Happiness and Morality Essay

Morality and happiness, works cited.

Happiness is acquired after the successful achievement of individual values. It is a conscious state that stems out of morality. It can also be defined as a state of satisfaction with life.

It is a joy that is not earned through guilt or which does not clash with ones values. On the other hand, morality can be defined as the state of being upright. It is acquired from living according to the moral standards and values of a society.

To be moral is to shun away immoral behaviors such as drug abuse, burglary, theft, among others. There exist a positive relationship between morality and happiness. Many philosophers hold that happiness results from morality. It is a virtue that is achieved after living uprightly.

Most immoral people find it difficult to be happy because they live with fear of what might happen to them or to their families. This paper will look at the meaning of happiness and morality, the relationship between morality and happiness and why many philosophers hold that in order to be happy, one has to be moral.

Happiness is the satisfaction of rational wishes; it is a state of joy which is achieved after being successful with ones mission in life. It is achieved at the clutch of emotional whims. Happiness is a state of being contented with life and the progress one is making in life.

One can never be happy if he lives in denial of who he/she is or if he/she is not ready to accept the kind of life he is living. It is not something that is given but it is earned. No one can give us the satisfaction we want unless we are ready to do something so as to achieve our values and purpose in life.

When one is happy, one feels good and at peace with himself, and with other members of the society. If a person does not recognize his purpose in life, he can never be happy with what he does (Annas 75). Everyone has a vision or a dream that he want to accomplish in life, if he finds himself on the path of achieving this dream, he feels contented and happy with his efforts.

A robber can never be happy with the injuries sustained or the fear he lives with. This is because he tries to live in an unjust manner by taking other people’s property. One can never be happy at the expense of another person. In happiness there should be no victims or conflict of interest.

According to Annas (117), an individual’s life is surrounded with suffering and happiness. While happiness is a state of being successful, suffering is a signal of failure.

Suffering comes about when one feels disappointed with life or when one fails to achieves his values. Happiness is measured by the success of productive work whereas suffering results from destruction of values. If one tries to live beyond what he can afford, he can never be happy because he will always be aiming at high goals which may not be achievable.

It is good to understand that, for one to be happy, he must set realistic and achievable goals which he will be able to achieve within a given time limit. Happiness is the highest purpose that one can ever live up to. It is the ultimate value of life which is pursued as one tries to maintain his life. It is a reward earned after achieving rational goals that makes life worth living.

Morality is a good judgment of behavior that distinguishes between good and bad decisions, actions, and general way of life. A moral is a good teaching within a moral code that defines how people should live.

On the other hand, immorality is an opposition of what is moral or of the morality. It is a violation of the expected behavior in a society or community. Morality refers to cultural value or code of conduct that differentiates between what is good or bad.

It also refers to what is right or wrong irrespective of what other people think. People are expected to follow the moral code regardless of what they think should be right or wrong. Not all people are able to live to the expectations and more often than not most of them divert from the morals (Hare 56).

If all people lived according to the moral codes, there would be no immorality in the society. The term morality is derived from societal norms; it cannot be defined in definite terms because it depends on the circumstances surrounding a particular situation. Morality is defined in three concepts, that is, in terms of behavior, responsibility, and identity.

Today, morality has become a complex issue that has become difficult to understand or comprehend. It defines how we should behave in the society without causing harm to ourselves or others. There are certain behaviors that are not only detrimental to ourselves but also to the people who live around us.

All of us are expected to be responsible and accountable for our actions so that they do not harm anyone. We should follow our conscience in all our actions and decisions.

It is in morality that we get the principles that help the society to survive. Many people believe that, morality is a religious act although that is not true because everyone is supposed to observe a certain moral doctrine.

Morality ensures that, people live in harmony with one another and treat each other with respect. It is also through morality that we are able to maintain a good relationship with our creator. Morality plays a huge role in our everyday decisions, it makes us good not only to ourselves but to the people around us (Hare 60).

These decisions originate from our conscience which directs us to do good. We should therefore let our conscience decide for us and we should never go against it. Morality creates a happy society, one that respects the rights of people. If we all follow our conscience, then there would be no trace of immorality because people would always be living to their expectations.

As we have seen above, morality results from doing the right things, things that matter to us and those that give us satisfaction. We should all aim at pleasing ourselves and the people related to us.

By doing this, we become happy and contented with our lives. Happiness is as a result of success that is earned after working tirelessly. One can never be happy if he does not want to work. Through moral codes and societal values, we learn how we should behave and this gives us satisfaction.

One cannot be moral and expects to be happy. Some behaviors such as drug abuse interfere with our conscience making us do some actions that we would not do if we were sober. These actions haunts us when we become sober depriving us off the opportunity to be happy.

A person may think that, by taking another person’s property, he will acquire the satisfaction he needs, but this is not the case, because one is left with guilt that haunts him for the rest of his life making him unhappy (Adams 27).

Many philosophers hold that, in order to be happy we must live our life. Life existed before we came into being, and it will be there long after we are gone. We should therefore live as we are and transmit the consecrated live to others. We all have a desire to live and the fear of death.

We feel as if we will live a void after we die and that’s why we find ourselves working hard to ensure that such a void will not be left. Every one of us has a very short period to live; we should therefore ensure that we live happily. This cannot be achieved if our actions and decisions are not thoughtful of others.

Happy living is associated with morality; this has resulted into human civilization. Human beings have created an ideal idea of what it means to be happy. It is not living according to our ancestors that will make us happy but according to human civilization.

Many things have changed which requires an upright mind to recognize them and to act positively to them (Annas 45). With technology, some moral codes have eroded and others have come up, for instance, we do not have to give a seat for an elderly man in a bus because there are so many buses carrying people.

Happiness is the food to our life and it gives us direction. When we are happy, we get motivated to work more productively in order to be even happier. It is through happiness that we get the desire to help other members of the society to achieve their goals. It also directs us on the path to follow for more satisfaction hence we become successful in life.

It is the significance which we affix to happiness that causes our life to be splendid. The moral pretense we live in creates in us a concealing outfit that directs the contemplation of our acts.

“With rare hypocrisy, we find moralities upon principles of duty, of justice, of love, of the fear of heaven, and of hell” (Anon 8). By stripping them, we find the factual purpose of life; that is the look out for happiness. There is a certain group of people in our communities who have not been able to find happiness because of immorality.

They indulge themselves in immoral behaviors such as robbery and prostitution to earn a living. Even though they are able to meet their basic needs, they can never be happy because they are not fulfilling their purpose in life.

In authenticity, man feels affection for and lives in this world only through and in support of happiness. By changing his responsiveness, he develops his feelings and does well instead of being immoral which turns out to be one of the indispensable states of his happiness. If the standard of happiness gushes out from personal awareness, it will protect us from dissatisfactions.

The belief of happiness from time to time occasions decent frustrations but at least happiness has a positive discrimination towards honesty and the vigor of a universal and unavoidable law.

Happiness depends primarily on the honest thoughts, for that reason, let us grant happiness candidly the foremost place, since, triumphantly, it has refused to accept and is defying all the endeavors to suppress it. I am happy because I believe I am moral. However, this does not mean that I have fully succeeded in life.

