The Nature and Significance of Happiness Draft—do not cite without permission Daniel M. Haybron 1. Introduction There is no point trying to define ‘happiness’ once and for all: the word has too many meanings for that. This chapter will focus just on the uses of ‘happiness’ that have come to dominate scientific and popular discussions of well-being. Evidently a lot of people want to be happier, or less unhappy at any rate, and the masses are forking over quite a bit of cash to psychologists, and others peddling the wares of psychologists, to learn how. What exactly are they seeking? Roughly speaking, there are three main answers on offer: a favorable attitude toward one’s life (the life satisfaction theory); a favorable emotional condition (the emotional state theory); or pleasure (hedonism). This chapter will discuss only the first two theories, as many of the points made here about emotional state extend to hedonism, and hedonism seems to me distinctly less promising than the other two views.1 Both life satisfaction and emotional state conceptions of happiness find support in ordinary usage, so we could reasonably use ‘happy’ and its cognates either way. But they are not at all equivalent, and in fact have radically different kinds of practical import. This chapter will briefly examine these two ways of conceptualizing happiness, suggesting that only an emotional state view can sustain commonsense views about the significance of happiness. While it is not an abuse of the language to use terms like ‘happy’ to denote life satisfaction, it can be highly misleading: life satisfaction is much less important than we ordinarily take happiness to be. Better, for most purposes, to understand happiness as a matter of a person’s overall emotional condition. It matters less how we use the word ‘happiness’, however, than that we understand the very different sorts of significance of the different psychological conditions that go by that name, and that research on “happiness” respects these differences. 2. Two literatures on “happiness,” two subject matters We will not say much about Aristotle. Nor Plato, Aquinas, or Kant. The reason is that, as the popular media and most contemporary “happiness” researchers tend to use the term, these thinkers did not clearly have theories of happiness. Consider an example: George is generally very cheerful, highly satisfied with his life, and feels deeply fulfilled. He enjoys his life greatly and has a very pleasant experience on the whole. But he does not realize that his wife, children and friends can’t stand him, ridiculing him behind his back. They pretend to love him only because he is wealthy. If he knew these things, he would be devastated. But he remains ignorant of the facts even into old age, and feels completely satisfied through the end of his life. He never learns the truth.

The reader may recognize this story as a variant of Robert Nozick’s famous “experience machine” case, which involves plugging into a virtual reality device.2 Was George happy? By my lights, yes, and so too by the lights of all but 3 of the 39 undergraduates who assessed this vignette in a questionnaire.3 Yet I do not think George was doing very well, and indeed his pre1

On the troubles with hedonism about happiness, see Haybron 2008. For an important recent defense of hedonism, see Feldman 2010. 2 This study was discussed in Haybron 2008, where a more extensive discussion of linguistic matters appears. 3 The questionnaire was administered at the start of the semester to students in two sections of my introductory ethics course.

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dicament strikes me as deeply unfortunate, even pathetic. Most philosophers also find it unintuitive to ascribe well-being to someone like George. A majority of students seem to have had a similar reaction, disagreeing with the suggestion that he was “fortunate,” “enviable,” “enjoyed a high level of well-being,” or “flourished.” Interestingly, a slight majority of students (21 of 39) also did not think that George had a happy life. Yet virtually all of them also said he was happy. This result actually seems rather intuitive, and probably reflects a crucial ambiguity in the language of happiness: when speaking about whether a person is happy, we typically mean only to be describing the person’s state of mind. Call this the long-term psychological sense of ‘happiness’—“long-term” to distinguish it from the short-lived emotion of feeling happy, which might be just one part, or no part at all, of being happy. But when speaking of someone’s leading a happy life, we seem not merely to be describing her mental state. For one thing, people’s lives contain much more than mental states. Instead, we seem to be making a value judgment, evaluating how well the person’s life is going for her. Is she fortunate, flourishing, doing well, enjoying a high level of well-being? The subject, in short, appears to be what philosophers tend to call well-being, welfare, or flourishing. Call this the well-being sense of ‘happiness’. Most historical literature referring to ‘happiness’, including translations of Aristotle, Aquinas, and so forth, employs the term in this way. Given this impressive historical pedigree, the present chapter could with some justice have taken the well-being notion as its subject matter; it would then be a discussion of the ethical ideal of well-being, the best-known theories being hedonism, desire satisfaction views, and objectivist accounts such as Aristotelianism.4 Yet the vast majority of contemporary research under the rubric of happiness, as well as most popular discussions of it, does not use the term this way: it concerns the purely psychological notion. Suppose that a paper on subjective well-being appears in a prestigious scientific journal, claiming that people in Utah, and every other state for that matter, exhibit higher levels of happiness than those in New York.5 There is no reason to believe that the authors, in making this contention, would be taking themselves to be making a value judgment, or that they are thereby committing themselves to the highly tendentious proposition that Utahans are better off than New Yorkers. It is not hard to imagine a good proportion of Manhattanites allowing that people in Utah have more pleasant lives and so forth, but complaining that they are also idiots—or, as one blogger put it, “New Yorkers Unhappiest People in America (Because We Work Hard and Read Books, Unlike Lazy, Stupid Hicks)”6 The Utahans, for their part, might regard the New Yorkers as self-absorbed neurotics. Surely smart investigators who can get papers published in places like Science would not mean foolishly to embroil themselves in that controversy—which subjective well-being data alone couldn’t possibly settle—even if they would side with the Utahans on this point. They are merely putting forth a psychological claim, in this case amounting to the contention that some people are more satisfied with their lives than others, and that this amounts in an important sense to being happier. This claim seems quite interesting enough, even if it does not try to settle Aristotle’s question about

