I never thought I'd be writing about John Piper on this blog, but I've been thinking about the thesis he calls Christian hedonism with the aim of figuring out exactly what this thesis corresponds to in standard philosophical terms. The post I was writing was a little more philosophical detailed than I usually have on my blog, so I'm posting the full version here and editing it for my own blog to make the philosophy a little less detailed.
It seems to me that Piper's Christian hedonism simply isn't any of the positions philosophers have called hedonism. I'm aware of four distinct theses philosophers refer to as hedonism, each a kind of hedonism with respect to a different issue. I do think Piper holds one of them, but I don't think it's equivalent to what he calls Christian hedonism, which doesn't seem to me to be a kind of hedonism at all.
First, here is Piper's account of what Christian hedonism is (this is all directly quoted from Desiring God, p.23):
1. The longing to be happy is a universal human experience; it is good, not sinful. 2. We should never try to resist our longing to be happy, as though it were a bad impulse. Instead we should seek to intensify this longing and nourish it with whatever will provide the deepest and most enduring satisfaction. 3. The deepest and most enduring satisfaction is found only in God. Not from God, but in God. 4. The happiness we find in God reaches its consummation when it is shared with others in the manifold ways of love. 5. To the extent we try to abandon the pursuit of our own pleasure, we fail to honor God and love people. Or, to put it positively: the pursuit of pleasure is a necessary part of all worship and virtue. That is, the chief end of man is to glorify God BY enjoying him forever.
I don't think this view is hedonism according to any of the standard philosophical views I know of that are called hedonism. (It's clearly not hedonism in the popular sense, but I'm concerned about the philosophical views called hedonism, which are what Piper thought he had in mind in choosing the term.)
Psychological hedonists say that our only motivation is to seek our pleasure. We never act for any other reason. We often fail at this, doing self-destructive things in the name of pleasure, but the only reason we do anything according to this view is in seeking pleasure. Now I think Piper would say that people rightly ordered will seek God and thus be attaining their pleasure, but is this what his thesis amounts to? He does think fallen humanity seeks selfish desires, and restored humanity seeks what turns out to be best for them in seeking God. We are seeking our own pleasure to the same degree that we are restored. Those who are more transformed into godliness will seek their true pleasure more.
I think Piper is, in fact, a psychological hedonist. He about says so in the preface to Desiring God. He favorably quotes Pascal:
All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end.... The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hand themselves. (Blaise Pascal, Pensees, thought #425, as cited by Piper, Desiring God, p.16
But is this the claim that he calls Christian hedonism? Hardly. Piper continues that this thought "made great sense" to him and opened up the door for developments in his thinking, leading eventually to Christian hedonism. So Christian hedonism is a further claim. He does't want to say just that we do seek our pleasure and that the most perfect way to do so is to seek God. He includes some ethical component. He thinks we ought to seek the fulfillment of our deepest desires in seeking the glory of God, which will lead to the most pleasure of anything we could do. That's not psychological hedonism. I'm just not sure it's any of the others either.
The three other hedonistic theses involve a genuinely normative component. Psychological hedonism is just about what we do. The three other brands of hedonism are about what is good or what we ought to do.
One thesis commonly called hedonism is welfare hedonism, which is a theory of the good, in particular of what's good for an individual person. It's not about what we in fact do, and it's not immediately about what we should do. It's about what's good for us, what's in our best interest, what sort of thing leads to more well-being. What's good for me is more pleasure and less pain, according to welfare hedonism. As long as I don't know any better, it doesn't matter if I'm being deceived, if I'm not achieving anything in life, etc., at least not for what can properly be called my well-being. Someone in the Matrix or on the Truman Show is just as well off as anyone who had the same experiences with real people not acting or being generated by computers. What matters is how much pleasure I experience, and this will often be expressed in terms of higher and longer-term pleasures being the best (so it doesn't imply that a short-term high with long-term terrible consequences is good for me while it's going on).
I seriously doubt Piper thinks this. Can he think my pleasure and pain are the only things that increase my well-being? The most important intrinsic good for Piper is God's glory, and I think Piper would think I would be better off to acknowledge that even if it didn't happen to lead to the most pleasure in the long run. It does happen to lead to the most pleasure, and since we're pleasure-seeking beings we should seek to fulfill that pleasure in God, the one who will lead us to the most pleasure, but that doesn't mean the pleasure itself is what's good for me. It's true that my seeking to grasp and promote God's glory is good for me, but does Piper think the only thing good for me about promoting it is the pleasure I gain? I can't believe that. Does he not think of it as being good for me in making me a better person even aside from the pleasure that comes from being a good person? Living a moral life is good for me even apart from the pleasure it will bring me. It's good for me simply because I'm not doing wrong.
