At the root of all human motivation is the pleasure principle, I think originally coined by freud.
It follows something like this: our pleasure/pain begins with our id, as a child we seek instant gratification.
Later our ego and superego develop more realistic approaches that will both work longterm and be socially acceptable. But the pleasure/pain principle still sits behind our motivation at this stage.
My question – and I’m looking for answers at the academic and professional level for this one – is whether an argument can be cogently advanced for having motivations that stand outside the pain/pleasure principle.
My initial feeling is the concept of motivation is intrinsically linked with pleasure/pain, and that you can’t, by definition, have a motivation, without it being linked to some sort of pleasure and/or pain.
Even a moral value, such as wanting to do the “right” thing, or wanting to extend your life, would still regress eventually to pleasure or pain. Or perhaps it takes a different guise, that of favorable or unfavorable.
If someone would like to rephrase this question in a clearer way please do so. Scientific, psychological and medical perspectives are welcome in this thread, i.e. scholarly observations outside the perview of philosophy proper.
Nobody will admit it but it’s true. All we are are Epicurean materialists, and a comprehensive neuro-cognological model can fully account for why and how this is true. At the basis for every cognitive and/or mental process is a relationship between electro-chemical processes which happen to maintain an equilibrium or homostasis. Action at this level is divided between charging and discharging potentials along axons… the body is a giant nervous network of these processes in this way. An action’s purpose is either to exhange a potential or eliminate it, so metaphorically speaking the system’s balanced state is an expression of it’s striving to avoid pain (which is a result of nervious system hyperactivity at this neurological level… an unbalance of charge and discharge).
Anthropomorphically we call it ‘pain’, neuro-cognologically we call it disequilibrium. It means a sensation has occured that other processes collectively work to eliminate. We do not think or choose to do this, and, ironically, a philosophy of anti-hedonism is, in these terms, another expression of the same process in the body; a cancelling out of some kind of dissonance.
You are right. Noone wants an eternity of pain, and they will do anything to get out of it. For example, noble people do things which are noble, which is closely aligned with Epicurean ideals.
Even so called Nihilists, and Enlightened Ams…they want Nirvana so they can avoi the cycle of rebirth, which they view as eternal pain.
Life is not so much motivated by pleasure, as it is avoidance of eternal pain. Now masochists may enjoy pain, even severe pain, but noone likes eternal pain. Eternal pain is such an intrinsic motivator that people who write books get it to make religions with billions of followers.
K: Actually the Greeks believed that the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain was indeed
a motivator of actions, however, Aristotle begin his famous book, Metaphysics, with this,
“All men seek knowledge” giving the pursuit of knowledge as a key factor for motivation.
I do think that seeking pleasure and avoiding pain is a factor, but not the deciding factor
in what motivates people for I have seen people enter a situation in which pain was involved
and yet still did it because of the reward or perceived reward at the end. This pursuit of knowledge
does motivate people as well as greed as well as the pursuit of love which does involve pleasure
and pain. I think there are other factors as well depending on the person. We cannot reduce the
motivating factor of people on any one thing be it greed, avoiding of pain, the pursuit of pleasure,
it usually is a group of things that motivate people into actions.
I think it’s nonsense, unless you expand pleasure/pain to encompass any definition of “what you want” . At which point it’s facile to say that pleasure/pain lies at the heart of motivation, because you’ve defined it as such.
Honour motivates some to endure great and needless suffering at a torturer’s hands in place of a quick and comparatively merciful death. Habit/compulsive behaviour drives people to do harmful, painful things to themselves. A desire for knowledge can prompt someone to go looking for unpleasant information that they could have remained blissfully ignorant on. Religious faith leads people to scour themselves, deny themselves and undergo great privations simply to show their piety.
Humans are so much more complex than scales on which to weigh pleasure/pain that it’s neither useful nor profound to mangle the meanings to fit.
the emotional pain one would suffer from awareness of losing honor would motivate them to die for honor. The discomfort of knowing you’re ignorant of some truth would impel you to know that truth. So I see where you’re coming from, but it’s not a slippery slope between pain/pleasure and “what you want.” We are talking about the pleasure/pain consequences attached to certain decisions, both short or long term, both physical and mental/emotional. The choices you referred to still can be tied back to some form of mental pain that was avoided in the choice made.