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For discussion of happiness in the well-being sense see Belliotti and McMahon, this volume. For an excellent survey of theories of well-being, see Crisp 2005. 5 See, e.g., Oswald and Wu 2010. The authors cautiously avoid framing their central claims in terms of happiness. In the press release and in other work, however, they explicitly describe their results in terms of “happiness” (e.g., Oswald 1997). 6 Roy Edroso, Friday, Dec. 18 2009, at blogs.villagevoice.com.

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which individuals are better off. Indeed, it says nothing that conflicts with Aristotle’s writing at all. This chapter follows the contemporary mainstream in focusing on happiness in the longterm psychological sense, and henceforth ‘happiness’ and cognates will take that meaning. Returning to the Utah-New York paper, the relevant questions for our purposes are: is the identification of happiness with life satisfaction—common in the empirical literature—plausible? How important is happiness, thus understood? What do self-reports of life satisfaction tell us about how happy people are, and about their well-being? 3. What is happiness? 3.1 Life satisfaction Earlier we set aside the hedonistic theory of happiness to focus on two other accounts: the emotional state (ES) and life satisfaction (LS) theories. In this section we will consider what each view amounts to and their relative merits, starting with LS. According to LS, happiness consists in being satisfied with one’s life. This is normally understood as a global attitude encompassing all aspects of one’s life over some period of time—typically that specified, vaguely, as “these days,” though LS attitudes could range over shorter or longer time spans, including one’s entire life. A typical LS measure might ask, “taking all things together, how satisfied would you say you are with your life these days?”7 As well, LS is normally viewed as mainly a cognitive state; while it may well be taken to have affective components, and might even be deemed an emotion, it is not simply a feeling. Crucially, it embodies the individual’s judgment about how her life is going. These features of LS bear heavily on its appeal. We are rational creatures, with our own priorities in life, and it seems to matter a great deal how far those priorities are met. Arguably, the best measure of that is the priority-setter’s own judgment, and LS may seem to accord with this intuition. We can understand why people should care about LS. We can also see how its significance differs from hedonistic happiness, or pleasure: whereas pleasure seems to matter because of how it feels, or what it’s like, LS seems to matter because of its connection with whatever we happen to care about in our lives—be it pleasure or something else. (So the common practice of referring to LS research as “hedonic” is deeply misleading.) Moreover, the hedonist looks at our lives merely as the sum of many moments of pleasure or pain, whereas LS allows that a life may be other than the sum of its parts, and evaluates it holistically. Yet LS theories of happiness face a number of objections.8 Two I will mention only in passing: first, it is possible to be satisfied with one’s life while, say, depressed, and many find it implausible to regard such a person as happy. Second, people’s attitudes toward their lives may often be poorly grounded, reflecting only what comes most readily to mind at the moment, or even be nonexistent. The importance of such attitudes is questionable. But here I want to focus on a deeper threat to the importance of LS, one that stems from the very nature and point of LS attitudes. How satisfied you are with your life does not simply depend on how well you see your life going relative to your priorities. It also depends centrally on how high you set the bar for a “satisfactory” life: how good is “good enough?” Rosa might be 7

For a few examples of philosophical views making life satisfaction central to or exhaustive of “happiness,” see Almeder 2000, Brülde 2007, Kekes 1982, Nozick 1989, Sumner 1996, Tatarkiewicz 1976, Telfer 1980. In some cases life satisfaction theories of “happiness” appear to concern the well-being sense of the term. 8 This section builds on points discussed in Haybron 2007, Haybron 2008.

