  Volitional choice therefore has a built-in normative feature in the form of an idea of a better state or self. But self-realization means more than this for ethical theory, for it purportedly represents the over-arching, ultimate goal of moral action, which entails some idea of a perfect, ideal self that is being aimed at. This raises an epistemic problem. With individual cases, such as the addict contemplating his situation, it may be that he gets an idea of how he might change by observing other people or considering how he used to be before becoming an addict. But how can anyone know what the ideal self is, the superior self that is not merely better, but best? Answering this is crucial if Bradley’s ethical theory is not to fall victim to a criticism he made of Mill’s thesis about the qualities of pleasures (Utilitarianism, Chapter 2). Bradley leveled a barrage of criticisms against any theory, Utilitarian or otherwise, that proposed the maximization of pleasure as the ultimate moral goal. The central objection was that since pleasures are a “perishing series,” with each one passing away once it has been experienced, it is not possible to accumulate a sum of pleasures, and since there are always more pleasures available than anyone has experienced, Mill’s moral goal of maximizing pleasant states was meaningless. But introducing the idea of qualitatively different kinds of pleasures that can be ranked suggests that perhaps the hedonist can, after all, successfully articulate the self we should be aiming at. Perhaps the best self—the ideal moral self—is the one that pursues the highest type of pleasure.