Drawing on the psychological associationist background of James and John Stuart Mill, this paper suggests that the three departments of what John Stuart called “the art of life” – morality, expediency, and aesthetics – cannot bypass the part the felicific calculus plays in the decision process. I claim that it is in and by the felicific calculus, resting upon the emergence of ideas which found the distinction between the higher and the lower pleasures, that morality and expediency are based on, and that aesthetics or “disinterested” actions may paradoxically presuppose an unconscious calculation formed by deeply rooted habits.