Finally, I will assume here the following conception of benefiting and harming :. Benefiting and Harming. To benefit somebody is to make her better off in some respect in her life considered as a whole than she would otherwise have been.
To harm somebody is to make her worse off in some respect in her life considered as a whole than she would otherwise have been. To work out whether some particular event benefited a person, it is necessary and sufficient to compare her actual whole life with the whole life she would have had had this event not occurred, and see if she is better off in any respect in the former than in the latter. On this assumption, hedonism implies the following view about benefiting and harming which will be important later on, in Section 3 :.
Hedonism about Benefiting and Harming HBH : Benefiting and harming just consist in affecting pleasures and pains in various ways. Now that it is clear what I think we should mean by hedonism, let us turn to the question of why hedonism is attractive. Many motivations have been offered for hedonism. Most of these, it is fair to say, are not very convincing. The Experience Requirement. If the experience requirement is true, then hedonism seems likely to be true as well.
This is because:. I will take 2 for granted. But I want to consider an important objection to 1. It may be suggested that, while it is indeed necessary in order to benefit or harm someone that one affect her experiences in some way, more is required. For example, it may be that in order to benefit someone, one must give her, not only a pleasure, but, say, actual fame or friendship, health, success, desire-satisfaction, or whatever it may be.
However, on closer inspection, such a view does not in fact satisfy this requirement. Suppose that somebody, having been given pleasure and fame and so, on such a view, having been benefited then loses the fame, but retains the pleasure.
On the view in question, the loss of this fame would constitute a harm to this person, since she no longer has both the pleasure and the fame. But her experiences need not have been affected in any way if, for example, she was ignorant of the loss of her fame. So, on such a view, there could be benefits or harms without changes in experiences. I will take it, then, that not only 2 , but 1 also, is true. The crucial question now is Why believe the experience requirement? I believe there is.
It is this:. Let me say something in defense of each premise, starting with 2. Each of them, however, went on to achieve tremendous posthumous success, fame, and desire-satisfaction since each dearly wanted their works to be appreciated. Now, if posthumous events could be good or bad for one, then surely the truly enormous posthumous success, fame, or desire-satisfaction that these individuals achieved would mean that their lives were not so unfortunate after all.
Intuitively, this is part of the reason their lives were tragic. Therefore, there can be no posthumous benefits or harms. Now consider 1. The burden here seems clearly to be on those who would deny 1 to answer the following question:. If the contribution to our well-being of success, fame, desire-satisfaction, or whatever it is, does not depend on our experiences being affected, then why should it matter whether we are still alive or not for this contribution to be made?
Some have suggested that it is because death removes the subject, and without a subject there is no-one left to be harmed. However, even after death, there remains a subject in one sense: the person who once existed. The experience requirement, by contrast, provides a very natural explanation of why there can be no posthumous benefits and harms.
What, after all, is death? I conclude that we have, in the experience requirement, a very powerful reason to believe hedonism. What should a hedonist say about the nature of pleasure and pain? There are two main competing theories: felt-quality and attitude-based ones. According to felt-quality theories,. Felt-quality theories seem to have commonsense on their side. To many, it seems that we like or want pleasures because they are pleasurable, and hate and seek to avoid pains because they are painful.
Why do I like or want the feeling of orgasm? Intuitively, it is because this feeling is pleasurable or feels good. It does not feel good because I want it. Why would I want it if not because it feels good?
Similarly, why do I hate the feeling of headache? It is because it is painful. It is not painful because I hate it. What is the feeling of headache even like without the painfulness? And why would I hate that? Attitude-based theories seem to get the order of explanation the wrong way around.
Despite this, most philosophers today favour attitude-based theories. This is mainly due to a widespread belief that felt-quality theories have been refuted by what has come to be known as the heterogeneity objection. This objection is as follows:. Consider the warm, dry, slightly drowsy feeling of pleasure that you get while sunbathing on a quiet beach.
By way of contrast, consider the cool, wet, invigorating feeling of pleasure that you get when drinking some cold, refreshing beer on a hot day. Attitude-based theories, by contrast, have no trouble accounting for the felt diversity of pleasures. What does a pleasure of sunbathing have in common with one of drinking a cold beer on a hot day?
