Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Ranking
While writing these posts, something came to mind that I wanted to share and get everyone's feed back on. We discussed that pleasures can be ranked according to the Utilitarian ideology. Some pleasures are more pleasurable than others or they give one more satisfaction than others would give them. However, the question I pose is, would ranking pleasures really make sense? Yes people would find some things to be more pleasurable than others would that really matter? The fact that something is pleasurable should be enough to a Utilitarian, not necessarily how pleasurable it is in comparison to something else that is pleasurable right? What are your thoughts?
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I think that Utilitarianism would fail to work without the ranking of pleasures. You need to be able to compare two pleasures together; when you can show one act to be more pleasurable than the other, you can call that act preferable.
ReplyDeleteThe main problem (at least for me) here, though, is that you would have to put the pleasures in some sort of comparable form. If we literally compare apples and oranges to find which is more pleasurable, we're going to need some sort of quantitative unit of measurement: a pleasure point, a utile, or what have you. Perhaps apples are worth 2 utiles, and oranges 3...an orgasm is 15, listening to Mozart is 20. But, it seems impossible to assign a quantitative value to different pleasures like this...
Similar to Shelby's issue, is the notion of comparing pleasure between individuals. Here is where I find the most disappointment in Utilitarianism. If there is a hierarchy of pleasure in this case apples, oranges, orgasms, and Mozart, then that leaves no room for individual input. This scale may be representative of Shelby's pleasure, but you may be an apple enthusiast, easily ranking apples above orgasms any day of the week. Perhaps a silly example, but one I feel raises a difficult question for utilitarians. When developing are umbrella ranking for all pleasures, the theory by definition ignores an aspect of the individual.
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