Fred Feldman

In common parlance, ‘hedonism’ suggests something a bit vulgar and risqué. We may think of someone like the former publisher of a slightly scandalous girlie magazine. He apparently enjoyed hanging out with bevies of voluptuous young women, drinking and dining perhaps to excess, travelling to tropical resorts where the young women would reveal extensive amounts of tanned flesh, and revelling till dawn. In an earlier era the motto was ‘wine, women, and song’. Nowadays, we are required to substitute the somewhat more P.C. ‘sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll’. No matter what the motto, the vision is misguided. It reveals a misconception of the views of most serious hedonists[.]

Fred Feldman, Pleasure and the Good Life: Concerning the Nature, Varieties, and Plausibility of Hedonism, Oxford, 2004, p. 21