Pleasure

Pleasure is experience that feels good, that involves the enjoyment of something. It contrasts with pain or suffering, which are forms of feeling bad. It is closely related to value, desire and action: humans and other conscious animals find pleasure enjoyable, positive or worthy of seeking. A great variety of activities may be experienced as pleasurable, like eating, having sex, listening to music or playing games. Pleasure is part of various other mental states such as ecstasy, euphoria and flow. Happiness and well-being are closely related to pleasure but not identical with it. There is no general agreement as to whether pleasure should be understood as a sensation, a quality of experiences, an attitude to experiences or otherwise. Pleasure plays a central role in the family of philosophical theories known as hedonism.

"Pleasure" refers to experience that feels good, that involves the enjoyment of something. The term is primarily used in association with sensory pleasures like the enjoyment of sex or food. But in its most general sense, it includes all types of positive or pleasant experiences including the enjoyment of sports, seeing a beautiful sunset or engaging in an intellectually satisfying activity.

Pleasure contrasts with pain or suffering, which are forms of feeling bad. Both pleasure and pain come in degrees and have been thought of as a dimension going from positive degrees through a neutral point to negative degrees. This assumption is important for the possibility of comparing and aggregating the degrees of pleasure of different experiences, for example, in order to perform the Utilitarian calculus.

The concept of pleasure is similar but not identical to the concepts of well-being and of happiness. These terms are used in overlapping ways, but their meanings tend to come apart in technical contexts like philosophy or psychology. Pleasure refers to a certain type of experience while well-being is about what is good for a person. Many philosophers agree that pleasure is good for a person and therefore is a form of well-being. But there may be other things besides or instead of pleasure that constitute well-being, like health, virtue, knowledge or the fulfillment of desires. On some conceptions, happiness is identified with "the individual's balance of pleasant over unpleasant experience". Life satisfaction theories, on the other hand, hold that happiness involves having the right attitude towards one's life as a whole. Pleasure may have a role to play in this attitude, but it is not identical to happiness.

Pleasure is closely related to value, desire, motivation and right action. There is broad agreement that pleasure is valuable in some sense.^{[citation needed]}

Many pleasurable experiences are associated with satisfying basic biological drives, such as eating, exercise, hygiene, sleep, and sex. Pleasure may come from the enjoyment of food, sex, sports, seeing a beautiful sunset or engaging in an intellectually satisfying activity. The appreciation of cultural artifacts and activities such as art, music, dancing, and literature is often pleasurable.

Pleasure is sometimes subdivided into fundamental pleasures that are closely related to survival (food, sex, and social belonging) and higher-order pleasures (e.g., viewing art and altruism).

Jeremy Bentham listed 14 kinds of pleasure; sense, wealth, skill, amity, a good name, power, piety, benevolence, malevolence, memory, imagination, expectation, pleasures dependent on association, and the pleasures of relief.