Copyright

Alison Stone

Published On

2026-07-16

Language

  • English

Print Length

18 pages

THEMA

  • QDTQ
  • QD
  • QDTJ
  • JPA
  • JH

BISAC

  • PHI005000
  • PHI019000
  • PHI009000
  • PHI022000
  • POL028000

Keywords

  • Victorian philosophy
  • Ethics
  • Metaphysics
  • Religion
  • History
  • Feminism

3. Pleasure and Pain

Chapter of: The Philosophy of Julia Wedgwood: Imperfect Antithesis

Wedgwood’s asymmetry of pain and pleasure is foundational for her broader approach to imperfect antithesis. The chapter outlines her view that we recoil from pain but have no symmetrically equivalent orientation towards pleasure. I look at her account of the lived experience of pain and its connection with the felt overwhelming presence of the body. Then I clarify how pain and pleasure remain an antithesis, though an imperfect one. This leads to a puzzle. Morally, Wedgwood places supreme value on self-sacrifice, and self-sacrifice means voluntarily undergoing pain. If pain is utterly bad and overwhelming – as she maintains – why and how would anyone voluntarily incur it? Her answer is that while pain is overwhelmingly bad for us as bodies, moral guilt is worse for us spiritually. Further, pain enhances our ability to sympathise with others. She incorporates animal pain and suffering into this picture. There are tensions amongst her claims about pain, but her defence would be that these tensions reflect our real dislocation between body and spirit.

Contributors

Alison Stone

(author)
Professor of Philosophy at Lancaster University
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9621-8263

Alison Stone is Professor of Philosophy at Lancaster University. Her most recent books are on nineteenth-century women philosophers. They are Frances Power Cobbe: Essential Writings of a Nineteenth-Century Feminist Philosopher (Oxford University Press, 2022), Frances Power Cobbe (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Women Philosophers in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Oxford University Press, 2023), and Women on Philosophy of Art: Britain 1770-1900 (Oxford University Press, 2024). With Charlotte Alderwick, she co-edited Nineteenth-Century Women Philosophers in Britain and America (Routledge, 2024), and with Lydia Moland, she co-edited The Oxford Handbook of American and British Women Philosophers in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2025).