Nature, happiness, and self-intetest

Sexual reproduction and all that it entails, physically, mentally, emotionally, passionately, or behaviorally, are Nature's abject sacrifice of the individual to the species.

So held Schopenhauer.

Mutatis mutandis, putting the gene for the species, so hold contemporary sociobiologists.

We are social neither for society's sake nor for our own, but to better achieve the purposes of Nature.

And by Nature, to its same aims, are our intelligence, our character, and our very conative and affective natures, shaped.

And so the interests and happiness of the individual are betrayed by his desires, his lusts, his deepest emotional needs, and even his body, from his reproductive organs to the genetic material of each and every cell.

Philosophers who seek to define the interests or the happiness of the individual in terms of his desires or preferences could not be more wrong.

But to admit this is to admit that the interests or the happiness of the individual do not require very much at all.

So little that it seems to most people almost disparaging of him, his choices, and his life to say of someone that throughout his life those were as well served as human nature and fortunate circumstance could make possible.

Certainly it seems a moral and religious condemnation.