Philip Hilton scribbles,

My Theory:

The will makes decisions based on a foresight into which course will produce the most pleasure. Thus, any way one looks, pleasure must be the ultimate goal of any decision.

There are two types of pleasure: the first, is anything that involves personal gratification, improvement, etc. Instances: food, smell, etc, anything that gratifies the five sense, and intellectual pleasures such as literature, music, etc; also, what are commonly called moral pleasures, almsgiving, not-swearing, etc. Such moral pleasures accrue generally to our sense of goodness, and it is a kind of Pharisaical happiness. “I thank God that I am not as other men…” In other words, all things that accrue to ego.

(This last idea of moral pleasure is a Nick Embrey production…Nick Embrey, Inc., however, does not in any way sponsor or approve of the material in this post…)

The other type is the Christ-type, the pleasure that comes from gratifying others. This type of love also has moral pleasures, but they are of such a sort as accrue not to the ego, the focal point of the other love, but the vos, the focal point of this love.

Love and pleasure. Pleasure is the object and love is the force that draws us to it.

To be quite clear:

Our will has two objects: giving pleasure to ourselves, and giving pleasure to others. The one is egotism and the other is self-sacrifice, and what is called love is the force that is considered to be the attraction between us and them, as if it were a kind of gravity force that not only attracts our own body to other bodies, but also our body to our own body…

This has some incidental implications for ethics. Morality/Ethics basically revolves around the second type of love: there can be no real morality based on the first type, since our sense of goodness in ourselves is even more ephemeral than our sense of goodness in others.

However, in theory we should be able to discover the rules for the second type of love, as we have discovered the rules for the first type, and ways of satisfying our ego, assuming that the second type really is separate from the first type, and thereby we could create a code of ethics absent traditional or divine morality, but with equal results.

Theoretically.