Simply that its subject happens to like it or want it to be occurring. I believe a hedonist should accept a felt-quality theory. Only hedonism paired with a felt-quality theory is consistent with the right motivation for hedonism, the experience requirement. Suppose hedonism is true, and some attitude-based theory of pleasure is also true.
In this case, there could be changes in well-being without changes in phenomenology. Why is this? For example, a bit of phenomenology that is for me right now neither pleasurable nor painful could become pleasurable simply in virtue of my coming to intrinsically want it to be going on. It may be objected that, while it is true that, on attitude-based theories, there can be changes in pleasures and pains without changes in phenomenology, a hedonist is not committed to the view that every change in pleasures or pains affects well-being.
But this is hardly satisfactory. Such a hedonist would lack an explanation of why the experience requirement is true. She could not hold the appealing view that benefiting and harming require a change in phenomenology because hedonism is true. A different response on behalf of attitude-based theorists is that intrinsically desiring some particular bit of phenomenology to be going on is a state that itself possesses a certain kind of phenomenology.
It would suggest that all pleasures do feel alike in some way—they would all share the phenomenology that is involved in the sort of desire that makes some bit of phenomenology count as a pleasure. Either way, then, the hedonist is going to have to contend with the heterogeneity objection. In light of this, it seems best simply to embrace the more commonsensical of the two kinds of theories—i.
Now, there is, I believe, a good response to the heterogeneity objection. This is that our knowledge of the intrinsic features of our own phenomenology is far from infallible. Not only can we have false beliefs about it, there are aspects of it that can be hard or even impossible for us to have true beliefs about. In a book and series of fine papers, Eric Schwitzgebel argues that. Concerning emotions, he writes,.
Or, as most people think, can it include, or even be exhausted by, something less literally visceral? Does it typically come and pass in a few moments as Buddhists sometimes suggest , or does it tend to last awhile as my English-speaking friends more commonly say?
He offers an example of a husband who is entirely oblivious to his own feelings of anger while doing the washing up:. My wife mentions that I seem to be angry about being stuck with the dishes again despite the fact that doing the dishes makes me happy? I deny it. Or felt and perfectly apprehended phenomenologically but somehow nonetheless mislabeled? Perhaps you have lived with a refrigerator that often whined due to a bad bearing.
If so, you might have found that, with time, you entirely ceased to notice the racket. But occasionally, when the compressor stopped, you did notice the sudden, glorious silence.
But obnoxious it was, and all the while it had been, unbeknownst to you, fouling your experience as you went about your business. Moreover, you might well have remained unaware of the noise even when reflecting on whether you were enjoying yourself: the problem here is ignorance—call it reflective blindness—and not, as some have suggested, the familiar sort of inattentiveness we find when only peripherally aware of something. In such cases we can bring our attention to the experience easily and at will.
If these philosophers are right, then our inability to introspect a common feel to all pleasures should not weigh all that heavily against felt-quality theories. I conclude that hedonism should be paired with a felt-quality, rather than an attitude-based, theory of pleasure and pain. The first objection to hedonism I want to consider is The Philosophy of Swine.
Mill put it like this:. To suppose that life has … no higher end than pleasure—no better and nobler object of desire and pursuit—[is] utterly mean and groveling … a doctrine worthy only of swine. Feldman makes the objection vivid in his example of Porky , a human being who. Let us imagine that Porky happily carries on like this for many years. Imagine also that Porky has no human friends, has no other sources of pleasure, and has no interesting knowledge.
Let us also imagine that Porky somehow avoids pains—he is never injured by the pigs, he does not come down with any barnyard diseases, he does not suffer from loneliness or boredom. Importantly, this seems true no matter how long it lasts for. But how can a hedonist accept this? Some hedonists have proposed biting the bullet—i.
They have tried to explain away our intuition to the contrary in a number of ways. But this is an extremely large bullet to bite. There is, I believe, a better response. There are two reasons that it is not. Let me explain them in turn. The most pleasurable kinds of pleasures are not bodily ones, but rather some of the pleasures of love, learning, aesthetic appreciation, and so on. Porky is missing out on these highly pleasurable pleasures. To attempt to convince you of this, I want to invoke a distinction from the previous section, between feeling or experiencing a pleasure i.
