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Should the end goal/telos be happiness? If so, the why not just pump ourselves with dopamine, similar to Brave New World’s “soma”

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  • According to whom? Different philosophers have said different things on that.
    – Philip Klöcking ♦
    Commented Feb 25, 2021 at 20:28
  • I’m not sure @Klöcking, I guess I will take any answer. Maybe the most widely accepted, if there is such a thing.
    – Mikhail Sams
    Commented Feb 25, 2021 at 20:31
  • Does this answer to another question address your question? It seems to be about whether happiness as such doesn't seem to lack something.
    – Philip Klöcking ♦
    Commented Feb 25, 2021 at 20:45
  • Because the sort of "happiness" we aspire to is something far more refined than what dopamine can deliver, see SEP, Happiness.
    – Conifold
    Commented Feb 25, 2021 at 21:02
  • The end goal is satisfaction.
    – Chris Degnen
    Commented Feb 25, 2021 at 22:54

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For some one like Faraday, one's end goal clearly is not happiness, or not even eudaimonia or ataraxia pursued by many philosophers which are much more conservative than happiness. Faraday once famously said: "The strong prove, the weak enjoy"...

As a more deeper explanation as for why happiness should not be one's end goal, if you adopt idealism it might be a little easier to understand. The most powerful foe or perhaps the only foe according to this philosophy is the mindset of yourself. Since nobody is perfect right after birth, so as long as you haven't realized and conquered yourself, you still haven't born-again, and you won't be happy or satisfied at the end of your life. How to realize and conquer yourself? Simply enjoying any happiness via outside material means or pills without your own struggle and effort cannot help. There exists another kind of mutated happiness which is not primitive happiness through normal sense organs, it's a kind of refined "philosophized" happiness full of hybrid forms of both normal senses and your distilled struggled validated epistemologies. This is a new refined mindset full of evolved senses like a final pure gold ring, your original primitive mind is like the raw gold sand. Of course it's easy to describe outside of one's mind, but extremely hard and complicated to realize within one's mind...

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