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ETHICS

ETHICS. DESIRE FOR HAPPINESS AND THE MORAL LIFE. ETHICS. 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. ETHICS.

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ETHICS

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  1. ETHICS DESIRE FOR HAPPINESS AND THE MORAL LIFE

  2. ETHICS 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

  3. ETHICS • All men desire to be happy but experience shows us that not all our choices lead us to happiness • BIG GAP: AM I DESIRE ------- ACTUALLY to be happy HAPPY?

  4. ETHICS • 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?

  5. ETHICS • Is there any good that can fully satisfy man’s desire for happiness? • Good that is absolute in itself?

  6. ETHICS SOURCES OF HAPPINESS • Material riches or wealth • Bodily goods • Spiritual goods (virtues,knowledge) • Pleasure (mixture of bodily and spiritual goods) • Power

  7. ETHICS • These goods are incapable of satisfying our desire for happiness

  8. ETHICS • What can satisfy man’s desire for happiness

  9. ETHICS • Distinction between objective final goal and the subjective final goal Objective absolute good Final goal ----- > that can give us Happiness - God Subjective ---- goal each person Final goal chooses for himself

  10. The role of reason in determining the content of happiness • 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.

  11. The role of reason in determining the content of happiness • 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.

  12. “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.

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

  14. Wealth and Happiness • 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.

  15. Wealth and Happiness • 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.

  16. Wealth and Happiness • 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?).

  17. Wealth and happiness • 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.

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

  19. Wealth and happiness • 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.

  20. Wealth and happiness • 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.

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

  22. Wealth and happiness • 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?

  23. The Economics of Un-happiness June 18, 2004

  24. Mental Health and Happiness • 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.

  25. Mental Health and Happiness • 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.

  26. Mental Health and Happiness • 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.

  27. Mental Health and Happiness • 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.”

  28. Mental Health and Happiness • 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.

  29. Mental Health and Happiness • 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.

  30. Mental Health and Happiness • 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.)

  31. Mental Health and Happiness • 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.

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