Now, certain pleasures, it seems, can be hard to attend to or to become aware of, while others can be difficult to miss. With this in mind, we can distinguish two senses in which a pleasure may be intense :.
Bodily pleasures, I want to suggest, are often extremely intense in the first sense. The pleasures of orgasm, massage, sunbathing, and so on, are for most of us, in most cases easy to attend to, and even hard to miss. It does not follow, however, that they are intense in the second sense, of being highly pleasurable. By contrast, what one sees of the pleasures of love, learning, aesthetic appreciation, and so on, when one introspects them , may be merely the tip of the phenomenological iceberg, so to speak.
There may be far more to these pleasures than typically meets the introspective eye. So far I have identified these things merely as possibilities. Is there any reason to think that they are actually so? Consider some of the key factors that go into determining how easy it is to attend to or introspect a given pleasure:. The pleasures of thought and study can only be enjoyed in the highest degree by those who have an ardour of curiosity which carries the mind temporarily away from self and its sensations.
In all kinds of Art, again, the exercise of the creative faculty is attended by intense and exquisite pleasures: but it would seem that in order to get them, one must forget them: the genuine artist at work seems to have a predominant and temporarily absorbing desire for the realisation of his ideal of beauty. For these reasons, it seems plausible to think that there may be significantly more to the pleasures in question than one can easily introspect or attend to.
It therefore seems reasonable to think that there is little or no more to most such pleasures than one can easily introspect or attend to. Turn now to the second reason that a Porky life is not high in well-being compared with a normal human life.
There are two parts to this reason:. I want to begin my defense of 2 by explaining why there is a great deal of qualitative diversity available in the pleasures of love, learning, and aesthetic appreciation. Consider, first, the pleasures of love. What it is like to come to know or love a particular person is not just the same as what it is like to come to know or love someone else.
Each person is unique, making the pleasures associated with friendships and relationships qualitatively unique for the people involved. Moreover, there are many qualitatively new pleasures that are made possible by friendships and relationships as they evolve or deepen over time, or as those who are involved in them overcome challenges or share new experiences together.
Consider, next, the pleasures of learning. All of these, intuitively, are qualitatively very different. Finally, consider the pleasures of appreciating great works of art, music, literature, etc.
Great novels and films typically transport one to places that no other work does, or involve characters that are so realistic that they are, like real people, unique, or offer insights or explore ideas in ways that no other work does.
But twice he bursts into tears, apparently for no reason at all. In psychoanalytic terms, he seems to be suffering from distress that becomes conscious only occasionally, and that explains his propensity to feel distress.
Haybron rejects both of the dominant theories of happiness in the philosophical and psychological literature: the hedonistic and the life-satisfaction theories. Hedonism, he argues, whether internalist, externalist, or attitudinal, invites multiple counterexamples, and simply cannot do the job that happiness does in explaining or predicting behavior.
Thus, for example, it is possible to have lots of pleasure and still be unfulfilled, or even in emotional pain. The phenomenon of hedonic inversion also shows that some painful experiences, e. Some pleasures, such as the pleasure of eating crackers, or of an intense orgasm with a stranger, are irrelevant to happiness because they are far too shallow: even a whole series of them over time need not go deep enough to have an impact on our emotional natures But even when they do, it is not they that constitute our happiness but, rather, the positive moods and dispositions they result in.
This leaves it open that deep pleasures, or important pleasures like those of tranquility, could be happiness-constituting Haybron argues, however, that even these will not do because they are mere experiences, whereas happiness consists of enduring moods, emotions, and mood-propensities with predictive and explanatory power Experiences happen to a person, whereas happiness is a state of a person that, in part, determines the kinds of experiences she will have This is the basic problem with hedonism.
He starts by saying that even intense bodily pleasures cannot be constitutive of happiness because they are too shallow to have an impact on our emotional condition. This suggests that if they were deep enough to have an impact on our emotional condition, they would be constitutive of happiness.
The same suggestion is present in the discussion of deep or important pleasures like tranquility. But then it turns out that even if the pleasures of orgasms or tranquility have an impact on our emotional condition, they are, at best, only causes of happiness, because pleasures are mere experiences, not enduring moods or mood-propensities.
