The concepts of happiness and pleasure have a rich
and varied history, and have functioned on diverse
fronts in human life and thought. Occasionally, as in
psychology, they have been made objects of direct
study. More often they have been put to work. Their
use in ethics has, of course, been central. In religion,
they are found within conceptions of salvation and
damnation. In aesthetics, the concept of aesthetic
pleasure is one of the foci of the field. In medicine,
pain is a major starting-point in both practical concern
and the development of the concept of health. In
psychology, the concepts of pleasure and pain have an
important, if not always dominant, place in motiva-
tional theory. In politics, the changing place of the
pursuit of happiness among the tasks of organized
society is a key to basic shifts in theoretical orientation.
In economics, ideas of maximizing satisfactions or
preferences became tied into the formulations of major
schools. In sociology, moral attitudes to pleasure and
pain, as in the traditional puritan morality and its
residues, impinge on the analysis of social treatment
of sex, of work and play, of success and failure. In
education, similar attitudes enter into the theory of
discipline, of motivation, of learning, and of educa-
tional design. In conceptions of social reform generally,
whether in the shape of wholesale creation of utopias,
or specific workaday policies concerning poverty and
welfare, or justifications in city planning and architec-
tural mainlines, concepts of happiness often have an
immediate place.
In ethics, both happiness and pleasure are early
found as candidates for the good. Pleasure is sometimes,
however, portrayed as a villain; pain is overwhelmingly
so considered. In ethical systems in which they do not
play such roles, happiness and pleasure and pain be-
come cast in neutral fashion as psychological phenom-
ena, to be evaluated in the ethical system itself.
When the concepts are used in an ethical way, they
function with a certain value-orientation. (1) They
usually impart a this-worldly character to the ethical
view, but not always, for an otherworldly concept of
blessedness may be invoked. (2) They steer ethics to-
ward individualism. For happiness and pleasure are
basically properties of the individual person and the
individual consciousness. Even when the ethics deals
with general or community happiness, there is a dis-
tributive reference to the aggregate of individuals. (3)
In modern uses of the concept, there enters an element
of measuring or ordering and a spur toward maximiza-
tion. An ethics of happiness or a pleasure-pain ethics
tends to be an optimizing ethics. (4) Again, happiness
and pleasure, in an ethical system, are usually regarded
as intrinsic values. Only rarely are we urged to be
happy as a means—because some divine figure com-
mands it, or (as on occasion with Kant) as insurance lest
unhappiness tempt us into immorality. The analysis of
these concepts is thus involved with the basic com-
plexities that attend the difficult conception of intrinsic
value itself. (5) In the ethical uses, happiness, when
distinguished from pleasure, carries the notion of
well-being (Aristotle's
eudaimonia) as a more total (or
sometimes totalling) phenomenon; or it is identified
with a background or pervasive mood (contentment),
or is more concerned with criteria for relating wholes
and parts of life.
There are a number of central problems in the phil-
osophical analysis of these concepts. (1) There is the
initial methodological question of explicating the
meaning of these notions and furnishing their modes
of identification—for example, whether they are to be
seen as phenomena of consciousness (and in the
dualistic tradition, therefore, as subjective), or whether
they can be identified in a deeper analysis of what is
going on in the human being. Here occur the problems,
too, of the mutual comparison of the phenomena and
the inspection of the differing properties of pleasure
and pain. (2) As a consequence of such distinctions and
of diverse epistemological outlooks, questions arise
about possible distinctions in this domain between real
and apparent or illusory pleasures; and comparably for
happiness and pain. These issues are sometimes formu-
lated in metaphysical terms. (3) Questions of compari-
son constantly arise in terms of both qualitative differ-
ences and measurement of amounts. Here the logical
investigation of the nature of measurement in the
human domain impinges directly on the issues. (4)
Scientific questions are perennial about the relation of
these concepts to psychological and biological phe-
nomena—for example, of pleasure to desire, or to
bodily tension and organic needs. (5) It was early
realized that the language of happiness and pleasure
and pain is richer than these three terms alone. How
far we are dealing with a whole family of concepts
of which these are only a conceptual elite, whether
the linguistic variety can be related to scientific differ-
entiations, have been long-standing questions. As men
became more conscious of their language as a system
of practices, and studied its finer shades, the whole
impact of such language study on the understanding
of pleasure and pain and happiness acquired a greater
philosophical importance.
The exposition of the roles which our concepts have
played, the properties they have exhibited, and the
problems they have involved, can best be set in a brief
historical sketch in which, while ethics is the guiding
thread, each concept finds its place at the points
and times at which it became a matter of reflective
concern.
