Should Individual Happiness Play a Role In An Ethical System?
Posted: Thursday, July 30, 2009
by Rose-Marie Chaperon
Chaperon Consulting, LLC
Webster defines happiness as a state of well-being and contentment. Ethics is defined as Ethics is defined as the discipline dealing with what is good and bad and with moral duty and obligation, it is also called moral philosophy the discipline concerned with what is morally good and bad, right and wrong. In this discussion you will the correlation between ethics and happiness.
Many people are afraid that if they make their own happiness a primary goal in life, they will become too selfish, too self-centered, too hedonistic, or even unethical. These fears of making happiness a primary goal need to be examined. If we give undo attention to our own happiness at the expense of others , then almost any thoughtful person would agree that we are, indeed, being selfish or unethical. Is making happiness a primary goal incompatible with being ethical and caring? No!
Happiness is the only human state that measures our overall physical and mental well-being. Happiness is even affected by our perception of the world's well-being. It results from harmony among our inner parts. We cannot deny important parts of ourselves and be fully happy. We cannot neglect the future and be fully happy. Nor can we neglect others and be fully happy. Happiness and love go hand-in-hand. Loving someone means we value his or her happiness. When we feel love, we feel happy--whether the love is for an object, an activity, or a person.
Simply because a person is happy and things are working well for that individual it does not mean that the person is being unethical. I believe that happy people do ethically and morally act. This is a controversial statement. Many people believe that there are happy drug dealers, dictators, manipulators, and others who are powerful, wealthy, have many "friends," and are generally happy people who go "unpunished" for their misdeeds. Indeed, they are happy in their own ways, however; they are unethical because of the type of people they are.
In closing I believe the United States constitution is quite permissive, it states that we each have the right to pursue our own happiness as long as it does not interfere with the rights of others to pursue it. It doesn't say anything about needing to actively seek others' happiness. It assumes that we are each responsible for our own happiness and we also have a duty to ourselves and society to be ethical.
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