I appreciate your question and identify two major subquestions in your comments: 1) Why is it widely accepted that technological progress helps us live better and increase happiness? Well for one thing, technology is literally a matter of life and death for some of us. As someone who survived cancer in my mid-20's, I'm very aware of the fact that technology makes all sorts of things possible. It increases our life expectancy, it increases our leisure time, it broadens the options concerning how we can spend our leisure time, etc. So, I have to go with the mainstream view that technology does help us live a happier life. Yet, I also appreciate your point that technology is not unqualifiedly positive. Your comment about the complications it introduces into life reminds me of a line from the classic movie 'The Gods Must Be Crazy' where the narrator mentions that in 'advanced' societies children are 'sentenced' to over a decade of school. Furthermore, lots of technology can be misused. 'Web'...

I don't think the illegality of prostitution has direct implications for whether or not we think pleasure is a moral good. We might think that pleasure is a moral good, but might ban an activity that promotes short term pleasure because we think (rightly or wrongly) that it results in a long term overall reduction in pleasure. So, even a group of hedonist utilitarians might ban prostitution if they think (correctly or incorrectly) that it spreads STDs too much (including deadly STDs) thereby producing a net decrease in overall long term pleasure. Someone might also be in favor of banning prostitution because they think pleasure is of genuine worth, but merely of less worth than other goods (virtue, stable family relationships, etc.). You may also recall that Mill's version of utilitarianism weighs the 'quality' of pleasure and not just the 'quantity'. So, someone might think (correctly or incorrectly) that physical pleasure is of a lower quality than other pleasures and therefore should be weighed...

An excellent question, it is important to reflect upon the things we invest our lives into. I think there are three very different concerns you might have about investing life into these activities: 1: Perhaps, these activities aren't happiness at all, but merely distract you from genuine happiness. 2: Perhaps, these activities are genuinely good to a degree, but distract you from more important things that are more central to happiness. 3: Perhaps, these activities are genuinely good because you find them pleasurable (or fulfill your desires). And pleasure (or fulfilled desire) is the only thing that is genuinely good, but these ways of pursuing pleasure are only effective short-term and are likely to undercut your total amount of long-term pleasure. Since you ask whether there is any value in these things at all, you seem to be more concerned about the first potential problem. However, the good news for you is that Plato's view is a minority view (even among philosophers) since it...

The four major views of happiness (aka subjective well-being) are that happiness is constituted by: 1) Pleasure (and the absence of pain) 2) Fulfilled Desires 3) Virtue 4) A number of different sources that form an objective list of some sort: usually including things like pleasure, fulfilled desire, virtue, but also friendship, knowledge, or beauty. Of course, this list of theories is an oversimplification since each of the theories has a number of variations. I'm not aware of any correlation between gender and preferred theories. I think theories one and two are the most dominant theories among philosophers and psychologists. Theory four seems to be the 'common-sense' theory that most people intuit...(but academics are often drawn to theories one and two because they attempt to reduce all the sources of well-being posited in theory four to a single value). Theory three enjoys a lot of classical support and still has contemporary supporters as well. I should also point...