TUMANGAN, Ma. Estela Leonor Angela, P.

07/30/2021
2019152008 EXAM 3
GED107 – B6
Read the article provided and answer three questions based on the reading.
1. According to Dr. Ramos’ article titled Pleasure and Happiness, Ayn Rand who is
a Russian-American writer and philosopher states that happiness is the concept
of man’s transition to become a heroic figure. A man’s happiness is his own
purpose in life morally and developmental achievements is his noblest act while
reason is his own absolute virtue. As for pleasure, Dr. Ramos’ statement which is
“Pleasure serves as a reward and an affirmation of the worth of one’s work.”
therefore “pleasure serves as an emotional fuel of the ego.” With that said, I truly
believe that pleasure and happiness are two different sides of the same coin.
That one cannot exist without the other.

In my personal observation, I believe that the difference between pleasure and

happiness is whether the individual is satisfied with themselves or not in a
specific amount of time which basically means that happiness is long-lived, and
pleasure is short-lived. I believe that pleasure is where an individual is satisfied
with himself because of an activity that perfectly grooms his ego, hence,
supporting Dr. Ramos’ statement in her article. As for happiness, I believe it is
long-lived in terms of an individual’s moral satisfaction. A situation that can
describe my own version of pleasure is when I join a party and spend the entire
night dancing and singing my heart out and forgetting about my responsibilities
for a few hours. It pleases my heart and mind that it can take a break from all the
pressure even if for a short amount of time. However, as for happiness, I will feel
happiness if I manage to graduate college and get a decent job to support my
family and self. This is where the individualism comes in as mentioned in Dr.
Ramos’ article. We all have our own value in pleasure and happiness, and we
also apply our own version of objectivism to differentiate pleasure from
happiness as well.

Furthermore, according to Robert Lustig, pleasure is experienced alone, and

happiness is experienced with other people so pleasure easily explains that it is
one’s own self interest and it is based on substances, behaviors, or materialistic
things which ultimately leads to addiction. Meanwhile, happiness has now end or
limit. Happiness will never lead to addiction unlike pleasure. A lot of people
mistake pleasure with happiness because of the similar euphoria that one
experience in both pleasure and happiness. This is the sole reason why pleasure
leads to addiction. As the person keeps hold of the thing that gives them
pleasure, they rely on it to prolong the pleasure as they assume that it would lead
to happiness in the end. Lustig argues that this is not the case therefore one
must know the difference between pleasure and happiness.
2. The only way to correctly apply the principles of happiness during these trying
times is to consider the conditions of each individual first before summing up to a
conclusion. This pandemic has brought us many unfortunate circumstances and
we could never even expected any of it before it happened. One would think that
the pandemic was something easy because we only had to stay at home and
always keep our hands sanitized however it was not easy for people that does
not have the luxury of a 4-month food supply when the quarantine started.

For me, happiness seemed to be impossible to achieve when the pandemic had
hit the country. We were all restricted from doing everything that we do on a daily
basis such us walking our dogs and going out for groceries or simply meeting
with our friends in a café or restaurant. Now as an individual, we must
understand that for our own safety and for others safety, we must comply with
the safety protocols in accordance with COVID-19 and we must also endure to
flatten the curve. There are many principles of happiness that can be applied to
our situation, but the main principles should be our aim towards fulfillment and
our drive towards happiness. According to Meier, one can achieve true
happiness if we focus on the fulfillment of our goals and to also choose to be
happy as we fulfill our goals. One example of this is our goal to flatten the curve
and totally eradicate the COVID-19 thus people do their best to follow protocols
and to get vaccinated. Everyone is working altogether to achieve that.

Another principle is that we can choose to be happy considering our situation

right now. We can choose to be happy despite all of the misfortunes that befell us
when the pandemic started. Everyone, especially the children, matured as an
individual when the protocols were ensued. Example of this is when people were
starting to spend more time in their personal spaces in the confines of their
homes. As they focus on social media for socializing, they discover the struggles
of the more unfortunate families that do not have access to a large amount of
income thus they do not have enough money to buy food and stock it up. They
also did not expect that the quarantine would last for 4 months as well so suffice
to say that there are people who relied on the goodness of others for them to
survive the 4-month quarantine. There were compassionate people who donated
food for the insufficient and donated enough supply to help other people. One of
which is the community parties that were established after the quarantine was
lifted to help other people and relieve them of the hardships that COVID-19 has
brought upon them. In this, fairness was applied thus it helped the people reach
closer to happiness. As stated in the previous statement, happiness is
experienced with others so with it comes with responsibilities to maintain that
fairness and individual maturity that everyone developed after the time that they
spent in their own home.
3. According to the article by Dr. Ramos, happiness can not be the sole basis of
one’s morality therefore we cannot consent to Utilitarianism because what if the
happiness that we speak of involves harming someone by means of physical,
emotional, mental, or intellectual then it would not be moral which goes against
Aristotle’s concept of happiness. According to Aristotle, happiness is a virtue and
virtue is simply a disposition and one must be naturally virtuous to gain a step
closer to happiness. When talking about Immanuel Kant’s deontological theory,
however, his concept of happiness argues that we should consider the majority
or rather the maxim of the people to which he introduced the universal law. In my
understanding, the maxim that Kant speaks of considers the general happiness
of everyone in the community so that everyone can be happy therefore Kant
believes that we can only be truly happy with ourselves only if others are happy
as well.

Now, we should consider that in Rand’s Objectivist ethics, happiness is the

highest moral purpose of humanity as man is the end of himself because life is
the end itself which directly means that man as a rational being must live for his
own sake and will not sacrifice anything else to others and vice versa. We can
now apply Aristotle’s concept of happiness and expound it further. Aristotle
argues that happiness is achieving all the good things in life (e.g., health, wealth,
knowledge, social relationships, etc.). This is mainly the reason why we can
apply or relate the concept of happiness to not one but to all of the ethical
theories that exists. Not only Rand or Kant but numerous philosophers believe in
Aristotle’s concept of happiness therefore the philosophers that developed the
many theories that we now study about is greatly affected by the ancient Greek
philosophers such as Socrates and Aristotle because we all relate to what they
say. In my personal opinion, I do believe that happiness is the highest moral
purpose of human beings, and one must always consider that we should remain
virtuous for us to remain ethically moral because our source of happiness cannot
be morally correct all the time (i.e., illegal drug usage, physical harm, etc.).
References:
 Happiness vs. Pleasure and Why it Matters at Work (deliveringhappiness.com)
 The Happiness Principles: 7 Ways to Bake Happiness into Your Life
(sourcesofinsight.com)
 Kant and Aristotle on Happiness - Free Essay Example | PapersOwl.com
 (PDF) Pleasure and happiness | Christine Carmela R . Ramos - Academia.edu