  There is another reason the British Idealists believed that pleasure could not be the end of moral action. Henry Sidgwick correctly expressed this objection: “It is said … by Mr. Green that ‘pleasure as feeling, in distinction from its conditions which are not feelings, cannot be conceived’; and, therefore, of course, cannot be taken as an end of rational action” (Hedonism and the Ultimate Good, p.36). The debate Green is weighing in on concerns what can and cannot be the intentional objects of desires. Sidgwick claims that Green’s argument trades on an ambiguous use of ‘conceive’. We might not be able to “form the notion of an angle without the notion of the sides containing it,” says Sidgwick, but we can see that an angle is greater than or equal to another “without any comparison of the containing sides” (loc. cit.). This misses the point. It is not that I have to compare sides in order to ascertain the size of an angle, but rather that our conception of an angle entails the notion of a space contained, as it were, between two lines that meet at a point and we cannot ‘think’ of a ‘mere angle’ in the sense of an unbounded spatial quantity. Applied to pleasures, the issue is whether there are naked pleasures, as it were, and whether one can attach any meaning to the idea of a pleasure detached from the activity or whatever it is that is the pleasant experience. Bradley made a similar point in Ethical Studies: pleasure and pain are feelings which “are as they are felt to be, but they tell us nothing. In a word they have no content: they are states of us, but they have nothing for us (Ethical Studies, p. 94). If we cannot characterize pleasures—because they have no meaning or content in and of themselves—then we cannot identify with them and so they could not be the objects aimed at in rational choice, as Green had said.