And this, unlike the earlier adjustment of pleasure's and pain's value within lives, is not merely offered to objectors but is proposed in our author's own voice. Moreover, when subjects' desert of pleasure and pain is allowed to similarly adjust hedonic states' contribution to the value of worlds (although not of lives), the historical hedonists' insistence that the value of larger wholes supervenes on that of the individual lives they contain is jettisoned as well. However, the deeper worry that such views abandon hedonism's guiding idea that life is ultimately better by, and only by, containing more pleasure or less pain is never satisfactorily addressed, but seemingly defined away (177-81), despite an earlier concession that these views use nonhedonic normative standards in determining value (121). Feldman defends Mill's and his own use of extra dimensions of value against Moore's charge, that this strategy actually abandons hedonism for value pluralism, by insisting that all 'basic intrinsic value states' in the resulting views are still pleasures and pains. This strategy of reconciling hedonism with its opponents follows the pattern of Mill's privileging of culturally 'higher' pleasures. Old-style hedonism's intensity and duration of pleasure and pain are thus supplemented by extra dimensions as needed to yield value theories that satisfy the various objectors.

While Feldman's 'basic intrinsic value states' are all 'hedonistic' in that they include pleasure or pain, these need not be taken at their hedonic face value, since this may be 'adjusted' as various normative standards, such as the appropriateness of the pleasure or pain as a response to its object, may demand.

For all the acute, ingenious, and concise disposal of many objections to hedonism that fill much of this clearly written, accessible, and often rewarding book, anyone who regards pleasure as ever an ultimate and unmediated value-maker, if only within some component of a pluralist value theory, will sense long before its end that this original guiding idea of hedonism has been left behind along the way. Fred Feldman begins in roughly this place and then proceeds to formulate a whole family of 'hedonisms' designed to be immune to moralists' various objections, until finally we are treated to 'hedonisms' that are close extensional equivalents to even such paradigmatically anti-hedonistic views as G.E. Hedonism, taken as a theoretical approach to life's value, says that a life is intrinsically or ultimately good or worthwhile according to and on account of the pleasure less the pain, or suffering, it contains.