 John Stuart Mill followed Aristotle in endorsing a rational preference for ‘higher’ pleasures over those we share with ‘lower’ animals, but objected to Aristotle’s tying pleasure to objective functional standards. He and more recent writers have posed simple counterexamples to these being even sufficient or necessary conditions for pleasure, using perceptual examples such as Aristotle used in expounding his theory. Mill’s objection may be interpreted and expanded upon as follows. Aristotle’s theory implies that, other things equal, the more precise and informative of two perceptions or cognitions must be the more pleasant. But this, it seems, may be the worse of two bad smells. The excellent acuity of the olfactory system and even its unimpeded operation and the mutual suitability of faculty and object (NE X, 4:1174b14–1175a3) seem not to exclude this. So Aristotle’s conditions seems insufficient for pleasure, if excellence of object is filled out in cognitive or functional rather than in hedonic terms. (Neither is any such condition necessary for pleasure, as in a relaxed and lazy mood.) Of course, we might downgrade or upgrade sensory interactions ad hoc, counting those we enjoy as excellent, but then we move in a small circle and offer no independent characterization of  pleasure.[17]  Perhaps a quasi-neoAristotelian might acknowledge all this and abandon the claims that led to the falsified predictions, while still believing pleasure is some way activities are performed (to be filled out empirically). But whether any plausible way can be found remains to be shown. The same holds all the more for Aristotle’s ambition of explaining pleasure’s value by some more basic independently defined value in biological functioning.