Happiness Interviews on Happiness Happiness is a complex topic, with often divergent meanings for different people. This paper explores how two people of vastly different backgrounds view and define happiness. One of the interviewees is a female colleague who works as a nurse for a medical surgical unit; the other is my mother, a 72-year-old mother of three who has been married for 45 years. Although the interviews were slightly different for

Happiness is perhaps the most illusive, but most sought after mental state in life. Like all human experiences, happiness is also a very subjective state; different things make different people happy. This is why it is so difficult to say what happiness is, and why there has been so much disagreement among philosophers, who have nonetheless not been deterred from attempting to describe this elusive emotion. Both Plato and Aristotle

Happiness Hypothesis I approached Jonathan Haidt's book The Happiness Hypothesis with the same sort of hubris that I tend to exhibit when someone asks me if I like a work of art. I am quite confident that I can point to art that I like, while being less consistently able to tell why I like or don't like a work of art. Similarly, I have been quite confident of my ability

According to utilitarian ethical theory, a lie would be very moral indeed if it increased someone's happiness without creating detriment to anyone -- telling a child that their unintelligible crayon markings is a great picture of a house, for instance, boosts their self-esteem and helps them to feel loved, and no one in the art world suffers for this white lie. Utilitarianism also provides a solution to conflicting duties that

This can be seen as both a negative and a positive thing; on the one hand, it means that nothing will ever really raise someone's happiness level significantly over the long-term, which could be seen as a negative thing. On the other hand, the set range of happiness also means that individuals will also not drop significantly below their happiness level for long periods, which means that people tend

In contrast, the stoic philosopher Epictetus focused upon changing one's mindset to accept the ways of the world, rather than striving to change the world to achieve happiness. Epictetus' tone is far different than Plato's. Rather than focusing upon changing the structure of society, in his Enchiridion the Stoic philosopher instead focused upon bending the mind to accept whatever life may bring. Epictetus would no doubt say to Plato that