Given a people inhabiting a tract which makes nomadic habits necessary,
and the happiness of each individual will be greatest when his nature
is so molded to the requirements of his life, that all his faculties
find their due activities in daily driving and tending cattle, milking,
migrating and so forth. The members of a community otherwise similar,
which is permanently settled, will severally achieve their greatest
happiness when their natures have become such that a fixed habitat, and
the occupations necessitated by it, supply the spheres in which each
instinct and emotion is exercised and brings the concomitant pleasure.
The citizens of a large nation, industrially organized, have reached
their possible ideal of happiness, when the producing, distributing,
and other activities, are such in their kinds and amounts, that each
citizen finds in them a place for all his energies and aptitudes, while
he obtains the means of satisfying all his desires. Once more we may
recognize as not only possible but probable, the eventual existence
of a community, also industrial, the members of which, having natures
similarly responding to these requirements, are also characterized by
dominant æsthetic faculties, and achieve complete happiness only when a
large part of life is filled with æsthetic activities. Evidently these
different types of men, with their different standards of happiness,
each finding the possibility of that happiness in his own society,
would not find it if transferred to any of the other societies.
Evidently, though, they might have in common such kinds of happiness
as accompany the satisfaction of vital needs, they would not have in
common sundry other kinds of happiness.
But now mark that while, to achieve greatest happiness in each of
such societies, the special conditions to be fulfilled must differ
from those to be fulfilled in the other societies, certain general
conditions must be fulfilled in all the societies. Harmonious
co-operation, by which alone in any of them the greatest happiness
can be attained, is, as we saw, made possible only by respect for
one another's claims: there must be neither those direct aggressions
which we class as crimes against person and property, nor must there
be those indirect aggressions constituted by breaches of contracts. So
that maintenance of equitable relations between men is the condition
to attainment of greatest happiness in all societies, however much the
greatest happiness attainable in each may differ in nature, or amount,
or both.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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