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satisfied with her life only when getting almost everything she wants, while Juliet is satisfied even when getting very little of what she wants—indeed, even when most of her goals are being frustrated. It can seem odd to think that satisfied Juliet, for whom every day is a new kick in the teeth, is better off than dissatisfied Rosa, who nonetheless succeeds in almost all the things she cares about but is more demanding. More to the point, it is not clear why LS should be so important insofar as it is a matter of how high or low individuals set the bar. Suppose Rosa has a lengthy, and not inconsequential, “life list,” and will not be satisfied until she has checked off every item on the list. It is not implausible that we should care about how well Rosa achieves her priorities—e.g., whether her goals are mostly met or roundly frustrated. But should anyone regard it as a weighty matter whether she actually gets every last thing on her list, and thus is satisfied with her life? It is doubtful, indeed, that Rosa should put much stock in it. The point here is not simply that LS can reflect unreasonable demands, but that it depends on people’s standards for a good enough life, and these bear a problematic relationship to people’s well-being, depending on various factors that have no obvious relationship to how well people’s lives are going for them. It may happen that Rosa comes to see her standards as unreasonably high and revises them downwards—not because her priorities change, but because she now finds it unseemly to be so needy. In this case, what drives her LS is, in part, the norms she takes to apply to her attitudes—how it is fitting to respond to her life. Such norms likely influence most people’s attitudes toward their lives—a wish to exhibit virtues like fortitude, toughness, strength, or exactingness, noncomplacency, and so forth. How satisfied we are with our lives partly depends, in short, on the norms we accept regarding how it is appropriate to respond to our lives. Note that most of us accept a variety of such norms, pulling in different directions, and it can be somewhat arbitrary which norms we emphasize in thinking about our lives. You may value both fortitude and not being complacent, and it may not be obvious which to give more weight in assessing your life. You may, at different times, vary between them. Similarly, LS depends on the perspective one adopts: relative to what are you more or less satisfied? Looking at Tiny Tim, you may naturally take up a perspective on your life that makes your good fortune more salient, and so you reasonably find yourself pretty satisfied with things. Then you think about George Clooney, and your life doesn’t look so good by comparison: your satisfaction drops. Worse, it is doubtful that any perspective is uniquely the right one to take: again, it is somewhat arbitrary. Unless you are like Rosa and have bizarrely—not to say childishly—determinate criteria for how good your life has to be to qualify as a satisfactory one, it will be open to you to assess your life from any of a number of vantage points, each quite reasonable and each yielding a different verdict. Indeed, the very idea of subjecting one’s life to an all-in assessment of satisfactoriness is a bit odd. When you order a steak prepared medium and it turns up rare, its deficiencies are immediately apparent and your dissatisfaction can be given plain meaning: you send it back. Or, you don’t return to that establishment. But when your life has annoying features, what would it mean to deem it unsatisfactory? You can’t very well send it back.9 Nor can you resolve to choose a different one next time around. It just isn’t clear what’s at stake in judging one’s life satisfactory or otherwise; lives are vastly harder to judge than steaks; and anyway, what counts as a reasonable expectation for a life is less than obvious since the price of admission is free—you’re just born, and there you are. So it is hard to know where to set the bar, and unsurprising that people can be so easily gotten by trivial influences to move it (Schwarz & Strack, 1999). You might 9

Well….

