Mill's Argument On The Pursuit Of Happiness By Mil Mill

The basic point of Mills’ argument is that happiness is a good and it is compared with pleasure or pain when it is attained or not. The fact that it is a good means that the people will place their own personal actions or virtue to attain happiness. It is their self-motivation that drives people to that end goal. People, in general, will find themselves finding ways to this goal by utilizing money or resources.
Mill mentioned that money is a means of itself and the strongest moving force of human life. This is a bold statement when implying that money is a necessity for human life. Of course, there is a need for money to an extent, but money shouldn’t be a tool required for survival. Unfortunately, it is crucial to have access to capital in countries like the United States because people will not have the ability to survive without having a “criminal” mindset. For example, a person that has absolutely no money will have no choice but to steal from local businesses. The reason why a broke person would steal is driven by the need to satisfy the craving for happiness. This person that is stealing is unhappy because they are living their lives hungry. Hunger creates pain within an individual, and to ease the pain, drastic measures must be taken into account.
Mill defends the utilitarian’s view by proposing the people’s desire of virtue.
People perform virtuous acts based on their own personal moral reasoning. The end game for people is that they get what they want regardless of the course of action that is taken. Utilitarians, on the other hand, want the best course of action to occur regardless if it makes them happy or not. Utilitarians believe that people’s virtue is to be desired because it is a means to an ultimate end. I believe that Mill intended that people, in general, are selfish for happiness and Utilitarians are not. This is a convenient way to sway readers into having a more utilitarian
mindset.
Mill also brings in another claim regarding the force of habit. He says that people will execute actions based on subconscious effects in their minds. Mill portrays it in a way that people achieve their happiness without any thought. The thought may have occurred once in their minds, but a repetition of these thoughts become embedded into human minds causing them to act without thinking. The force of habit is a real and concrete definition of how human minds work. This can be very dangerous to society if the particular human practices “bad habits.” For example, a man lies to his wife to prevent future arguments to occur because of the situation he is in. This man will eventually lie more often to his wife because of self-preservation. This process is exactly the force of habit and it is a continuous subconscious affect because that man wants to be happy and his wife is preventing that from happening. The dangerous effect that may occur is if the wife figures out that he is lying and it really spirals into something far worse than it could have been if the man spoke the truth.
I can agree with Mill with the idea of attaining happiness caused by the force of habit, but I cannot agree, to some extent, with the idea of the need for money. I cannot agree with the need for money to deliver happiness in an extreme case. For example, if you’re a fugitive of the law and you’re in a cabin which is extremely cold with nothing but a lighter and a sack full of money. Would you burn the money in the fireplace to warm yourself up? Or would you freeze to death? The answer is very obvious. You would burn the money to preserve your life because this will bring happiness to yourself because you can live another day. This is an extreme case which is unlikely to happen, but the point I am trying to make is that money is not a means to happiness.