my own feelings seem to tell me. Then she dashed to the restroom to vomit. Turns out she had food poisoning, and that’s what her body was trying to tell her. So, no, your feelings are not necessarily a reliable guide to the truth!”
We’re dealing just with physical feelings and only in this particular snapshot of time. No rational planning for the sake of maintaining present and future mental stability (Epicureanism). No organizing what the incentives and disincentives of a society should be (Utilitarianism). Just interpreting physical sensations in the present and trying to direct ourselves based on those. Epicurus wouldn’t agree with this and neither would Mill or Bentham.
Moreover, while the woman in this story is definitely experiencing a physical sensation it shouldn’t be called pleasure. The fact that she confuses her food poisoning with feelings of love, if only momentarily, makes for an amusing anecdote when the punchline is delivered. But it’s not an argument against Hedonism.
Pleasure is a physical sensation. It takes place in the brain. A number of other physical sensations can often be associated with it and come at the same time. We distinguish pleasure from those other sensations because it’s the one that feels good. By her own self-reporting, the woman on the date was not feeling good. Her date didn’t elicit any pleasure from her. Could she actually have not known this? It seems dubious.
But Pigliucci’s larger point is that our senses aren’t always a reliable guide. Very well, sometimes they aren’t. But it doesn’t follow from this that we should be indifferent towards them, which is what Stoics contend.
He then goes on to argue that we should understand pain and pleasure according to the role that both have played in evolutionary biology. Specifically, he cites “The Axiology of Pain and Pleasure” by philosophers Alycia LaGuardia-LoBianco & Paul Bloomfield. As Pigliucci explains, axiology is the study of value and the essential quality of value. These axiologist philosophers bolster their argument by appealing to evolutionary theory. I applaud that Pigliucci includes this. I think he’s right on point when he says that science and the humanities can be synergistically combined. We should use evolutionary biology to understand pleasure and how it works.
On that note, let’s talk about what Pigliucci misses about the role of evolutionary biology in understanding the value of exercise.
He states:
“[…] [G]oing to the gym may be painful, both physically and mentally, but it brings long-term health benefits, again both physical and mental. Contrariwise, sitting on the couch and eating junk food may feel pleasurable in the moment, but it has long-term negative effects.”
When a writer wants a practical example of why Hedonism doesn’t work, they’ll often reach for this one. But while it’s trite, it’s not true.
What about the pleasure that comes from physical exertion? The runner’s high? The exhilaration that comes when the blood rushes through your brain after a challenging stretch or set?
If exercise is “painful, both physically and mentally,” it’s a sign that you’re out of shape. And why? Is it because you have a bad, undeveloped character? Not at all. It’s because you’re a creature shaped by evolutionary biology.
If you choose to sit on the couch and eat junk food instead of going for a run, it’s because calorie-rich food has been decoupled from the effort you would have to exert to get that reward in a natural environment. The taste of something fatty or sugary is pleasurable. But since you wouldn’t put up with the exertion of running to get that delicious food without another pleasure to urge you along, you get the endorphin rush that exercise provides to spur you on. That’s evolution, baby.
Finally, Pigliucci closes his dismissal of Hedonism with what he refers to as “the Cradle Argument” put forward by the Stoic Cato the Younger. I’ll reproduce the same quote by Cato here:
“It is the view of those whose system I adopt, that immediately upon birth (for that is the proper point to start from) a living creature feels an attachment for itself, and an impulse to preserve itself and to feel affection for its own constitution and for those things which tend to preserve that constitution; while on the other hand it conceives an antipathy to destruction and to those things which appear to threaten destruction. In proof of this opinion they urge that infants desire things conducive to their health and reject things that are the opposite before they have ever felt pleasure or pain; this would not be the case, unless they felt an affection for their own constitution and were afraid of destruction. But it would be impossible that they should feel desire at all unless they possessed self-consciousness, and consequently felt affection for themselves. This leads to the conclusion that it is love of self which supplies the primary impulse to action. Pleasure on the contrary, according to most Stoics, is not to be reckoned among the primary objects of natural impulse.” (III.5)
The idea that the drive to self-preservation is a priori of experiences of pleasure and pain is entirely false. Infants do not demonstrate a sense of self at birth. Our best estimates based on what’s called “the mirror test” is that babies develop a sense of ego boundaries between themselves and the world around them at around 18–24 months of life. (See Amsterdam’s paper entitled “Mirror Self-Image Reactions Before Age Two”) That’s the stage at which they start to see themselves in the mirror, something that most animals never do.
They do, however, experience pleasure moments after birth; the pleasure of their mother’s scent and the feel of her skin within moments of being born. And pain too somewhere along the way in their course of their first two years.
Babies have an urge to preserve themselves before ever experiencing pleasure or pain? Nonsense. Cato is simply wrong here.
Yet Pigliucci treats this piece of pure conjecture by Cato as evidence that pleasure is secondary because the urge toward self-preservation is primary. Since the Cradle Argument doesn’t wash, Pigliucci’s argument against pleasure’s significance doesn’t either.
In closing, Pigliucci returns to LaGuardia-LoBianco & Bloomfield, who argue that simply stating that all pleasures are desirable and all pains undesirable is insufficient. Well, Epicurus could have told you that. He never argued that every pleasure should be pursued or that there is no way to rank different kinds of pleasures or even that we shouldn’t ever leave some pleasures alone.
When LaGuardia-LoBianco and Bloomfield argue that, “what ought to be maximized are not pleasures per se, nor ought pains per se to be minimized, but rather good pleasures alone are maximized while bad pains alone are minimized” an Epicurean would interpret this to mean that we should maximize those virtues that promote health and happiness, human flourishing over time. That is, pleasures which are “natural and necessary” instead of “unnatural and unnatural ones.” We should avoid pleasures which feel good but are later found to be deleterious.
A Utilitarian would take this to mean we should try to maximize pro-social pleasures which serve the most people in a society while avoiding ones with deleterious externalities as much as possible.
Yet Pigliucci doesn’t consider either of these positions. He insists that we can’t apply terms like “good” and “bad” to pleasures without resorting to outside, non-hedonic value judgments.
Why? Doesn’t it make consistent sense to define “good pleasures” as those which are salubrious and prosocial? Can we not say that “bad pleasures” are ones which are neither?
Hedonism may have internal contradictions and flaws that make it unworkable as a philosophy. I may come to see what those are and be converted to virtue ethics someday.
But as long as the arguments against it remain unchanged, I’ll stay an Epicurean.
Ειρήνη και Ασφάλεια
Peace and Safety
