(3) It would, of course, be impracticable to stop and calculate at the moment when action is needed.  But such continual recalculation is unnecessary.  Our ancestors, after many experiments, have found solutions for all the familiar types of situation; the results of their thought are crystallized for us in the ideals that press upon us from without and the voice of conscience that calls to us within.  Forces beyond the individual human mind have taken care of these things and slowly steered man, with all his passions and caprices, toward his own better welfare.  It is only in moments when we long to understand and justify our ideals, or when some unusually baffling problem arises, that we need to calculate and weigh relative advantage and disadvantage.  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.  Socrates says in the Philebus, “Do we not say that the intemperate has pleasure, and that the temperate has pleasure in his very temperance, and that the fool is pleased when he is full of foolish fancies and hopes, and that the wise man has pleasure in his wisdom?  And may not he be justly deemed a fool who says that these pairs of pleasures are respectively alike?”

Why, however, do we rate the pleasures of temperance and wisdom above those of intemperance and folly?  Simply because of their respective effects.  Intrinsically they may be equally desirable, or the latter may even be keener pleasures? that depends upon the individual circumstances; but there is no question about their relative extrinsic value.  There is always “the devil to pay” for intemperance and folly; while temperance and wisdom lead to health, love, honor, achievement, and many another good.  As to push- pin-or let us say baseball-versus poetry, it is only prejudice that makes us say we rate the latter higher.  Outdoor games are not only productive of a keener delight to most people, they are extrinsically good as well, conducing to health, quickness of wit, self-control, and other goods.  They are, in their time and place, as good as poetry.  The reason for the greater reverence we feel, or feel we ought to feel, for poetry lies in the fact that it takes much more mental cultivation to acquire the taste for it; the love of poetry is a sort of patrician distinction.  It is also true that poetry opens up to its lover a much wider range of enjoyments; it opens his eyes to the beauty and significance and pathos in the world; it is immensely educative, and inspiring to the spiritual life.  The love of broadening and inspiring things requires cultivation in most of us; so that we praise and honor such things and urge people toward them.  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.