Relation Of Pain And Enjoyment To Character Rough Draft

Alina Rossi-Conaway
Mr. Woodruff
Philosophy and Composition HH
December 7, 2012
Relation of Pain and Enjoyment to Character Rough Draft In the Callicles portion of Plato's Gorgias, something was agreed upon by Socrates and Callicles during an investigative conversation that is just not true. Around 499a, the two men agree in passing that he who feels enjoyment is good, and he who feels pain is bad. These assertions are explained by saying that good men feel enjoyment because good things are present within them, while bad men feel pain because of bad things present in them. This is simply not accurate. Enjoyment and pain are things that are felt as a result of outside events; they themselves provide no insight into a person's character.
In fact, it is often the case that good people experience more pain, while bad people experience more enjoyment. Regardless of whether a person is good or bad, they will feel both pain and enjoyment at different points throughout their lives.
This is true for every person. Enjoyment and pain are experiences caused by positive and negative events that take place in a person's life and, as everyone experiences both, they have nothing to do with what kind of a person one is. Enjoyment provides no evidence of good things within a person, just as pain provides no evidence of bad things within a person. Enjoyment is the sense of satisfaction one experiences when something goes their way or they achieve something that they have been aspiring to. Pain is the grief one experiences as a result of suffering a loss or disappointment. Achievement, as well as loss, are things that every person goes through regardless of their character
traits. That being said, it is often the case that good people are more likely than bad ones to experience pain, and bad people are more likely to experience enjoyment. To proceed logically with this argument, it is necessary to define the terms good and bad as referring to qualities of people. A good person is one who is selfless and honest and willing to put the needs of others before their own desires. On the other hand, a bad person is one who is greedy and selfish and cares about nothing more than their own personal gain-especially if it means they have to hurt others along the way. Simply striving for success for oneself does not qualify a person as bad. It is when this personal success is so important that it makes the person willing to hurt others to achieve it that a person is considered bad. Following with these definitions, the assertion can be made that good people are more likely to experience pain because they are more likely to make sacrifices for the needs of other people; even if it means finding their personal endeavors halted. Their goodness makes them willing to do this, but that does not mean that it doesn't cause them a great deal of pain. My mother has always had to make personal sacrifices for the sake of our family, sacrifices that included putting her career on hold in order to raise my siblings and I. Unsatisfied in where she was career-wise, she tried to go back to school a few years ago to become a physician's assistant. Despite tremendous effort, she found it to be too demanding to try and balance her schoolwork with singlehandedly raising four children. She had to drop the classes. As much as it hurt her to have to give up, she knew that it was in the best interests of our family. Being a good person, she was willing to put her own desires aside for the sake of my siblings and I. Bad people are more likely to experience enjoyment because they will not let anything get in the way of achieving whatever it is they want to achieve. These people experience enjoyment in response to their personal gain, regardless of the means by which they achieved it. Something that perfectly exemplifies this type of greed today is the economic system of leveraged buyout. These firms make absurd amounts of money through gaining control of a healthy, functioning company by buying up the majority of its stock, then somehow gaining a profit through liquidating the company's assets and laying off its workers. While the actual technicalities of this are not very clear, these buyout firms essentially run companies into the ground; making a profit for themselves but leaving behind a worthless company and hundreds of unemployed people. The heads of these companies feel enjoyment as a result of their success, but are in no way good because of it. Another factor that must be considered when examining this unfortunate phenomenon is the fact that different things constitute and bring about enjoyment and pain for different people.
As a result, the degrees of enjoyment felt vary for different people. For selfless people, making a sacrifice in their lives brings about immediate pain but leaves them with lasting enjoyment through helping out those that they love. For selfish people it is quite the opposite. Their personal gain brings about enjoyment despite it being at the expense of others. One must look at whether this is shallow or deep enjoyment. By this I mean that the greedy people feel enjoyment, but since they hurt others along the way it would not be considered real enjoyment to good people. In addition, the enjoyment of the bad will be short-lived as it is purely materialistic and they pushed people away in order to attain
it. In that last paragraph lies the real conclusion that was formed in exploring this topic. The mere experiencing of pain or enjoyment does not qualify a person as good or bad, selfless or greedy. Pain and enjoyment are things that every person experiences, regardless of their character, as a result of outside events. These things do not reflect the inner qualities of the person. What makes a person good or bad is what they qualify as causing pain or enjoyment, and the means through which it came to them.