There's a post at The New York Times philosophy blog - The Spoils of Happiness by David Sosa - which seems to be about selling Aristotle's idea of virtuous flourishing = happiness (as opposed to pleasure = happiness). Here's some of the article ......
Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Super-duper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life experiences? [...] Of course, while in the tank you won’t know that you’re there; you’ll think that it’s all actually happening [...] Would you plug in?. (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. 3) ........
I think that for very many of us the answer is no .... Life on the machine wouldn’t constitute achieving what we we’re after when we’re pursuing a happy life. There’s an important difference between having a friend and having the experience of having a friend ... [it] would all be, in a way, false — an intellectual mirage ....
One especially apt way of thinking about happiness — a way that’s found already in the thought of Aristotle — is in terms of “flourishing.” Take someone really flourishing in their new career, or really flourishing now that they’re off in college. The sense of the expression is not just that they feel good, but that they’re, for example, accomplishing some things and taking appropriate pleasure in those accomplishments. If they were simply sitting at home playing video games all day, even if this seemed to give them a great deal of pleasure, and even if they were not frustrated, we wouldn’t say they were flourishing. Such a life could not in the long term constitute a happy life. To live a happy life is to flourish .....
[W]hat’s wrong with the drug addict’s life is not just the despair he feels when he’s coming down. It’s that even when he’s feeling pleasure, that’s not a very significant fact about him. It’s just a feeling, the kind of pleasure we can imagine an animal’s having. Happiness is harder to get. It’s enjoyed after you’ve worked for something, or in the presence of people you love, or upon experiencing a magnificent work of art or performance — the kind of state that requires us to engage in real activities of certain sorts, to confront real objects and respond to them. And then, too, we shouldn’t ignore the modest happiness that can accompany pride in a clear-eyed engagement with even very painful circumstances.
I guess the article is pitching a point of view, that of Aristotle and almost everybody else, but I think it states as facts what are really just assumptions: that imagined experience is less worthy than actual experience, that enjoyment of the moment is a less true form of happiness than achieving some goal, (and that drug addicts and animals experience only pleasure rather than flourishing - what?).
And the article expresses the common (but I think wrongheaded) belief that we can't experience real happiness unless we've crawled over broken glass to achieve it. I used to call this the Captain Kirk philosophy of life :) and you can see it expressed in this out-take from This Side of Paradise, an episode in which Kirk "rescues" Spock from a world where an indigenous plant produces in everyone, even Spock, a sense of peace. I believe Spock was right in thinking he was truly happy ....
