Dear philosophers, I am a 23-year-old boy living in a developed country (in my opinion, it is an important detail to underline) and I very often find myself reflecting on this question, never being quite pleased about the answer. Why is it widely accepted by the overculture that the technological progress applied to everyday life helps to live better than the past and feel happier, when as a matter of fact our existences become much more complex and unpleasant, especially for the young people? My remark about complexity in particular refers to the new educational system, the labour skills more and more oriented to few qualified jobs, the social and interpersonal relations, the welfare state, the financial and technological world and so on...Is the contemporary the best of all possible worlds? I don't think so. Francesco from Bari, Apulia Region, South Italy

I appreciate your question and identify two major subquestions in your comments: 1) Why is it widely accepted that technological progress helps us live better and increase happiness? Well for one thing, technology is literally a matter of life and death for some of us. As someone who survived cancer in my mid-20's, I'm very aware of the fact that technology makes all sorts of things possible. It increases our life expectancy, it increases our leisure time, it broadens the options concerning how we can spend our leisure time, etc. So, I have to go with the mainstream view that technology does help us live a happier life. Yet, I also appreciate your point that technology is not unqualifiedly positive. Your comment about the complications it introduces into life reminds me of a line from the classic movie 'The Gods Must Be Crazy' where the narrator mentions that in 'advanced' societies children are 'sentenced' to over a decade of school. Furthermore, lots of technology can be misused. 'Web'...

Doesn't the fact that prostitution is illegal imply that pleasure is not a considered a legitimate and significant moral good? Prostitutes are said to be people who provide nothing of value to society. Nothing of value? Really? Perhaps this is because our society has a deontological system of values? In a utilitarian standpoint wouldn't it not only be moral to make prostitution legal wouldn't it in fact be extremely immoral to make it illegal since sex is extremely pleasurable and in a utilitarian calculus more pleasure equals more good?

I don't think the illegality of prostitution has direct implications for whether or not we think pleasure is a moral good. We might think that pleasure is a moral good, but might ban an activity that promotes short term pleasure because we think (rightly or wrongly) that it results in a long term overall reduction in pleasure. So, even a group of hedonist utilitarians might ban prostitution if they think (correctly or incorrectly) that it spreads STDs too much (including deadly STDs) thereby producing a net decrease in overall long term pleasure. Someone might also be in favor of banning prostitution because they think pleasure is of genuine worth, but merely of less worth than other goods (virtue, stable family relationships, etc.). You may also recall that Mill's version of utilitarianism weighs the 'quality' of pleasure and not just the 'quantity'. So, someone might think (correctly or incorrectly) that physical pleasure is of a lower quality than other pleasures and therefore should be weighed...

I enjoy playing lots videogames, listening to (and DJing) lots of various styles of electronic dance music, and frequently smoke marijuana. These things are hobbies of mine that usually make me happy. It seems, however, that most philosophical thought says to disregard things like this because they instill a false sense of happiness in us; that they are temporary, material things that satisfy the senses and should be discarded in favor of supposed "real" things that have a lasting value. Take Plato's cave allegory, for example. Are the things that I like simply shadows, fooling me from real happiness? Because I fill my free time with these things, am I living in ignorance of what real happiness could be? Is there any value from engaging in these activities at all?

An excellent question, it is important to reflect upon the things we invest our lives into. I think there are three very different concerns you might have about investing life into these activities: 1: Perhaps, these activities aren't happiness at all, but merely distract you from genuine happiness. 2: Perhaps, these activities are genuinely good to a degree, but distract you from more important things that are more central to happiness. 3: Perhaps, these activities are genuinely good because you find them pleasurable (or fulfill your desires). And pleasure (or fulfilled desire) is the only thing that is genuinely good, but these ways of pursuing pleasure are only effective short-term and are likely to undercut your total amount of long-term pleasure. Since you ask whether there is any value in these things at all, you seem to be more concerned about the first potential problem. However, the good news for you is that Plato's view is a minority view (even among philosophers) since it...

I am reading some philosophy and psychology about happiness, and much of the work proclaims that we must act in order to be "happy" (Aristotle, William James, as well as more popular writers such as Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie and Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi). As you will notice, they are all men. Are there difference in how female philosophers describe and prescribe "happiness" (or subjective well-being or flourishing)? Thank you.

The four major views of happiness (aka subjective well-being) are that happiness is constituted by: 1) Pleasure (and the absence of pain) 2) Fulfilled Desires 3) Virtue 4) A number of different sources that form an objective list of some sort: usually including things like pleasure, fulfilled desire, virtue, but also friendship, knowledge, or beauty. Of course, this list of theories is an oversimplification since each of the theories has a number of variations. I'm not aware of any correlation between gender and preferred theories. I think theories one and two are the most dominant theories among philosophers and psychologists. Theory four seems to be the 'common-sense' theory that most people intuit...(but academics are often drawn to theories one and two because they attempt to reduce all the sources of well-being posited in theory four to a single value). Theory three enjoys a lot of classical support and still has contemporary supporters as well. I should also point...