It suffices to say that, as experiences, they are the wrong sort of animal. For all these reasons, life satisfaction cannot be equated with happiness.
His view explains why life-satisfaction survey results often correlate only weakly with positive affect and strongly with negative affect. In addition, his insightful and thought-provoking defense of the thesis that which perspective or norm we adopt in evaluating our lives is often rationally underdetermined raises intriguing questions about the rational underdetermination of our evaluations in other realms as well: relationships, moral character, novels, and so on.
How do we measure happiness not, as commonly thought, by asking people if they are satisfied with their lives? In Part III , Haybron turns his attention to the nature of well-being, defending a self-fulfillment conception of well-being against both the Aristotelian perfectionist conception and the subjectivist desire-satisfaction and life-satisfaction conceptions.
The importance of happiness in our lives, he argues, cannot be explained by subjectivist accounts of well-being Ch. Haybron gives two extended examples that convincingly make this point and that also show that happiness cannot be identified with either informed desire satisfaction or life satisfaction. Claudia prefers her wealth and social status as an attorney to leading a life with less stress and anxiety and more happiness They are mistaken in de-valuing happiness, because by so doing they devalue their self-fulfillment and well-being.
Their happiness requires them to change their nature by doing things that are contrary to their nature, e. It looks like Haybron needs to add a qualifier to his conception of happiness: happiness lies in emotional nature-fulfillment so long as your nature does not rule out the very possibility of happiness.
But perhaps this type of qualification is unavoidable for any theory of happiness or well-being. As noted above, Haybron calls his self-fulfillment conception of well-being eudaimonistic.
One question is whether happiness, thus conceived, is very important. As well, it is unlikely that respondents invariably interpret happiness questions as being about life satisfaction. At any rate, even life satisfaction theorists might balk at this variant of the account, since life satisfaction is sometimes taken to involve, not just explicit global judgments of life satisfaction, but also our responses to the particular things or domains we care about.
Some will hesitate to deem satisfied people who hate many of the important things in their lives, however satisfied they claim to be with their lives as a whole. In other words, researchers should decide in advance what they want to measure—be it life satisfaction, hedonic state, emotional state, or something else—and then ask questions that refer unambiguously to those states. An important question going forward is how far well-being research needs to incorporate indicators beyond subjective well-being.
The scientific literature on happiness has grown to proportions far too large for this article to do more than briefly touch on a few highlights.
The first claim, that most people are happy, appears to be a consensus position among subjective well-being researchers for a seminal argument, see Diener and Diener The contention reflects three lines of evidence: most people, in most places, report being happy; most people report being satisfied with their lives; and most people experience more positive affect than negative.
On any of the major theories of happiness, then, the evidence seems to show that most people are, indeed, happy. Yet this conclusion might be resisted, on a couple of grounds. First, life satisfaction theorists might question whether self-reports of life satisfaction suffice to establish that people are in fact satisfied with their lives.
Perhaps self-reports can be mistaken, say if the individual believes herself satisfied yet shows many signs of dissatisfaction in her behavior, for instance complaining about or striving to change important things in her life. Second, defenders of affect-based theories—hedonistic and emotional state views—might reject the notion that a bare majority of positive affect suffices for happiness.
While the evidence for any specific ratio is highly controversial, if anything like this proportion were adopted as the threshold for happiness, on a hedonistic or emotional state theory, then some of the evidence taken to show that people are happy could in fact show the opposite. In any event, the empirical claim relies heavily on nontrivial philosophical views about the nature of happiness, illustrating one way in which philosophical work on happiness can inform scientific research.
The second claim, regarding adaptation and set points, reflects well-known findings that many major life events, like being disabled in an accident or winning the lottery, appear strongly to impact happiness only for a relatively brief period, after which individuals may return to a level of happiness not very different from before.
Such claims have caused some consternation over whether the pursuit and promotion of happiness are largely futile enterprises Lykken and Tellegen ; Millgram However, the dominant view now seems to be that the early claims about extreme adaptation and set points were exaggerated: while adaptation is a very real phenomenon, many factors—including disability—can have substantial, and lasting, effects on how happy people are. As well, the large cross-national differences in measured happiness are unlikely to be entirely an artifact of personality variables.