I am in the process of fulfilling my purpose in life and this gives me satisfaction. The desire of my life is to achieve the highest level of education which will enable me acquire a decent job with a decent salary. With this, I will be able to look after my family and the less privileged members of the society.

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Dimensions of Practical Necessity pp 237–252 Cite as

Morality and Happiness: Two Precarious Situations?

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The relation between morality and happiness is a complex one, and it has been widely discussed throughout the history of ethics. In this chapter, Corinna Mieth scrutinizes several influential proposals of how to understand this relationship. First, she sketches four general ways of relating morality and happiness: The identity thesis, the harmony thesis, the dissonance thesis, and the incompatibility thesis. In the second step, she discusses how far individual life plans are compatible with moral demands. In this context, Mieth outlines the Kantian theory of morality as being worthy of happiness and then turns to Bernard Williams and Friedrich Nietzsche, who both are proponents of a view based on the concepts of individual authenticity and prudential rationality. There are good reasons for not abandoning the theories of Williams and Nietzsche in general; however, the strict demands of morality require subordinating our personal life plans to moral values and obligations. Finally, Mieth argues that even if we include claims to individual happiness in our moral considerations, in specific cases it often depends on chance whether morality and happiness complement each other or are mutually exclusive.

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Mieth, C. (2017). Morality and Happiness: Two Precarious Situations?. In: Bauer, K., Varga, S., Mieth, C. (eds) Dimensions of Practical Necessity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52398-9_12

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Happiness and Goodness: Philosophical Reflections on Living Well

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6 Morality and Happiness

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This chapter examines the connection between morality and happiness. Some philosophers, echoing Plato, have argued that those who are moral are happy, and those who are happy are moral. Among the many who believe that happiness depends on a commitment to morality is Philippa Foot, who finds happiness “a most intractable concept” but defends the claim that “great happiness, unlike euphoria or even great pleasure, must come from something related to what is deep in human nature, and fundamental in human life, such as affection for children and friends, the desire to work, and love of freedom and truth.” Thus she believes that immorality precludes happiness. One historical reason why some philosophers may suppose happiness requires moral behavior is that Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics , claims that eudaimonia , a Greek word often translated as “happiness,” can be achieved only by virtuous activity, the fulfillment of the best aspect of human nature.

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The Virtues of Happiness: A Theory of the Good Life

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Paul Bloomfield,  The Virtues of Happiness: A Theory of the Good Life,  Oxford University Press, 2014, 253pp., $65.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199827367.

Reviewed by Neera K. Badhwar, University of Oklahoma/George Mason University

Paul Bloomfield's book is a welcome addition to the recent literature on virtue and happiness, understood as eudaimonia or a Good Life (10). Happiness in this sense refers to a life that is good for the person living it, as distinct from merely a life filled with happy feelings, or a life that feels fulfilling. Bloomfield's aim is to give a new argument for the ancient claim that virtue is partly constitutive of happiness. His central insight is that happiness requires valuing everything, including oneself and others, at their true worth, and that we are virtuous to the extent that we do. In particular, happiness requires self-respect, and self-respect requires respect for others as ends in themselves. Bloomfield's detailed treatment of these claims, and especially of the second, which links the modern notion of respect and self-respect to the ancient notion of happiness, is both genuinely original and interesting.

Bloomfield argues that "living morally or virtuously is necessary and sufficient for people to live as happily as possible, given who they are and their circumstances" (6). This should not be confused with the Stoic view that virtue is both necessary and sufficient for happiness, for it does not claim that virtue overcomes all misfortune or that our circumstances make no difference to our happiness (6-7). What it claims is simply that, regardless of our circumstances, without virtue we cannot be happy, and with virtue our lives are happier than they could be otherwise. This thesis is defended in three long chapters.

Bloomfield's main foils are ethical egoists such as Hume's Sensible Knave and others who are improperly partial to themselves and those they care about, on the one hand, and "moralists," on the other (Ch. 1). The former believe that their own happiness (or their own and the happiness of those they care about) is the most valuable thing in the world and that morality is generally opposed to their happiness, whereas the latter believe that happiness is one thing and morality another, and when they conflict, morality ought to win (6-7). Both egoists and moralists conceive of morality as something inherently selfless, and happiness as inherently selfish, and this is a big part of the problem. Even when a moralist like Kant acknowledges the moral importance of self-regarding attitudes like, say, self-respect, and condemns servility, he locates the importance of self-respect in a demand of rationality, instead of a demand of our happiness (16 ff.). Morality shows us how to live a good life by coordinating our interests and actions with those of others (22 ff.), by reconciling other-regard with self-regard, and this is the source of morality's authority (40-42).

Bloomfield agrees that immorality is (often) irrational, but points out that this is not enough to justify morality to the egoist -- for if he is persuaded that he is irrational, he may no more care about rationality than about morality. An argument with bite must start from shared premises, that is, premises that both immoralists and those who care about morality share. These premises are that (i) their own happiness is important to them, and (ii) happiness requires self-respect. If the egoists are persuaded that they lack self-respect, they are unlikely to say that they don't care about self-respect.

Bloomfield's main argument against the egoists, whom he calls the Foscos after the arch-villain in The Woman in White , and whom he opposes to the Hartrights, named after the hero of the novel, appears in Ch. 1. The Foscos believe that they are inherently superior to the Hartrights for they, the Foscos, see life as it is, whereas the Hartrights are dupes of morality. The Foscos see themselves as strong and self-respecting, and the Hartrights as weak, self-deceived, and lacking in self-respect (45ff.). Hence the Foscos feel justified in taking advantage of the Hartrights whenever necessary for advancing their own interests. The Foscos and Hartrights agree that being seriously self-deceived is incompatible with self-respect and thus with the Good Life, but each thinks that it's the other who is self-deceived. Bloomfield's task is to show that it's the Foscos who are mistaken.

Bloomfield's first argument is ontological. He argues that paradigm forms of immorality, such as coercion, treachery, and manipulation are harmful to their perpetrators because they are incompatible with self-respect and thus with happiness. Here Bloomfield draws on a distinction made by Stephen Darwall, and before him by Elizabeth Telfer, between "appraisal respect" and "recognition respect" (61). Appraisal respect is based on an individual's achievements or character, whereas recognition respect is based on the fact that, because she is a human being, she is intrinsically valuable, an end in herself and not a thing. Here Bloomfield departs from the usual view that what makes us ends in ourselves is our rationality or agency or capacity for morality, arguing that it is simply our human-ness that bestows this status on us. The Foscos, however, treat others -- or those they don't care about -- as mere things. Either they deny that people are ends in themselves and, thus, deny the existence of recognition respect, or they acknowledge that there is such a thing as recognition respect, but claim that only they have the properties that grounds such respect. In the first case they fail to respect themselves and thus harm themselves. In the second case, they are inconsistent in failing to treat like cases alike, and this makes their self-respect fraudulent (62-63). In either case, they fail to be happy.

