Our only way of knowing for certain what is of value and what is not is the same way we know anything: through conscious, rational inquiry, based in facts. But these are automatic or mostly subconscious processes, respectively, and they can err. We feel hunger for food, and we love good friends, for example. Generally, the pleasure/pain mechanism and our emotions exist to help us to live: they warn us against disvalue and urge us toward valuable things. Our beliefs cannot prevent a pin-prick from causing pain (in the main), while our beliefs do affect how we feel about the current President of the U.S.A., to give one pair of examples. Positive and negative emotions arise partly from the same physiological basis, but they are largely determined by our subconscious, conceptual value judgments. For scholarly debate on these issues, see TAS's Objectivist Studies monographs: 'Reason and Value: Aristotle versus Rand ' by Roderick Long and others, and ' Is Virtue Only a Means to Happiness? ' by Neera Badhwar and others.) Feelings of pleasure and pain are automatized reactions that evolution has adapted our bodies to feel. (Objectivist philosopher Harry Binswanger has developed this argument in his 'The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts,' published by the ARI Press, and Objectivist philosopher Tara Smith's book 'Viable Values,' published by Rowman and Littlefield, is also useful in this respect. All our other uses of ideas of value derive from this base in our needs as living beings, and it is a mistake to separate moral ideals from the biological basis of value. Living beings face the ultimate alternative, life versus death, and continue in existence through successful actions to gain and use values such as food, shelter, and so on. 'Value' presupposes a living being, a being that faces an alternative that matters to it.

As Ayn Rand explains in her essay 'The Objectivist Ethics,' the idea of 'good' versus 'evil' presupposes a fundamental conception of what is or is not of value, and more fundamentally, of what it is to value something. This is because each of us is a living organism, and we are adapted to live as long and as well as we can. Objectivism holds that one's own life is the ultimate value. This is the position of Utilitarianism, for example. Some have speculated that pleasure or happiness might be measured in 'hedons,' which would allow us to compare the amount of net pleasure in one person versus that of another. Moral philosophers have speculated that pleasure might be maximized, and pain minimized, by the right moral code. They seem very similar in this regard.Īnswer: Hedonism is the moral doctrine that pleasure, somehow construed, is the ultimate purpose of morality. Question: I would like to know how Objectivism is different from hedonism, at least as far as morality is concerned.

Hedonism examples