An Evaluativist Account of Sensory Pleasures

Let a ‘sensory pleasure’ be any pleasant sensory experience. How can we characterize pleasantness to provide a plausible account of sensory pleasures thus defined? My goal in this paper is to identify the most plausible evaluativist answer to this question. What I consider to be the standard evaluativist view holds that the pleasantness of a sensory pleasure consists in a non-conceptual representation of the object of the sensory experience as good (simpliciter) or as good for the individual undergoing the experience. In this paper, I challenge this view and propose an alternative. First, I argue that the account of pleasantness on which the standard view is based leads to counterintuitive implications. Second, I suggest an alternative account of pleasantness, according to which the pleasantness of a sensory pleasure consists in a non-conceptual representation of the object of the sensory experience as pleasurable, rather than as good (simpliciter) or as good for the individual.