Bioethics vs Happiness

Abstract

The article deals with complicated, but extremely important for everyone – concept of happiness. The difficulty is that we have two very different understanding of happiness: happiness as a mental state and happiness as well-being. The first understanding opens the prospect for debates among professionals. Second – is to serious philosophical reflections. Applied ethics tends to debates as a way of working out legal solutions, so it cannot use the second understanding. But the first and the second understanding of the concept of happiness are only cases of its linguistic use, when we are trying to describe what exactly makes us happy. That is, we are talking about the symptoms, not the essence. However, bioethics in particular and applied ethics in generally do not give us the essence of happiness.