"Why," I said, "even if we grant that the end of action is the greatest happiness of the greatest number, yet we have still to discover wherein that happiness consists."
"But," he said, "happiness we define quite simply as pleasure."
"Yes; but how do we define pleasure?"
"We don't need to define it. Pleasure and pain are simply sensations. If I cut my finger, I feel pain; if I drink when I am thirsty, I feel pleasure. There can be no mistake about these feelings; they are simple and radical."
"Undoubtedly. But if you limit pleasure and pain to such simple cases as these, you will never get out of them a system of Ethics. And, on the other hand, if you extend the terms indefinitely, they lose at once all their boasted precision, and become as difficult to interpret as Good and Evil."
"How do you mean?"
"Why," I said, "if all conduct turned on such simple choices as that between thick soup and clear, then perhaps its rules might be fairly summed up in the utilitarian formula. But in fact, as everyone knows, the choices are far more difficult; they are between, let us say, a bottle of port and a Beethoven symphony; leisure and liberty now, or £1000 a-year twenty years hence; art and fame at the cost of health, or sound nerves and obscurity; and so on, and so on through all the possible cases, infinitely more complex in reality than I could attempt to indicate here, all of which, no doubt, could be brought under your formula, but none of which the formula would help to solve."
"Of course," said Parry, "the hedonistic calculus is difficult to apply. No one, that I know of, denies that."
"No one could very well deny it," I replied. "But now, see what follows. Granting, for the moment, for the sake of argument, that in making these difficult choices we really do apply what you call the hedonistic calculus—"
"Which I, for my part, altogether deny!" cried Leslie.