I think Piper would agree with this. I'm not sure. I don't think this thesis is the claim he calls Christian hedonism, though. Christian hedonism is the thesis that we should seek to have our desires met by God rather than by inferior things. Whatever else is true of that thesis, it's not simply about what's good for me. It's about what I ought to do.
A second normative claim sometimes called hedonism is value hedonism, which is more general than welfare hedonism. It is a theory about what's ultimately good, but it's not restricted to what's good for an individual person. It's about what's good in general. Which sets of circumstances are better than others? Is one outcome the better one? Is a state of the world better than another state of the world? Value hedonism says the way to answer such questions will be determined wholly by how much pleasure each situation involves.
As with welfare hedonism, this isn't what Piper is saying. I don't think he could say this, because the highest good is God's glory, which isn't itself pleasure. Almost as strong is the fact that Christian hedonism involves an ethical component of some sort. This is just about which situation is better overall, which doesn't immediately tell us what we ought to do. That takes further moral claims.
That leaves us with the one common philosophical thesis of hedonism that is ethical, i.e. ethical hedonism. This view says we ought to do what leads to the most pleasure for ourselves. The reason it's right to do it is that it leads to the most pleasure for us. Once you clarify what counts as pleasure, this isn't as radical as it sounds. The truest, deepest pleasures are long-term, higher pleasures, so it's not like the tendency to give in to immediate short-term pleasures that modern society calls hedonism.
It's tempting to see Piper as taking such a position, with the highest pleasure as pursuit of God, and he does think it's our moral obligation to do what leads to that highest pleasure, but this isn't Piper's view. In fact, he explicitly denies it:
Christian hedonism is not a "general theory of moral justification." In other words, nowhere do I say: an act is right because it brings pleasure. My aim is not to decide what is right by using joy as a moral criterion. My aim is to own up to the amazing, and largely neglected, fact that some dimension of joy is a moral duty in all true worship and all virtuous acts. I do not say that loving God is good because it brings joy. I say that God commands that we find joy in loving God.... I do not say that loving people is good because it brings joy. I say that God commands that we find joy in loving people. (Desiring God, p.20)
He doesn't think we should seek God merely because it leads to our pleasure. He thinks we should seek God because God is the most worthy being of our pursuit. It does lead to the most pleasure we could possibly attain, but that doesn't seem to me to be Piper's main basis for why we should glorify God. Valuing the most truly valuable is what's central for him. The fact that it leads to the most pleasure, and the fact that we get pleasure out of it are not incidental because he insists that we have these desires and ought to fulfill them in the best way possible, but at the same time it's not the fact that it leads to pleasure that makes it right to glorify God. He explicitly denies that. So Piper is no ethical hedonist.
Where does this leave us? I don't think Piper's Christian hedonism is enough like any of the standard hedonist views to be worthy of the name. It isn't really about pleasure. It's about one kind of pleasure. It isn't some general theory that bases some important consideration on pleasure and pleasure alone, which is what all the versions of hedonism do. It's a view about the one thing we should have the most pleasure in, not a view that some philosophical problem (such as what is good or what is right) has pleasure as the answer (or the basis of the answer). It's thus not hedonism.
I propose that Piper's Christian hedonism takes the primary element to be evaluated as desire-fulfillment, and it evaluates it in terms of whether the desire is being fulfilled in the best way it can be fulfilled (which, as it turns out, is always going to be in seeking to fulfill it in God). This is just a general moral theory, one that I think is fairly interesting and uncommon.
This is the primary thing morality will evaluate. Actions, rules, character traits, motives, and societal institutions may also be evaluated in moral ways, and this theory as I've spelled it out doesn't necessarily subsume all of them under desire-fulfillment. It may be that Piper is a value pluralist. If so, then there are multiple things to be evaluated morally, and this is just an essential element. I wonder if his denial that this is a general hedonistic account of morality is simply saying that he doesn't try to reduce all morality to this one principle.
So above, when he said he wasn't giving an account of what makes an action right, I think he was wrong. He is giving such an account. He wanted to be clear that that wasn't what he was up to. When he says he isn't doing this, he makes it pretty clear that he isn't giving an account of what makes an action right that has to do with pleasure. In other words, his hedonism isn't a general account of what makes an action right. He's not giving a hedonist account of what makes an action right. I do think he's presented an interesting ethical theory, one I've never quite seen explicitly formulated before.
