This is the fallacy inherent in hedonism—in any variant of ethical
hedonism, personal or social, individual or collective. “Happiness” can
properly be the purpose of ethics, but not the standard. The task of
ethics is to define man’s proper code of values and thus to give him the means
of achieving happiness. To declare, as the ethical hedonists do, that “the
proper value is whatever gives you pleasure” is to declare that “the proper
value is whatever you happen to value”—which is an act of intellectual and
philosophical abdication, an act which merely proclaims the futility of ethics
and invites all men to play it deuces wild.