But why does failing to treat like cases alike make the Foscos' self-respect fraudulent? Because in denying that the properties that make people ends in themselves are sufficient reason for treating others with recognition respect, the Foscos also in effect deny that the properties that make them ends are sufficient reason for treating themselves with recognition respect. This argument succeeds, however, only if it's true that (i) what makes us ends in ourselves is simply our biological status as human beings, and (ii) no one who thinks that it's our rationality, agency, or capacity for morality that makes us ends can have recognition respect for anyone. Yet both assumptions carry a heavy argumentative burden. Bloomfield does say that his argument succeeds even if (i) is false (65, n. 62). But if it is false, the Foscos could easily say (as people have often said about those outside their own community) that they have recognition respect for members of their own community because only they have the requisite properties. They would still be badly mistaken in thinking that only members of their own community have these properties, but because they have recognition respect for some people, they have some genuine self-respect.

Bloomfield's epistemological argument, however, succeeds without the assumption that it is our human-ness that makes us ends (72-79). Self-respect requires self-knowledge, and a "human being's self-knowledge requires knowledge of other human beings" (75). As he argues earlier, "we could not be who we are as individuals were we not human beings" (68). So if the Foscos are blind to others' status as ends, they must be blind to their own as well. Hence they lack recognition self-respect.

Here again, however, it is important to distinguish between those who don't recognize anyone's , or hardly anyone's, status as ends, and those who don't recognize this status of some classes of people: foreigners, or those who pray to foreign gods, or women, and so on. Sometimes Bloomfield writes as though his argument from lack of self-knowledge applies equally to all such people. But provided that their own community is fairly large, those who downgrade only outsiders do have some understanding of other human beings. Hence, too, they have some self-knowledge and, thus, some self-respect and happiness.

Bloomfield recognizes that the Foscos might say that they don't care about recognition self-respect, only appraisal self-respect. But he argues persuasively that appraisal respect "only makes sense against a background of recognition respect" (88). If we were "mere instruments that can only do what they do and cannot be or do otherwise," there would be no ground for respecting their achievements (88). I agree with Bloomfield here, but note that he is now basing recognition respect on the capacity for choice that most adult human beings have, and not merely on membership in the species, homo sapiens .

As a last-ditch effort, the Foscoes might respond that they don't need self-respect to be happy, but in so responding, they contradict their claim that it's the Hartrights, those dupes of morality, who lack self-respect, thus losing whatever advantage they had over them (89). Bloomfield has turned the tables on the Foscoes.

In Ch. 2 Bloomfield addresses the paradox of happiness, the idea that doing everything for the sake of one's happiness is self-defeating. He rejects Henry Sidgwick's argument that it's self-defeating because such a focus distracts us from investing ourselves in the projects and relationships that make us happy, an investment that is necessary for happiness (96-97). For if that were the only problem, we could decide to put thoughts of our own happiness on the back burner, but still invest ourselves in our projects and relationships as mere means to our happiness, believing that our happiness was the most valuable thing in the world. It's this very notion -- that our happiness is the most valuable thing in the world, and that nothing else has any value independently of our happiness -- that is the problem. Happiness requires a life lived in recognition of the fact that other people have value in their own right, as do many projects, value that is independent of our happiness. It is the proper or virtuous pursuit of such inherently valuable things (or, at any rate, some of them), and virtuous relationships with good people, that make us truly happy. Such pursuits and relationships become partly constitutive of our happiness. The Foscos fail to be happy because they are "improperly and immorally partial" to themselves, their families, or their communities, and have "false beliefs and expectations about how to live well and be happy" (111).

I agree with Bloomfield's general point that happiness requires appreciating the inherent value of people and things, and not merely their instrumental value for our happiness. But his argument raises some important questions. Granted that it's wrong to think that our happiness is the only or even the most important thing in the world, is it also wrong to think that our happiness is the most important thing in the world to us ? The latter is compatible with recognizing that others' happiness may be the most important thing in the world to them , that there are inherently valuable things in the world. Further, if it's the virtuous incorporation of (certain) independently valuable things in our lives that makes our lives happy, then what's wrong with holding that our happiness -- our good life -- is the most important thing in the world to us? Isn't this the same thing as saying that acting virtuously in pursuit of independently valuable things in our lives is the most important thing in the world to us?

A partial answer to these questions is given in Bloomfield's use of Joseph Butler's distinction between our happiness and the things that make us happy (97-98). Bloomfield argues that "If we invest ourselves fully in what makes us happy, and if we have chosen well in this regard, then there is no further reason for us to be motivated by our own happiness per se on top of being already motivated by what we already take to be valuable" (132). We need take account of our happiness again only if we find that our choice is not making us happy.

Now if being "motivated by our own happiness per se" means constantly dwelling on whether or not our choices are producing positive emotions or bringing external rewards, Bloomfield's advice is sound. But Bloomfield goes beyond such advice when he states that "we must not be motivated to tend to [what makes us happy] because of its instrumental value for our own happiness . . . rather, we must genuinely be motivated to tend to it because it is itself of value, as an end in itself, and for no other reason" (133, cf. 207). In short, we must not be motivated by happiness because this is incompatible with being motivated by the inherent value of the things that make us happy. This raises two questions. First, why can't we be motivated by the things that make us happy both as ends in themselves and instrumentally? If I love both math and philosophy, but choose to become a math teacher because it pays better, and the better pay is a means to my happiness, I choose being a math teacher partly for instrumental reasons, and continue to teach it partly for instrumental reasons. Second, why can't we be motivated by something both as an end in itself and as part of our happiness? There are many inherently valuable activities or projects to choose from, but phronesis -- practical wisdom -- dictates that I choose the one that is partly constitutive of my happiness, and continue to engage in it so long as it is part of my happiness. Bloomfield's arguments give no reason to think that I cannot or ought not to do so.

He does say that "when we have to choose between the two," i.e., happiness and what makes us happy, such as our own children, "we ought to regard the latter as more important than our happiness," because if we continue to think that both are equally important, "our motivational structure will be divided and we'll end up undermining our happiness" (130ff.). But this claim is restricted to conflict situations, unlike the claim discussed above. Even this restricted claim, however, can't be true of every valuable thing that makes us happy, for example, math instruction. If I lose interest in teaching math, and become interested in, say, writing novels, I have no good reason to continue teaching math. We ought to choose our children over our happiness because we have an obligation to them, but there is no such obligation to everything valuable.

Bloomfield's reason for not choosing our happiness over our children, viz., that if we do so "we'll end up undermining our happiness," also needs qualification. For if we choose our children over our happiness , we are, by hypothesis, also undermining our happiness. The most Bloomfield can claim here is that doing so is less undermining than not doing so. Sometimes, as Philippa Foot has argued, no matter what we do, we undermine our happiness (2001).

In Ch. 3, Bloomfield makes even stronger claims against regarding happiness as a goal. He argues that happiness is only a side-effect or by-product of living virtuously (207-208). "What ought to take pride of place in practical decision making is not being happy, but being virtuous" (208). But by-products are unimportant, and often undesirable, products, like the smoke from a coal engine. So if happiness is only a by-product, it's hard to see it as valuable, and if it's valuable, it's hard to see why it should altogether drop out of our deliberation and motivation. For reasons given above, instrumental and non-instrumental motivations can exist simultaneously. Further, if happiness consists largely of virtuous activity, then in deliberating about the virtuous thing to do we can't help but be aware that doing it is part of leading a happy life. Bloomfield's sidelining of happiness in deliberation and motivation is in tension with his central argument that we ought to be virtuous because virtue is constitutively necessary for happiness.

