DESIRE FOR HAPPINESS AND THE MORAL LIFE

The desire for happiness-

a universal experience

All men wish to be happy

Men seek happiness as a final goal (end) in a natural and necessary way

All men desire to be happy but experience shows us that not all our choices lead us to happiness

BIG GAP: AM I

DESIRE ------- ACTUALLYto be happy HAPPY?

The CONTENT of happiness is not self-evident to us

Task of ethics:

define where does true happiness lies

in what does it consist of?

Is there any good that can fully satisfy man’s desire for happiness?

Good that is absolute in itself?

SOURCES OF HAPPINESS

Material riches or wealth

Bodily goods Spiritual goods

(virtues,knowledge) Pleasure

(mixture of bodily and spiritual goods)

Power

These goods are incapable of satisfying our desire for happiness

What can satisfy man’s desire for happiness

Distinction between objective final goal and the subjective final goal

Objective absolute goodFinal goal ----- > that can give us

Happiness - God

Subjective---- goal each personFinal goal chooses for himself

Through his reason, man can discover that happiness can only be achieved in an infinite good thing.

Finite goods- unsatisfactory to the will

The will has an infinite potency for happiness; is never fully satisfied with what is finite.

The intellect has the capacity to know and to understand that God is the Infinite Good

Through our reason, we can know or discover whether our actions conform or not to the true goal.

“The natural tendency to happiness would be frustrated if there did not exist, or the intellect did not find anything more than finite goods.

But at the moment when the will enters into contact with the intellect , the good will be presented as finite, and as such, unsatisfactory to the will, which is an infinite potency.

So, although it is true that we only love that which we know, the knowledge of the good ought to grow”3.

Pursuing happiness

Source: Economist; 7/1/2006, Vol. 380 Issue 8484, p32-32, 1p, 1c

The Founding Fathers of the United States of America were the first politicians to produce the explosive combination of individual rights and the pursuit of happiness.

Everywhere you look in contemporary America you see a people engaged in that pursuit.

The pursuit of happiness explains all sorts of peculiarities of American life:

from the $700m that is spent on self-help books every year to the irritating dinner guests who will not stop looking at their Black Berries.

You can see it in work habits.

◦ Americans not only work harder than most Europeans (they work an average of 1,731 hours a year compared with an average of 1,440 for Germans).

◦ They also endure lengthy commutes (who cares about a couple of hours a day in a car when you have a McMansion to come home to?).

You can see it in geographical mobility.

◦ About 40m of them move house every year.

◦ They are remarkably willing to travel huge distances in pursuit of everything from bowling conventions to factory outlets.

You can see it in religion:

◦ Americans relentlessly shop around for the church that most suits their spiritual needs.

And you can see it in the country's general hopefulness: two-thirds of Americans are optimistic about the future.

Since Americans are energetic even in deconstructing their own founding principles, there is no shortage of people who have taken exception to the happiness pursuit.

They range from conservatives such as Robert Bork, who think the phrase encapsulates the "emptiness at the heart of American ideology", to liberals who think that it is a justification for an acquisitive society.

One criticism is that the pursuit is self-defeating. The more you pursue the illusion of happiness the more you sacrifice the real thing.

The flip side of relentless mobility is turmoil and angst, broken marriages and unhappy children. They report having fewer close friends than a couple of decades ago.

And international studies of happiness suggest that people in certain poor countries, for instance Nigeria and Mexico, are apparently happier than people in America.

Another criticism is that Americans have confused happiness with material possessions (it is notable that Thomas Jefferson's call echoes Adam Smith's phrase about "life, liberty and the pursuit of property").

Do all those pairs of Manolo Blahnik shoes really make you happy? Or are they just a compensation for empty lives?

June 18, 2004

Most physical health trends have improved over the past half century. But mental health trends [in the U.S.] have diverged radically, according to this.

For reasons that no one really understands (social isolation? pollution? competitive individualism? media saturation? secularism? modern conveniences?),

as societies around the world have grown richer at a galloping pace, their mental health has plummeted.

Depression rates in the United States have climbed perhaps tenfold in the span of 50 years, and the incidence of anxiety disorders has also skyrocketed.

Authors Ed Diener and Martin Seligman write,

“the average American child in the 1980s reported greater anxiety than the average child receiving psychiatric treatment in the 1950s.”

Mental illness is striking at earlier ages, as well.

The average age of depression's first onset is now in the already-vulnerable adolescent years.

Mental illness is now epidemic in the United States.

Roughly one sixth of Americans suffer from clinical depression, an anxiety disorder, or another mental illness during any given month.

Over a year, the figure rises to almost half of the adult population. (For comparison, roughly one third of American adults suffer obesity; roughly one quarter smoke.)

Measured by the number of years of normal daily life ruined by various diseases (“quality-of-life-adjusted life expectancy,” the specialists call it),

depression is on a trajectory to become the worst health problem in industrial countries by 2020.