An account of pleasure should start from the cases nobody disputes

The argument

A second argument for this account is methodological. Proponents observe that the plainest and least contested examples of pleasure are all sensual: warmth after cold, rest after exertion, food when hungry, touch, the first mouthful of something cool. Nobody argues about whether these are pleasures. The contested cases are the ones further out, such as whether a satisfied ambition or a vindicated opinion is pleasant in the same sense. Proponents argue that a sound account explains the clear cases first and derives the doubtful ones from them, rather than beginning with the hard cases and stretching the concept to cover the easy ones. The mechanism they propose for the derivation is extension by resemblance. The further pleasures are called pleasures because they share the structure of the bodily cases: a want or lack, an occasion that meets it, and a felt change in the person. The resemblance is close enough that the same word is used across them in ordinary speech without any sense of metaphor. Proponents argue this is exactly what one should expect if the bodily case is the original and the rest are extensions of it. Proponents add that the order of learning supports the same ordering. Nobody acquires the concept of pleasure from satisfied ambitions. It is learned early and bodily, from warmth, feeding and comfort, long before there is anything recognisable as a plan to be fulfilled, and the later applications are built on that base. On this account an analysis which makes satisfied desire fundamental has the sequence backwards, treating the sophisticated and disputed instances as the core and the undisputed ones as a special case.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics argue that being uncontested is not the same as being fundamental, and that the bodily cases are clear only because they are simple, in the way that counting on fingers is clearer than arithmetic without being its basis. They add that the order in which a concept is learned says little about what the concept picks out, since much of what people learn first turns out to be a special case of something more general. Others object that the derivation does no real work: once the structure of want, occasion and felt change is said to be what the further pleasures share with the bodily ones, that structure rather than the bodily material is doing the explaining, which concedes the point to the rival accounts.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Critics argue the premise mistakes agreement for evidence. Bodily cases are uncontested because they are the ones everyone has had, not because they reveal the nature of the thing, and the pleasure of being understood is no less certain for being harder to describe. [Rejecting P2] The methodological rule is disputed. Inquiry frequently finds that the clearest instances of a kind are peripheral to it, and insisting on building from the obvious cases would entrench whichever examples happen to be most familiar. [Rejecting P3] Critics note that the structure said to be shared, a lack met by an occasion with a felt change following, contains nothing bodily in it. If that structure is what makes the further cases pleasures, then it rather than the body is fundamental, which is the rival account's conclusion.