There is, of course, a conception of happiness on which Bloomfield's view that happiness ought not to be central in practical decision making is (usually) true: the purely psychological sense of feeling good about one's life, having positive moods, or having a long-term sense of self-fulfillment. But this is not Bloomfield's conception of happiness.

Bloomfield's recommendations in his discussion of love of people are equally austere. He argues that although love of good people is rewarding, we ought not to love them for the sake of the reward -- including the reward of having our love reciprocated (221). Having our love returned is also, he states, a by-product of love (although see 219, n. 74). But at least in romantic love and friendship, being loved or liked back is of the very essence of a relationship worth having, and the desire for being loved or liked, and the belief that we are or will be loved or liked, is necessary for letting our feelings grow and sticking with the relationship.

Bloomfield concludes the book in Ch. 3 by providing a lively and original discussion of the virtues of justice, courage, temperance, and phronesis (practical wisdom), and their role in the good life. He recognizes that the virtues are related to each other, but rejects the unity of virtue doctrine that says that there is only one virtue: phronesis . He also offers an excellent argument against the Stoics, pointing out that if happiness is identical with virtue, then, if a disaster killed everyone except for one virtuous person, on the Stoic view he would, implausibly, continue to be happy (203).

There is much else worth discussing in this book, but space restrictions prevent me from doing so. Bloomfield is more optimistic than I that acting virtuously is always more happiness-making than acting non-virtuously, regardless of the situation, but I agree with his basic point about the centrality of virtue in a happy life. All in all, Bloomfield's book makes an important contribution to the eudaimonistic literature and is also a pleasure to read.

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There are roughly two philosophical literatures on “happiness,” each corresponding to a different sense of the term. One uses ‘happiness’ as a value term, roughly synonymous with well-being or flourishing. The other body of work uses the word as a purely descriptive psychological term, akin to ‘depression’ or ‘tranquility’. An important project in the philosophy of happiness is simply getting clear on what various writers are talking about: what are the important meanings of the term and how do they connect? While the “well-being” sense of happiness receives significant attention in the contemporary literature on well-being, the psychological notion is undergoing a revival as a major focus of philosophical inquiry, following on recent developments in the science of happiness. This entry focuses on the psychological sense of happiness (for the well-being notion, see the entry on well-being ). The main accounts of happiness in this sense are hedonism, the life satisfaction theory, and the emotional state theory. Leaving verbal questions behind, we find that happiness in the psychological sense has always been an important concern of philosophers. Yet the significance of happiness for a good life has been hotly disputed in recent decades. Further questions of contemporary interest concern the relation between the philosophy and science of happiness, as well as the role of happiness in social and political decision-making.

1.1 Two senses of ‘happiness’

1.2 clarifying our inquiry, 2.1 the chief candidates, 2.2 methodology: settling on a theory, 2.3 life satisfaction versus affect-based accounts, 2.4 hedonism versus emotional state, 2.5 hybrid accounts, 3.1 can happiness be measured, 3.2 empirical findings: overview, 3.3 the sources of happiness, 4.1 doubts about the value of happiness, 4.2 restoring happiness to the theory of well-being, 4.3 is happiness overrated, 5.1 normative issues, 5.2 mistakes in the pursuit of happiness, 5.3 the politics of happiness, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the meanings of ‘happiness’.

What is happiness? This question has no straightforward answer, because the meaning of the question itself is unclear. What exactly is being asked? Perhaps you want to know what the word ‘happiness’ means. In that case your inquiry is linguistic. Chances are you had something more interesting in mind: perhaps you want to know about the thing , happiness, itself. Is it pleasure, a life of prosperity, something else? Yet we can’t answer that question until we have some notion of what we mean by the word.

Philosophers who write about “happiness” typically take their subject matter to be either of two things, each corresponding to a different sense of the term:

  • A state of mind
  • A life that goes well for the person leading it

In the first case our concern is simply a psychological matter. Just as inquiry about pleasure or depression fundamentally concerns questions of psychology, inquiry about happiness in this sense—call it the (long-term) “psychological sense”—is fundamentally the study of certain mental states. What is this state of mind we call happiness? Typical answers to this question include life satisfaction, pleasure, or a positive emotional condition.

Having answered that question, a further question arises: how valuable is this mental state? Since ‘happiness’ in this sense is just a psychological term, you could intelligibly say that happiness isn’t valuable at all. Perhaps you are a high-achieving intellectual who thinks that only ignoramuses can be happy. On this sort of view, happy people are to be pitied, not envied. The present article will center on happiness in the psychological sense.

In the second case, our subject matter is a kind of value , namely what philosophers nowadays tend to call prudential value —or, more commonly, well-being , welfare , utility or flourishing . (For further discussion, see the entry on well-being . Whether these terms are really equivalent remains a matter of dispute, but this article will usually treat them as interchangeable.) “Happiness” in this sense concerns what benefits a person, is good for her, makes her better off, serves her interests, or is desirable for her for her sake. To be high in well-being is to be faring well, doing well, fortunate, or in an enviable condition. Ill-being, or doing badly, may call for sympathy or pity, whereas we envy or rejoice in the good fortune of others, and feel gratitude for our own. Being good for someone differs from simply being good, period: perhaps it is always good, period, for you to be honest; yet it may not always be good for you , as when it entails self-sacrifice. Not coincidentally, the word ‘happiness’ derives from the term for good fortune, or “good hap,” and indeed the terms used to translate it in other languages often have similar roots. In this sense of the term—call it the “well-being sense”—happiness refers to a life of well-being or flourishing: a life that goes well for you.

Importantly, to ascribe happiness in the well-being sense is to make a value judgment : namely, that the person has whatever it is that benefits a person. [ 1 ] If you and I and have different values, then we may well differ about which lives we consider happy. I might think Genghis Khan had a happy life, because I think what matters for well-being is getting what you want; while you deny this because you think a life of evildoing, however “successful,” is sad and impoverished.

Theories of well-being—and hence of “happiness” in the well-being sense—come in three basic flavors, according to the best-known taxonomy (Parfit 1984): hedonism, desire theories, and objective list theories. Whereas hedonists identify well-being roughly with experiences of pleasure, desire theorists equate it with the satisfaction of one’s desires— actually getting what you want, versus merely having certain experiences. Both hedonism and desire theories are in some sense subjectivist, since they ground well-being in the individual’s subjective states. Objective list theorists, by contrast, think some things benefit us independently of our attitudes or feelings: there are objective prudential goods. Aristotelians are the best-known example: they take well-being ( eudaimonia ) to consist in a life of virtuous activity—or more broadly, the fulfillment of our human capacities. A passive but contented couch potato may be getting what he wants, and he may enjoy it. But he would not, on Aristotelian and other objective list theories, count as doing well, or leading a happy life.

