‘Feeling good’ hardly a fallacy

Lionel WIJESIRI

The other day, I was talking to an old friend. He asked the usual questions and I gave him the usual answers. It went like this:

“How are you?” “Fine, thanks.”

“How’s the family keeping?” “Everyone is great.”

“Business good?” “Busier than ever.”

“Feeling good?” I wasn’t sure how to answer his question

I suddenly remembered the Canadian pop group – Slone’s slogan, “If it feels good, do it.” The part of the lyrics came into my mind.

If it feels good do it even if you shouldn’t

don’t let people mess you around

feels go do it even if you shouldn’t

nobody can mess you around

Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse. Life is kicks, fun, adrenaline. Glimpses of Jimi Hendrix, Dylan Thomas, Anna Nicole, Paris Hilton crossed my vision.

That evening while retiring to bed, I pondered on this little incident. My mind went 2400 years back in to the history to the great Greek civilization.

The Greek respectable philosopher, Epicurus, embraced the idea of pleasure as the principal aim of life, but sought to refine the idea by arguing that some pleasures are better than others—that intellectual pleasures, for instance, are more desirable than purely physical ones.

From him we get the term “epicure,” which the dictionary defines as “a person of refined and fastidious taste.” Thus, for Epicurus, a “good man” was someone who lived for pleasure but was smart enough to know which pleasures were most desirable.

This kind of “feel-good” philosophy did not, however, vanish with the Greeks. In the 19th century, the influential English thinker, Jeremy Bentham, worked out a complicated system which, while still embracing pleasure as the main aim of life, sought to classify all pleasures.

Bentham, a mathematician, devised a complex and, finally, impractical scale by which he thought that all pleasures could be measured—evaluating such things as intensity, purity, certainty, and fruitfulness.

Bentham, along with John Stuart Mill, his most influential disciple, refined this philosophy into a social one, positing that the “greatest good for the greatest number” was the ultimate aim of all good social policy.

The greatest good

Of course, the great majority of people today do not pause, while making their moral decisions, to think about philosophy.

The man of integrity in his cloistered study may take time to weigh out carefully the consequences of his actions, seeking to find “the greatest good for the greatest number,” but when the ordinary human being comes to make moral choices, the “man in the street,” as we call him, makes his decisions on the immediate, personal basis And those decisions are, almost inevitably, self-centered and short of social responsibility.

For a huge number of persons in our contemporary society immediate personal sensual pleasure takes precedence over everything else. The social consequences—the “greatest good for the greatest number” play little real part in their decisions. “Pleasure” is the prime factor.

To be rich—to “make it” economically—has been established as the ultimate hallmark of success. Our consumer-oriented society encourages us to value economic achievement—sometimes however brought about—as the most admirable of all goals. This means that material prosperity has been equated with the highest pleasure, and the “if it feels good, do it” philosophy reigns supreme.

Strangely enough, this kind of “feel-good” approach to matters of sensual and economic ethics does not lack its academic defenders. The other day I was reading the text of a lecture last year given by the respected cultural Canadian commentator, Michael Ignatieff, arguing that radical selfishness was an expression of moral virtue.

Human beings, he said, have a prime duty to themselves and a prime right to individual freedom and happiness (pleasure). Ignatieff did not hesitate to face the consequences of his belief. We must, he said, accord respect to an individual’s needs “against the devouring claims of family life.”

Moral imperative

For me, Ignatieff’s ideas seem terribly naive. When a fifty-year old man, struggling with his second adolescence, leaves his wife and children in cavalier fashion for the charms of a sexy, younger lady, he has not exemplified legitimate human freedom.

He has acted out of base irresponsibility. What he has done is not something that affects only him in the exercise of his freedom, but something which directly affects his wife—another human being, deserving of respect—and his innocent children.

Beyond that, he has affected in a real way the society in which he lives, the community of which he is a part. (I do not need to say, I trust, that these words would apply to a woman who did the same sort of thing.)

Individual freedom is a precious moral right, but freedom without responsibility has no moral basis. To act with no understanding that one’s actions inevitably encroach, at some point, upon the freedom of others is the road to moral anarchy. And with moral anarchy there is no community.

The “feel-good” ethic is inevitably self-defeating. The individual who lives only for his own pleasure will eventually face the situation in which his “pleasure” is opposed by another individual or group with more power and the individual’s pleasure will be replaced with misery. When power becomes the only ingredient in the social process, the weak must inevitably suffer.

Self esteem

Self Esteem is what we experience when we feel good about ourselves and when we feel good inside. What makes you feel good inside?

I think feeling good means being satisfied with what you have, with what you are doing and where you are going. What you need to feel good inside is within your power. It is not the result but the route to achievement.

You will have high self esteem when you have a sense of direction, satisfaction about your choices and actions and know that you are doing your best and doing something good.

If you define “feeling good” as reckless, heady abandon spiraling upwards to climax in an intoxicating sense of personal freedom and power, then no, I’m not having any. But if you define it as the little things in life that add up to your life, nursing a child, doing without, paying the price for what you believe, then I would have to say that I’m having quite a time.