Mill's View Of Utilitarianism

Going back to Murray’s article, he describes happiness as, “defined simply and unrestrictive as lasting and justified satisfaction with one’s life as a whole” (2). Murray does run into one problem with his definition of happiness in his choice of the word ‘justified’ where he states that it “means that it is not enough to feel happy; one must have a plausible reason for feeling happy. A person who claims that he can be happy by injecting himself with a drug that causes perpetual euphoria is wrong” (3). In the same sense people trying to live the American dream have been dragged into the thought that monetary success will give them this justified satisfaction. In the 3rd chapter of Subjectivity Donald Hall gives Althusser’s view of subjectivity,

It appears that it has been forgotten that capitalism truly gives a person freedom, and the freedom of choice to pursue their own happiness. This is where Bentham and Mill now enter the argument, with their philosophies on Utilitarianism. In Pojman and Vaughn’s book The Moral Life a section on Utilitarianism is explained through the teachings of Jeremy Bentham and J.S. Mill. Bentham believed that “nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure” (Pojman, Vaughn 222). With these two sensations Bentham argued that a person should maximize pleasure and minimize pain, and to him this was considered moral. Mill another proponent of Utilitarianism built upon Bentham’s work stating that happiness (not pleasure, as pleasure is an end in its own right) should be maximized. Although Mill’s view has some contrast to Bentham’s view of utilitarianism both support the idea of well-being through pursuing one’s own

In the article It Still Pays to Get a College Degree Susan Adams writes, “For the vast majority of young people, college still offers a path to financial success” (27). Throughout the article Adams gives statistics on employment rates of people with college degrees and those