Abstract

This chapter explains the importance of happiness and the definition of a valuable life. John Stuart Mill ties happiness to satisfaction of desire, and equates it with pleasure toward which, he contends, all desires ultimately point. Kant discusses happiness as the common focus of goal-directed behavior. Aristotle illustrates that a person's degree of eudaemonia depended heavily on that person's possession and exercise of excellences, including intellectual abilities and moral virtues. Value of a life as simply its degree of happiness has considerable plausibility. A very good life requires a strong and moderately good character. A happy life will have to contain some value within itself, in virtue of what happiness involves, this value need not be above the average of lives, so that the happy life need not count as a good one.