This is Philosophy Bites with me Nigel Wolperton and me David Edmunds.

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Why do we make philosophy bites? According to one strand of philosophical thinking, there

can be only one answer. It's because, however, implausible this might seem, it makes us happy.

Poor Bloom is a psychologist, interested in whether we really are driven by the avoidance

of pain and the search for pleasure.

Poor Bloom, welcome to Philosophy Bites. Thank you so much for having me on and thrilled

to be on the show. The topic we're going to focus on is psychological

hedonism. Maybe you could just say at the beginning what that is. It's a very popular

theory. A lot of my friends and colleagues hold it. A lot of people on the street hold

it. And the idea is that all people are after fundamentally is pleasure. Seek out pleasure

to avoid pain. Obviously life contains suffering, but that's a bad thing. And obviously we choose

suffering, but for the hedonist we only choose suffering instrumentally. So I enjoy having

a warm bed and eating food and unfortunately to do that I have to go to work. If I enjoy

having a child I have to wake up in the middle of the night to change the diapers and all

that stuff. So we suffer, but the suffering is the cost we pay for pleasure. If we could

get rid of it we do so in a second. So this is what Jeremy Bentham said more or less.

The idea is that there are two guides to life. Pain and pleasure, avoid the pain, seek

out the pleasure, maximize the pleasure, get the greatest aggregate happiness, the balance

of pleasure over pain, and that is what we should all aim at. And we do. That's right.

There's a distinction here which is important. So there's a psychological hedonist name

...