Editing Pleasure (section)

=== 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"/>