Philosophy of ethics is based on a couple of main theories that were found by the philosophers of the past several thousand years. Two of the main theories are the Virtue Theory found by Aristotle and the Theory of Utilitarianism found by the British philosopher John Stuart Mill. The two of them have very different opinions on what happiness is to each human being and how we should live our lives to reach the ultimate happiness. It is understandable that the theories they each came up with are quite different because they happened to live over two thousand years apart and one would expect that the way people look at life would change over such a long period of time.
Living couple of hundred years before common era and learning philosophy from Plato, Aristotle came up with the Virtue theory. He believed tha
Given the contrasting views of happiness by Aristotle and John Stuart Mill one could wonder what Mill would say if Aristotle ever met him and told him that his notion of happiness is worthy only of a swine. There are several ways Mill could respond to Aristotle. Mainly, he could say that the definition or the meaning of happiness is different for every person. Not everyone can be a scholar and lead a life of study. Most people are just not intellectually gifted enough to spend their entire lives learning different things from books. The majority of people would become bored really fast and become unhappy with their careers. Even if you could get everyone to become a scholar, there will be nobody left to do the other essential tasks needed for the general population to survive.
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