Aristotle Examines Pleasure

In the fifth section of the tenth book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle continues to examine pleasure.

He has said before that pleasure is a sort of epiphenomenon that crowns and completes certain robustly-pursued activities. Here he says that there seem to be different kinds of pleasure, depending on which kinds of activities they accompany. For example, the pleasure that comes from delighting the senses is a different sort of pleasure than that which comes from engaging in pleasant contemplation.

A pleasure intensifies and spurs on the activity it is related to, so that, for instance, the best mathematicians will be those who take pleasure in manipulating numbers and discovering proofs. On the other hand, pleasures that are not related to a particular activity can hinder that activity. For example, if you take great pleasure in music, you may have a difficult time paying attention to a lecture if there is music playing nearby. In this way, a pleasure that isn’t associated with a particular activity can be just as distracting and discouraging as a pain that is.

If you are engaging in two activities at once, the one that gives the most pleasure will tend to dominate your attention. If you’re scarfing down popcorn at a bad movie, you’ll be paying attention to the popcorn; at a good movie, you’ll be paying attention to the movie.

Since pleasures are particular and each is associated with certain activities, just as some activities are virtuous, others are vicious, and others are neither, some pleasures are good, others are bad, and others are neutral. The pleasure that comes from virtuous activity is a good pleasure; any pleasure that comes from behaving viciously is a bad sort of pleasure.

Pleasure is kind of like desire in this respect (that some desires, like some pleasures, are good and others are bad, depending on what sort of activity they are associated with). But pleasure is more tightly-bound to activity than desire is, since pleasure is coextensive with the activity, whereas desire precedes it or may even exist in its absence.

So pleasures can be ranked in their goodness based on the goodness of the activity with which they are coupled. Some pleasures are better than others. But this isn’t true in an absolute way, but only relative to the being that is perceiving the pleasure. For instance, what sort of pleasure is good for a person isn’t the same as what sort of pleasure is good for a dog.

So what pleasures are most good for people? Between people there is variety in what individuals find pleasing, and even in a single person, different things will be pleasing to them in different circumstances. To answer the question of what pleasures are the best ones, look for what the most virtuous people find pleasant. If we know what are the best and most virtuous activities, we simultaneously know that the accompanying pleasures are the best ones. (Any pleasures that are said to accompany vice hardly deserve the name of pleasure at all.)

The following excerpt from John Thomas Ball’s The Reformed Church of Ireland (1537–1886) concerns resistance to mandatory tithes by Irish Catholics in the 1830s.

The value of the tithes levied at this time in Ireland may be reckoned at about six hundred and forty-three thousand pounds a year. Of this sum nearly five-sixths belonged to the Established Church, and the remainder to laymen, in whom monastic property had vested under grants from the Crown. In Ireland, lands in permanent pasture were exempt from this impost; as also were certain other privileged lands; but everywhere else the tenth of the produce of the soil had to be set apart by the farmers, and rendered by them in kind or value to the tithe-owners, lay and clerical, according to their respective rights. Extreme subdivision of the leaseholds threw the burden largely upon a poor and ignorant class, unable to protect themselves against the exactions of the agents employed to levy the tax, who, undertaking an unpopular office, endeavoured to obtain compensation through whatever arts were fitted to increase its profits. To uneducated tenants it was useless to point out that although paid by them tithe really fell upon the landlords, since the liability was necessarily taken into account when ascertaining their rents; or to suggest that the abolition of one obligation was certain to lead to increase of the other. Such persons only considered the immediate claims upon them, and the vexations accompanying their enforcement.

To a demand, therefore, of this character nothing could be expected to reconcile the agricultural population, except an application of its proceeds for purposes either beneficial to their interests or acceptable to their sentiments and sympathies. But in Ireland in three provinces the vast majority of the farmers from whom the tithes were levied were Roman Catholics, while the revenue collected went in much the greater number of instances to maintain a Church whose ministrations these farmers rejected, and, where this was not the case, to lay proprietors. It increased the dissatisfaction thus caused that the persons subject to the liability were left to maintain their own clergy without the least assistance from the State.

The result was that associations to obtain the abolition of tithes were extensively formed. These continually increased in number and strength, until finally they expanded in Leinster, Munster, and Connaught into an almost universal combination of the Roman Catholic tenants to resist the collection of the tax. Resistance developed into systematized violence; the agents concerned in asserting the rights of the tithe-owners were obstructed and terrified; and in many places outrages of great enormity were perpetrated. Government tried, but failed, to enforce the law; and in the end, over the larger part of the island, the charge ceased to be levied.