John Stuart Mill On Happiness Essay

As a child, most learn that sharing is caring. Giving something that is abundant to the individual to those who could benefit from it is a concept as old as civilization. Naturally, as humans, we seek to be happy and more often than not, make others happy. Thus the utilitarian view was created, but what does that mean? What exactly is happiness and how does one go about spreading happiness it to others? A man by the name of John Stuart Mill seems to be able to give us some answers to these questions. Mill starts our inquiring journey with defining what utilitarianism stands for. In short he states that it is the construction of utility, which claims that the actions that stimulate happiness in is morally fit and vice versa to be unfit. Happiness is something that we want for

Easy enough, but then pleasure is then divided into two levels: higher and lower. Lower levels of pleasure are those that we as humans share with animals. They include things such as food, sex, and music. All of these are relatively easy to attain. Higher levels of pleasures are intellectual, such as art or chess. Things that are mentally stimulating and take a bit to learn and attain. It is said that higher levels are more resistant to tolerance. Meaning that you bore from it way less easier than a lower level pleasure. Consequently, the way we achieve such happiness seems to fizzle when put into action with rule and act utilitarianism. Louis P. Pojman clarifies the difference between the two. The variation between the two is that act utilitarianism states that an action is correct only when it brings good to the situation verses any other choice you could have made. Rule utilitarianism states that an action is correct if we followed the given rules that were made in order to have the greatest chance of achieving the most amount of