Pleasure as Ethics

When morality is reduced to personal tastes, people exchange the moral question, “What is good?” for the pleasure question, “What feels good?” They assert their own desires, then attempt to rationalize their choices with moral language. In this case, the tail wags the dog. Instead of morality constraining our pleasures (“I want to do that, but I really shouldn’t”), our pleasures define our morality. This effort at ethical decision-making is really nothing more than thinly veiled self-interest—pleasure as ethics.