Mill thinks that the only thing we desire in and of itself (as long as we have full and accurate information) is happiness. For this week’s group discussion, I want you to come up with 2 things other than happiness that it seems people might value in and of themselves (regardless of any potential happiness they might bring). Then give a short discussion on whether or not you think people really do value those things in and of themselves regardless of happiness. I’ve attached an example of what this would look like for one thing [don’t forget you will need to do two things]. I am certainly not looking for anything more than what I’ve put; indeed you could probably get by even with a bit less detail.
Morgan Davies
One candidate for an intrinsically valuable thing is art. It may seem as though we really do intrinsically value at least some art since it seems like there is some art that doesn’t bring us happiness, but we still think these pieces of art are valuable. For example, art works that depict negative parts of our society or history generally make us unhappy, but we still think they are valuable. But it maybe that even these works of art derive value from happiness just not directly. Perhaps these works are valuable because the help prevent us from doing the bad things we did in the past or fix the broken parts of our society and these two things would bring a lot of happiness(or more aptly, mitigate a lot of suffering) for a lot of people.