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\title{Hedonism and Planning Ahead}
\author{David Golombek}
\date{\today\\1916 Words}

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\maketitle
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\section{Introduction}
{\Large
Hedonism is one of the oldest schools of philosophy in existence,
founded by Aristippus around 400 B.C.  He and his followers, the
Cyrenaics, followed a code that suggested that the pleasure of an
activity is a measure of its goodness, and that one should strive to
maximize total pleasure by taking rational action to ensure their
continuance.  They similarly avoided all situations that caused pain
or sorrow, both to themselves or others, taking a proto-utilitarian
stance on the maximum good for all people.  The Cyrenaics eventually
disappeared, but their teachings were incorporated into Epicurean
philosophy, although Epicurus also merged in many other elements, such
as Atomism and temperance.  Through the writings of the Epicureans and
later works by the Utilitarians, hedonism has survived into the modern
age, although it is no longer as strong a school of philosophy as it
used to be.  Modern hedonistic theory revolves around variations of
the quote ``pleasure is the only good'', with each philosopher making
his own minor variations to make it fit his own theories better.
}

{\Large
To paraphrase a famous quip, ``Having fun is a tough job, but
someone's got to do it.''  Maintaining a pleasurable life will almost
always require the expenditure of some effort, as I'll show below, and
the more ``advanced'' the pleasure, the more effort that goes into
achieving it.  One of the large parts of putting effort into
achieving a future goal is planning ahead, taking actions that have
little pleasurable effect but will help in the long run.  In some
cases, the immediate actions may involve some minor amount of pain or
foregoing of other pleasures, so that the the long-term pleasure may be
obtained.  These short-term losses are typically explained away as
being acceptable for the greater pleasure that will be attained at the
end --- sacrifice now, reap the benefits later.  However, take this
attitude a little bit farther, and suddenly everybody begins to look
like a hedonist.  Extend the definition of pleasure a little bit (and
it's already a very hazy word), and the time frames involved in
planning ahead, and anyone who is seeking happiness in life (ie, most
of us) is a hedonist.  Certainly most of us wouldn't call ourselves
hedonists, nor should we, but somewhere in dealing with the nature of
planning ahead, we changed the nature of hedonism.  Thus, I'd like to
explore the relation between planning ahead and hedonism more in the
rest of this paper.
}

\section{Maintaining Pleasure}
{\Large
From the beginning of hedonistic ponderings, there has always been a
realization that pleasure requires some degree of rationalistic action
to ensure a its continuance.  Even the simplest pleasures
(here meaning those pleasures requiring the least planning and effort
to achieve) cannot be maintained indefinitely without taking breaks to
deal with the necessities of life, with a few rare exceptions.  We
can examine a few of these cases to see why planning is almost always
a necessity.  First imagine a man is happy with a life composed only
of eating, sleeping, and reading, two of which are necessities of life
but nonetheless highly enjoyable to many, and the third a pleasure to
fill the rest of his life.  He must still arrange to eat, be this by
shopping and preparing food, or by ordering it, and he must arrange for
new reading material, for almost no one is pleased with re-reading the
same book indefinitely.  Second we take a person on the island of
Hedonism, a resort which caters to those seeking to avoid even the
above responsibilities, providing every service a person could seek,
for a price of course.  This service doesn't come cheap, and most
people must take at least some action to maintain their cash flow, be
it managing their inheritance or making phone calls to manage their
business.  Thus, it seems that only the insanely rich, who can afford
the services of and island like Hedonism indefinitely, are likely to
avoid planning entirely, or those mentally incapable of making the
decisions necessary for planning, and thus require the assistance of
others.
}

\section{What is Pleasurable}
{\Large
If hedonism is described as constantly seeking out that which is
pleasurable, then we must decide what is pleasurable.  Certainly the
specifics are going to vary from person to person; some people like
spicy food, some don't.  But consider the bigger picture --- how do we
distinguish between those things we merely {\it want} and those things
we expect to find {\it pleasurable}.  For example, I want to end
hunger problems in the world, not because they directly affect me, but
because I think it is an admirable goal.  On the other hand, I want to
go out to a good dinner, because I will find the food very
pleasurable.  The distinction here is difficult to make, and one that
has caused hedonistic philosophers many problems.  As J.C.B. Gosling
describes in his book \underline{Pleasure and Desire} \cite{PAD}, 
``'Pleasure', then, is a word used to refer to a certain sort of
feeling, identified by the way it feels, not by context.''  This is as
helpful as Justice Potter Stewart's description of obscenity, ``I know
it when I see it.''  Gosling goes on give a great many examples, and
ties pleasure to other feelings such as fear and awe, but never manages to
pinpoint it further.  Lionel Tiger does a much better job in his book
\underline{The Pursuit of Pleasure} \cite{PP}, in which he breaks down
pleasures into physiopleasures, sociopleasures, psychopleasures, and
ideopleasures, and explores ways to link these with biological
factors, such as the limbic system and evolutionary forces.  For the
purposes of the paper, I shall treat pleasurable actions as those that
result in a release of pleasing hormones in the body.  This is almost
certainly too restrictive of a definition, but one that is easy to
work with, and is very similar to Tiger's definition.
}

