Flesh, bone, desire, consciousness — in almost every way, the farmers were different from him and therefore obdurate in their singleness and as capable of pleasure and misery as he.
Butler suggested in Sermon IX that we have a fundamental obligation to the happiness of sensible creatures other than ourselves insofar as they are capable of pleasure and pain, an obligation that can only be ignored in order to bring about greater happiness (to be further discussed in Section 6).
Why is he capable of finding pleasure in his solitary game?
After dismissing most of Kipling's verse as "horribly vulgar," Orwell concedes it nonetheless is "capable of giving pleasure to people who know what poetry means".
"The peace of mind I found, largely alone, on that white-water mecca, convinced me that life was capable of exquisite pleasure and undefined meaning deep in the face of failure," he wrote.
Prescription opioids work on the same sorts of receptors that heroin does, and so are capable of causing pleasure, and hence addiction – and the acquisitive crime associated with addiction – as well as the same sort of medical problems, ranging from nausea and constipation, through respiratory depression, to death.
A being (Condillac's "statue") endowed with just this one sense but no motive power would, Condillac supposed, be capable of receiving pleasure or pain from the experience of different odoriferous objects.
Hence, the eighteenth century utilitarian Jeremy Bentham (1789), and now Peter Singer (1993), have argued that the interests of all the sentient beings (i.e., beings who are capable of experiencing pleasure or pain)—including non-human ones affected by an action should be taken equally into consideration in assessing the action.
One of the things your body is physically capable of is pleasure.
Knowing that your body is capable of producing pleasure on its own (regardless of your relationship status) is powerful.
However, Akira is illustrated as being capable of innocent pleasure, particularly in one fleeting scene in which he and his black friend Gil (Chico Rolands), whom he views as a fellow outcast, frolic in the ocean.
