Comparing Kant's Views On Happiness And Virtue

Happiness and pleasure are two concepts we chase and try to achieve throughout our lifetime, in my opinion a person will always ask for more without anything satisfying him or her. In this paper I will be comparing the views of two different philosophers and how they both view the best kind of life in addition to how they define happiness. Aristotle and Kant’s views on happiness and virtues will be compared, although they do not agree on many issues my objective is to find a similarity to their idea of a good life. During this course I had the chance to read the work of both philosophers which allowed me to compare their philosophy with my personal life and how I am living it, but when it comes to who made more sense to me it was the work of

A person has good will if he chooses to follow a set of moral laws for the sake of the moral itself, because to him the moral playing field is level due to the face that everyone can achieve their moral duty because of free will. To Kant the pursuit of a moral life is more important that the pursuit of a happy, because according to his theories the good life is not only the happy life because we would be able to make decisions that would lead to suffering. A will is considered good when it follows the moral law regardless of the consequences or follows the categorical imperatives, and happiness is only considered good is when it exists in a person of good will. To explain further more a bad person can achieve happiness by doing something bad, for example when a thief gets away with his crime he will be happy with the amount of stuff he stole. Kant’s moral philosophy is the view that right actions are those actions that are not started by impulses or desires, but by practical reason. Right action is right only if it is undertaken for the sake of fulfilling a duty, and fulfilling a duty means acting in accordance with certain moral laws. To help us identify those laws which are morally binding Kant has provided us with the ultimate solution which he calls the ‘categorical imperative’ which stating ‘Act only in

When asked how are they different, they are different in a sense every philosopher whether right or wrong is preaching to a different side of the story, but to me the whole conflict is around the word virtue and what it means to both of them. Aristotle would be interested in the what kind of character is suitable to live a life of happiness as much as possible, on the other hand Kant would be interested in what kind of character is most deserving of moral virtue. I noticed that Kant is much more negative than Aristotle when it comes to the possibility of living a life filled with happiness, because Kant knows that human nature will always come in the way of full happy lives. Other differences in theories of the perfect life is that Kant is concerned with the idea of good will and how it is immune from any external distractions, because it’s the only thing a human can control and make decisions with to make his life better, on the other hand Aristotle is not concerned with such a responsibility and won’t change his goal of a fulfilling life with happiness as a goal. The only similarity I can think of is that both these philosophers don’t differ in their rankings of character, but only in how high can humans climb to the top and by rank I mean