"But the only thing you care about is pleasure!" he yelled.
"What else is there?"
"Responsibility, hard work, satisfaction."
"Satisfaction is pleasure. And responsibility and hard work are only extremely round-about means to achieve satisfaction. In the end you want the same thing but you've been taught that pain and displeasure are requirements that are on the route towards pleasure."
"That's not true. The pleasure is greater when you have weathered pain and done hard work to arrive at it."
"So we agree that in the end all that matters is pleasure--"
"No, because only caring about pleasure leads to a qualified different form of it than caring about the path towards the reward."
"You're still wrong then. Every statement you've made explicitly confesses that in the end we want to attain the same thing. Now you're making a very different argument: the degree of pleasure. You're saying that the degree of pleasure will be greater based on how one arrives at it."
"Partially, I suppose. But it's not just the degree. It's the type as well. One might try to objectively rank pleasurable experiences, and you could then add value based on the difficulty of arriving at a particular experience, but that's impossible because there is no objective ranking. The ranking itself is dynamic and depends on the experiences that you're used to; they are relative to each other."
"Now you're getting highly specific. In fact, you're showing more clearly than I ever could have that all you care about is pleasure, and that you're even aiming to optimize it by introducing effects that subjectively augment its power -- effects that can objectively be categorized as things humans by nature want to avoid: responsibility and hard work chief among them."
"I don't follow you at all."
"What is something that you enjoy doing? Something that -- despite psychological effects of experience damping or hedonic adaptation or whatever -- is more or less objectively enjoyable for you and that following some hard labor you participated in or some amount of stress you had to experience would make you feel good?"
"Reading a book and drinking a coffee."
"And what is something that we could agree on as being objectively dis-pleasurable?"
"Reading accounting records and drinking lukewarm tea."
"Agreed."
"Good."
"OK. So for me, finding a moment to read a book and drink a coffee would bring me pleasure and so I want to try to maximize the opportunities that I have for doing so. One way would be to work hard for a long time so as to make a lot of money and then eventually when I have enough I could stop working and just read books and drink coffee all day long."
"..."
"But you are so obsessed with pleasure, demonstrably caring about even more so than me, because taking your argument to its natural conclusion, you would want to maximize the pleasure associated with reading your book and drinking your coffee by consciously deciding to first spend a lot of your finite amount of time reading accounting records and drinking lukewarm tea which would in turn make the (good) book more exciting/pleasurable/intellectually stimulating/whatever and the coffee more delicious/mind-sharpening/calmness-inducing/whatever. Is that right?"
"Again, no. You're taking my argument much too literally."
"Enlighten me then."
"With pleasure [ed: ha!]... The point is that we cannot separate the concepts of "pure" pleasure and the means (which can be unpleasant) to reach that sort of happiness. If literally all you care about is pleasure then you will be bound to search it out and reject all unpleasant things which will in turn lead to less pleasure. It is not a game theory problem or an optimization problem but a life philosophy that makes rational choices leading to general happiness the right way to live."
"That sounds like a whole bunch of mumbo jumbo to me."
"You know, you're probably right. Let's go grab a coffee and stop at the bookstore on the way."
"Deal."
