Hedonism
 

Unjustly maligned or a malignant practice?

by Lloyd Harrison Whitling

You may think you know all there can be known about hedonism. Truthfully, though, most of what you know about this ancient philosophy originated in religious propaganda, and serves to diminish your interest in this heavy-hitting philosophy. What you don't know can hurt you and, unless you enjoy suffering from pain, take the questionnaire and read the pages to be more fully informed. You may be surprised by what you'll learn about yourself, your religion, and maybe your  own family.

That's just a start!

When we think of pain, it seems that images arise about bruises, cuts, blood or broken bones. Often some kind of violent activity gets pictured in our minds, such as being in a wreck, falling down stairs or over a cliff, or getting beat on the head by a Louisville Slugger. We know that getting scalped would be painful, but do you know that being tickled is considered to be a form of induced pain? Or, that hunger, too, is a kind of pain?— as are the feelings that arise from being scolded, accused of wrongdoing (whether we are guilty or innocent), or anything that gives rise to an awareness that we are somehow less perfect than we had thought, and that induce us to view ourselves in a negative light.

While ordinary hedonism is as much about the avoidance of pain as it is about the pursuit of pleasure the religionists like to reference in their inflammatory condemnations, Practical Hedonism is about how to use pain to develop a system of self-guidance in a positive direction. It is, in that way, an opposite approach to the negative tack taken by religionists, wherein pain (as in being tickled) gets perverted into being seen as a kind of pleasure. As this site gains informative essays about this fascinating natural philosophy, you can heighten your own understanding of it by following the progress shown by new links as they appear in the following table.

Click on a title to view that subject

Tickle or Hurt?

Pleasure/Pain Principle

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"To deny a right to the experience of pleasure is immoral unless that denial can be justified by a valid presentation of how pain will result from that experience in an amount that would render the expected pleasure regrettable; or, if it can be shown that pain will be induced in others innocent of any involvement. The role of science in moral issues should be to test that, predict that, and find harmless ways to demonstrate that."

— L. H. Whitling in the eBook, Secular Morality —