Now we can sharpen the initial question somewhat: when you ask what happiness is, are you asking what sort of life benefits a person? If so, then your question concerns matters of value, namely what is good for people—the sort of thing that ethical theorists are trained to address. Alternatively, perhaps you simply want to know about the nature of a certain state of mind—happiness in the psychological sense. In this case, some sort of psychological inquiry will be needed, either philosophical or scientific. (Laypersons often have neither sort of question in mind, but are really asking about the sources of happiness. Thus it might be claimed, say, that “happiness is being with good friends.” This is not a view about the nature or definition of happiness, but rather a theory about the sorts of things that tend to make us happy. It leaves unanswered, or takes for granted, the question of just what happiness is , such that friends are a good source of it.)

In short, philosophical “theories of happiness” can be about either of at least two different things: well-being, or a state of mind. [ 2 ] Accordingly, there are essentially two bodies of philosophical literature about “happiness” and two sets of debates about its nature, though writers often fail to distinguish them. Such failures have generated much confusion, sometimes yielding bogus disagreements that prove to be merely verbal. [ 3 ] For instance, some psychologists identify “happiness” with attitudes of life satisfaction while remaining neutral on questions of value, or whether Bentham, Mill, Aristotle, or any other thinker about the good life was correct. Such researchers employ the term in the psychological sense. Yet it is sometimes objected against such claims that life satisfaction cannot suffice for “happiness” because other things, like achievement or knowledge, matter for human well-being. The objectors are confused: their opponents have made no claims about well-being at all, and the two “sides,” as it were, are simply using ‘happiness’ to talk about different things. One might just as sensibly object to an economist’s tract on “banks” that it has nothing to say about rivers and streams.

Which use of ‘happiness’ corresponds to the true meaning of the term in contemporary English? Arguably, both. The well-being usage clearly dominates in the historical literature through at least the early modern era, for instance in translations of the ancient Greeks’ ‘ eudaimonia ’ or the Latin ‘ beatitudo ’, though this translation has long been a source of controversy. Jefferson’s famous reference to “the pursuit of happiness” probably employed the well-being sense. Even later writers such as Mill may have used the term in its well-being sense, though it is often difficult to tell since well-being itself is often taken to consist in mental states like pleasure. In ordinary usage, the abstract noun ‘happiness’ often invites a well-being reading. And the locution ‘happy life ’ may not naturally take a psychological interpretation, for the simple reason that lives aren’t normally regarded as psychological entities.

Contrast this with the very different meaning that seems to attach to talk of “ being happy.” Here it is much less clear that we are talking about a property of a person’s life; it seems rather to be a property of the person herself. To be happy, it seems, is just to be in a certain sort of psychological state or condition. Similarly when we say that so-and-so “is happy” (as opposed to saying that he is leading a happy life). This psychological usage, arguably, predominates in the current vernacular. Researchers engaged in the self-described “science of happiness” usually do not take themselves to be making value judgments when they proclaim individuals in their studies to be happy. Nor, when asserting that a life satisfaction study shows Utahans to be happier than New Yorkers, are they committing themselves to the tendentious claim that Utahans are better off . (If they are, then the psychology journals that are publishing this research may need to revise their peer-review protocols to include ethicists among their referees.) And the many recent popular books on happiness, as well as innumerable media accounts of research on happiness, nearly all appear to take it for granted that they are talking about nothing more than a psychological condition.

Henceforth ‘happiness’ will be used in the long-term psychological sense, unless otherwise specified. Note, however, that a number of important books and other works on “happiness” in recent decades have employed the well-being sense of the term. Books of this sort appear to include Almeder 2000, Annas 1993, 2011, Bloomfield 2014, Cahn and Vitrano 2015, Kenny and Kenny 2006, McMahon 2005, McPherson 2020, Noddings 2003, Russell 2013, White 2006, and Vitrano 2014, though again it is not always clear how a given author uses the term. For discussion of the well-being notion, see the entry on well-being . [ 4 ]

2. Theories of happiness

Philosophers have most commonly distinguished two accounts of happiness: hedonism , and the life satisfaction theory. Hedonists identify happiness with the individual’s balance of pleasant over unpleasant experience, in the same way that welfare hedonists do. [ 5 ] The difference is that the hedonist about happiness need not accept the stronger doctrine of welfare hedonism; this emerges clearly in arguments against the classical Utilitarian focus on happiness as the aim of social choice. Such arguments tend to grant the identification of happiness with pleasure, but challenge the idea that this should be our primary or sole concern, and often as well the idea that happiness is all that matters for well-being.

Life satisfaction theories identify happiness with having a favorable attitude toward one’s life as a whole. This basic schema can be filled out in a variety of ways, but typically involves some sort of global judgment: an endorsement or affirmation of one’s life as a whole. This judgment may be more or less explicit, and may involve or accompany some form of affect. It may also involve or accompany some aggregate of judgments about particular items or domains within one’s life. [ 6 ]

A third theory, the emotional state view, departs from hedonism in a different way: instead of identifying happiness with pleasant experience, it identifies happiness with an agent’s emotional condition as a whole, of what is often called “emotional well-being.” [ 7 ] This includes nonexperiential aspects of emotions and moods (or perhaps just moods), and excludes pleasures that don’t directly involve the individual’s emotional state. It might also include a person’s propensity for experiencing various moods, which can vary over time, though several authors have argued against this suggestion (e.g., Hill 2007, Klausen 2015, Rossi 2018). Happiness on such a view is more nearly the opposite of depression or anxiety—a broad psychological condition—whereas hedonistic happiness is simply opposed to unpleasantness. For example, a deeply distressed individual might distract herself enough with constant activity to maintain a mostly pleasant existence—broken only by tearful breakdowns during the odd quiet moment—thus perhaps counting as happy on a hedonistic but not emotional state view. The states involved in happiness, on an emotional state view, can range widely, far more so that the ordinary notion of mood or emotion. On one proposal, happiness involves three broad categories of affective state, including “endorsement” states like joy versus sadness, “engagement” states like flow or a sense of vitality, and “attunement” states like tranquility, emotional expansiveness versus compression, and confidence. Given the departures from commonsensical notions of being in a “good mood,” happiness is characterized in this proposal as “psychic affirmation,” or “psychic flourishing” in pronounced forms.

A fourth family of views, hybrid theories , attempts an irenic solution to our diverse intuitions about happiness: identify happiness with both life satisfaction and pleasure or emotional state, perhaps along with other states such as domain satisfactions. The most obvious candidate here is subjective well-being , which is typically defined as a compound of life satisfaction, domain satisfactions, and positive and negative affect. (Researchers often seem to identify happiness with subjective well-being, sometimes with life satisfaction, and perhaps most commonly with emotional or hedonic state.) The chief appeal of hybrid theories is their inclusiveness: all the components of subjective well-being seem important, and there is probably no component of subjective well-being that does not at times get included in “happiness” in ordinary usage.