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be satisfied with your life simply because it beats being dead. The ideal of life satisfaction arguably imports a consumer’s concept, one most at home in retail environments, into an existential setting where metrics of customer satisfaction may be less than fitting. (It is an interesting question how far people spoke of life satisfaction before the postwar era got us in the habit of calling ourselves “consumers.”) In short, LS depends heavily on where you set the bar for a “good enough” life, and this in turn depends on factors like perspectives and norms that are substantially arbitrary and have little bearing on your well-being. The worry is not that LS fails to track some objective standard of well-being, but that we should expect that it will fail to track any sane metric of well-being, including the individual’s own. To take one example: studies suggest that dialysis patients report normal levels of LS, which might lead us to think they don’t really mind it very much. Yet when asked to state a preference, patients said they would be willing to give up half their remaining life-years to regain normal kidney function.10 This is about as strong as a preference gets. A plausible supposition is that people don’t adjust their priorities when they get kidney disease so much as they adjust their standards for what they’ll consider a satisfactory life. LS thus obscures precisely the sort of information one might expect it to provide—not because of errors or noise, but because it is not the sort of thing that is supposed in any straightforward way to yield that information. LS is not that sort of beast. I am not claiming that LS measures never provide useful information about well-being. In fact they frequently do, because the perceived welfare information is in there somewhere, and differences in norms and perspectives may often cancel out over large populations. They may not cancel out, however, where norms and perspectives systematically differ, and this is a serious problem in many contexts, especially cross-cultural comparisons using LS.11 But what the points raised in this section chiefly indicate about LS measures is that we cannot support conclusions about absolute levels of well-being with facts about LS. That people are satisfied with their lives does not so much as hint that their lives are going well relative to their priorities. If we wish reliably to assess how people see their lives going for them, we need a better yardstick than life satisfaction. Life satisfaction theories may capture some uses of ‘happy’, but the term, in its most compelling applications, seems primarily to concern emotional matters, as I will elaborate in the next section. Given that, and the difficulty LS theories have making sense of happiness’ importance, it is misleading for researchers to couch life satisfaction claims as contentions about happiness. If the defeated, glue-sniffing residents of Mordonia report high levels of life satisfaction, but do so only because they deal with hardship by dropping the bar for a satisfactory life to the ground, it would be unenlightening at best to report one’s findings by calling them happy. Would readers not tend to infer, on hearing that Mordonia’s denizens are happy, that they are actually doing pretty well, and that life there is remarkably fulfilling? It would be wiser, it seems, to conceive of happiness in emotional state terms, at least regarding core uses of the word. 3.2 Emotional state theories The ES theory identifies happiness with a person’s overall emotional condition: if one’s emotional condition is sufficiently positive, one counts as happy. The theory differs from hedonism in two respects. First, it incorporates our emotional conditions in their entirety, including 10

Ubel and Loewenstein 2008; Torrance 1976; Riis, Loewenstein, Baron, Jepson, Fagerlin and Ubel 2005 Haybron 2007, Haybron 2008. For a vivid illustration of the problem, see Sen’s discussion of self-reported health in India, which bears little relation to actual health (Sen 2009). 11

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their nonconscious aspects. A depressed person is unhappy, not by virtue of experiencing the unpleasantness of depression, but by virtue of being depressed. Think of how depression involves so much more than simply having unpleasant experiences. It warps one’s whole psyche, indeed one’s personality. Second, the ES theory counts only affects that involve our emotional conditions. Trivial or “peripheral” affects, like merely sensory pains and pleasures, don’t themselves impact how happy we are.12 Consider the intense but sometimes unemotional pleasure of an orgasm—pleasant indeed, but one need not be any happier by virtue of it. In its most basic form, an ES theory identifies happiness solely with an individual’s moods and emotions. (In general, the account seems to center on mood-related states, understood broadly.) Some variants of the ES theory might incorporate, in addition, a person’s mood propensity, which is to say her disposition to experience certain moods rather than others. You might, during a trying period of your life, be highly prone to anxiety, the slightest provocation tending to leave you tremendously anxious. Being so disposed arguably compromises your happiness, even when you aren’t feeling anxious: your emotional condition is worsened. Or, similarly, you might generally be in good spirits, but only when you keep yourself busy; at day’s end, when no longer distracted by the day’s activities, you feel dispirited and depressed. This is a fairly standard portrait, in literature and film, of unhappiness. Interestingly, measures of depression and anxiety—which are essentially measures of certain kinds of unhappiness—often focus on dispositional states, such as “I can laugh and see the funny side of things.”13 Our emotional conditions run more deeply than our experienced moods and emotions, and so too, perhaps, does our happiness. These considerations indicate that happiness, on an ES view, can amount to far more than simply being in a good mood or feeling happy. Indeed the greatest misconception about happiness, in ES terms, may be the common conflation of happiness with feeling happy. This is surely to take too narrow a view of happiness, and certainly of the potential resources of an ES theory. In fact it seems that someone could count as happy without ever feeling happy, say by enjoying a high degree of serenity. Intuitively, any psychological state that plays a role in defining a person’s emotional condition could qualify as happiness-constituting on an ES view, and so the theory could encompass quite a broad range of psychic phenomena. To illustrate, let’s consider a conjecture about the varieties of emotional response. Correct or not, it will serve our purposes if it conveys a sense of the most important states involved in happiness and their diversity. Let’s suppose that each emotional state instantiates one or more of three different modes of response, corresponding to different types of evaluation. (We are assuming that affects function as evaluations in some sense.) At the most basic level are responses pertaining to security or safety: are you taking up a vigilant and defensive posture, as to threatening or insecure circumstances? Emotional responses of this sort most obviously include states of tranquility versus anxiety, but may also include confidence and openness or expansiveness of mood, or a sense of freedom (as opposed to states of “compression,” where you feel small and pressed-upon, or “pinched and hidebound,” as Mill put it). The root idea here concerns being psychically at home in one’s life, and we may call this dimension of happiness the attunement dimension.14 12

