Editing Pleasure (section)

== Theories of pleasure ==
''Theories of pleasure'' try to determine what pleasurable experiences have in common, what is essential to them.<ref name="Pallies"/> They are traditionally divided into 
* quality theories; that pleasure is a quality of pleasurable experiences themselves,
* attitude theories;<ref name="Bramble">{{cite journal |last1=Bramble |first1=Ben |title=The Distinctive Feeling Theory of Pleasure |journal=Philosophical Studies |date=2013 |volume=162 |issue=2 |pages=201–217 |doi=10.1007/s11098-011-9755-9 |s2cid=170819498 |url=https://philpapers.org/rec/BRATDF}}</ref> that pleasure is in some sense external to the experience since it depends on the subject's attitude to the experience.<ref name="Pallies"/><ref name="Bramble"/> An alternative terminology refers to these theories as ''phenomenalism'' and ''intentionalism''.<ref>{{cite web |last1=Moore |first1=Andrew |title=Hedonism: 2.1 Ethical Hedonism and the Nature of Pleasure |url=https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hedonism/#EthHed |website=The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy |publisher=Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University |access-date=1 February 2021 |date=2019}}</ref> 
* hybrid or dispositional theories, that incorporate elements of both quality and attitude approaches.<ref name="Borchert"/><ref name="Pallies"/>

=== Quality theories ===
In everyday language, the term "pleasure" is primarily associated with sensory pleasures like the enjoyment of food or sex.<ref name="Borchert"/> One traditionally important ''quality-theory'' closely follows this association by holding that pleasure is a sensation. On the simplest version of the sensation theory, whenever we experience pleasure there is a distinctive pleasure-sensation present.<ref name="Borchert"/><ref name="Katz"/> So a pleasurable experience of eating [[chocolate]] involves a sensation of the taste of chocolate together with a pleasure-sensation. An obvious shortcoming of this theory is that many impressions may be present at the same time.<ref name="Borchert"/> For example, there may be an itching sensation as well while eating the chocolate. But this account cannot explain why the enjoyment is linked to the taste of the chocolate and not to the itch.<ref name="Borchert"/> Another problem is due to the fact that sensations are usually thought of as localized somewhere in the body. But considering the pleasure of seeing a beautiful sunset, there seems to be no specific region in the body at which we experience this pleasure.<ref name="Borchert"/><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Myers |first1=Gerald E. |title=Ryle on Pleasure |journal=Journal of Philosophy |date=1957 |volume=54 |issue=March |pages=181–187 |doi=10.2307/2022655 |jstor=2022655 |url=https://philpapers.org/rec/MYEROP}}</ref>

These problems can be avoided by felt-quality-theories, which see pleasure not as a sensation but as an aspect qualifying sensations or other mental phenomena.<ref name="Borchert"/><ref name="Pallies"/><ref name="Smuts"/> As an aspect, pleasure is dependent on the mental phenomenon it qualifies, it cannot be present on its own.<ref name="Borchert"/> Since the link to the enjoyed phenomenon is already built into the pleasure, it solves the problem faced by sensation theories to explain how this link comes about.<ref name="Borchert"/> It also captures the intuition that pleasure is usually pleasure ''of'' something: enjoyment ''of'' drinking a milkshake or ''of'' playing chess but not just pure or object-less enjoyment. According to this approach, pleasurable experiences differ in content (drinking a milkshake, playing chess) but agree in feeling or hedonic tone. Pleasure can be localized, but only to the extent that the impression it qualifies is localized.<ref name="Borchert"/>

One objection to both the sensation theory and the felt-quality theory is that there is no one quality shared by all pleasure-experiences.<ref name="Bramble"/><ref name="Pallies"/><ref name="Smuts">{{cite journal |last1=Smuts |first1=Aaron |title=The Feels Good Theory of Pleasure |journal=Philosophical Studies |date=2011 |volume=155 |issue=2 |pages=241–265 |doi=10.1007/s11098-010-9566-4 |s2cid=170258796 |url=https://philpapers.org/rec/SMUTFG}}</ref> The force of this objection comes from the intuition that the variety of pleasure-experiences is just too wide to point out one quality shared by all, for example, the quality shared by ''enjoying a milkshake'' and ''enjoying a chess game''. One way for quality theorists to respond to this objection is by pointing out that the hedonic tone of pleasure-experiences is not a regular quality but a higher-order quality.<ref name="Borchert"/><ref name="Pallies"/> As an analogy, a vividly green thing and a vividly red thing do not share a regular color property but they share "vividness" as a higher-order property.<ref name="Pallies"/>

=== Attitude theories ===
''Attitude theories'' propose to analyze pleasure in terms of attitudes to experiences.<ref name="Smuts"/><ref name="Katz"/> So to enjoy the taste of chocolate it is not sufficient to have the corresponding experience of the taste. Instead, the subject has to have the right attitude to this taste for pleasure to arise.<ref name="Borchert"/> This approach captures the intuition that a second person may have exactly the same taste-experience but not enjoy it since the relevant attitude is lacking. Various attitudes have been proposed for the type of attitude responsible for pleasure, but historically the most influential version assigns this role to [[desire]]s.<ref name="Pallies"/> On this account, pleasure is linked to experiences that fulfill a desire had by the experiencer.<ref name="Borchert"/><ref name="Pallies"/> So the difference between the first and the second person in the example above is that only the first person has a corresponding desire directed at the taste of chocolate.

One important argument against this version is that while it is often the case that we desire something first and then enjoy it, this cannot always be the case. In fact, often the opposite seems to be true: we have to learn first that something is enjoyable before we start to desire it.<ref name="Borchert"/><ref name="Pallies"/> This objection can be partially avoided by holding that it does not matter whether the desire was there before the experience but that it only matters what we desire while the experience is happening. This variant, originally held by [[Henry Sidgwick]], has recently been defended by Chris Heathwood, who holds that an experience is pleasurable if the subject of the experience wants the experience to occur for its own sake while it is occurring.<ref name="Heathwood">{{cite journal |last1=Heathwood |first1=Chris |title=The Reduction of Sensory Pleasure to Desire |journal=Philosophical Studies |date=2007 |volume=133 |issue=1 |pages=23–44 |doi=10.1007/s11098-006-9004-9 |s2cid=170419589 |url=https://philpapers.org/rec/HEATRO}}</ref><ref name="Bramble"/> But this version faces a related problem akin to the [[Euthyphro dilemma]]: it seems that we usually desire things because they are enjoyable, not the other way round.<ref name="Smuts"/><ref name="Katz"/> So desire theories would be mistaken about the direction of explanation. Another argument against desire theories is that desire and pleasure can come apart: we can have a desire for things that are not enjoyable and we can enjoy things without desiring to do so.<ref name="Borchert"/><ref name="Pallies"/>

=== Dispositional theories ===
''Dispositional theories'' try to account for pleasure in terms of [[Disposition (philosophy)|dispositions]], often by including insights from both the quality theories and the attitude theories. One way to combine these elements is to hold that pleasure consists in being disposed to desire an experience in virtue of the qualities of this experience.<ref name="Katz"/><ref name="Borchert"/><ref name="Pallies"/> Some of the problems of the regular desire theory can be avoided this way since the disposition does not need to be realized for there to be pleasure, thereby taking into account that desire and pleasure can come apart.<ref name="Borchert"/><ref name="Pallies"/>