of foretelling accurately the nature of the pleasures and pains attaching to the various possible courses of action. But it is a fact of common experience that this is often quite impossible. Our forecasts of future pleasures and pains are often very far wide of the mark. All we can do is to calculate probable pleasant and painful consequences. After all our elaborate calculation, our standard does not tell us that such and such an action is right: it merely enables us to say that it is probably right.
And another grave objection to pleasure as the standard is that it is open to all the criticisms that we have already brought against the general theory according to which the consequences of an action determine its tightness or wrongness. The view we are considering at present says that an action is right if its total consequences are probably more pleasurable than those of any other possible action under the circumstances. That is, the consequences of the action constitute the test of its Tightness or wrongness. And this, as we have seen, is not really a moral standard.[1]
§5. Is Pleasure the Object of Desire? Hedonism maintains not only that pleasure is the object of desire, but that it is the only object of desire. As a matter of fact, say the Hedonists, all men desire pleasure; and when they seem to desire other things, they desire them only because they are means to the attainment of pleasure. Ultimately the only thing desired is pleasure.
- ↑ The criticism in this paragraph, which is really the fundamental one, applies equally to all varieties of Utilitarianism. But the rest of § 4, it will have been noticed, has Bentham in view, rather than Mill.