Postscript: I'm wondering if Piper's position is the kind of thing Basil was thinking about in the comments on Imran's post about rational unbelief. If the most basic moral requirement is to fulfill one's desires in God, then obviously all unbelievers are not doing so and are thus thoroughly immoral in the deepest way possible. Piper would welcome this conclusion, because he believes every mere human being is thoroughly immoral but by the common grace of God bestowed upon all human beings can at least do deeds that appear on the surface to be righteous. The issue of culpable non-belief is thus irrelevant. The non-culpability of one's unbelief does not make up for being thoroughly immoral at the very root. There are plenty of further issues, but I'm mentioning this now because I think this sort of view explains what Basil was getting at pretty nicely.
I actually think that Piper is even *less* interested in hedonism and even desire fulfillment then you do. You are right that pleasure is not the only factor that determines the morality of an action for Piper, but it is also not even the primary factor. Piper constantly focuses on God's commanding us to take pleasure in him, and he ground much of his theory in this way. As such I see it much more as a Divine Command Theory. I think that when pressed to choose one reason as to why we should do a certain action Piper would claim that it is because God commands it not because it gives us pleasure or desire-fulfillment. It's a little bit of a chicken and egg question but I think that it is clear the commanding is always coming first and the possibility of worlds where the greatest pleasure was not found in glorifying God bring out that pleasure is not what's taking the lead here. Whether intentional or not I like to think that the 'Christian Hedonism' title is an exaggeration meant to get pleasure talk just back on the map.
Divine command theory says something much stronger than what Piper says. It says that the only reason anything is good is because God says so. This includes not just morally right actions but goodness itself. There's no way Piper can mean that, because he thinks God's goodness is the paradigm example of intrinsic goodness.
In fact, a graduate student in my department who is a divine command theorist has read a lot of Piper and thinks he takes the wrong horn of the Euthyphro dilemma. He wants to say that things are good because God chooses those things to be good, but he thinks Piper says the opposite. This comes out pretty strongly in The Pleasures of God. Piper applies the same moral theory he uses for us to questions about what God should do, and he makes it quite clear that he thinks God must, of moral necessity, seek his own glory first and foremost, through finding pleasure in himself.
That places moral requirements on God, which a divine command theorist won't want to do, since it treats some moral truth as at least independent of God's choice (though, contrary to the standard invalid formulation of the dilemma, this doesn't mean it's independent of God, since it might be based on his nature rather than something independent entirely).
Piper's constant talk about God's commands is thus primarily about our way to know what's right. It need not have anything to do with what makes it right, and there's good reason to think Piper can't intend that. There's also too much evidence that his theory is based on his conviction that we should value what's most good, which relies on notions of intrinsic goodness that he thinks are independent of any choice of God. His theory isn't based in God's commands but in these deeper notions of what's most worth valuing.
You are right that a pure divine command theory as you have outlined would not fit Piper. I guess what I have in mind is more of a standard deontological theory which just draws heavily from the commands of God. This does draw on notions of intrinsic goodness and places commands on God and us as well. It is then our duty to obey and take pleasure in God because of who he is and who we are. I think Piper feels free to endorse hedonism simply because of the way that the world actually has been set up. With the way God is and the way we are, it is good to seek our pleasure. But this surely could have been different, and I don't think that Piper wants to endorse following pleasure or desire-fulfillment in those other worlds. This is why he can't be primarily a hedonist or desire-fulfillment theorist. I suppose that it is possible that his grounding of his theory in God's commands is merely an epistemic grounding, but then why does he never (at least to my knowledge) defend it in any philosophical way? He doesn't make this distinction and his only other account of why we should be hedonists is his flirtations with psychological hedonism which as you mentioned in your original post is not enough to get us to the ethical version. I agree that Piper believes that we should value what is most good, but I think that the relationship that he finds that to have with pleasure is merely a contingent one which is why I think it needs the backing of a further deontological theory.
For what it's worth I remember emailing Desiring God Ministries this kind of question, "When it comes down to it, why ought we to X, because of the command or the desire for pleasure?" I don't know if it was Piper, or more likely someone else who responded, but their response was the command.
I am pretty sure his theory boils down to either something pretty obvious ( I won't say trival) or something false. In what sense can our highest good be the pursuit of happiness? Certainly in christian ethics the pursuit of god comes first. He could say that in practice the two are the same but practice isn't everything, two actions the same in all except motivation are radically different.
One possibility is that his theory basically means God wants us to be happy, that's an important message but I don't see how you call it "Christian Hedonism." Only a handful of Ultra-Fundamentalist cultic "Christians" would claim that god does not want us to be happy. Maybe his theory is that he thinks the way we will glorify god is by being happy, but that doesn't make being happy the cheif end of man.
Timothy, he's saying something in between those last two items. Being happy isn't the chief end, but he's also not saying that we glorify God by being happy. He's saying both that being truly happy only comes from glorifying God and that the only way to glorify God includes delighting in God, i.e. finding happiness in God.
