All right, you think they're fools, you despise them because their morals, their happiness is the source of your frustration and resentment.
Kant argued that humans are obliged to bring about the summum bonum: the two central aims of moral virtue and happiness, where happiness arises out of virtue.
Finally, integration of the moral virtues into happiness is achieved if they are not just instrumental means to happiness but a part of human happiness, while contemplation remains the most important component.
Their story carries a familiar, comforting moral -- find happiness in the people you love and the place where you are, rather than in a fruitless search for far-away fame.
The inventive chaos wreaked by an amoral teenage angel called Satan in a medieval Austrian village is simply hilarious — even if it also demonstrates the unhappy moral: "Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination".
To briefly sketch the outlines of this slippery disagreement: Cox Gurdon believes that very dark subject matter (which she defines as including "kidnapping and pederasty and incest and brutal beatings") might endanger a teen-age reader's "happiness, moral development and tenderness of heart".
This argument depends on making a link between the moral virtues and happiness.
Sulzer's morality is a Wolffian form of utilitarianism, according to which the goal of the moral life is happiness.
So like Aristotle, Aquinas holds a eudaimonistic theory of ethics: the point of the moral life is happiness.
Whereas prudential practical reasoning, on Kant's view, aims to maximize one's happiness, moral reasoning addresses the potential universalizability of the maxims — roughly, the intentions — on which one acts.
