A critical insistance on pleasure is fine. Emphasis on critical. The
point is to preserve some interval between enjoyment and thought
("emotion recollected in tranquility"), otherwise enjoyment becomes
self-legitimating. Ethical reflection can't get very far if you start
with the assumption that if you're doing something you enjoy then your
lifestyle is necessarily beyond reproach.
The old jibe at the puritans vis-a-vis bear-baiting was that they
disapproved of the pleasure it gave the spectators, rather than the
suffering it caused the bear. But that seems to me to be a quite
correct attitude. Not because pleasure is in itself wicked, but
because pleasure correlated with the infliction of suffering is.
Pleasure is almost always pleasure *in* something - some activity,
some circumstance. How does it go again? "Loves I allow, and passions
I approve, only I would wish that men would alter their objects and
better their intent"?
Dominic
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