Abstract
In this article, I attempt to resuscitate the perennially unfashionable distinctive feeling theory of pleasure (and pain), according to which for an experience to be pleasant (or unpleasant) is just for it to involve or contain a distinctive kind of feeling. I do this in two ways. First, by offering powerful new arguments against its two chief rivals: attitude theories, on the one hand, and the phenomenological theories of Roger Crisp, Shelly Kagan, and Aaron Smuts, on the other. Second, by showing how it can answer two important objections that have been made to it. First, the famous worry that there is no felt similarity to all pleasant (or unpleasant) experiences (sometimes called ‘the heterogeneity objection’). Second, what I call ‘Findlay’s objection’, the claim that it cannot explain the nature of our attraction to pleasure and aversion to pain.
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Notes
Other theories exist, but are not sufficiently plausible or developed to warrant discussion here. On one such theory, which we might call representationalism, for an experience to be unpleasant is for it to represent bodily damage in oneself. See Tye (1995). Rachels (2000) argues convincingly against this view.
Some have characterised the distinctive feeling theory differently, as the view that “pleasurable sensations are pleasurable in virtue of the fact that each of them causes a special feeling we might call ‘the feeling of pleasure itself’” (Feldman 1997, p. 86) (my emphasis). Aaron Smuts, also, writes, “Pleasurable experiences, on this view, are those that give rise to the distinct feeling of pleasure” (Smuts 2010) (my emphasis). However, on this characterisation, the theory would not ascribe pleasantness to an experience of, say, eating a juicy peach that, while it involved ‘the pleasant feeling’, was not itself a cause of this feeling. Moreover, it would ascribe pleasantness to an experience of eating a juicy peach that, while it did not itself involve ‘the pleasant feeling’, happened to cause this feeling some time down the track. However, any philosopher who self-identifies as a distinctive feeling theorist will want to hold that an experience of eating a juicy peach that involves ‘the pleasant feeling’ is a pleasant one, even if ‘the pleasant feeling’ in question was caused, not by the experience of eating the peach, but by, say, the ingestion of the peach. And no such philosopher will want to hold that future events can have any bearing on which past experiences were pleasant and painful. For this reason, the distinctive feeling theory is better characterised as holding that what makes an experience pleasant is the inclusion or involvement in that experience of ‘the pleasant feeling’. Unfortunately, I cannot refer to characterisations given by actual distinctive feeling theorists to support this claim, because, rather surprisingly, there aren’t any. The distinctive feeling theory, while it is easily the best known phenomenological theory, has not been explicitly advocated in print. G.E. Moore (1903, §12) is a possible exception.
Crisp (2006), Kagan (1992), Smuts (2010). It is common to refer to phenomenological theories that are alternatives to the distinctive feeling theory as ‘hedonic tone’ views. Other well-known hedonic tone theorists include C.D. Broad (1930), and Karl Duncker (1941). See also Carolyn Morillo (1995), Timothy Schroeder (2004), Jesse Prinz (2004), Valerie Hardcastle (1999), and Daniel Dennett (1978). I regret that there is not sufficient space in the article at hand to devote to discussion of all this important and relevant work.
Rachels (2000, p. 196) Even Heathwood accepts the intuitiveness of this idea. He writes, “Imagine the feeling of stepping barefoot on a tack. Isn’t it just part of the very nature of that feeling that it is painful? It can seem incredible to suppose that this feeling qualifies as painful only due to the attitude that we happen to take up towards it” (Heathwood 2007b).
Feldman (2006, p. 79).
Korsgaard (1996, p. 148).
Smuts (2010).
Melzack (1961, p. 47).
Liking/disliking theories are held by Hall (1989), and Parfit (2011). Liking/disliking theorists are notoriously vague on what the relevant attitude of liking (or disliking) involves. Some attempt to explain it by saying that it must be liking (or disliking) “at the time of experience”, “by the experiencing agent”, or “merely as feeling”. However, these explanations seem to me to add nothing. Is it really possible to like a past or future experience of one’s? Or to like somebody else’s experience? Or to like an experience for something other than its phenomenology? I doubt it. One might like that one is having or has had a certain experience, but to like an experience itself seems already to imply that it is one’s own, that it is occurrent, and that it is liked for its phenomenology, rather than for some other feature of it.
A hint of this argument is contained in Rachels (2000, p. 194): “Yesterday I felt pleasure, to different degrees, all day long. In what sense did I have a “favorable emotional attitude” to my experiences when I was not focusing on them? The notions of liking and disliking need further explication.” Note that it is entirely consistent with this argument that we can have attitudes, too, (for example, intrinsic desires) of which we are entirely unaware. My point is that one cannot take up the relevant kind of attitude (be it an attitude one is aware of or not) toward an experience of which one is entirely unaware. An agent must have some kind of awareness of an occurrent experience if he is to, say, intrinsically want it not to be occurring.
Haybron (2008, p. 222).
Haybron (2008). See also Oliver Sacks, who quotes a patient of his who has lost his sense of smell: “Sense of smell? I never gave it a thought. You don’t normally give it a thought. But when I lost it—it was like being struck blind. Life lost a good deal of its savour – one doesn’t realise how much ‘savour’ is smell. You smell people, you smell books, you smell the city, you smell the spring – maybe not consciously, but as a rich unconscious background to everything else. My whole world was suddenly radically poorer” (Rachels 2004, p. 225).