Note that even highly heritable traits can be strongly susceptible to improvement. Better living conditions have raised the stature of men in the Netherlands by eight inches—going from short five foot four to tall over six feet —in the last years Fogel Yet height is considered much more heritable than happiness, with typical heritability estimates ranging from.
The question of mistakes will be taken up in section 5. But the last claim—that material prosperity has relatively modest impacts on happiness—has lately become the subject of heated debate. For some time the standard view among subjective well-being researchers was that, beyond a low threshold where basic needs are met, economic gains have only a small impact on happiness levels. In the U. Against these claims, some authors have argued that absolute income has a large impact on happiness across the income spectrum e.
The question continues to be much debated, but in a pair of large-scale studies using Gallup data sets, including improved measures of life satisfaction and affect, suggested that both sides may be partly right Kahneman and Deaton ; Diener, Ng et al. Surveying large numbers of Americans in one case, and what is claimed to be the first globally representative sample of humanity in the other, these studies found that income does indeed correlate substantially.
Yet the correlation of household income with the affect measures is far weaker: globally,. For more recent discussions of empirical work, see Jebb et al.
Research on the complex money-happiness relationship resists simple characterization, but a crude summary is that the connection tends to be positive and substantial, strong at lower income levels while modest to weak or even negative at higher incomes, and stronger and less prone to satiation for life evaluation than emotional well-being metrics.
But again, these are very rough generalizations that gloss over a variety of important factors and admit of many exceptions across both individuals and societies.
In short, the relationship between money and happiness may depend on which theory of happiness we accept: on a life satisfaction view, the relationship may be strong; whereas affect-based views may yield a much weaker connection, again above some modest threshold. Here, again, philosophical views about the nature and significance of happiness may play an important role in understanding empirical results and their practical upshot.
Economic growth, for instance, has long been a top priority for governments, and findings about its impact on human well-being may have substantial implications for policy. It is important to note that studies of this nature focus on generic trends, not specific cases, and there is no dispute that significant exceptions exist—notably, populations that enjoy high levels of happiness amid low levels of material prosperity.
Among others, a number of Latin American countries, Maasai herders, Inughuit hunter-gatherers, and Amish communities have registered highly positive results in subjective well-being studies, sometimes higher than those in many affluent nations, and numerous informal accounts accord with the data. The importance of money for happiness may depend strongly on what kind of society one inhabits. An interesting question, particularly in light of common environmental concerns, is how far the lessons of such societies can, or should, be transferred to other social forms, where material attainment and happiness are presently more tightly coupled.
Perhaps some degree of decoupling of happiness and money would be desirable. So the role of money in happiness appears, at this juncture, to be a mixed bag, depending heavily on how we conceive of happiness and what range of societies we are considering. What else , then, does matter most for happiness? There is no definitive list of the main sources of happiness in the literature, partly because it is not clear how to divide them up. But the following items seem generally to be accepted as among the chief correlates of happiness: supportive relationships, engagement in interesting and challenging activities, material and physical security, a sense of meaning or purpose, a positive outlook, and autonomy or control.
An illustrative study of the correlates of happiness from a global perspective is the Gallup World Poll study noted earlier Diener, Ng et al. In that study, the life satisfaction measure was more strongly related to material prosperity, as noted above: household income, along with possession of luxury conveniences and satisfaction with standard of living.
What these results show depends partly on the reliability of the measures. However, the results are roughly consonant with other research, so they are unlikely to be entirely an artifact of the instruments used in this study.
What this means for happiness depends on which view of happiness is correct. Were you to survey public attitudes about the value of happiness, at least in liberal Western democracies, you would likely find considerable support for the proposition that happiness is all that really matters for human well-being.
Many philosophers over the ages have likewise endorsed such a view, typically assuming a hedonistic account of happiness. A few, like Almeder , have identified well-being with happiness understood as life satisfaction. Most philosophers, however, have rejected hedonistic and other mental state accounts of well-being, and with them the idea that happiness could suffice for well-being.
Objections to mental state theories of well-being tend to cluster around two sets of concerns. First, it is widely believed that the non-mental conditions of our lives matter for well-being: whether our families really love us, whether our putative achievements are genuine, whether the things we care about actually obtain.
