What is pleasure?

[Disagreeable]

The experience of doing cocaine is usually intrinsically good but it's usually instrumentally very bad.

The experience of listening to your favorite piece of music is usually intrinsically good but instrumentally it's usually neutral.

So, why do people do cocaine? Because it’s instrumental to the pleasure they feel. Same with listening to a piece of music, watching a sunrise, falling in love, etc. These things are instrumental to the pleasure we get from doing them. We don’t know if ANY experience is pleasurable until we’ve had it. Pleasure is the end game of a pleasurable experience. That makes the acts instrumental, not intrinsic.

Boru

Well the pleasurable experiences you list are good in and of themselves, for their own sake, which makes them intrinsically good.

The fact that people find pleasure useful doesn't make them instrumental in the relevant sense of intrinsic versus instrumental value. I was talking about experiences that are good in themselves versus experiences that are good because they lead to something else. I wasn't talking about whether activities are 'instrumentally useful' or something like that. So now I think that we're talking past each other.

You say "We don't know if any experience is pleasurable until we've had it." But I disagree because we can know that a pleasure is pleasurable *during* the experience. It doesn't have to be after the experience.

Another thing. When we find an experience pleasurable it's not like we have the experience and then it produces pleasure. The pleasurable experience itself feels pleasurable as we're experiencing it. Which is an example of intrinsic value, not instrumental value.