scholarly journals HAPPINESS IN KANT AND ROUSSEAU

1969 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael ROHLF
Keyword(s):  
Desire Satisfaction ◽  
Subjective States

Most modern philosophers understand happiness fundamentally in terms of the subjective states of pleasure or desire satisfaction; while pre-modern philosophers tend to understand happiness fundamentally in terms of possessing certain objective goods like virtue, which do not reduce to pleasure or desire satisfaction, or engaging in objectively worthwhile activities like doing philosophy76. his paper investigates two modern conceptions of happiness: namely, Kant's and Rousseau's. I argue that their subjectivist conceptions of happiness do not prevent them from recognizing certain objective goods that help us to become happy. In fact, I argue that they both hold that some of the same objective goods that Aristotle thinks happiness consists in - including virtue, the development of our rational powers, and love of others - are either necessary for or at least tend to promote one's own happiness.

Human Flourishing Versus Desire Satisfaction

1999 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard J. Arneson
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Surprising Result ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Prudential Value ◽  
Desire Satisfaction ◽  
Individual Good ◽  
Helping Others ◽  
Good For

What is the good for human persons? If I am trying to lead the best possible life I could lead, not the morally best life, but the life that is best for me, what exactly am I seeking?This phrasing of the question I will be pursuing may sound tendentious, so some explanation is needed. What is good for one person, we ordinarily suppose, can conflict with what is good for other persons and with what is required by morality. A prudent person seeks her own good efficiently; she selects the best available means to her good. If we call the value that a person seeks when she is being prudent “prudential value,” then an alternative rendering of the question to be addressed in this essay is “What is prudential value?” We can also say that an individual flourishes or has a life high in well-being when her life is high in prudential value. Of course, these common-sense appearances that the good for an individual, the good for other persons, and the requirements of morality often are in conflict might be deceiving. For all that I have said here, the correct theory of individual good might yield the result that sacrificing oneself for the sake of other people or for the sake of a morally worthy cause can never occur, because helping others and being moral always maximize one's own good. But this would be the surprising result of a theory, not something we should presuppose at the start of inquiry. When a friend has a baby and I express a conventional wish that the child have a good life, I mean a life that is good for the child, not a life that merely helps others or merely respects the constraints of morality. After all, a life that is altruistic and perfectly moral, we suppose, could be a life that is pure hell for the person who lives it—a succession of horrible headaches marked by no achievements or attainments of anything worthwhile and ending in agonizing death at a young age. So the question remains, what constitutes a life that is good for the person who is living it?

Revealed preference, belief, and game theory

2000 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel M. Hausman
Keyword(s):  
Game Theory ◽  
Revealed Preference ◽  
Preference Theory ◽  
Revealed Preference Theory ◽  
Subjective States

The notion of ‘revealed preference’ is unclear and should be abandoned. Defenders of the theory of revealed preference have misinterpreted legitimate concerns about the testability of economics as the demand that economists eschew reference to (unobservable) subjective states. As attempts to apply revealed-preference theory to game theory illustrate with particular vividness, this demand is mistaken.

Hegel’s Philosophy of Action

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Yeomans
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Action ◽  
Desire Satisfaction ◽  
Goal Directedness ◽  
Alternate Possibilities

Though Hegel has a strikingly pluralistic philosophy of action, he intends that philosophy to make good on a range of traditional commitments running from the necessity of alternate possibilities through the value of desire satisfaction to the centrality of goal-directedness. It is of course true that many of those possibilities, desires, and goals are essentially social and even collective, and that determining their nature is a public and often retrospective interpretive act. But that determination must also take its cue from the interpretive direction proposed with the act by the agent herself, and the notion of absolute modality is Hegel’s way of seeing that cue as consisting in the suggestion of a context of interpretation by way of marking out the contrast of the action with a certain range of other possible actions.

From Unfelt Harm to Frustrated Desire

Dead Wrong ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 59-110
Author(s):  
David Boonin
Keyword(s):  
Desire Satisfaction ◽  
Central Argument

This chapter provides an extensive defense of the second premise of the book’s central argument: the claim that if it is possible for an act to wrongfully harm a person while they are alive even if the act has no effect on the person’s conscious experiences, then frustrating a person’s desires is one way to harm a person. The chapter begins by offering a defense of this claim. It argues that we should accept the Desire Satisfaction Principle if unfelt harm is possible because accepting the principle is necessary in order to provide the best explanation of the fact that unfelt harm is possible. It then considers a series of objections that can be raised against the claim and responds to them.

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