I defend the idea that the hedonic ceiling is reached when an experience is completely free from unpleasant phenomenology. No experience feels better; no experience is more pleasant. Similar ideas appear in the literature on Epicureanism, 19th-century German philosophy, and elsewhere. Perhaps the most common objection to such ideas is to present putative counterexamples of real-life experiences that we are supposed to be familiar with. We can purportedly tell from our own experiences that freedom from unpleasantness is not the hedonic ceiling. I argue that this objection does not have as much force as it has been taken to have. The idea that nothing is more pleasant than freedom from all unpleasant feelings seems compatible with what we can tell from our own experiences. I also respond to two other objections based on real-life and hypothetical cases.
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