One causal argument for hedonism is that autonomy, achievement, friendship, honesty, and so on, generally produce pleasure, and this makes us tend to think they have value of their own; in this way the valuable pleasure produced by these non-pleasures tends to confound our thinking about what has value.
In all these experiences, the creators know the valuable pleasures they bring to us — their customers.
The least most valuable is pleasure (RG 152).
You will never forget Nepal and its valuable artistic pleasure.
Thus, the English philosopher G.E. Moore, one of the founders of contemporary analytic philosophy, regarded many kinds of consciousness including friendship, knowledge, and the experience of beauty as intrinsically valuable independently of pleasure, a position labelled "ideal" utilitarianism.
And if we believe that those activities are valuable independently of the pleasure we gain from engaging in them, then we shall probably gain more pleasure overall.
Some critics argue that not all pleasures are valuable, since, for example, there is no value in the pleasures that a sadist gets from whipping a victim or that an addict gets from drugs.
These conditions could be specified either negatively (e.g., pleasure is valuable only when it does not arise from and is not directed at a bad deed or character state or state of affairs), or positively (e.g., pleasure is valuable only when its object exists, or only when its object is deserving of it).
Doing so (as in the passage first cited above) avoids the unintuitiveness that some (e.g., Feldman 1997a) see in interpretations of Sidgwick's views that make pleasure intrinsically valuable but itself constituted by its relation to desire.
The simple picture of pleasure as valuable or at least attractive due to its own experiential nature may survive the objections considered so far, at least as theoretical possibility.
Fred Feldman, for instance, defends a version of consequentialism that adjusts utility for justice on the basis that a pleasure is more valuable if it is deserved and less valuable, or perhaps even disvaluable, if it is undeserved (Feldman 1997).
