Essentials of Christian Ethics - Lesson 4

 The following lecture is provided by biblical training. The speaker is Dr. Ronald Nash. More information is available at WW w dot Biblical training dot org. In a moment, I'm going to begin talking about the next ethical theory we're going to examine. It will be hedonism. But I just want to pause for a moment and point out something that I hope is obvious to all of the listeners. If you're a listener to this tape, if you've been listening for the last 40 minutes, even if you are not a Christian. Even if you don't care a bit about what the Christian worldview says about ethics, I would think that one very important point must have registered by now. If you're into relativism, if you're into subjectivism, if you're into situational ethics now, how can I say this in a polite way? You're not playing with a full deck. One does not have to be a Christian to oppose relativism. Situational ethics and certainly ethical subjectivism. These are utterly untenable theories that make no sense at all. If you're listening to this tape and you're not a Christian, are you beginning to wonder where you might find an adequate ethical theory? Now, I know there are lots of people who don't care to find an ethical theory, but one would have to be mad to give his life over to Subjectivism or to relativism, or even the foolish theory of situational ethics. But now we're going to look at several related theories that have had a great appeal for people outside the Christian faith. And even though it requires a little bit more attention to see exactly what's wrong with these theories, they turn out to be just as problematic as anything that we've seen up to this point.

Now we're going to talk about hedonism and varieties of hedonism. Hedonism is the belief that pleasure is the highest good. Hedonism has appeared in several forms, two of which are seen in the important difference between egoistic hedonism found in the ancient world. Now, let me explain what egoistic and egoistic hedonist is. Someone who believes or did believe that it is my own personal pleasure that is the highest good and that kind of hidden existed. Oh, 200 300 years before Christ and beyond that. But in the 19th and 20th centuries, a different form of hedonism became prominent. And that is called altruistic hedonism. That means that I should seek the happiness of the greatest number of people. And then in the meantime, if my own personal happiness has to suffer in order to bring about the happiness of the greatest number of people, then I should be pleased with that result. If we believe that pleasure is the highest good, we have to decide whose pleasure is most important. And egoistic hedonist is going to think that his own pleasure takes precedence while an altruistic hedonist is going to care about the pleasure of others. Or, to be more specific, the pleasure or happiness of the greatest number of people. Well, let's begin first by talking about egoistic hedonism, and we find here that there are also two forms of egoistic hedonism. Another important distinction within hedonism divides egoistic hedonism into two movements, namely the crude, sensual hedonism of a man named STIP us who died about 350 B.C. and whose life overlapped the lives of Socrates and Plato. There is that one kind of crude, sensual hedonism. And then there's the more sophisticated hedonism of the philosopher named Epicurus, who died around 270 B.C.. So let's talk first about Eros strippers and his crude, sensual hedonism, which was part of a movement to which a strip as blond called Sereny is ism.

Erik STIP us was a minor figure in ancient Athens who led a movement known as Serenade System. The serenade is not only believed that a person's own pleasure was the highest good, but also emphasized the primary importance of bodily pleasures. Do not worry or think about the future. The serenade said, Get all of the bodily pleasure you can get right now. In the present serenade ex lived by the motto Let us eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we may die. Things don't change much. The world is still full of people who live by that motto. Epicurus, though, was different, even though Epicurus believed the pleasure of each individual was the highest good. He offered perhaps the best critical examination of crude, sensual hedonism. Everyone living the life of a hedonist ought to examine the beliefs and the arguments of Epicurus. Epicurus agreed with the syringe mix. That's Air Estep and his crowd. The pleasures differ only in quantity, never in quality. As we know, some pleasures are more intense than others. But pleasures differ not only in intensity, they can also differ in duration. Some pleasures simply last longer than others. The pleasures of the body may be more intense, but they tend to be fleeting. Think of how many times you've had a great meal in the evening. But come sunrise, the memory of last night's meal cannot satisfy your hunger of the moment. Up to this point, there was basic agreement between Epicurus and Paris Dippers. Epicurus began his movement away from heiress dippers and Serena, a system by recognizing that if pleasure is the highest good, then the greatest evil must be pain. And since pain has the potential of canceling our pleasures, the wise hedonist will be as interested in avoiding pain as he is in achieving pleasure.

