Mill departs still further from the purely quantitative...

Mill departs still further from the purely quantitative notion of happiness when he recognizes that it is not just a sum of unrelated experiences but also an ordered whole. To say that human beings aim at happiness is not to deny that they pursue more specific goals such as knowledge or artistic and cultural activity or moral goodness, and that they pursue these things for their own sake. These are some of the 'ingredients' which go to make up a life of happiness.

Mill is here attempting, perhaps unsuccessfully, to combine two traditions of thought about 'happiness'. The identification of 'happiness' with 'pleasure' we may call the 'hedonistic' conception of happiness. This we may contrast with what has been called the 'eudemonistic' conception of happiness. The term comes from the Greek word 'eudaimonia', which is usually translated as 'happiness'. Although one of the Greek philosophical schools, Epicureanism, did identify eudaimonia with pleasure.

The Greek concept lends itself less easily than the English term to this identification. In English one can speak of 'feeling happy', and although the relation between such states of feeling and a life of happiness is not entirely clear, they are undoubtedly connected - one could not be said to have a happy life if one never felt happy. The term eudaimonia refers not so much to a psychological state as to the objective character of a person's life.

The classic account of eudaimonia is given by Aristotle. He emphasizes that it has to do with the quality of one's life as a whole; indeed, he sees some plausibility in the traditional aphorism 'call no man happy until he is dead' (though he also recognizes that there is little plausibility in calling someone happy after he is dead). For Aristotle happiness is to be identified above all with the fulfillment of one's distinctively human potentialities.

These are located in the exercise of reason, in both its practical and its theoretical form. Aristotle is thus the ancestor of one stand in Mill, and of that general conception of 'happiness' which links it with ideas of 'fulfillment' and 'self-realization'. Norman; cited in Honderich, 2005. All ethical theories accord some importance to human happiness.