1. The empirical method of egoistic hedonism, and indeed
the very conception of greatest happiness as an end of action,
rests on the basic assumption that pleasures and pains have
definite quantitative relations to each other. If they don’t,
they can’t be conceived as elements—·pleasures positive,
pains negative·—of a total that we are to try to make as
great as possible. What if some kinds of pleasure (·let’s call
them ‘superpleasures’·) are so much pleasanter than others
that the smallest conceivable amount of a superpleasure
would outweigh the greatest conceivable amount of any other
pleasure? ·That wouldn’t wreck the calculation·, because if
we knew that it was the case, we could handle any hedonistic
calculation involving superpleasures by treating all other
pleasures as practically non-existent.1 But in all ordinary
prudential reasoning, I think, we implicitly assume that
all the pleasures and pains we could experience bear a
finite ratio to each other in respect of pleasantness and its
opposite. If we can make this ratio definite, we can balance
the intensity of a pleasure (or pain) against its duration; for
if finitely long pleasure (or pain) x is intensively greater than
another, y, in some definite ratio, it seems to be implied
in this conception that if y were continuously increased in
extent without change in its intensity it would at a certain
point just balance x in amount.