What kind of hedonist chooses actions that produce, let us say, 100 units of pleasure. And 250 units are paying Epicurus. His answer Only a foolish hedonist would engage in such behavior. Why is hedonists will settle for less pleasure in exchange for less pain? Epicurus also emphasized the difference between the pleasures of the body and the pleasures of the mind. Pleasures of the mind might include the pleasures we receive from listening to great music, observing great art, or watching the sunrise over the Grand Canyon. I can't speak for you, but last Thanksgiving's dinner, as good as it was, hasn't given me any pleasure since the day I ate it. But memories of happy times with my grandchildren, or visits to the Louvre in Paris, or performances of life miserable, or experiencing that sunrise over the Grand Canyon, continue to give me pleasure. Yes, the pleasures of the body can be overwhelmingly powerful, but they are short lived. While the pleasures of the mind, though they are less intense, live on, as Epicurus might have said. Hedonists of the world unite. Pay more attention to the pleasures of the mind. One reason for this attitude is the pleasures of the body always carry the danger of producing pain. The greatest of all evils. This is so in at least two ways. For one thing, it is impossible to enjoy a bodily pleasure without first experiencing some want or need or desire, each of which is a form of pain. For example, during my first year of teaching at a state university, the papers carried the story of a college freshman who reportedly made the Guinness Book of Records for drinking the most consecutive bottles of Coke. I think he drank more than 20 bottles in 5 minutes.

How much pleasure do you suppose he got from all of that carbonated soda? You cannot enjoy the pleasures of drinking unless you're thirsty. And thirst is a kind of pain. The reason we fail to recognize this is because none of us allows our thirst to go unsatisfied for more than a few minutes. Where's the water fountain? Where's the coke machine? Where's the fruit juice? And so it goes. It is also impossible to enjoy the pleasures of eating unless you're hungry. Many of us remember a Paul Newman movie titled Cool Hand Luke. It's the movie that's famous for the line. What we have here is a failure to communicate, a fact that may make it the first public appearance of deconstruction ism. It's also the film in which Luke, the Newman character, accepts a challenge to eat 50 hard boiled eggs within 10 minutes. Do you think Paul Newman enjoyed eating those eggs? You cannot enjoy the pleasures of eating unless you're hungry and hunger is a kind of pain. If you doubt that statement, try to go three or four days without any anything. To summarize Epicurus his position thus far. The wise hedonist will be as concerned with avoiding pain as with attaining pleasure. While the pleasures of the body are stronger and more intense than pleasures of the mind, they have some disadvantages. For one thing, as we've seen, enjoying bodily pleasure requires one first to experience degrees of pain such as thirst or hunger. But there is a second disadvantage to bodily pleasure. Overindulgence in the pleasures of the body produces pain. The more overindulgence, the more the pain. Surely all of us can testify to the truth of this observation. Epicurus parted company with the Syrian ex, those crude sensual hedonists in another regard.

He warned his hedonistic followers not to live just for the present moment. The wise hedonist takes the long view. He lives for tomorrow, for the future. Epicurus had no use for hedonists who live by the mantra Eat, drink and be merry. For tomorrow we may die. Since the odds are strongly in favor of your being alive tomorrow, do not be a fool and engage in behavior that will produce long term pain that will far exceed the short term pleasure. If you are such a fool, the odds are good that the day will come when, like people I have known, the infections cannot be overcome. Your liver will be ruined, your heart will fail or your mind will be gone. Spend some time interviewing an AIDS patient and ask how much fun he's had during the past week. So far as the pleasures of the body are concerned, Epicurus taught. Live a life of moderation, don't overindulge in any bodily pleasures, or they will come back to haunt you. Finally, Epicurus recommends the pleasures of the mind to us. While mental pleasures are much less intense than bodily pleasures, they last much longer than physical pleasures and avoid the bad side effects of irresponsible bodily behavior. Epicurus His advice is to play it safe, practice moderation, and not do anything stupid. Epicurus, the most famous hedonist in history, has presented a powerful case against the kind of crude, sensual hedonism so popular in our society. And he did so without once quoting the Bible. Of course he could. Does Epicurus, his version of hedonism, deserve our respect? I think not. Plato and Aristotle had delivered serious objections to hedonism generations before Epicurus was born. Keep in mind that what we're evaluating is still the simplistic identification of pleasure with the good.

