Hi all

I encountered a problem today that has me stumped. It concerns the phrase "to give weight to". I am writing an essay and attempted to put this into a present-continuous sentence:

"Mill argues that the source of pleasure is relevant to its moral value, weighting pleasure resultant from higher faculties above that from lower."

It later occurred to me that a better form would perhaps be "giving weight to" but this is clumsier... So I am interested in whether "weighting" is a legitimate word in this context.

One suggestion I received was to use "weighing" but I think there is certainly a semantic difference between that and what I mean by "weighting".

Thoughts?

"Mill argues that the source of pleasure is relevant to its moral value, weighting pleasure resultant from higher faculties above that from lower."

Do you mean giving way to pleasure, i.e., "succumbing to it"? Or did you mean giving weight to pleasure, i.e., "making it important"? I'd probably need to see the paragraph the sentence comes from to make sense of it, but in isolation, it is vague. To me, weight is a noun. You can give weight to something, but you cannot *weight it. Is Mill saying that there is a hierarchy of philosophical pursuits? That ethics (moral values) trump passions? Or that one needs to termper them with reason (higher faculties)?

Also, any way you slice it, the that, third from the right of the period (or full stop) ought to be than.

"Giving greater weight to..." would flow better IMHO.

Although, in English, there are "no nouns that cannot be verbed", that doesn't mean that all should be thus treated.

"To give weight to" is, to my mind, a far better verbal phrase.

I realize I may have come off sounding all prescriptive like, but while coining new denominal verbs is all fine and dandy, grammatically speaking, when it interferes with the intended meaning of a sentence, I would advise against it on stylistic grounds. Unless, of course, you wish to call attention to something by confusing your reader.

quote:

You can give weight to something, but you cannot *weight it.

Sure you can. You weight something by putting a weight on it.

Sure you can. You weight something by putting a weight on it.

I knew I would regret getting up on the prescriptive side of the bed today, grammatically Procrustean as I am. Be that as it may, the sentence as written still sounds hinky to mine ears, and I have difficulty extracting an unambiguous meaning from it.

I agree with z in that I am not quite sure what the intent of this sentence is. However, one way I could take it would be: "weighing pleasure resultant from higher faculties above that from lower."

Z, I took the "that" to be referring to "pleasure;" that is, "weighting pleasure resultant from higher faculties above pleasure ("that") from lower."

But then, I am not completely sure what is meant by this sentence, and I may be way off.

I took the "that" to be referring to "pleasure;" that is, "weighting pleasure resultant from higher faculties above pleasure ("that") from lower."

Could be. When I read it I think I took it to mean: "Mill argues that the source of pleasure is relevant to its moral value, giving greater weight to pleasure resulting from higher faculties above than from lower."

Are these mental faculties? Adding a that after my than may add clarity.

Oh, yes. Maybe!

Yes, I thought they referred to mental faculties, but I wasn't sure which ones. Being from the medical field, I was thinking cerebral (thinking) versus the more involuntary, such as breathing. But it could be cerebral versus somatic or emotional. Or it could be something completely different, like the higher moral values.

Thanks for the enthusiastic responses.

@Kalleh, Z: The faculties Mill talks about are a mixture of mental/cognitive and other 'capabilities'. His basic concern is to say that things like reading give a form of pleasure that is more valuable than the pleasure of sex.

Part of my problem was certainly a stylistic one, and I admit I'm quite bemused that people struggled to understand the sentence itself when all I was worrying about was the word "weighting".

In the end this went into the final draft:
``J. S. Mill argues that the source of pleasure is relevant to its moral value. He gives greater weight to pleasure resulting from higher human faculties than pleasure resulting from our more animal appreciations.''

Please do not let your volume accrue
On the woman who’s in bed with you.
Keep at least half your weight
From on top of your mate:
It’s the only polite way to screw.

quote:

a form of pleasure that is more valuable than the pleasure of sex.

Hmmm, that sounds judgmental to me.

I like your rewording because it is more clear.