To help illuminate the bases by which individuals establish their values, I have promised to present the most prevalent ideologies, which have fostered our current cultural thinking in America. This posting is part of a series of core behavioral principles known as, “How people define what it is to be ‘good’,” “Christian Ethics,” “Humanism ethics,” “Hedonism ethics,” “Existentialism ethics,” “Relativism ethics,” and a proclaimed state of mind identified as, “Self-realization.” As Christians, I believe it is important to be knowledgeable of these fundamental belief systems in order to more effectively promote God’s truth within our society:
Hedonism is a philosophy in which the highest good is pleasure. The hedonist decides between the most enduring pleasures or the most intense pleasures, whether present pleasures should be denied for the sake of overall comfort, and whether mental pleasures are preferable to physical pleasures.
The term “Hedonism” means an ethical system based on pleasure instead of rules or consciously chosen values. This system argues that what is moral, in any context, is whatever gives the moral actor the most pleasure. The problem with this concept is that it forgets that men have control over what gives them pleasure, what a person perceives as his values affects what gives him pleasure. A person feels pleasure when he achieves what he believes to be his values. Ethical hedonism is silent on this critical point. Man, in order to practice hedonism, must take his already formed perceptions of proper human values as cast in stone and simultaneously as flexible, [at his whim]. Because hedonism is powerless to tell men what their values are, it fails as an ethical system. Additionally, hedonism robs human beings of volition. It argues that humans, in fact, do not have true volitional power; they automatically choose whatever will give them the most pleasure. Believing this, its adherents cannot argue that the tenets of hedonism are in fact true, but only that it gives them the most pleasure to believe and argue that they are true..
