By Happiness Is Intended Pain By John Stuart Mill

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As a Hedonistic thinker, John Stuart Mill is a firm believer that certain pleasures are intrinsically better than others, bolstering this claim by defining what is good, discussing the differences between quantity and quality, and questioning if a gain is worth its consequences. Primarily, Mill begins by discussing what he considers to be good. Mill states, “By happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain and the privation of pleasure”, meaning that in order to have happiness, you have to have pleasure and no pain, but in order to have unhappiness, you have to have pain and no pleasure. By basing his argument on this definition of what is considered to be pleasurable, Mill continues on to determine which type of pleasure is intrinsically …show more content…

He proclaims, “It would be absurd, that while, in estimating all other things, quality is considered as well as quantity, the estimation of pleasures should be supposed to depend on quantity alone”. Higher quality is always better than higher quantity in his eyes. Mill is convinced that if you have an item or event of higher quality, it will mean that the pleasure you receive from it is deemed more valuable than an item will more quantity. A famous example used is, “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied, than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied, than a fool satisfied”.
Look at it this way, would you rather have two beaten up Ford Contours with windows falling out and the engine only starts up half the time, or would you rather have a brand new Chevy Spark? Both of these items would bring you pleasure by allowing you to drive to wherever you need. The two Ford Contours offer more quantity, but the brand new Chevy Spark offers higher quality. Therefore, Mill would conclude that the Chevy Spark will bring you more pleasure than the Ford

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