For further discussion of emotional state theories, and the contrast with hedonism, see Haybron 2008. From the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) (Zigmond and Snaith 1983). In fact the HADS is arguably one of the better happiness measures, though it focuses inordinately on how the individual is doing now relative to her past condition. 14 For an excellent illustration of happiness understood primarily as attunement, see Ricard 2006. 13

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Assuming one’s situation is secure, the next question is whether it merits investment or effort: are there opportunities to pursue, things worth doing? Here we can distinguish at least two sorts of affirmative response: vitality or exuberance, and flow. Flow is the state you experience when fully caught up in an activity, especially when “in the zone,” as opposed say to boredom, whereas vitality concerns a high state of energy or enthusiasm. Both are stances conducive to heartily engaging with one’s life, and so we can call this the engagement dimension of happiness. The importance of engagement comes to the fore in the case of depression, which is not simply or even mainly sadness, but more centrally a profound form of psychic disengagement or withdrawal from one’s life. Finally, there is the question how to respond to good or bad events in one’s life, which brings us to the endorsement dimension of happiness. Here we find the prototypical emotions, notably states of feeling happy or sad, cheerful or irritable. Most of what we think of when we think about emotions falls under this heading, and also most of what gets studied in research on happiness as an emotional phenomenon. Indeed, there seldom seems to be much recognition that our emotional lives, and certainly happiness, involve anything but endorsement-type affects. This is unfortunate, for three reasons. First, it is at least arguable that endorsement-type affects are the least important aspect of happiness. Historical ideals of living frequently center on states of attunement (e.g., Epicureans, Stoics, Buddhists) or engagement (e.g., Aristotle, Nietzsche), but not so much feeling happy or being cheerful (Democritus, perhaps). Joy gets a lot of attention, to be sure, but typically as a fleeting phenomenon; it is hard to sustain, at least in this life. Second, as just noted, endorsement states are highly sensitive to recent events, and hard to change over the long haul. This makes them both exceptionally prone to adaptation and less apt as objects of pursuit—again, mostly the wrong focus of well-being promotion. If your happiness research centers narrowly on these, you should not be surprised if happiness seems remarkably vulnerable to adaptation and hard to change, as many researchers have claimed. Third, many of our most pressing practical concerns relate to the other aspects of happiness. That Americans aren’t cheerful enough has been rather less salient a social worry than that Americans may be too stressed, anxious, bored, weary, or depressed. These are all concerns about happiness, yet discussions of happiness often omit much of the story—indeed, perhaps the chief part of the story. Whether this is the right way to conceptualize the emotional terrain is open to debate, but it should at least be clear that ES theories can take happiness far beyond the “smiley-face feeling” stereotypes. Indeed, happiness may not even be primarily a matter of feelings at all, but rather of the individual’s psychic orientation or stance toward her life. Consider the way stress impacts our emotional conditions: not mainly through unpleasant feelings—it isn’t usually that unpleasant—but by making us irritable and sapping our ability to enjoy life. This is, I take it, a fairly important phenomenon, and reducing it simply to unpleasant “feelings of stress” misses a rather large part of the picture. Happiness, on an emotional state view, may best be seen, not on the model of feeling cheerful or happy, but more broadly as psychic affirmation—psychically responding to one’s life as if things are going well. In more pronounced forms, as when a person is truly thriving, we might call it psychic flourishing. Needless to say, measures of happiness that focus only on good or bad feelings are omitting a large fraction of the story, and do little to dispel prejudices that happiness is simply a matter of cheery feelings, or being in a “good mood.”

