ABSTRACT
Nobody is in any doubt about what it is that all men and women want, only about what it means. What everyone wants is happiness, despite Marx’s withering comment that only the English ever desired that. But this was a smack at the peculiarly anaemic notion of happiness espoused by the Utilitarians, for whom happiness is an essentially unproblematic concept, reducible in effect to pleasure. But to attain happiness I must sometimes pass up on short-term pleasures; and if happiness were not as opaque and bedevilled a notion as it is, we would not have landed ourselves with those convoluted discourses known as moral thought, whose task is precisely to examine what human happiness consists in and how it might be achieved.