They’d be dead, quickly. No emotional pain there. And if you’re going to compare the “emotional pain” of the confession against the physical pain of extended torture, you’re going to have to find some way of meaningfully quantifying it… but I suspect all one can fall back on is “well, they chose to do it so we can conclude that whatever it was was greater than the physical pain”. In which case, a Nothing will do every bit as well as a Something about which nothing can be said; the view you present appears to be exactly the one I’m arguing against (to be clear, I’m not arguing this from a Romantic, anti-science “more things in heaven and earth” perspective - I’m an engineer and hard-science experimentalist).
So what’s “emotional pain”? How can you know at what point it outweighs other physical or emotional pains? Are we actually hyper-accurate integrators of pain that lump discomfort, unease, agony, displeasure and shame into some as-yet-unspecified unit and predicts its future aggregate over time? Of course not; that’s taking a naive 19th-century mechanistic view of life. There’s no unit of pain or pleasure. Sometimes we have to choose between apples and oranges, sometimes between a much-needed lie-in and a spectacular walk, between great sex and fidelity, between shame and physical pain. Sometimes virtue matters more than thrill; sometimes it doesn’t.
Obviously this is very reductionist. You could even go further to reduce it to one or the other. ie. everything is done for the avoidance of pain; OR for the pursuit of pleasure.
The other way of looking at the problem is to use a more nuanced and inclusive view point. You might add, rather than subtract. You could add to pleasure: compassion, honour, duty, sense of achievement, satiation (such as for hunger), slaking (of thirst) ad infinitem. On the negative side you could add disappointment, discomfort, boredom, etc…
Thus a man is uncomfortable (but not in pain), because he is thirsty, so he drinks water (a thing he takes no pleasure in) but is not longer uncomfortable.
Yes, that’s possible, there are many possible reasons behind moral behavior. Some people are moral because they fear pain of immorality, others are moral because it gives them pleasure. But these are not only reasons that exist. And moreoever, people who act in this way aren’t truly moral. Moral cowards are “moral” because morality allows them to avoid pain, and moral hedonists are “moral” because morality gives them pleasure. These are not genuine forms of morality.
What Gamer is arguing here, and what is defended by others such as Zoot and Arbiter, is that no matter what choice you make, it’s always because it gives you more pleasure (or less pain) than any other choice you could have made. This is demonstrably false, but they can continue insisting because the process of interpretation has no end (you can always doubt whatever you want to doubt and maintain hope in whatever you want to believe.)
A moral person – a truly moral person – is moral because they want to be moral, not because morality gives them pleasure or helps them avoid pain.
The idea that there is only a single motive guiding all human behavior is used by people in order to deny divergence. And the reason people are motivated to deny divergence is because by denying divergence they also deny the possibility of their inferiority in relation to other people, or in cases that’s not the case, the possibility of responsibility. The aim is to hide the fact that there are differences between people, and hopefully, to make those who are different doubt the fact that they are different, and thus, drop what makes them different. This is all done on unconscious level. It’s not planned out, it’s just a random act that is naturally reinforced over and over again because it works, but not in the way it is purported. It works because it confuses, not because the claim itself is true.
This is the same trick that is used to claim that everyone is an egoist. Or that everyone behaves tribally. Or that everyone strives for survival, pleasure or power. Or that everyone “self-values”. It’s moral superiority by appealing to the impossibility of any other suggested form of superiority.
Wow. Everyone calm down. I’m not arguing anything. I’m trying to grapple with a fictional characters motivation I’m developing for a piece of Art.
Pls bear with me. First, a decision doesn’t have to end up yielding less or greater pain for it to have been motivated by pain/pleasure. Sometimes it’s a short term instant gratification. As in over eating or impulse buys. In the case of dying for honor it is indeed painful in that moment to imagine not having honor. It may not be quantifiably a wise bargain to die for honor, but it’s still, I believe, tied to a short term pleasure response weighed against a long term pain response. It’s not for me or you to tally up the values. I’m only looking at motivation, rational or otherwise. I seriously doubt human motivation is ever as carefully examined as it would be here. Usually it’s nearly unconscious and tied to emotion.
