1. Gilbert Ryle in The Concept of Mind, London, Hutchinson & Co., 1949, criticized extensively the view that pleasure is some kind of sensation or feeling, and few recent philosophers have defended a form of the property of conscious experience theory. J. J. C. Smart in An Outline of Utilitarian Ethics, Carlton, Melbourne University Press,. 1961, reprinted in a revised edition in J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1973, seems committed to such a view. Other philosophers, such as J. C. B. Gosling, Pleasure and Desire, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1969, and Anthony Kenny, Action, Emotion and Will, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963, argue that there is one sense of pleasure in which it is a sensation, but that not all pleasure is a sensation. Part of this theory’s importance is that probably most ordinary persons implicitly hold some version of it, and so it in turn underlies such persons’ attitudes towards the use of drugs for pleasure.
2. Among the more extensive discussions of pleasure sympathetic to some form of the preference theory are J. L. Cowan, Pleasure and Pain, New York, St. Martins Press, 1968, and D. L. Perry, The Concept of Pleasure, The Hague, Mouton, 1967. An excellent, shorter review of alternative theories of pleasure is William Alston, “Pleasure,” in Paul Edwards, ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, New York, Macmillan, 1967.
3. Smart and Williams, p. 19.
4. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, S. Gorovitz, ed., Indianapolis, BobbsMerrill, 1971, pp. 18–19.
5. For readers unfamiliar with the philosophical literature and positions on the mind-body problem, two useful starting points are Richard Taylor, Metaphysics, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall, 1963, Chapters 1–3, and the entry, “The Mind-Body Problem,” by Jerome Schaffer in Paul Edwards, ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, New York, Macmillan, 1967.