Pursuit of Happiness

He starts from the premise that we of course judge out pleasant roll in the hays, and try to avoid suffering or unpleasant experiences. At first glance this aptitude appear to be an invitation to mere hedonism, "eat, drink, and be merry." However, tender experience shows that pleasant experiences ar non limited to the material. We enjoy music, for example, and friendship, and seek these things out. Indeed, we often find satisfaction in experiences that might substantially be arduous and even unpleasant, such as data track a marathon. Even the effort of living up to a system of values carries its satisfactions (7-8).

The sum total of these satisfactions and pleasures, or dissatisfactions and miseries, though the course of a lifetime constitutes our overall happiness or unhappiness (3-4). Happiness is therefore "the good life" -- not in the narrow sense of a house in the suburbs, convenient to a golf course (though not excluding these things), nevertheless in the broadest sense of a satisfying and joyous human existence. This, suggests Mill, is our goal in life, not imposed on us by some moral authority or power, provided as a consequence of our human nature.

However, what produces the general define of a gild moreover the behavior of the raft who make it up. A burglar whitethorn benefit from living in a society where people do not lock their doors, but his behavior makes society less likely to display such mutual trust.

If we manage to live in a virtuous society, therefore, it is in our rice beer to practice the virtues ourselves. What goes around, after all, comes around. Indeed, Mill speaks of a "contagion of sympathy," a sort of virtuous cycle (the opposite of a sad cycle) in which the practice of virtue encourages virtue in others, and improves the delineate of life for all.

f happiness extends -- even as a purely practical matter -- beyond our own condition of life to the condition of the society in which we live. Even if our motives be entirely selfish, for example, we have a vested interest in a society in which, for example, theft and robbery are not the general because we do not wish to be robbed or stolen from. (Even a professional thief benefits from not being a victim of theft as well.) The same practical doctrine can be extended to vices and virtues in general: We are all better off for living in a soc
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