How do we determine which theory is correct? Traditional philosophical methods of conceptual or linguistic analysis can give us some guidance, indicating that some accounts offer a better fit with the ordinary concept of happiness. Thus it has been argued that hedonism is false to the concept of happiness as we know it; the intuitions taken to support hedonism point instead to an emotional state view (Haybron 2001). And some have argued that life satisfaction is compatible with profoundly negative emotional states like depression—a suffering artist might not value emotional matters much, and wholeheartedly affirm her life (Carson 1981, Davis 1981b, Haybron 2005, Feldman 2010). Yet it might seem counterintuitive to deem such a person happy. At the same time, people do sometimes use ‘happiness’ to denote states of life satisfaction: life satisfaction theories do seem faithful to some ordinary uses of ‘happiness’. The trouble is that HAPPINESS appears to be a “mongrel concept,” as Ned Block (1995) called the concept of consciousness: the ordinary notion is something of a mess. We use the term to denote different things in different contexts, and often have no clear notion of what we are referring to. This suggests that accounts of happiness must be somewhat revisionary, and that we must assess theories on grounds other than simple fidelity to the lay concept of happiness—“descriptive adequacy,” in Sumner’s (1996) terms. One candidate is practical utility: which conception of happiness best answers to our interests in the notion? We talk about happiness because we care about it. The question is why we care about it, and which psychological states within the extension of the ordinary term make the most sense of this concern. Even if there is no simple answer to the question what happiness is, it may well turn out that our interests in happiness cluster so strongly around a particular psychological kind that happiness can best, or most profitably, be understood in terms of that type of state (Haybron 2003). Alternatively, we may choose to distinguish different varieties of happiness. It will be less important how we use the word, however, than that we be clear about the nature and significance of the phenomena that interest us.

The debate over theories of happiness falls along a couple of lines. The most interesting questions concern the choice between life satisfaction and affect-based views like hedonism and the emotional state theory. [ 8 ] Proponents of life satisfaction see two major advantages to their account. First, life satisfaction is holistic , ranging over the whole of one’s life, or the totality of one’s life over a certain period of time. It reflects not just the aggregate of moments in one’s life, but also the global quality of one’s life taken as a whole (but see Raibley 2010). And we seem to care not just about the total quantity of good in our lives, but about its distribution—a happy ending, say, counts for more than a happy middle (Slote 1982, Velleman 1991). Second, life satisfaction seems more closely linked to our priorities than affect is, as the suffering artist case illustrates. While a focus on affect makes sense insofar as we care about such matters, most people care about other things as well, and how their lives are going relative to their priorities may not be fully mirrored in their affective states. Life satisfaction theories thus seem to fit more closely with liberal ideals of individual sovereignty, on which how well my life is going for me is for me to decide. My satisfaction with my life seems to embody that judgment. Of course a theory of happiness need not capture everything that matters for well-being; the point is that a life satisfaction view might explain why we should care so much about happiness, and so enjoy substantive as well as intuitive support. [ 9 ]

But several objections have been raised against life satisfaction views. The most common complaint has already been noted, namely that a person could apparently be satisfied with her life even while leading a highly unpleasant or emotionally distressed existence, and it can seem counterintuitive to regard such a person as happy (see section 2.2). Some life satisfaction theorists deny that such cases are possible (Benditt 1978), but it could also be argued that such possibilities are part and parcel of life satisfaction’s appeal: some people may not get much pleasure out of life because they don’t care particularly about affective matters, and a life satisfaction theory allows that they can, in their own fashion, be happy.

Two other objections are more substantive, raising questions about whether life satisfaction has the right sort of importance. One concern is whether people often enough have well-grounded attitudes of life satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Evaluating one’s life as a whole can be a complicated business, and there is some question whether people typically have well-defined attitudes toward their lives that accurately reflect how well their lives measure up relative to their priorities. Some research, for instance, suggests that life satisfaction reports tend to reflect judgments made on the spot, drawing on whatever information comes readily to mind, with substantial influences by transient contextual factors like the weather, finding a dime, etc. (Schwarz and Strack 1999). Debate persists over whether this work undermines the significance of life satisfaction judgments, but it does raise a question whether life satisfaction attitudes tend to be well-enough grounded to have the kind of importance that people normally ascribe to happiness.

The third objection is somewhat intricate, so it will require some explaining. The claim is that a wide range of life satisfaction attitudes might be consistent with individuals’ perceptions of how well their lives are going relative to what they care about, raising doubts about the importance of life satisfaction (Haybron 2016). You might reasonably be satisfied when getting very little of what you want, or dissatisfied when getting most of what you want. One reason for this is that people tend to have many incommensurable values, leaving it open how to add them up. Looking at the various ups and downs of your life, it may be arbitrary whether to rate your life a four out of ten, or a seven. A second reason is that life satisfaction attitudes are not merely assessments of subjective success or personal welfare: they involve assessments of whether one’s life is good enough —satisfactory. Yet people’s values may radically underdetermine where they should set the bar for a “good enough” life, again rendering the judgment somewhat arbitrary. Given your values, you might reasonably be satisfied with a two, or require a nine to be satisfied. While it may seem important how well people see their lives going relative to what they care about, it is not obviously so important whether people see their lives going well enough that they are willing to judge them satisfactory.

If life satisfaction attitudes are substantially arbitrary relative to subjective success, then people might reasonably base those attitudes on other factors, such as ethical ideals (e.g., valuing gratitude or noncomplacency) or pragmatic concerns (e.g., comforting oneself). Shifts in perspective might also reasonably alter life satisfaction attitudes. After the funeral, you might be highly satisfied with your life, whereas the high school reunion leaves you dissatisfied; yet neither judgment need be mistaken, or less authoritative.

As a result, life satisfaction attitudes may be poor indicators of well-being, even from the individual’s own point of view. That people in a given country register high levels of life satisfaction may reflect nothing more than that they set the bar extremely low; they might be satisfied with anything short of pure agony. Another country’s citizens might be dissatisfied with their lives, but only because they set the bar much higher. Relative to what they care about, people in the dissatisfied nation could be better off than those in the satisfied nation. To take another example, a cancer patient might be more satisfied with his life than he was before the diagnosis, for he now looks at his life from a different perspective and emphasizes different virtues like fortitude and gratitude as opposed to (say) humility and non-complacency. Yet he need not think himself better off at all: he might believe himself worse off than he was when he was less satisfied. Neither judgment need seem to him or us to be mistaken: it’s just that he now looks at his life differently. Indeed, he might think he’s doing badly, even as he is satisfied with his life: he endorses it, warts and all, and is grateful just have his not-so-good life rather than some of the much worse alternatives.

For present purposes, the worry is that life satisfaction may not have the kind of significance happiness is normally thought to have. This may pose a difficulty for the identification of life satisfaction with happiness: for people frequently seem to use happiness as a proxy for well-being, a reasonably concrete and value-free stand-in that facilitates quick-and-dirty assessments of welfare. Given the discovery that someone is happy, we might infer that he is doing well; if we learn that someone is unhappy, we may conclude that she is doing poorly. Such inferences are defeasible: if we later find that the happy Ned’s wife and friends secretly hate him, we need not decide that he isn’t happy after all; we simply withdraw the conclusion that he is doing well. So long as happiness tracks well-being well enough in most cases, this sort of practice is perfectly respectable. But if we identify happiness with life satisfaction, then we may have a problem: maybe Sally is satisfied only because she values being grateful for the good things in life. This sort of case may not be merely a theoretical possibility: perhaps the very high rates of self-reported life satisfaction in the United States and many other places substantially reflects a broad acceptance of norms of gratitude and a general tendency to emphasize the positives, or perhaps a sense that not to endorse your life amounts to a lack of self-regard. It is not implausible that most people, even those enduring great hardship, can readily find grounds for satisfaction with their lives. Life may have to be pretty hard for a person to be incapable of affirming it.

