GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

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* BTMZGS
ownership of an impulse and its object
It is a fact that
It is also a fact
every impulse that I satisfy is my impulse.
that the satisfaction of any impulse brings pleasure. It
does no^ however, follow that my object in satisfying the
impulse is the pleasure which attends its satisfaction.
It is, Butler maintained, possible to distinguish those
actions which proceed from the motive of increasing one's
own pleasure from those which are prompted by the need
to satisfy an impulse. Thus, to take an example, We can
distinguish between a man's purpose in eating in the case
in which he is seeking to allay hunger, and his purpose
in eating when he is seeking to obtain pleasant sensations,
as, for example, when a replete man eats a chocolate.
To assert that, when I feel hunger and eat, I do so with
the conscious motive of increasing my. happiness, saying
to myself, 'If I eat, I shall get more pleasure than if I
refrain from eating; therefore I will eat' is psychologically
incorrect. When I raise my fork to my lips, I am not
conscious of any such motive: I am conscious only of a
feeling of hunger, combined, if I think about the matter
at all, which I usually do not, with the belief that food
will satisfy my hunger. The hedonist makes the mistake
of concluding that, because by eating food .and allaying
need I obtain pleasure, it was at the pleasure that I was
consciously aiming when I raised my fork to my lips. But
this is to put the cart before the horse. It is to suppose
that, because pleasure (P)
occurs when I obtain some-
thing (X) that I want, therefore, I only wanted (X)
because of (P); but, if I had not wanted (X) for its own
sake, I should not have experienced (P) on obtaining it.
(P), in other words, only occurred because I wanted (X)
independently of (P). Hence, that we should desire things
other than pleasure is sometimes a necessary condition
of our experiencing pleasure.
THE BY-PRODUCT THEORY OF PLEASURE, So
far is it from being true that I am always motivated soltly
by the desire to obtain pleasure for myself, that a plausible