Let me boil this down to how you can help me. (Why lump me in with nihilists? That’s absurd. I deeply want there to be a moral layer that transcends pleasure/pain. I just don’t see how to avoid reducing this to pleasure and pain nuggets once moral choices and behaviors are cashed in for some form of emotional satisfaction that feels good on some level.)
Imagine if you were in an accident that gave you permanent euphoria. Compete blissful buzz in your emotional centers. Imagine that even pain fear and guilt don’t reduce these feelings of bliss in your cortex. My question is, in this state, how would you make choices? What would motivate you to do one thing over another, if in the end, your brain injury causes you to max out on bliss at all times?
I suspect there’s a moral layer, a survival instinct layer, but I’m trying to figure out how to have these or other layers in an intellectually honest way, given the premise. Or perhaps the solution is to change the premise a little.
It may be. It may be that the thought doesn’t really occur to you; if you’ve been brought up to be honourable, you just don’t consider it. Personally, I never consider the potential physical pleasure of raping a friend or colleague or neighbout that I’m alone with and balance it against the cost of guilt and the risk of being caught and the displeasure of losing friendship. I just don’t do it, it doesn’t occur to me. And if somebody suggested it, I wouldn’t calculate anything.
I’d like to help, but I honestly can’t see why you insist on boiling it down to pain and pleasure when you have no evidence that that’s how we work, except the circular argument that we choose what we choose therefore it must be have been emotional pain/pleasure that caused that. It’s an invented conundrum.
Not so fast. A pleasure is not always physical. For example, a person can experience greater pleasure in maintaining one’s honor but suffering physically, than not suffering physically but being unable to exercise that honor. Put slightly differently. If the feeling of having that honor even at the expense of some physical pain is qualitatively better than no experience of pain but without the experience of the pleasure of having honor, then it isn’t physical pleasure that one is after. However, even those things can be explained in terms of the dissonance I mentioned earlier.
The feeling of being ‘wrong’ is a peculiar thing because it exists both in the language and in the body. Thinking bad thoughts, for example… a string of words that bring bad feelings… but why? What is it about the phrase "I am obsessive and compulsive’ that produces a quite different feeling than the phrase “I am well mannered and composed”. It can’t be in the words because words in themselves are just arbitrary. Then it is the emotional effect of having remembered how one associates phrases in certain ways that are learned. Obsessive and compulsive have always (or most usually) been in a negative context, while mannered and composed are not. Eventually those words, and phrases they are in, come to signify through long use, a feeling of dissonance… intuitively as ‘wrong’ states or ways or things to be. Finally one can bring oneself to tears or fall into a deep depression by thinking the right wrong thoughts.
The feeling of wrongness - whether or not such as thing really exists is beside the point at the moment - is a learned displeasured state, but not because the words carry with them something that can cause pleasure or pain.
If Joe is willing to be tortured because he will not reveal the location of his base, the feeling of wrongness at the thought of revealing his base was enough to direct his behavior. Only here, his behavior is directed to avoid the dissonance, …the feeling of wrongness in his thought “revealing my base would be terrible”. Even though this is not a visceral state, it can still be considered an unpleasant state, or else people wouldn’t ever regret revealing their bases to their enemies.
So if you include this way of understanding what pleasure is there isn’t any problem. I’ve merely expanded the general definition of pleasure from the physical into the linguistic. For whatever reason a person does what they do, they conclude their deciding what to do with a final thought; this is what I am to do. And if people were always motivated by physical pleasure, they would not stick so resolutely to doing whatever it takes to avoid that feeling of wrongness.
Zoot, I think the post would have had more impact if you hadn’t used the name Joe in your example. Too predictable. Next time you’re compelled to use Joe in a hypothetical, consider subbing with the name Sal, Vince, or even Brent. I’m pretty sure that would make the whole thing just a whole lot more pleasant for everybody.
That said, I think you make a good point. Nobody else in this thread understands the question. I have a premise that the guy has hyperhedonic euphoria. He can look at a wall for hours and feel complete. Thus he has little impetus to do anything. He can rest on a bed of spikes and feel as much bliss as lying on a bed of greased supermodels. He can be told he has a minute to live and still feel orgasmically complete and happy. His loved ones could die and he’d be just as happy whether they died or didn’t. He could do something moral or immoral and feel just as wonderful with the cosmos. In this light, what would impel him to do anything? By what principle would he make decisions?
