Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/393

 CAN THERE BE A SUM OF PLEASURES? 379 and handed about from one person to another. If any one has fallen into such a confusion, I venture to submit that it is the people who object to the mental addition of different people's pleasure, and not the people who contend for its possibility. The objection seems, in fact, to be little more than a question of words. The question whether two people's pleasure is not twice the like pleasure in one person's con- sciousness must depend on the purpose for which the addition is to be used. The meaning which I attach to the assertion is that I regard a certain amount of pleasure in two persons as twice as important as the same amount in one ; and ceteris paribus I regard it as a duty to promote more pleasure than less pleasure. If this last proposition is to be denied, we have arrived at an ultimate difference of ethical ideal : if it is admitted, I do not see how duty is to be fulfilled without mentally adding together, multiplying, the amount of pleasure by the number of persons enjoying that pleasure or (to avoid cavil) enjoying a like amount of pleasure. If this is admitted, where is the objection to the convenient phrase " a sum of pleasure " ? So far I have been dealing with the comparison of pleasures which are the same in kind that is, as I understand it, in which the greater or less pleasurableness of the two pleasures is the only ground upon which we base our judgment as to their comparative preferability. Is the case altered when one pleasure is higher than another ? It is impossible to answer the question without attempting to define what we mean by saying that one pleasure is higher than another. And here I must be allowed to be dogmatic, because I must be brief. I hold that, when we pronounce one pleasure higher than another, we mean that though both of them are pleasant it may be equally pleasant the one is more valuable than the other for some other reason than its pleasantness. What I prefer is really the superior moral or intellectual quality of the pleasant psychical state, not its superior pleasantness. If I compare them simply as pleasures, I make abstraction of all qualities in them except their pleasantness. And pleasure in the strict sense of the word the abstract quality of pleasantness can differ from pleasure only in quantity, ex- tensive or intensive. Hence it appears that strictly speaking there is no difference in quality between pleasures considered
 * ply as such, though there may be between pleasures in

the popular sense of the word, i.e., there may be difference in intrinsic value between two states of consciousness equally pleasant. The distinction would be conveniently expressed By saying : " Pleasure can be estimated only quantitatively,