Some moral theorists seek a single simple basic principle because they assume that simplicity is needed in order to decide what is right when less basic principles or reasons conflict. This assumption seems to make hedonism attractive. Unfortunately, however, hedonism is not as simple as they assume, because hedonists count both pleasures and pains. Pleasure is distinct from the absence of pain, and pain is distinct from the absence of pleasure, since sometimes people feel neither pleasure nor pain, and sometimes they feel both at once. Nonetheless, hedonism was adopted partly because it seemed simpler than competing views.
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The simplicity of hedonism was also a source of opposition. From the start, the hedonism in classic utilitarianism was treated with contempt. Some contemporaries of Bentham and Mill argued that hedonism lowers the value of human life to the level of animals, because it implies that, as Bentham said, an unsophisticated game (such as push-pin) is as good as highly intellectual poetry if the game creates as much pleasure (Bentham 1843). Quantitative hedonists sometimes respond that great poetry almost always creates more pleasure than trivial games (or sex and drugs and rock-and-roll), because the pleasures of poetry are more certain (or probable), durable (or lasting), fecund (likely to lead to other pleasures), pure (unlikely to lead to pains), and so on.