Answer to Question #318552 in Philosophy for Jnls

Question

Are all pleasures commensurable? Can they be evaluated on a single scale? Can some goods, like friendships, be balanced against other goods, like money?

Answer 1

The answer is no. Not only are not all pleasures commensurable, you couldn’t even devise a scale to evaluate the pleasure of biting into a perfect slice of cheese pizza and compare between all people. Some don’t like pizza. Pizza lovers have different ideas of what goes into and must be present in a perfect slice. Pleasure taken between people in the same thing can’t be compared, because there’s no way to take a level! There’s no metric for pleasure. No standard unit of measurement, and no even way to measure.

So what could this scale possibly use? How could the measurement be taken? Orally? Language? Ask them each how good it was? No, it won’t do.

Pleasure isn’t commensurable even within one person, say me. The pleasure of slipping into a hot bath is nothing at all like the pleasure of tart sherbet slipping icily down the throat, which is nothing like the pleasure of anticipation awaiting something good you know is in the mail, which is nothing like a really good kiss - which is frankly and not to be a cad, very little like a really good kiss from a different person. Each of these pleasures is not really commensurable at all with the others, and there are so many others. Most of them don’t FEEL like they hit on any similar scales.

Some pleasures have a scale all to themselves, which no other pleasure activates. Sure, a few of them activate the same basic pleasure sensors, but even then often in quite incomparable ways. I doubt you could get anything but the sloppiest, most sentiment-charged and emotion-obscured “measurements” from the human being doing the feeling.