Plato noted that pleasure and the good cannot be identical. If the claim of identity were true, then there could be no such thing as a bad pleasure. Pleasure and the good cannot be equivalent. Aristotle explained that pleasure is only one component of a happy life. While this implies an admission that pleasure is important, it counters those who say that pleasure is identical with the good. The best way to attain pleasure is to forget it. Aristotle said the way to get pleasure is to lose yourself in other activities, and suddenly you'll discover that you're enjoying yourself. Since the path to pleasure is to pursue and attain other things, this counters the belief that pleasure is the highest good. Now it's time to look at that altruistic version of hedonism that came on the scene. Oh, let us just say, in the 19th century, Hedonism experienced a revival of sorts in the work of Jeremy Bentham, who died in 1832, and John Stuart Mill, who died in 1873. Bentham repeated the ancient claims that pleasure is the highest good and that pleasures differ only in quantity. Because Bentham believed, the pleasures differ only in quantity. He urged people to seek the happiness of the greatest number of people. Incorporating more and more people within the circle of hedonism was a guaranteed way to increase the total quantity of pleasure being produced. Eventually, this way of thinking came to be known as utilitarianism. More recently, the name Consequential ISM has been used to point to. This latter name was the fact that the goodness of an act was deemed to lie solely in its consequences, namely the tendency to produce the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people. Because my primary interest lies in the hedonistic side of utilitarianism, I will skip other issues raised by the utilitarian thinkers, save for a few comments a little bit later on.

What concerns me here is Bentham's belief that the quest for the good life will lead us to maximize the quantity of happiness in the world where happiness is understood as pleasure. Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle, who died in 1881, charged that hedonism is a PIGS philosophy. His proof was that if pleasure is the highest good, then that highest good is as attainable by a pig. A dirty pig playing in the mud as by a prince, a professor or a poet, stung by what he knew was a devastating critique, John Stuart Mill wrote a short book entitled Utilitarianism that introduced a major change into the Theory of Hedonism prior to the appearance of Mill's book in 1861. Proponents of hedonism had insisted that pleasures differ only in quantity. Pleasures may be stronger or weaker, but they cannot be higher or lower. Pleasures cannot differ in quality. Mill sought to change that by arguing that some pleasures can be superior to others in quality. In Mill's famous words, it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig. Satisfied. Better to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a fool, satisfied in order to avoid a moral philosophy that would degrade humans by lowering them to the level of the pig. Mill argued that some pleasures are qualitatively superior to others. To update some of Mill's examples, an advocate of Mill's position might contend that the pleasure derived from reading Shakespeare is qualitatively better than the pleasure received from reading a cartoon strip such as Hagar. The horrible or peanuts. The pleasure derived from watching a ballet is superior to that received from watching your favorite team win the seventh game of the World Series. Mill did not realize that when he introduced a qualitative difference of pleasures in the hedonism, he was setting the stage for the destruction of hedonism.

Understanding why this is so is an important step in the maturing of one's philosophical skills under the quantitative analysis. If the only good is pleasure, then the only way to make a pleasure better is to increase its quantity. One must not introduce qualitative considerations, but contrary to hedonists. Before him, Mill argued that a pleasure can be improved by altering its quality. This was a mistake on Mill's part. Consider the following analogy. Suppose someone claims that money is the highest good and then adds that money earned teaching philosophy is better than money earned robbing banks. If money is the highest good, it doesn't matter how you acquire it. All that does matter is getting more. Once one introduces qualitative considerations, he has crossed the line so that money is not and cannot be the highest good. The reason this is so is because there is now a standard higher than money. Since that newly introduced standard enables us to pass judgment on to piles of money while ignoring quantity, money is no longer the highest good, the standard, rather, by which we judge some piles of money to be superior to others without regard to quantity is the higher good. Mills dilemma can be formulated as follows. Premise one If a utilitarian ignores qualitative differences among pleasures, then he advocates a pigs philosophy, and if he affirms qualitative differences among pleasures, then in principle he is abandoning hedonism by elevating some standard above pleasure. Premise two Either he does or does not affirm qualitative differences. Therefore, either the utilitarian advocates a pigs philosophy or he abandons utilitarianism. In the work of Bentham and Mill. Utilitarianism referred to the position that consequences always are the primary determinant of the morality of an act. For Bentham and Mill, the most important consequence is the tendency of an act to produce the greatest happiness or pleasure for the greatest number of people.