\section{Planning Pleasurable Things}
{\Large
Now that we have a definition of pleasurable activities, we can begin
to examine why one would need to plan ahead for some of them, and see
why they may require extensive work.  Let us take as example
the goal of getting a promotion in a job.  This is a very pleasurable
goal for many people; first, it usually involves the immediate burst
of pleasing hormones when the news is first announced, and second, it
brings with it many benefits, such as higher salary and possibly more
interesting tasks.  However, there are many costs frequently
associated with obtaining the raise --- extra time at work, extra
thought and effort devoted to problems at work, and expenditure of
energy to be noticed over one's co-workers.  With the extra time you
spend at work, you could instead have done many more immediately
pleasing activities.  With the extra thought and effort, you could
have daydreamed, and the extra energy, you could have saved up for
activities after work.  Fred Feldman gives many examples of trying to
rank and compare pleasurable activities in his essay ``Mill, Moore,
and the consistency of qualified hedonism'' \cite{UHD}, and in his
terms, if the pleasure constant of the raise was greater than the sum
of the pleasure constants of the activities given up for it, then the
tradeoff would be worthwhile.  According to Feldman then, the
promotion would be worth it if we gained  10 units of pleasure from it
\footnote{Feldman's pleasure units are fairly arbitrary and never
described.  I follow that pattern here, and only use the relation
between numbers for indication of their goodness}, as compared to 2
units of pain from all the sacrifices to get there, thus yielding a
net pleasure of 8 units.
}

{\Large 
I find any attempt at measuring pleasure such as Feldman's to be an
exercise in futility.  Although I don't see an easy way of easily
ranking the relative pleasures of different activities, I agree that
it is a theoretical possibility (varying from person to person of
course).  However, rankings such as this can never take the
repercussions of an event into account, because no one can predict the
fallout of an event that never occurs.  No event happens in a vacuum,
having no aftereffects at all.  Some may have very few, but some may
be very great.  In the example above of obtaining a promotion, say
that one evening, instead of working those extra hours, you had met a new
lover.  This would be counted as a very pleasurable activity.  But if
through sexual activity with the new lover, you contracted a sexually
transmitted disease, it would possibly become an overall unpleasant
(or ``doloric'', to use Feldman's opposite of hedonistic) action.
These repercussions are all unknowns --- thus it is impossible to
accurately rank an activity against its opportunity cost.
}

{\Large
Hedonism does not claim that people should always attempt to reach the
maximum level of pleasure all the time --- it merely states that
pleasurable activities are far better than painful ones.  Thus, not
knowing what pleasures we're missing by taking a course of action does
not present an insurmountable challenge.  We must simply make sure
that the total pleasure at the end of our chosen course of actions is
positive; that is, that we've had more (and greater) pleasurable
activities in sum than painful ones in sum.  Which leads to the
biggest problem with long term planning --- even the best laid plans
often go astray.  If we make small sacrifices on the way to trying to
achieve a large pleasure, and we don't obtain the large pleasure for
whatever reason, we're left with an overall painful experience.  Any
plan requiring long term planning is inherently risky, because we can
never predict all the things that may change between when we start
planning and when the concluding actions occur.  This then suggests
that we should enjoy each individual action on the way to achieving
the final pleasure.  Let us return to the example of getting a
promotion; you should enjoy the work you're currently doing, so that
the extra hours aren't a burden, and the extra time and energy should
match your enthusiasm for the tasks.  If you don't enjoy the work in
the first place, then you're clearly violating hedonistic principles.
Thus we see that this rule both makes sense on a theoretical, and
applied to a real situation (and many other situations commonly found
in life).
}

\section{Conclusion}
{\Large
We've seen that almost all activities require some amount of planning,
certainly in varying degrees.  Planning itself is rarely pleasurable
or painful, although some people may find it so, usually due to
imagining possible turnouts of the planning.  However, if reaching the
end goal of a plan requires any amount of pain along the way, we must
be extremely cautious, because if the final goal is not achieved, the
pain will be for nothing, and thus purely bad (by using the inverse of
modern hedonistic theory).  Therefore we should try to ensure we enjoy
every action on the way to the culmination of our planning, thus
ensuring a net pleasurable experience.
}

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\begin{thebibliography}{9}

\bibitem{UHD} Feldman, Fred.  Utilitarianism, Hedonism, and Desert.
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997, p. 108.

\bibitem{OTPAK} Fraser, J.T.  Of Time, Passion, and Knowledge.
Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1990.

\bibitem{PAD} Gosling, J.C.B.  Pleasure and Desire.
Oxford University Press, London, 1969, p. 30.

\bibitem{PP} Tiger, Lionel.  The Pursuit of Pleasure.   Little, Brown
and Co., Boston, MA, 1992.

\end{thebibliography}
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