Motivational hedonists are making the empirical conjecture that motivation by pleasure and pain underlies and generates all apparently non-hedonistic motives, such as to become competent with more recipes, make one's spouse happy, paint a masterpiece and so forth. The difficulty motivational hedonists must then confront is to make literal sense of what is the underlying motive, such that it would be possible to tell what sort of psychological evidence would be needed to confirm or refute their claim.
Normative hedonism is the claim that only pleasure has value and only pain has disvalue non-instrumentally, that is, independently of the value of anything they might cause or prevent. On this view, our friendships, actions, and achievements, our states of understanding, insight and character, have only instrumental worth, through the pleasure they cause or the pain they diminish. Things can of course have both instrumental and non-instrumental value. Where they do so, their overall value is a function of both. The two can pull in opposite directions. The pain of being once bitten has non-instrumental disvalue, for example, but it might also have instrumental value, through the further pain you avoid by its making you twice shy.
Normative hedonism can take the non-egoistic form that was used to state it above; or instead the egoistic form that all and only one's own pleasure has value for oneself. Many other variants are also possible. For example, it can be specified as a claim about morality, well-being, rationality or aesthetics; as a claim regarding our beliefs, actions or feelings; or as a thesis about what is of value, what reasons we have, what we ought to do or be, what is good, or what is right. The discussion below aims for generality across these different forms of normative hedonism. For simplicity of expression, its points are made in ‘value’ terminology.
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