Excerpt from "Hedonism as Compassion"
From the blog Light(ning) Illuminates (now defunct):
The pursuit of Pleasure is not about seeking out out those things that already feel good. It is about cultivating yourself so that more and more things are pleasurable, and choosing those things with wisdom, to shape yourself in ways consistent with what wisdom your experience has revealed to you. The True Hedonist transforms their soul, seeking pleasure in helping others, becoming a channel for Pleasure into the world, compassionately seeking to magnify the pleasure that every living thing takes in their own existences.
Thus the Hedonist is selfless, and is often an activist, striving for change in the world: an end to oppression, religious liberty, sexual freedom, gender equality, an end to homophobia.
The Hedonist holds that all people must be free to pursue their bliss, however and wherever they might find it, so long as they do not harm others.
The Hedonist maintains that there is no good reason, whatsoever, to restrict the freedoms of any individual, in action, in speech, in thought, or in being, except to protect the welfare of the people from tangible harm. That tangible harm is harm to the integrity and health of the body, death, or any result that will lead to either of these evils; tangible harm is also the unreasonable restriction of another person’s freedom to speak, act, or be as they wish.
[...] Hedonism contains within it a social contract, the understanding that the collective society and each individual must work for the greatest well-being for the greatest number of people, to endure for the greatest amount of time, and that the most enduring of all solutions is to promote tolerance among all people, and to not impede the liberty of any individual to pursue whatever bliss they wish, except to protect others from tangible harm. It also recognizes that protecting individual freedom is not enough: the collective society must strive to protect the well-being of each individual, including caring for physical needs like food, health, and shelter.
And so we strive for a society in which each person’s basic needs are met, and in which basic individual freedom–the right of everyone to live, to act, to speak, and to be as they wish– is valued and upheld above all else.
