The Greatest Happiness Principle says, “that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness(Mill, J.).” What I understood from Mill was that if something promotes use-fullness or utility than it is morally correct and vise versa. Mill explains that a swine has different pleasures than that of a human being. He explains that, “the rule of life which is good enough for the one would be good enough for the other. The comparison of the Epicurean life to that of beasts is felt as degrading, precisely because a beast’s pleasures do not satisfy a human being’s conceptions of happiness.” He explains that the swine’s pleasures do not satisfy that of a human and therefore doesn’t appeal to our happiness. Which makes complete sense, our desires are completely different than those of a pig. We have some similarities however if you try giving the same necessities to a human that you would give a pig most humans would not be pleased. Mills says, “the rule of life which is good enough for the one would be good enough for the other.” He supports his opinion of the Greatest happiness principle by comparing the desires of a swine to that of a human being.

Mill explains that people choose lower pleasures because it is harder to pursue the higher pleasures. According to Mill, “Men lose their high aspirations as they lose their intellectual tastes, because they have not time or opportunity for indulging them; and they addict themselves to inferior pleasures, not because they deliberately prefer them, but because they are either the only ones to which they have access, or the only ones which they are any longer capable of enjoying.” He says men but I believe he is stating men as in humanity as a whole rather than as just men themselves. I believe that there is some truth to this. I feel this way because as people get older our desires change, we no longer worry about what we want rather what we need in order to survive and the “lower pleasures” help with having some sort of free will. They allow us to ensure that we still have some say in our life whether or not we have to choose a certain job in order to pay the bills or feed the mouths of our families. Our tastes change as we age, we may not precisely say that we want the inferior pleasures but we show we do with our actions. However it’s not only our actions but our behavior and our teaching that show us it is normal to drop our high pleasures. We are just now changing the teaching system but for a long time we were taught in school to chase something we can reach. It was pushed on us since we were little whether it be from teachers who never believed in us to colleagues that thought less of you. We were simultaneously pushed to do our best yet oppressed enough that we knew our place. This is what I believe led to the norm of choosing the lower pleasures in life. We get addicted to the little victories we have in our day to day lives with these low pleasures which causes us to seek more of them. It is in our genetics that we are drawn to highly addictive stimuli. We, as Mill says, “they addict themselves to inferior pleasures, not because they deliberately prefer them, but because they are either the only ones to which they have access, or the only ones which they are any longer capable of enjoying,” and I think that its true we addict ourselves to the euphoria we get from getting the low pleasures in life which then causes us to stop chasing the higher pleasures at a young age.

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