 Two interpretations have been offered to explain al-Rāzī’s position on pleasure. According to Lenn E. Goodman (1971, 1999, followed by Groff 2014), al-Rāzī was defending an Epicurean ethic in which pleasure should be maximized. On this account, his rationale for moderation is that it is the way to have the most pleasure: going too far with pleasures turns out to be more painful in the long run. This interpretation has been criticized by Adamson (2008a, 2021), on the grounds that it ignores al-Rāzī’s own theory of pleasure. According to this theory, which is clearly based on the Timaeus, pleasure can be had only as the result of a process of removing a harmful state. For example, drinking is pleasant because it eliminates thirst. On this account of pleasure, as Plato himself pointed out, hedonism is an attempt to win at a zero-sum game: you can only have pleasure to the extent that you have suffered pain, or at least harm. (Not all harm is felt as pain, just as not all restoration is felt as pleasure, because only fast changes are noticeable.) Furthermore, al-Rāzī says himself in the Doubts about Galen (DG: §7.7) that pleasure is not the good to be sought in itself, which is a direct rejection of the sort of hedonism adopted in Epicureanism.