Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek on the attractions of monistic hedonism
I don’t like dilemmas, I want to overcome them. I feel that there must be a guidance. Maybe there is this desire in me to find a proper guidance, and I worry that with pluralistic theories, its impossible, or maybe you need to end up with particularism, i.e. a pluralistic theory where you need to decide every time what to do. I think you are very right that I am the kind of person who wants to get the troubles out of my way, even if getting into another one, that is namely putting everything under the umbrella of pleasure.
I also believe that we make quite a lot of mistakes in terms of choosing our values. And that some choices of those values depend on the culture and the religion that we are in. And so that worries me as well, that simply our pluralistic judgements about values are sometimes irrational.
For example we have this discussion in Poland now, about the rationality of the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. We started an uprising against Nazis and it brought a terrible devastation to the whole city, deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, it made no sense at all in terms of consequences. But some people said that it was a sign of our honorable thinking. So there was this honour, this virtue of “doing what needs to be done” even if the consequences were terrible. I think now you can see how people have changed their thinking about values, how now, the value of fighting, even against your enemy, is taking less importance than the value of presevation of your life.
So to answer your question: it’s not only a desire to make things easier, and to give reason the possibility of a guidance, but also I simply worry that some of the values that we choose are irrational to have, and that they are based on culture and religion and so on.
quote katarzyna de lazari-radek hedonism sidgwick bernard williams