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Articles

Preference Satisfaction and the Good

Michael Philips wonders what you really, really want.

To Jeremy Bentham it all seemed obvious. Pleasure is the only good, pain is the only evil and both are easy to calculate. It is simply a matter of multiplying the intensity by the duration. How do we measure intensity? As undergraduates, my friends and I chose the pleasure of biting into a certain juicy hamburger (the Denny Burger) as our unit of pleasure intensity and measured other experiences in relation to that one: dives into cool pools on hot days had a DBB (Denny Burger Bite) equivalent, as did first kisses, Bergman films, philosophical insights, and howling at the moon. Of course, we disagreed on how many DBB’s to assign to these experiences.

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