Schwitzgebel (2008, p. 252).
Compare Rachels (2000).
Crisp (2006, p. 109).
It might be objected that there can be coloured experiences that are not visual—for example, the experience of thinking of a red phone booth, or a feeling of anger. I am inclined to think, however, that such non-visual experiences are not well described as themselves being literally coloured. When somebody is angry, and ‘sees red’, he is not literally having a red experience—or, if he is, then this is because his visual experience has been subtly reddened as a result of (or in connection with) his angry feelings. Similarly, when I think of a red phone booth, bring one to mind, or whatever, what is red is the object of my thought, not my experience of thinking of it. On the other hand, I would not wish to rule out the possibility that some thoughts are, in a way, quasi-visual. Talk of one’s ‘mind’s eye’ may be more literal than is commonly thought. If this is right, however, then, even if my experience of thinking of a red phone booth can itself fairly be described as literally red, this is only because it is a kind of visual experience.
Kagan (1992).
Kagan (1992). Kagan cites unpublished work by Leonard Katz.
Smuts (2010).
Smuts (2010).
Smuts (2010).
Smuts (2010).
Schwitzgebel (2008, p. 250) emphasises that it is not just that we can be inarticulate about our phenomenology, but that our introspection can fail us too: “It’s not like perfectly well knowing what particular shade of tangerine your Volvo is, stumped only about how to describe it. No, in the case of emotion the very phenomenology itself—the “qualitative” character of our consciousness—is not entirely evident, or so it seems to me.”
Schwitzgebel (2002).
Schwitzgebel (2000).
Schwitzgebel (2008).
Haybron (2008, p. 200).
Smuts (2010).
Haybron (2008, p. 199).
Smuts (2010).
Smuts (2010).
Another possibility worth mentioning is that, while there is no ‘feeling of pleasure itself’, there are a number of ‘pleasant feelings’, the presence of any of which in an experience is enough to make that experience count as pleasant. These feelings might be related to each other in the same way that the different shades of a single colour are related to each other. Sprigge (1988) seems to hold a view like this. If this view is correct, it may further explain the felt diversity of pleasant experiences.
Findlay (1961, p. 177).
Heathwood (2011) suggests, though does not state, this objection when he writes that, if phenomenological theories are true, then “pleasure is really just another sensation among others (or, on its hedonic tone variety, just another feature of sensations among others). Just as there is the taste of chocolate, the feeling of sun on your back, and the sound of Ella Fitzgerald’s voice, there is the feeling of pleasure. On [phenomenological theories], it must be just a contingent fact about us humans that we tend to like and want this feeling of pleasure (just as it is contingent that we tend to like and want to hear the sound of Ella Fitzgerald’s voice).”
Sprigge (1988).
Wilson (2010).
Note that this explanation assumes both (a) that our pleasures are (at least, for the most part) good, and that our pains are (at least, for the most part) bad, and (b) that there is a conceptual connection between believing something good and being attracted to it, and also between believing something bad and being averse to it. These assumptions, while not universally accepted, are extremely widely held. I will not attempt in this article to defend them. Note also that this explanation is consistent with the existence of individuals who are not attracted to their pleasures, or averse to their pains. Such individuals, according to this explanation, would be failing to believe that their pleasures are good, or their pains bad. An example of such an individual might be the ascetic mentioned above. Other examples might include individuals who are profoundly self-loathing or guilt-ridden as a result of abusive childhoods, or religious indoctrination.
Heathwood (2011).
Alston (1968, p. 346). See also Sobel (2005, p. 445): “Given the historical significance of versions of hedonism that claim a phenomenological commonality between pleasures, it is surprisingly obscure what can be said by way of vindicating the reason-giving status of such states.” Sobel goes so far as to compare a phenomenological theorist who claims that only pleasant experiences are intrinsically valuable, to someone who insists that chocolate is an intrinsically more valuable flavour than strawberry. The very notion, he says, is comic.
See also Haybron’s wonderful example of Glen, a mechanic from Detroit, who only realises how unhappy he is in his everyday life after he returns to his childhood home in the countryside and is struck by the contrast: “He experiences real joy for the first time in years, but more than that he feels a tremendous surge of vitality and expansion of spirit. He feels free and big; by contrast, his usual self, and most of those back in the city, now strike him as tiny, compressed and shriveled up, like ants. He instinctively resumes the confident posture and stride of his youth, and at day’s end slips easily into a deep, untroubled sleep. He now realizes that what had previously seemed like happiness was anything but – not because he didn’t understand what happiness is, but simply because he was oblivious to the character of his emotional condition. This becomes more apparent still when he returns home to Detroit and gradually resumes that unhappy state.” Intuitively, Glen’s unhappiness in Detroit was bad, even though he was ignorant of it.
Goldstein (1980, p. 357).
Goldstein (1980, p. 358).
Things might be different if there turned out to be a viable alternative to phenomenological theories.
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Bramble, B. The distinctive feeling theory of pleasure. Philos Stud 162, 201–217 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9755-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9755-9