Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

You can register for a free account to have four complimentary articles per month. We will occasionally email you a newsletter, from which you can unsubscribe at any time. We do not sell personal data or otherwise disclose personal information to other organisations.

Happiness

Hedonic Treadmills in the Vale of Tears

Michael Gracey looks at how philosophers have pursued happiness.

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), whose theology was Unitarian, edited an abridged version of the New Testament that stripped the gospels of their supernatural elements and Jesus of his divinity. Jefferson had no use for the traditional church acceptance of the miraculous, which he thought was designed to confuse the flock and herd it toward an unquestioning faith.

While Jefferson didn’t quite do to his God what he’d done to his king, and while he didn’t exactly reduce God to the remote deist ‘clock-maker’ we sometimes hear about, he did develop a circumscribed view of providence. The guy who told Americans they had a God-given right to pursue happiness thought that while humans’ natural endowment had made us free, it also made us responsible for creating happiness out of the resources we saw before us. If we’re going to find bliss in this lifetime, we’ll have to work for it.

…