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And that is what, in such situations, most people do. Are some pleasures worthier than others? Undiscriminating critics have often condemned the eudsemonistic criterion on the ground that any sort of pleasure is rated equally high on its scale so long as it is pleasure. "Pushpin as good as poetry!" seems to some the height of sarcasm.
Many did not even believe in legislation affecting the hours of labor or the work of children. This "let-alone" theory was widely held until the close of the nineteenth century. He measured the morality of actions by their efficiency in producing this happiness, and he said that pushpin is as good as poetry, if it gives as much pleasure.
Pushpin, or baseball, NEEDS no apotheosis. But if we ever develop into a race of anaemic bookworms, we shall have to glorify sport and learn to shrug our shoulders at the soft and easy enjoyments of poetry. Nothing is more obvious than the utilitarian nature of such habitual judgments and attitudes. "Is such a life eligible?" asks Socrates.
'I remember one time, at such a trifling game as pushpin, she gave me a very bad opinion of her; for I observed, instead of pushing the pin as she ought to do, she would try to lift it up with her finger a little, to make it cross over the other. 'And when we were all at cards, she would peep, to find out the pictured ones, that she might have them in her own hand.
If I didn't see what I wanted I asked for something else. In about half an hour I had a dozen cigars, five story magazines, and seven or eight rail-road time-tables in my pockets, and never a smell of coffee or bacon to point out the trail. "Once a lady sitting at a table and playing a game kind of like pushpin told me to go into a closet that she called Number 3.
In about half an hour I had a dozen cigars, five story magazines, and seven or eight railroad time-tables in my pockets, and never a smell of coffee or bacon to point out the trail. "Once a lady sitting at a table and playing a game kind of like pushpin told me to go into a closet that she called Number 3. I went in and shut the door, and the blamed thing lit itself up.
"Do you mean to say that you really agree with Bentham that, quantity of pleasure being equal, pushpin is as good as poetry?" "Yes; at least I agree with what he means, though the particular example doesn't appeal to me, for I hardly know what either pushpin or poetry is." "Well then, let us take Plato's example.
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