Minimize Pain Maximize Pleasure Quotes

Since everything changes, and we incessantly think about how to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, it’s no wonder we find life difficult.

Bentham maintained that what mattered about an action was how much pleasure it produced and how much pain was avoided. He enjoined us always to act so as to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.

Each of us, actually every animal, is a data scientist. We collect data from our sensors, and then we process the data to get abstract rules to perceive our environment and control our actions in that environment to minimize pain and/or maximize pleasure. We have memory to store those rules in our brains, and then we recall and use them when needed. Learning is lifelong; we forget rules when they no longer apply or revise them when the environment changes. Learning

To maximize pleasure and to minimize pain - in that order - were characteristic Enlightenment concerns. This generally more receptive attitude toward good feeling and pleasure would have significant long-term consequences. It is a critical difference separating Enlightenment views on happiness from those of the ancients. There is another, however, of equal importance: that of ambition and scale. Although the philosophers of the principal classical schools sought valiantly to minimize the role of chance as a determinant of human happiness, they were never in a position to abolish it entirely. Neither, for that matter, were the philosophers of the eighteenth century, who, like men and women at all times, were forced to grapple with apparently random upheavals and terrible reversals of forture. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 is an awful case in point. Striking on All Saints' Day while the majority of Lisbon's inhabitants were attending mass, the earthquake was followed by a tidal wave and terrible fires that destroyed much of the city and took the lives of tens of thousands of men and women. 'Quel triste jeu de hasard que le jeu de la vie humaine,' Voltaire was moved to reflect shortly thereafter: 'What a sad game of chance is this game of human life.' He was not alone in reexamining his more sanguine assumptions of earlier in the century, doubting the natural harmony of the universe and the possibilities of 'paradise on earth'; the catastrophe provoked widespread reflection on the apparent 'fatality of evil' and the random occurrence of senseless suffering. It was shortly thereafter that Voltaire produced his dark masterpiece, Candide, which mocks the pretension that this is the best of all possible worlds. And yet, in many ways, the incredulity expressed by educated Europeans in the earthquake's aftermath is a more interesting index of received assumptions, for it demonstrates the degree to which such random disasters were becoming, if not less common, at least less expected. Their power to shock was magnified accordingly, but only because the predictability and security of daily existence were increasing, along with the ability to control the consequences of unforeseen disaster. When the Enlightened Marquis of Pombal, the First Minister of Portugal, set about rebuilding Lisbon after the earthquake, he paid great attention to modern principles of architecture and central planning to help ensure that if such a calamity were to strike again, the effects would be less severe. To this day, the rebuilt Lisbon of Pombal stands as an embodiment of Enlightened ideas. Thus, although eighteenth-century minds did not - and could not - succeed in mastering the random occurrences of the universe, they could - and did - conceive of exerting much greater control over nature and human affairs. Encouraged by the examples of Newtonian physics, they dreamed of understanding not only the laws of the physical universe but the moral and human laws as well, hoping one day to lay out with precision what the Italian scholar Giambattista Vico described as a 'new science' of society and man. It was in the eighteenth century, accordingly, that the human and social sciences were born, and so it is hardly surprising that observers turned their attention to studying happiness in similar terms. Whereas classical sages had aimed to cultivate a rarified ethical elite - attempting to bring happiness to a select circle of disciples, or at most to the active citizens of the polis - Enlightenment visionaries dreamed of bringing happiness to entire societies and even to humanity as a whole.

We navigate life by making decisions that maximize pleasure and/ or minimize pain.

hedonism – striving for maximization of pleasure (positive affect) and minimization of pain (negative affect).

Utilitarianism is not focused simply on saving lives; it is more broadly focused on maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain (creating value) across all sentient beings.

Utilitarianism has its roots in the philosophies of Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806–73). Bentham held to a hedonistic utilitarianism, which maintains that the most moral acts are those that maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Mill developed his approach away from hedonism and toward a more general concept of maximizing the general happiness or the greatest good for the greatest number. When it was proposed, utilitarianism was a radical theory, since it divorced morality from divine revelation and from any view of nature. According to utilitarianism, moral behavior no longer required faithfulness to divine ordinances and rigid moral rules. Utilitarian modes of moral reasoning are widely applied to many of the currently debated moral issues. Most of the public policy in the United States and Western Europe is still decided on overwhelmingly utilitarian grounds.

As we have said from the beginning, we think people are built to maximize their own pleasure and minimize their own pain. In reality, we are actually built to overcome our own pleasure and increase our own pain in the service of following society’s norms.