Jon, I'm fairly sure Piper's view on divine commands is squarely on the epistemological side. It doesn't assume anything more, anyway. We know what's right because God tells us. That doesn't say anything about what makes it right. I'm not sure why you're surprised that an evangelical Christian would ground his theory on biblical statements, as if that would need explanation in some meta-ethical theory. The explanation isn't in his meta-ethics. It's in his doctrine of scripture. He sees the Bible as God's word and thus authoritative. That issue is entirely separate from divine command theory, which is about the grounding of morality, not about the authority of scripture.
I think you're right that Piper might allow that creatures not made like us might not have the same moral requirements. Angels, for instance, might not work the same in terms of motivation. Psychological hedonism might not be true of them.
I don't think you're right that he doesn't have a further ethical argument besides psychological hedonism and scriptural statements. I've given his argument above. He thinks we ought to recognize what's of utmost value and devote our lives to bring praise to what's worth praising. We ought, therefore, to center our values and our desires around what's most truly valuable. That's an ethical claim, and that's his support. He doesn't really support that claim, but he's not a philosopher, and I wouldn't have expected him even to go as far in giving a philosophical backing as he does. I'm surprised about how much there is that can lead to classifying his view philosophically.
Thanks for the continued discussion. I think that perhaps I am confused. I agree that his primary ethical claim is that we ought to value what is most valuable. But to me that sounds like a deontological claim not a hedonist one. It may turn out that how that obligation plays out is in a hedonistic way, but the primary and motivating principle doesn't look hedonistic to me. Instead it seems to be based on who God is and who we are - independent of questions of pleasure at least at this level of analysis. Am I missing something here?
The point of the post was to show that it's not hedonist. We don't disagree on that. Piper calls it hedonist, but that doesn't line up with philosophical usage of that term.
I guess my question would then be how you interpret the 'value the most valuable' thesis as relating to a theory based on desire-fulfillment rather than giving it the deontological reading that I am giving it.
What do you mean by deontological? I was thinking of the desire-fulfillment view as a kind of deontological view. It isn't merely about consequences, and I think people usually thinkg of deontological theories as those that aren't based just in consequences. That's how Shelly Kagan's Normative Ethics treats it, anyway. Piper isn't giving a Kantian universalizability view, but there are plenty of other deontological foundations of ethics.
Doing some spring cleaning I just came across an article by Piper entitiled "A Response to Richard Mouw's Treatment of Christian Hedonism in The God Who Commands." It's dated 1993, but I don't know if it was ever published. While I too prefer a deontological reading of Piper, if your looking for how Piper understands his theory, he makes it clear in this article that he sees his theory as stemming from a Divine Command Theory. A couple quotes,
"I love Richard Mouw's focus on 'divine command ethics' which makes God the basic criterion of all morality"
"Christian Hedonism is, one could say, a specific application of Mouw's vision of 'divine command ethics'. I think I am starting exactly where Mouw starts, namely with God's absolute authority to tell us how to live."
The use of the word 'criterion' sounds epistemological, which makes me a little unclear whether he's got Divine Command Theory in mind, which bases ethics metaphysically on God's commands. There are even milder and more extreme versions of the metaphysical view. One simply accepts the horn of the Euthyphro dilemma that Ockham and Locke do, saying that the only reason something is right is because of a mere command of God. The more common one tries to go through the horns of the dilemma by basing morality on God. I don't think the latter view is actually the traditional divine command theory, so I'm hesitant to describe it as such, but some contemporary philosophers do, e.g. Alson. If that's all Piper is saying, I don't think it's departing from anything I said. What I don't think he does (though I'm open to revision, of course) is think morality is metaphysically based on the mere commands of God and not from God's nature. Regardless of what he says there, it's an independent issue from Christian hedonism. You can hold either without the other.
Check out the "desiringgod" website for an article entitled "Christian Hedonism" in which Piper emphatically rejects Kant's ethics (and perhaps by extension other deontological theories) and claims his support for the view that desire for one's own pleasure is a legitimate MOTIVATION to be moral.
Daniel, I think you must mean this article. What Piper says there seems to me to confirm my reading.
What he challenges in Kant there is not Kant's deontological views. He disagrees with Kant's rationalistic view of morality that separates enjoyment from morality, as if pursuing something for its enjoyment decreases the moral value of the action.
But denying that view of Kant's is perfectly consistent with holding a deontological ethical theory. Deontology is just the view that there are some moral constraints on our actions that can apply even against actions that would lead to a greater good. As far as I can tell, Piper does not need to deny that.