Word.ws English Dictionary

hedonium

hedonium noun: matter arranged in a way that produces pleasure or happiness as efficiently as possible, as might be encouraged by philosophical hedonism.

Noun

hedonium (uncountable)

  1. (rare) Matter arranged in a way that produces pleasure or happiness as efficiently as possible, as might be encouraged by philosophical hedonism.
    • Suppose that we agreed to allow almost the entire accessible universe to be converted into hedonium—everything except a small preserve, say the Milky Way, which would be set aside to accommodate our own needs.2014, Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence, page 219
    • It’s because we intuitively or pre-theoretically think that we shouldn’t give all our cookies to the utility monster or kill ourselves to tile the solar system with hedonium that we reject the straightforward extension of utilitarian happiness-maximizing theory to such cases and reach for a...2015 November 17, Eric Schwitzgebel, Mara Garza, “A Defense of the Rights of Artificial Intelligences”, in Midwest Studies in Philosophy

Origin of hedonium

2010s, from hedonism + -ium.

Questions about hedonium

What does hedonium mean?
Hedonium means matter arranged in a way that produces pleasure or happiness as efficiently as possible, as might be encouraged by philosophical hedonism.
What part of speech is hedonium?
Hedonium is a noun.

Words near hedonium in the dictionary

  1. hedonist
  2. hedonistic
  3. hedonistic calculus
  4. hedonistically
  5. hedonists
  6. hedonium
  7. hedonology
  8. hedonometer
  9. hedonometers
  10. hedonometric
  11. hedonometrics

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hedonium (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “hedonium.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hedonium. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.