The four purusharthas, dharma, artha, kama and moksha, are traditionally read as an ordered hierarchy rather than a flat list of equally weighted goals: artha, material prosperity, and kama, pleasure, are legitimate pursuits only within the boundary dharma sets, and moksha, liberation, stands as the aim toward which the other three ultimately point. Kama as an arishadvarga is what happens when this ordering inverts, when pleasure is pursued as though it answered to nothing beyond itself, and classical Hindu narrative literature returns to the collapse repeatedly: figures who chase desire without regard to dharma, in the Mahabharata and the Puranas alike, are shown losing not only virtue but eventually the very pleasure they pursued, since desire unmoored from any larger structure tends in these stories toward escalation rather than satisfaction.
Gavin Flood's introduction to Hinduism notes that this makes kama a genuinely difficult category for the tradition to theorise cleanly, since the same word names both a proper aim of a householder's life and the first and, in some tellings, most dangerous of the enemies, a tension the tradition generally resolves not by ranking one meaning above the other in the abstract but by insisting the distinction can only be judged in context, against a specific person's stage of life, ashrama, and station, varna, rather than by a universal rule fixed in advance.