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4. Measuring happiness Our discussion carries an important moral for the study of happiness: measuring happiness demands a certain degree of rigor in specifying exactly what one is trying to measure. Note, first, that asking people how happy they are is a nonstarter. Even setting aside the “well-being” uses of the term, it is clear that common usage employs the term to denote at least two radically different psychological phenomena, with very different significance. Defenders of self-reported happiness will note that such measures exhibit nice psychometric properties, correlating decently with what you’d expect them to correlate with. Yet in matters of well-being, just about everything correlates decently with everything else. You might also get a passable happiness instrument by measuring stomachaches. We can do better. Alternatively, some researchers defend the practice on the grounds that it lets people decide what matters to them. This is confused: seeking reports of life satisfaction in unambiguous language is a way to let people judge their lives by their own standards. But handing people a question of obscure meaning and letting them sort it out before answering whatever they guessed the query to be is a rather different project, and not obviously a good use of research money. Happiness measures, then, require a prior decision about what psychological states are at issue. Happiness research does not require investigators to take a stand on the correct theory of happiness, so long as they make no explicit claims about “happiness.” But it does demand that they decide exactly what states they are interested in and then apply the best feasible measures of those states. This will, pace the points above, probably never take the form of asking people how happy they are. Rather, it will involve applying explicit measures of life satisfaction, or emotional state, or whatever psychological states interest us. If we are interested in people’s emotional conditions, then we will want to use, not “happiness” questions, but emotional state measures (e.g., HADS, or the Positive And Negative Affect Scale). In light of the broad spectrum of states potentially covered by an ES theory, it is a good question whether existing scales adequately cover this territory.15 Clearly, the breadth and richness of our emotional conditions belies any notion that happiness can easily be summed up in a single question. Indeed, it makes plain that even judging our own happiness is no simple affair: there is much to consider, some of it not even conscious, and a lot to overlook if we aren’t careful—and maybe even if we are.16 5. The importance of happiness Given an ES view, happiness obviously matters a great deal, even if not quite as much as many have supposed. As we saw earlier, experience machine-type cases—among others, including “happy slave” cases involving extreme adaptation to deprivation—suggest that neither happiness nor any other mental state can suffice for well-being. But this hardly means that happiness isn’t important for well-being. One response, which currently enjoys some popularity, is to identify well-being with happiness that is suitably grounded in the individual’s life and values, or what L.W. Sumner calls “authentic happiness.”17 In fact happiness arguably qualifies as an important good, in most lives, on all major theories of well-being. Desire theories, for instance, should count happiness as a major good be15

See Haybron 2008. Ibid. 17 In recent years several theorists have proposed authentic happiness-centered theories of well-being (Sumner 1996, Brülde 2007, Haybron 2008, Tiberius and Plakias 2010). Another possibility, of course, is to reject the intuitions taken to militate against pure mental state theories of well-being like hedonism (e.g., Crisp 2006, Feldman 2004). 16