Despite these concerns there is significant intuitive appeal in the idea that to be happy is to be satisfied with one’s life. Perhaps a different way of conceiving life satisfaction, for instance dispensing with the global judgment and aggregating particular satisfactions and dissatisfactions, would lessen the force of these objections. Alternatively, it is possible that idealized or qualified forms of life satisfaction would mitigate these concerns for some purposes, such as a theory of well-being. [ 10 ]

A second set of issues concerns the differences between the two affect-based views, hedonism and emotional state. The appeal of hedonism is fairly obvious: the pleasantness of our experience is plainly a matter of great significance; many have claimed it to be the only thing that matters. What, by contrast, motivates the emotional state account, which bears obvious similarities to hedonism yet excludes many pleasures from happiness? The question of motivation appears to be the chief worry facing the emotional state theory: what’s to be gained by focusing on emotional state rather than pleasure?

One argument for taking such a view is intuitive: some find it implausible to think that psychologically superficial pleasures invariably make a difference in how happy one is—the typical pleasure of eating a cracker, say, or even the intense pleasure of an orgasm that nonetheless fails to move one, as can happen with meaningless sexual activity. The intuitive distinction seems akin to distinctions made by some ancient philosophers; consider, for instance, the following passage from Epictetus’s Discourses :

‘I have a headache.’ Well, do not say ‘Alas!’ ‘I have an earache.’ Do not say ‘Alas!’ And I am not saying that it is not permissible to groan, only do not groan in the centre of your being . ( Discourses , 1.18.19, emphasis added).

The Stoics did not expect us never to feel unpleasant sensations, which would plainly be impossible; rather, the idea was not to let such things get to us , to impact our emotional conditions.

Why should anyone care to press such a distinction in characterizing happiness? For most people, the hedonic difference between happiness on an emotional state versus a hedonistic view is probably minimal. But while little will be lost, what will be gained? One possibility is that the more “central” affects involving our emotional conditions may bear a special relation to the person or the self , whereas more “peripheral” affects, like the pleasantness of eating a cracker, might pertain to the subpersonal aspects of our psychologies. Since well-being is commonly linked to ideas of self-fulfillment, this sort of distinction might signal a difference in the importance of these states. Another reason to focus on emotional condition rather than experience alone may be the greater psychological depth of the former: its impact on our mental lives, physiology, and behavior is arguably deeper and more pervasive. This enhances the explanatory and predictive significance of happiness, and more importantly its desirability: happiness on this view is not merely pleasant, but a major source of pleasure and other good outcomes (Fredrickson 2004, Lyubomirsky, King et al . 2005). Compare health on this score: while many think it matters chiefly or entirely because of its connection with pleasure, there are few skeptics about the importance of health. As well, emotional state views may capture the idea that happiness concerns the individual’s psychological orientation or disposition : to be happy, on an emotional state theory, is not just to be subjected to a certain sequence of experiences, but for one’s very being to manifest a favorable orientation toward the conditions of one’s life—a kind of psychic affirmation of one’s life. This reflects a point of similarity with life satisfaction views of happiness: contra hedonism, both views take happiness to be substantially dispositional, involving some sort of favorable orientation toward one’s life. But life satisfaction views tend to emphasize reflective or rational endorsement, whereas emotional state views emphasize the verdicts of our emotional natures.

While hedonism and emotional state theories are major contenders in the contemporary literature, all affect-based theories confront the worries, noted earlier, that motivate life satisfaction views—notably, their looser connection with people’s priorities, as well as their limited ability to reflect the quality of people’s lives taken as a whole.

Given the limitations of narrower theories of happiness, a hybrid account such as a subjective well-being theory may seem an attractive solution. This strategy has not been fully explored in the philosophical literature, though Sumner’s “life satisfaction” theory may best be classified as a hybrid (1996; see also Martin 2012). In any event, a hybrid approach draws objections of its own. If we arrive at a hybrid theory by this route, it could seem like either the marriage of two unpromising accounts, or of a promising account with an unpromising one. Such a union may not yield wholesome results. Second, people have different intuitions about what counts as happiness, so that no theory can accommodate all of them. Any theory that tries to thus risks pleasing no one. A third concern is that the various components of any hybrid are liable to matter for quite different reasons, so that happiness, thus understood, might fail to answer to any coherent set of concerns. Ascriptions of happiness could be relatively uninformative if they cast their net too widely.

3. The science of happiness

With the explosive rise of empirical research on happiness, a central question is how far, and how, happiness might be measured. [ 11 ] There seems to be no in-principle barrier to the idea of measuring, at least roughly, how happy people are. Investigators may never enjoy the precision of the “hedonimeter” once envisaged by Edgeworth to show just how happy a person is (Edgeworth 1881). Indeed, such a device might be impossible even in principle, since happiness might involve multiple dimensions that either cannot be precisely quantified or summed together. If so, it could still be feasible to develop approximate measures of happiness, or at least its various dimensions. Similarly, depression may not admit of precise quantification in a single number, yet many useful if imprecise measures of depression exist. In the case of happiness, it is plausible that even current measures provide information about how anxious, cheerful, satisfied, etc. people are, and thus tell us something about their happiness. Even the simplest self-report measures used in the literature have been found to correlate well with many intuitively relevant variables, such as friends’ reports, smiling, physiological measures, health, longevity, and so forth (Pavot 2008).

Importantly, most scientific research needs only to discern patterns across large numbers of individuals—to take an easy case, determining whether widows tend to be less happy than newlyweds—and this is compatible with substantial unreliability in assessing individual happiness. Similarly, an inaccurate thermometer might be a poor guide to the temperature, but readings from many such thermometers could correlate fairly well with actual temperatures—telling us, for instance, that Minnesota is colder than Florida.

This point reveals an important caveat: measures of happiness could correlate well with how happy people are, thus telling us which groups of people tend to be happier, while being completely wrong about absolute levels of happiness. Self-reports of happiness, for instance, might correctly indicate that unemployed people are considerably less happy than those with jobs. But every one of those reports could be wrong, say if everyone is unhappy yet claims to be happy, or vice-versa, so long as the unemployed report lower happiness than the employed. Similarly, bad thermometers may show that Minnesota is colder than Florida without giving the correct temperature.

