I Want To Be Happy

Grice lectured profusely on happiness.

His motivation was, well, everybody wants to be happy, right?

His motivation was ... the universalisability of the Kantian counsel of prudence:

If you want a youthful skin, smear it with peanut butter.

His example.

This is a 'hypothetical' imperative. Not a categorial, important one, alla Kant.

There is a way in which hypothetical imperatives, though imperatives, relate to true judgements:

If yu smear your skin with peanut butter and it still does not look youthful, the remedy is inefficient, and the 'maxim' _wrong_.

For more general maxims, e.g. all the ones in his 'decalogue':

say the truth
be reliable
be informative
don't be informative
be relevant
be unambiguous
be clear
be orderly
be brief
be questionable

make sense only on the condition that

you want to be happy.

Grice claimed, with Kant, that this is almost analytic, although it's synthetic a priori.

Surely some people "are" Masoch. They do not want to be happy. But caeteris paribus, we follow a counsel of prudence or THE counsel of prudence par excellence, which is the Kantian maxim of the 'sky above us' because we want to be happy.

Oddly, Nanette knew this (in "No, No, Nanette").