A Study Of Sidgwick's View Of Happiness

In the field of ethics, happiness is an extremely important subject. Sidgwick, as a famous utilitarian ethicist at the British Victorian era, has been made an explicit explanation on it. The Victorian era was a time to reflect cost while continue to pay for it. As its economy developed dramatically and its democracy progressed rapidly, it was impossible for it to avoid the spiritual crisis. Sidgwick, depending on his own time, constructed his happiness theory from the angle of philosophy. In this paper, the author intends to explain from three aspects: his understanding of happiness, personal happiness and universal happiness. On the understanding of happiness, he thought happiness was composed of joy or delight. People's pursuit of happiness was established on the base of an intuitionism—the commonsense morality, personal happiness and social happiness were worth pursuiting. On the question of personal happiness, he thought happiness was evaluative. He analyzed a variety of objective origins of individual's pursuit of happiness, advocated rational pursuit of happiness, and emphasized on the over-all development of people themselves. On the aspect of universal happiness, he absorbed the emotion of benevolence to happiness in order to integrate with "self-love". It had provided a possibility for the realization of happiness on the social level; moreover, it had ensured the citizens to obtain happiness in terms of an equitable distribution principle, and then realized the freedom of the society. In his rich meaning of happiness, it not only included emotional happiness, but also virtue, obligation, intuition and other factors, in addition, demonstrated the relationship between them; it not only upheld the principle of utilitarianism, but also absorbed factors in the theory of obligation and intuitionism; it not only highlighted the attention on individual happiness, but also contained the profound knowledge of social happiness. This paper aims to help us have a better understanding of Sidgwick's moral thought in terms of the study of his view on happiness,and we are expected that it will give us an inspiration to pursuit our real happy life.