The premise that happiness is the only good is quite superficial. It’s good to know things, and to be saved unto eternal life for those of faith, yet knowledge doesn’t always make one happy. To require that happiness attend everything good is to demand that the good is somewhat silly. One could be high on dope and very happy even as it ends one’s life. There may in fact be objective standards for what the good is that people are entirely unaware of yet that are nevertheless valid.
One might be unhappy to learn that the Big Bang didn’t really happen, if it is possible to exhaustively disprove that theory. The Malament-Manchak theorem suggests that it isn’t really possible to know the global shape of the Universe after all. It is so though that many would be initially unhappy yet realize later that the facts are good and better than the happiness of believing in Big Bang Theory. https://aeon.co/…/scientists-are-no-longer-sure-the…
Socrates might have noted that if happiness can be detached from any property then it isn’t actually a meaningful part of the property that one is happy about. If one stipulates that happiness is simply a state of affairs that is always good, and that nothing else is good, one might not only be unhappy about that determination, one might have no sense at all about value theories, nor belief that there is such a thing as the good that can exist for itself; even if the awareness of the presence of the good occurs simply within a mind stimulated by externally perceived objects or circumstances that have no element of happiness in them.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/…/abs/pii/S1355219808000580 Malament-Manchak theorem
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