The Hedonist’s Calculator by Epicurus
Is this pleasure worth it? Pick something you are tempted by, answer a few honest questions, and get a reading.
It works on a method Epicurus set out more than two thousand years ago: weigh what a pleasure gives you against what it costs you, now and later. Where each step comes from is further down the page.
Weigh a pleasure
Step 1: Pick a pleasure
Type what is tempting you, or start from an example.
Step 2: Rate it
Answer honestly. There are no right answers, only yours.
The want
Would going without it actually hurt?
Does it fix something: hunger, tiredness, loneliness, stress?
Is it mostly about how you look to other people?
Would a little of it be enough?
Do you chase it hard?
The feeling it gives
The good and the cost
Score each from 0 to 10, say how long it lasts, and whether you feel it in your body or your head.
Step 3: Your reading
What it costs you afterwards outweighs the pleasure it gives.
Why
- A nice-to-have: it adds to a good feeling rather than fixing a lack.
- Its pleasure is the buzz kind. Once the want is met, more of it only changes the feeling; it does not add to it.
- Going without would not hurt, so if it gets hard to come by or starts doing harm, it is easy to drop.
Show the numbers
- Feels good now
- 9.0
- Good that lasts
- 0.0
- Costs you now
- 0.0
- Costs you after
- 12.0
- The good
- 9.0
- The cost
- 12.0
Each line is score × how long it lasts, and anything you feel in your head counts one and a half times. How the reading is worked out is explained below.
Read deeper
In his Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus said every pleasure must be judged “by measuring one against another, and by looking at the conveniences and inconveniences.” X.130 Here is what each step of the calculator is doing, and where it comes from.
The real name, and the source
The name of this calculator is ours. Epicurus never called his method a calculator, and he gave it no numbers. His own words for it are “measuring one against another, and … looking at the conveniences and inconveniences” X.130, from his Letter to Menoeceus. The letter survives because Diogenes Laertius copied it into Book X of his Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Every quotation on this page is from R. D. Hicks’s 1925 English translation of that book.
The phrase “hedonic calculus” came much later. It is one of the names, with “felicific calculus”, for the method Jeremy Bentham set out in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (London, 1789), which weighs a pleasure by its intensity, duration, certainty, nearness, fecundity, purity and extent. Bentham sums pleasures and pains across everyone an act affects; Epicurus weighs them for one person, aiming at “the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul”. X.131
Three kinds of want
The five questions about the want sort it into one of the three kinds Epicurus named. PD 29 An ancient note on his Principal Doctrines gives an example of each:
- Natural and necessaryRemoves a pain. Going without hurts.“drink when we are thirsty”In the calculator: A real need
- Natural, but not necessaryVaries a pleasure without removing a pain.“costly viands”In the calculator: A nice-to-have
- Neither natural nor necessaryComes from illusory opinion, not from nature.“crowns and the erection of statues in one’s honour”In the calculator: An empty want
A want also counts as empty when it is hard to satisfy yet would cost you nothing to go without: such a longing “is easily got rid of”. PD 26 An empty want is read as “Let it go” whatever the scale says. The pleasure itself is not the problem, since “no pleasure is in itself evil” PD 8; the wanting is.
Calm and buzz
Epicurus told two kinds of pleasure apart. The calm kind is pleasure at rest (in Greek, katastematic); the buzz is pleasure in motion (kinetic):
“Peace of mind and freedom from pain are pleasures which imply a state of rest; joy and delight are seen to consist in motion and activity.” X.136
He made the calm kind the goal: “The magnitude of pleasure reaches its limit in the removal of all pain.” PD 3 Once a want is met, the buzz can change but not grow: pleasure “admits no increase when once the pain of want has been removed; after that it only admits of variation.” PD 18
How the reading is worked out
Epicurus gave no numbers, so the calculator supplies its own. Each line is scored as how strong × how long it lasts (a moment 1, hours 1.5, days 2, months 3, lasting 4), and anything you feel in your head counts one and a half times, because he held “the pains of the mind to be the worse”. X.137 Those multipliers are ours; the principles are his. The good and the cost are then compared:
- Let it go
- An empty want, whatever the balance says. PD 29 · PD 30
- Too close to call
- The good and the cost are within a tenth of each other.
- Skip it
- The cost outweighs the good. Epicurus: we “ofttimes pass over many pleasures when a greater annoyance ensues from them”. X.129
- Worth the effort
- The cost comes first and outweighs the pleasure now, but the good that lasts outweighs that cost. Epicurus: we “submission to the pains for a long time brings us as a consequence a greater pleasure”. X.129
- Go for it
- A real need, and the good outweighs the cost. X.127
- Enjoy it, lightly
- Worth it, but a nice-to-have rather than a need. PD 18
In his own words
“We must also reflect that of desires some are natural, others are groundless; and that of the natural some are necessary as well as natural, and some natural only. And of the necessary desires some are necessary if we are to be happy, some if the body is to be rid of uneasiness, some if we are even to live.”
“Of our desires some are natural and necessary; others are natural, but not necessary; others, again, are neither natural nor necessary, but are due to illusory opinion.”
“Epicurus regards as natural and necessary desires which bring relief from pain, as e.g. drink when we are thirsty; while by natural and not necessary he means those which merely diversify the pleasure without removing the pain, as e.g. costly viands; by the neither natural nor necessary he means desires for crowns and the erection of statues in one’s honour.”
“All such desires as lead to no pain when they remain ungratified are unnecessary, and the longing is easily got rid of, when the thing desired is difficult to procure or when the desires seem likely to produce harm.”
“Those natural desires which entail no pain when not gratified, though their objects are vehemently pursued, are also due to illusory opinion.”
“Peace of mind and freedom from pain are pleasures which imply a state of rest; joy and delight are seen to consist in motion and activity.”
“The magnitude of pleasure reaches its limit in the removal of all pain.”
“Pleasure in the flesh admits no increase when once the pain of want has been removed; after that it only admits of variation.”
“We do not choose every pleasure whatsoever, but ofttimes pass over many pleasures when a greater annoyance ensues from them. And ofttimes we consider pains superior to pleasures when submission to the pains for a long time brings us as a consequence a greater pleasure.”
“It is, however, by measuring one against another, and by looking at the conveniences and inconveniences, that all these matters must be judged.”
“No pleasure is in itself evil, but the things which produce certain pleasures entail annoyances many times greater than the pleasures themselves.”
“Whatever is natural is easily procured and only the vain and worthless hard to win.”
“By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul.”
“Epicurus holds the pains of the mind to be the worse; at any rate the flesh endures the storms of the present alone, the mind those of the past and future as well as the present.”
“Of all the means which are procured by wisdom to ensure happiness throughout the whole of life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friends.”
Translation: R. D. Hicks, Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book X (1925), via Wikisource.