Would you plug in to such a machine for life? Most people would not, and the case is widely taken to vitiate mental state theories of well-being. Beyond having positive mental states, it seems to matter both that our lives go well and that our state of mind is appropriately related to how things are. A second set of objections concerns various ways in which a happy person might nonetheless seem intuitively to be leading an impoverished or stunted life. Related worries involve people with diminished capacities blindness, Down Syndrome , or choosing to lead narrow and cramped or simpleminded lives e.
Worries about impoverished lives are a prime motivator of Aristotelian theories of well-being, which emphasize the full and proper exercise of our human capacities. In the face of these and other objections most commentators have concluded that neither happiness nor any other mental state can suffice for well-being.
Philosophical interest in happiness has consequently flagged, since its theoretical importance becomes unclear if it does not play a starring role in our account of the good. Even as happiness might fail to suffice for well-being, well-being itself may be only one component of a good life , and not the most important one at that. Kant, for example, considered both morality and well-being to be important but distinct elements of a good life.
Yet morality should be our first priority, never to be sacrificed for personal happiness. In fact there is a broad consensus, or near-consensus, among ethical theorists on a doctrine we might call the priority of virtue : broadly and crudely speaking, the demands of virtue or morality trump other values in life.
This view need not take the strong form of insisting that we must always act as virtuously as possible, or that moral reasons always take precedence.
If it would be wrong to leave your family, in which you are unhappy, then you must remain unhappy, or find more acceptable ways to seek happiness.
The mainstream views in all three of the major approaches to ethical theory—consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics—agree on some form of the priority of virtue. Where these views chiefly differ is not on the importance of being good, but on whether being good necessarily benefits us.
Virtue ethicists tend to answer in the affirmative, the other two schools in the negative. Building virtue into well-being, as Aristotelians do, may seem to yield a more demanding ethics, and in some ways it does. Yet many deontologists and consequentialists—notably Kant—advocate sterner, more starkly moralistic visions of the good life than Aristotle would ever have dreamt of e.
Happiness, in short, is believed by most philosophers to be insufficient for well-being, and still less important for the good life.
These points may seem to vitiate any substantial role for happiness in ethical thought. However, well-being itself is still regarded as a central concept in ethical thought, denoting one of the chief elements of a good life even if not the sole element. And there are reasons for thinking happiness important, both practically and theoretically, despite the worries noted above. Even if happiness does not suffice for well-being—a point that not all philosophers would accept—it might still rate a privileged spot in theories of well-being.
This could happen in either of two ways. First, happiness could be a major component of a theory of well-being. Objective list theories of well-being sometimes include happiness or related mental states such as enjoyment among the fundamental constituents of well-being.
A more ambitious proposal, originated by L. Sumner, identifies well-being with authentic happiness —happiness that is authentic in the sense of being both informed and autonomous Sumner The approach remains fairly new, however, so its long-term prospects remain unclear. A second strategy forsakes the project of giving a unitary theory of well-being, recognizing instead a family of two or more kinds of prudential value. Happiness could be central to, or even exhaustive of, one of those values.
In short, we might distinguish narrow and wide well-being concepts. An experience machine user might be doing well in the narrow sense, but not the wide—she is doing well, though her life is quite sad. Happiness might, then, suffice for well-being, but only in the narrow sense. Others have made similar points, but uptake has been limited, perhaps because distinguishing multiple concepts of prudential value makes the already difficult job of giving a theory of well-being much harder, as Kagan pointedly observes.
The preceding section discussed ways that happiness might figure prominently even in non-mental state theories of well-being. The question there concerned the role of happiness in theories of well-being. This is a different question from how important happiness is for well-being itself.
Even a theory of well-being that includes no mention at all of happiness can allow that happiness is nonetheless a major component or contributor to well-being, because of its relation to the things that ultimately constitute well-being. If you hold a desire theory of well-being, for instance, you will very likely allow that, for most people, happiness is a central aspect of well-being, since most people very much desire to be happy. Indeed, some desire theorists have argued that the account actually yields a form of hedonism, on the grounds that people ultimately desire nothing else but happiness or pleasure Sidgwick [], Brandt , Happiness may be thought important even on theories normally believed to take a dismissive view of it.