This view, which came to be known as hedonistic utilitarianism, was savaged by philosophers in the decades following mill. The basic line of attack was to show that an exclusive dependance upon pleasurable consequences led to embarrassing results. The arguments often took the form of comparing two scenarios as the following examples illustrate. First, imagine two worlds in world one. Leaders of a nation seize the property of a minority of its citizens and send them to concentration camps where many are tortured and killed. Let us suppose that the suffering of these people produces significantly more pleasure for the majority in that society than would have happened without the theft of property, the persecution and the imprisonment and the killing of innocent people. In World two, the citizens of the country treat all citizens justly. But for some reason, the amount of pleasure or happiness in World two falls short of that produced in World one. The hedonistic utilitarian would have to say on his grounds that world one, the world with persecution and torture and theft and a whole lot of perverts is ethically superior to world too. Critics of hedonistic utilitarianism kept throwing examples like this at the hedonists, like hand grenades. By the time British philosopher George Edward Moore, who died in 1958, published a book. Called Principio Ethical. In 1903, utilitarianism had begun to turn in a non hedonistic direction. The non hedonistic version of utilitarianism practiced by Moore and others came to be known as ideal utilitarianism. Its basic thesis was that we should always act in a way that produces the greatest amount of goodness, not simply pleasure. For several decades, many people believed that this was the kind of emphasis on consequences that would work. But this view also was clobbered, often through the use of contrasting scenarios in which the ideal utilitarian position ended up supporting unjust situations.

For example, consider world three, in which only guilty people are accused, tried and convicted, whereas in world four, there are times when authorities knowingly and intentionally accuse, try and convict innocent people. Suppose the authorities in world for do this only in rare instances, and only when, in their judgment, convicting innocent people serves the public good. Something much like this could have happened in the case of the infamous London killer known as Jack the Ripper. Between August 7th and November 10th, 1888, operating within a square mile of slums in London's East End. The unknown killer murdered as many as 14 drunken prostitutes by slitting their throats and eviscerating them. One theory as to the murderer's identity is that he was a mentally disturbed nephew of Queen Victoria who was finally institutionalized after he was committed. The killings stopped. Suppose the London authorities believed that it would harm the public good if the Queen's nephew were accused of the crime and that it would help the public good if another mentally deranged person, this one, a poor resident of the London slums without any family, were tried and convicted. Such an act would satisfy the desire of the people of the city for justice and for an end to the killings. This would be a significant accomplishment for the small price of punishing an innocent person who could not defend himself. This would be a significant accomplishment for the small price of punishing an innocent person who could not defend himself. According to ideal utilitarianism, the greater quantity of goodness produced thereby in world for would make it ethically superior to World War Three. This is one example of the kinds of paradoxes people raised to embarrass ideal utilitarianism. A century later, it is extremely difficult to find anyone interested in defending hedonistic or ideal utilitarianism, as was taught between 1860 and 1820.

A different kind of utilitarianism now known as rule. Utilitarianism has its advocates, but interested people will have to pursue that subject in other books. I don't have time to go into detail on these theories except to say that all the king's horses and all the king's men cannot put consequential ism utilitarianism back together again. The position has been badly beaten up in the 20th century, while consequences of our actions are often important. They can hardly be the only thing we should consider in determining the morality of an action. Well, it is clear to me that we've spent quite a bit of time looking at some pretty hopeless ethical theories. When you realize, though, how popular those theories have been for centuries, that ought to tell you one important lesson that when people ignore or flee the ethical system of the Bible, there isn't much that's worth pursuing, that secular systems of ethics turn out to be pretty hopeless, pretty pathetic. And even though time does not permit, in this summary version, an examination of the ethical theory of Immanuel Kant and others that I talk about on the longer version, their theories turn out to be equally problematic. There's a lot to be said for the ethics of the biblical worldview.