Achieving Happiness: Aristotle, Epicurus, and Utilitarianism
Aristotle’s Perspective on Happiness
For Aristotle, happiness is the ultimate virtue. He believed that each being strives for its own perfection, and for humans, this means achieving their full potential. Living a happy life involves consistently exercising our rational capabilities. Happiness, in this context, is the development of ethical virtues and prudence.
The Ideal of Happiness: Aristotle’s Proposals
Aristotle’s ideal of happiness can be summarized in three proposals:
- The ideal person surrendered to pleasures.
- The ideal wise and virtuous man.
- The ideal of the wise.
The ideal of the person surrendered to pleasures should be our goal. The ideal of the sage can be a reference for happiness, which comes from contemplative activities. The ideal of wise and virtuous human beings presupposes an area where the individual can make their life happy. Virtue is a field and a willingness to do good that is acquired in practice by acting in a balanced and harmonious way. Prudence helps us to deliberate and guide our lives, because through it we can find the terminomedio between excess and deficiency, which is virtue. For example, facing fear is a virtue, avoiding both temerity and cowardice.
Happiness and Pleasure: The Epicurean View
Epicurean philosophers, a prominent school during the Hellenistic period, identified the happy man with the virtuous man. Happiness, for them, is achieving the maximum degree of pleasure possible. They believed that pleasure guides human life and is characterized by the absence of physical suffering and agitation of the soul.
Epicurus believed that natural pleasures are the best and should always be enjoyed with moderation. These pleasures are subdivided into ephemeral intellectual or physical pleasures, or lasting ones. Social pleasures eventually make men unhappy.
The author distinguishes three types of desires:
- Natural and necessary desires: organic needs.
- Natural but unnecessary desires: inclinations and preferences.
- Unnatural desires: inclinations that are not natural nor necessary.
Happiness and Usefulness: Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism encompasses a range of ethical theories that agree that the criteria and purpose of moral actions is utility. Bentham systematized and founded this system. The end of human pursuit, according to this philosopher, is happiness, which he identifies with the good. This individual utilitarianism inevitably leads to selfishness.
Bentham’s theory received criticism, so Stuart Mill proposed reforming it with qualitative criteria rather than quantitative ones. He distinguished between higher and lower pleasures, defending the moral supremacy of criteria that benefit humanity before purely personal ones. Mill turns to historical experience to determine social utility. He determines that historical experience is enough to study moral rules and their results for humanity. Mill found it useful to establish a verification that the utilitarian criterion should be applied to each and every one of the moral laws.