Aristotelians identify well-being with virtuous activity, yet Aristotle plainly takes this to be a highly pleasant condition, indeed the most pleasant kind of life there is see, e. I 8; Bk. VII You cannot flourish, on Aristotelian terms, without being happy, and unhappiness is clearly incompatible with well-being. Even the Stoics, who notoriously regard all but a virtuous inner state as at best indifferent, would still assign happiness a kind of importance: at the very least, to be unhappy would be unvirtuous; and virtue itself arguably entails a kind of happiness, namely a pleasant state of tranquility.
As well, happiness would likely be a preferred indifferent in most cases, to be chosen over unhappiness. To be sure, both Aristotelian and Stoic accounts are clear that happiness alone does not suffice for well-being, that its significance is not what common opinion takes it to be, and that some kinds of happiness can be worthless or even bad.
But neither denies that happiness is somehow quite important for human well-being. In fact it is questionable whether any major school of philosophical thought denies outright the importance of happiness, at least on one of the plausible accounts of the matter.
Doubts about its significance probably owe to several factors. Some skeptics, for example, focus on relatively weak conceptions of happiness, such as the idea that it is little more than the simple emotion of feeling happy—an idea that few hedonists or emotional state theorists would accept.
Or, alternatively, assuming that a concern for happiness has only to do with positive states. The study of happiness need be no more concerned with smiles than with frowns. The last set of questions we will examine centers on the pursuit of happiness, both individual and collective. Most of the popular literature on happiness discusses how to make oneself happier, with little attention given to whether this is an appropriate goal, or how various means of pursuing happiness measure up from an ethical standpoint.
More broadly, how if at all should one pursue happiness as part of a good life? We saw earlier that most philosophers regard happiness as secondary to morality in a good life. The individual pursuit of happiness may be subject to nonmoral norms as well, prudence being the most obvious among them.
The view raises interesting questions about the benefits of less extreme pharmaceuticals, such as the therapeutic use of antidepressants; such medications can make life more pleasant, but many people worry whether they pose a threat to authenticity, perhaps undercutting their benefits.
It is possible that such drugs involve prudential tradeoffs, promoting well-being in some ways while undermining it in others; whether the tradeoffs are worth it will depend on how, in a given case, the balance is struck. Looking to more broadly ethical, but not yet moral, norms, it may be possible to act badly without acting either immorally or imprudently.
While Aristotle himself regarded acting badly as inherently imprudent, his catalogue of virtues is instructive, as many of them wit, friendliness, etc. They might, for instance, be undignified or imbecilic.
Outwardly virtuous conduct undertaken in the name of personal happiness might, if wrongly motivated, be incompatible with genuine virtue. This sort of conduct would not obviously instantiate the virtue of compassion or kindness, and indeed might be reasonably deemed contemptible.
Yet the virtue of gratitude might be undermined by certain kinds of gratitude intervention, whereby one tries to become happier by focusing on the things one is grateful for. A different question is what means of pursuing happiness are most effective.
This is fundamentally an empirical question, but there are some in-principle issues that philosophical reflection might inform. It is not clear how to interpret this dictum, however, so that it is both interesting and true. Yet never considering happiness also seems an improbable strategy for becoming happier.
If you are choosing among several equally worthwhile occupations, and have good evidence that some of them will make you miserable, while one of them is likely to be highly fulfilling, it would not seem imprudent to take that information into account. Yet to do so just is to pursue happiness. The so-called paradox of hedonism is perhaps best seen as a vague caution against focusing too much on making oneself happy, not a blanket dismissal of the prospects for expressly seeking happiness—and for this modest point there is good empirical evidence Schooler, Ariely et al.
That happiness is sometimes worth seeking does not mean we will always do a good job of it Haybron b. In recent decades a massive body of empirical evidence has gathered on various ways in which people seem systematically prone to make mistakes in the pursuit of their interests, including happiness. Such tendencies have been suggested in several domains relating to the pursuit of happiness, including with recent surveys cited :.
Less discussed in this context, but highly relevant, is the large body of research indicating that human psychology and behavior are remarkably prone to unconscious social and other situational influences, most infamously reported in the Milgram obedience experiments Doris , , Haybron Human functioning, and the pursuit of happiness, may be more profoundly social than many commentators have assumed.
