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:To be honest, I'm generally going by what I learned in philosophy class. My professor put a Christian emphasis on every redeemable branch of ethics (which moral relativism isn't). I'll search for sources. --Pious (talk) 16:31, 20 July 2016 (CDT)
:To be honest, I'm generally going by what I learned in philosophy class. My professor put a Christian emphasis on every redeemable branch of ethics (which moral relativism isn't). I'll search for sources. --Pious (talk) 16:31, 20 July 2016 (CDT)
::Well, I'd say it's not so much that ethical hedonism is about self so much as it is about believing that happiness is the greatest good. This can be either selfish or selfless. So, for instance, Jeremy Bentham's defintion of Utilitarianism (which is a hedonistic philosophy) was "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong", which isn't a selfish philosophy. A person could say "Well, even though this action would be painful to me, it's going to cause others more pleasure than it causes me, so it's right to do it.", or "Even though it would make me happy to do this thing, it would hurt others more than it would benefit me, so it would be wrong. Hedonism is more of a general category than a specific philosophy, and it's the group of philosophies that says, "Happiness is goodness, unhappiness is evil." As for Christian hedonism being a minority view in Christianity, most Christianity says that while following God's commandments will probably make you a happier person, you shouldn't follow them for that reason, but because God commands them and its a good thing to do what God wants and bad to do what He doesn't. The source of goodness isn't happiness. The source of goodness is God. And the long list of martyrs in Christianity shows that there are times when following God's commandments is going to make you suffer or even die. Stephen in the bible probably would rather not have been stoned to death if that were the choice in isolation, Jan Huss probably would rather not have been burned at the stake, and Maximilian Kolbe probably would rather not have gone to the gas chamber. But their love for God and their fellow man, and their desire to do what they understood God wanted them to do was stronger than their fear and their desire to stay alive. --[[User:Whizkid|Whizkid]] ([[User talk:Whizkid|talk]]) 19:27, 20 July 2016 (EDT)