Philosophical encounters towards a route to happiness from the ethics of Immanuel Kant, the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill and the alienated work of Karl Marx

Abstract

Happiness turns out to be questionable and polysemic, but, as a human emotion, it seems to combine sensations of pleasure, desire, absence of pain and, in general, satisfaction with highly relevant moral and ethical implications. The research aims to analyze some philosophical and tentative positions on the essence of happiness, its possible defining precepts and scope requirements in Kantian and utilitarian ethics, as well as the challenge of feasibility of this object of study in the face of alienated work. The application of the critical analectic method (Dussel, 2011; Scannone, 2009) made it possible to externalize the most notable features of the ethics referred to and of historical and dialectical materialism, behind the significant trace of what is understood as happiness and what is considered indispensable from each of these perspectives to achieve it, as well as the social motivations that facilitate justifying this search. It is concluded that the concept of happiness can bring together in an equilibrium point the moral duty it contains (happiness of others), and the good consequences of satisfaction for the majority as its existential end (utility), but the viable route of obtaining happiness does not It could be stimulated only from the level of individual and social consciousness, without the prior intervention of a transformation of the economic relations of production, which begin with work and move towards the self-realization of being and society.