Mill thinks that the only thing we desire in and of itself (as long as we have full and accurate information) is happiness. For this week’s group discussion, I want you to come up with 2 things other

Morgan Davies

One candidate for an intrinsically valuable thing is art. It may seem as though we really do intrinsically value at least some art since it seems like there is some art that doesn’t bring us happiness, but we still think these pieces of art are valuable. For example, art works that depict negative parts of our society or history generally make us unhappy, but we still think they are valuable. But it maybe that even these works of art derive value from happiness just not directly. Perhaps these works are valuable because the help prevent us from doing the bad things we did in the past or fix the broken parts of our society and these two things would bring a lot of happiness(or more aptly, mitigate a lot of suffering) for a lot of people.