Taken together, this research bears heavily on two central questions in the philosophical literature: first, the broad character of human nature e. How should we conceive of human autonomy? Just a decade ago the idea of happiness policy was something of a novelty. While it remains on the fringes in some locales, notably the United States, in much of the world there has been a surge of interest in making happiness an explicit target of policy consideration.
Attention has largely shifted, however, to a broader focus on well-being to reflect not just happiness but also other welfare concerns of citizens, and dozens of governments now incorporate well-being metrics in their national statistics. People should be freed to seek the good life as they see it, and beyond that the state should, by and large, stay out of the well-being-promotion business.
This vision of the good society rests on empirical assumptions that have been the subject of considerable debate. If it turns out that people systematically and predictably err in the pursuit of their interests, then it may be possible for governments to devise policies that correct for such mistakes.
But even if governments cannot effectively counteract human imprudence, it may still be that people fare better in social forms that influence or even constrain choices in ways that make serious mistakes less likely. Food culture and its impact on health may be an instructive example here. The idea that people tend to fare best when their lives are substantially constrained or guided by their social and physical context has recently been dubbed contextualism ; the contrary view, that people do best when their lives are, as much as possible, determined by the individuals themselves, is individualism Haybron b.
Recent contextualists include communitarians and many perfectionists, though contextualism is not a political doctrine and is compatible with liberalism and even libertarian political morality.
Contextualism about the promotion of well-being is related to recent work in moral psychology that emphasizes the social character of human agency, such as situationism and social intuitionism. Quite apart from matters of efficacy, there are moral questions about the state promotion of happiness, which has been a major subject of debate, both because of the literature on mistakes and research suggesting that the traditional focus of state efforts to promote well-being, economic growth, has a surprisingly modest impact on happiness.
One concern is paternalism : does happiness-based policy infringe too much on personal liberty? Extant policy suggestions, however, have been more modest. Also relatively light-handed, and perhaps not paternalistic at all, are state efforts to promote happiness directly through social policy, for instance by prioritizing unemployment over economic growth on the grounds that the former has a larger impact on happiness. Other policies might include trying to reduce commute times, or making walkable neighborhoods and green space a priority in urban planning, again on happiness grounds.
A related sort of objection to happiness-based policy argues that happiness, or even well-being, is simply the wrong object of policy, which ought instead to focus on the promotion of resources or capabilities Rawls , Nussbaum , Quong , Sen According to this constraint, governments must not promote any view of the good life, and happiness-based policy might be argued to flout it.
Worries about paternalism also surface here, the idea being that states should only focus on affording people the option to be happy or whatever, leaving the actual achievement of well-being up to the autonomous individual.
As we just saw, however, it is not clear how far happiness policy initiatives actually infringe on personal liberty or autonomy. But a major motivation for thinking happiness the wrong object of policy is that neither happiness nor well-being are the appropriate focus of a theory of justice. What justice requires of society, on this view, is not that it make us happy; we do not have a right to be happy.
Rather, justice demands only that each has sufficient opportunity in the form of resources or capabilities, say to achieve a good life, or that each gets a fair share of the benefits of social cooperation.
However plausible such points may be, it is not clear how far they apply to many proposals for happiness-based policy, save the strongest claims that happiness should be the sole aim of policy: many policy decisions are not primarily concerned with questions of social justice, nor with constitutional fundamentals, the focus of some theories of justice. This is not, in the main, a debate about justice, and as of yet the philosophical literature has not extensively engaged with it.
However, the push for happiness-based policy is a recent development. In coming years, such questions will likely receive considerably more attention in the philosophical literature. Aquinas, Saint Thomas Aristotle Bentham, Jeremy character, moral: empirical approaches communitarianism consequentialism economics: philosophy of emotion ethics: ancient ethics: virtue hedonism Kant, Immanuel liberalism Mill, John Stuart moral psychology: empirical approaches pain paternalism Plato pleasure well-being.
Theories of happiness 2. The science of happiness 3. The importance of happiness 4. The pursuit and promotion of happiness 5. Discourses , 1. Bibliography Adler, Matthew D.
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