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cause most people so strongly desire it. Similarly, all plausible objectivist theories will accord substantial importance to happiness in some manner or other. Aristotle viewed well-being as a matter of virtuous activity, not happiness,18 yet virtuous activity essentially involves pleasure— taking pleasure in acting well, for instance. Clearly eudaimonia for him includes being happy, on any plausible view of happiness, and Aristotle regards this as a crucial feature of his account. And so, too, do all major ideals of human well-being make it a matter of no small importance whether people are happy or unhappy. This importance comes through in ordinary thinking about happiness, where happiness often appears to serve as a convenient proxy for well-being. That someone is happy arguably creates a presumption that she is doing well, while unhappiness signals the opposite. The presumption is defeasible, for instance if we learn that the happy person has been lobotomized. But for the most part, happiness seems to correspond roughly with a person’s overall well-being. Why does happiness matter? The obvious answer is that it is pleasant. Beyond that, it plays a central role in determining how pleasant our experiences will be, and more broadly how we will respond to things in our lives; recall the earlier points about the dispositional aspects of happiness, and the way stress or anxiety can keep us from enjoying many of life’s pleasures. In this respect happiness matters in much the way that health does. Third, happiness can be seen as a broad evaluation of the person’s life: essentially an emotional counterpart to life satisfaction— the verdict of the individual’s psyche on how he is living. Fourth, the pervasive impact of happiness on one’s psychological condition suggests that happiness might be specially connected to the self: on one recent proposal, the facts about what ways of living make us (authentically) happy partly define who we are—our emotional selves or natures—and so (authentic) happiness can be seen as valuable, not only because it is pleasant, but also because it constitutes a kind of selffulfillment.19 (Think, by contrast, of a Jane-Austenesque woman trapped in a confining lifestyle that leaves her hollow, deflated, flat. Intuitively, the problem is that she’s unable to fully express her nature, her self. Old friends might worry that she’s a “shadow of her former self.”) The ideal of self-fulfillment in turn belongs to a venerable tradition of thinking about human well-being, stretching from Aristotle through Mill to Maslow and the current school of “eudaimonic” psychology. So there are several plausible explanations of the role of happiness in well-being. Yet, while happiness is a major part of human well-being, well-being itself may not be the only thing that matters in life. In fact most commentators take, not well-being, but virtue, to be the foremost element of a good life. The concept of a good life denotes a life that is desirable or choiceworthy all things considered—not just for the person’s own benefit, but period. The notion of a good life thus encompasses all the values that matter in a life; whatever matters in life, matters for a good life. Whereas the concept of well-being more narrowly concerns what benefits a person (is good for her, serves her interests, or makes her better off). In a good life we must above all act well, or at least decently: virtue is our first priority. On this point Utilitarians, Kantians, Aristotelians and perhaps all other serious ethical thinkers agree. There is considerable dispute about whether virtue and well-being are distinct, and sometimes conflicting, elements of the good life, or whether well-being actually consists in virtue, as Aristotelians and Stoics maintain. But there is no dispute about whether virtue sometimes conflicts with happiness. While virtue surely is, on the whole, a better bet for happiness than immorality or the pursuit of worthless goals, there are times when acting well leaves us less happy. This 18 19

Recall that we are using the word here purely as a psychological term, not in its well-being or eudaimonia sense. Haybron 2008.

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point is crucial to bear in mind when thinking about the advancement of happiness. The fact that you would be happier with a divorce, for instance, does not by itself justify seeking one: it depends, at the very least, on what you owe to your children, and your spouse. Sometimes you just have to suck it up. Efforts to promote happiness, then, must be mindful of the limits that other values place on its pursuit.20 Some commentators take such observations to vitiate happiness as a major practical concern. But that doesn’t follow at all: happiness need not be the only thing that matters to merit a pretty lofty spot on the list. For example: one of the chief critiques that have been lodged against many contemporary societies, for instance, is that they seem to have traded the chief sources of happiness—social capital, companionship, a reasonable pace of life—for a bunch of stuff, the result being a lot of lonely, tense rich people whose joyless lifestyles are taxing the biosphere. Billions of other aspiring consumers, meanwhile, see their own happiness in doing the same. Or maybe not; the accuracy of this complaint is not our concern here. The point, rather, is that it matters whether our way of life makes us happy, or unhappy. Happiness matters.

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For further discussion, see Belliotti, this volume.

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Sen, A. (2009). The Idea of Justice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Sumner, L. W. (1996). Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics. New York: Oxford. Tatarkiewicz, W. (1976). Analysis of Happiness (E. Rothert & D. Zielinskn, Trans.). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Telfer, E. (1980). Happiness. New York: St. Martin's Press. Tiberius, V., & Plakias, A. (2010). Well-Being. In J. Doris, G. Harman, S. Nichols, J. J. Prinz, W. Sinnott-Armstrong & S. Stich (Eds.), The Moral Psychology Handbook. New York: Oxford University Press. Torrance, G. (1976). Social preferences for health states: An empirical evaluation of three measurement techniques. Socioeconomic Planning Science, 10, 129-136. Ubel, P. A., & Loewenstein, G. (2008). Pain and Suffering Awards: They Shouldn't Be (Just) about Pain and Suffering. The Journal of Legal Studies, 37(s2), S195-S216. Zigmond, A. S., & Snaith, R. P. (1983). The Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 67(6), 361-370.

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