Two morals emerge from these reflections. First, self-report measures of happiness could be reliable guides to relative happiness, though telling us little about how happy, in absolute terms, people are. We may know who is happier, that is, but not whether people are in fact happy. Second, even comparisons of relative happiness will be inaccurate if the groups being compared systematically bias their reports in different ways. This worry is particularly acute for cross-cultural comparisons of happiness, where differing norms about happiness may undermine the comparability of self-reports. The French might report lower happiness than Americans, for instance, not because their lives are less satisfying or pleasant, but because they tend to put a less positive spin on things. For this reason it may be useful to employ instruments, including narrower questions or physiological measures, that are less prone to cultural biasing. [ 12 ]

The discussion thus far has assumed that people can be wrong about how happy they are. Is this plausible? Some have argued that (sincerely) self-reported happiness cannot, even in principle, be mistaken. If you think you’re happy, goes a common sentiment, then you are happy. This claim is not plausible on a hedonistic or emotional state view of happiness, since those theories take judgments of happiness to encompass not just how one is feeling at the moment but also past states, and memories of those can obviously be spurious. Further, it has been argued that even judgments of how one feels at the present moment may often be mistaken, particularly regarding moods like anxiety. [ 13 ]

The idea that sincere self-reports of happiness are incorrigible can only be correct, it seems, given a quite specific conception of happiness—a kind of life satisfaction theory of happiness on which people count as satisfied with their lives so long as they are disposed to judge explicitly that they are satisfied with their lives on the whole. Also assumed here is that self-reports of happiness are in fact wholly grounded in life satisfaction judgments like these—that is, that people take questions about “happiness” to be questions about life satisfaction. Given these assumptions, we can plausibly conclude that self-reports of happiness are incorrigible. 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 a similar vein, the common practice of measuring happiness simply by asking people to report explicitly on how “happy” they are is sometimes defended on the grounds that it lets people decide for themselves what happiness is. The reasoning again seems to presuppose, controversially, that self-reports of happiness employ a life satisfaction view of happiness, the idea being that whether you are satisfied (“happy”) will depend on what you care about. Alternatively, the point might be literally to leave it up to the respondent to decide whether ‘happy’ means hedonic state, emotional state, life satisfaction, or something else. Thus one respondent’s “I’m happy” might mean “my experience is generally pleasant,” while another’s might mean “I am satisfied with my life as a whole.” It is not clear, however, that asking ambiguous questions of this sort is a useful enterprise, since different respondents will in effect be answering different questions.

To measure happiness through self-reports, then, it may be wiser to employ terms other than ‘happiness’ and its cognates—terms whose meaning is relatively well-known and fixed. 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. [ 14 ] This stratagem may be all the more necessary in cross-cultural work, where finding suitable translations of ‘happy’ can be daunting—particularly when the English meaning of the term remains a matter of contention (Wierzbicka 2004).

This entry focuses on subjective well-being studies, since that work is standardly deemed “happiness” research. But psychological research on well-being can take other forms, notably in the “eudaimonic”—commonly opposed to “hedonic”—literature, which assesses a broader range of indicators taken to represent objective human needs, such as meaning, personal growth, relatedness, autonomy, competence, etc. [ 15 ] (The assimilation of subjective well-being to the “hedonic” realm may be misleading, since life satisfaction seems primarily to be a non -hedonic value, as noted earlier.) Other well-being instruments may not clearly fall under either the “happiness” or eudaimonic rubrics, for instance extending subjective well-being measures by adding questions about the extent to which activities are seen as meaningful or worthwhile (White and Dolan 2009). 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. [ 16 ] Here is a sampling of oft-cited claims:

  • Most people are happy
  • People adapt to most changes, tending to return over time to their happiness “set point”
  • People are prone to make serious mistakes in assessing and pursuing happiness
  • Material prosperity has a surprisingly modest impact on happiness

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 1996). 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 traditional view among hedonists has indeed been that happiness requires no more than a >1:1 ratio of positive to negative affect, this contention has received little defense and has been disputed in the recent literature. Some investigators have claimed that “flourishing” requires greater than a 3:1 ratio of positive to negative affect, as this ratio might represent a threshold for broadly favorable psychological functioning (e.g., Larsen and Prizmic 2008). 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. [ 17 ] As well, twin studies have found that subjective well-being is substantially heritable, with .50 being a commonly accepted figure. Consequently many researchers have posited that each individual has a characteristic “set point” level of happiness, toward which he tends to gravitate over time. Such claims have caused some consternation over whether the pursuit and promotion of happiness are largely futile enterprises (Lykken and Tellegen 1996; Millgram 2000). 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. [ 18 ] This point was already apparent from the literature on correlates and causes of happiness, discussed below: if things like relationships and engaging work are important for happiness, then happiness is probably not simply a matter of personality or temperament. 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 150 years (Fogel 2005). Yet height is considered much more heritable than happiness, with typical heritability estimates ranging from .60 to over .90 (e.g., Silventoinen, Sammalisto et al . 2003). [ 19 ]

The question of mistakes will be taken up in section 5.2. 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. According to the well-known “Easterlin Paradox,” for instance, wealthier people do tend to be happier within nations, but richer nations are little happier than less prosperous counterparts, and—most strikingly—economic growth has virtually no impact (Easterlin 1974). In the U.S., for example, measured happiness has not increased significantly since at least 1947, despite massive increases in wealth and income. In short, once you’re out of poverty, absolute levels of wealth and income make little difference in how happy people are.

Against these claims, some authors have argued that absolute income has a large impact on happiness across the income spectrum (e.g., Stevenson and Wolfers 2008). The question continues to be much debated, but in 2010 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 2010; Diener, Ng et al . 2010). 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 (.44 in the global sample), at all levels, with life satisfaction—strictly speaking, a “life evaluation” measure that asks respondents to rate their lives without saying whether they are satisfied. Yet the correlation of household income with the affect measures is far weaker: globally, .17 for positive affect, –.09 for negative affect; and in the United States, essentially zero above $75,000 (though quite strong at low income levels). For more recent discussions of empirical work, see Jebb et al. 2018 along with relevant chapters in Diener et al. 2018 and the annual World Happiness Reports from 2012 onward (Helliwell et al. 2012). 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. [ 20 ] Such “positive outliers” suggest that some societies can support high levels of happiness with extremely modest material holdings. 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. [ 21 ] Significant correlates may also include—among many others—religion, good governance, trust, helping others, values (e.g., having non-materialistic values), achieving goals, not being unemployed, and connection with the natural environment. [ 22 ]

An illustrative study of the correlates of happiness from a global perspective is the Gallup World Poll study noted earlier (Diener, Ng et al . 2010; see also Jebb et al. 2020). 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. The affect measures, by contrast, correlated most strongly with what the authors call “psychosocial prosperity”: whether people reported being treated with respect in the last day, having family and friends to count on, learning something new, doing what they do best, and choosing how their time was spent.

What these results show depends partly on the reliability of the measures. One possible source of error is that this study might exaggerate the relationship between life satisfaction and material attainments through the use of a “ladder” scale for life evaluation, ladders being associated with material aspirations. Errors might also arise through salience biases whereby material concerns might be more easily recalled than other important values, such as whether one has succeeded in having children; or through differences in positivity biases across income levels (perhaps wealthier people tend to be more “positive-responding” than poorer individuals). Another question is whether the affect measures adequately track the various dimensions of people’s emotional lives. 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. [ 23 ] A further point of uncertainty is the causal story behind the correlations—whether the correlates, like psychosocial prosperity, cause happiness; whether happiness causes them; whether other factors cause both; or, as is likely, some combination of the three.

Such concerns duly noted, the research plausibly suggests that, on average, material progress has some tendency to help people to better get what they want in life, as found in the life satisfaction measures, while relationships and engaging activities are more important for people’s emotional lives. What this means for happiness depends on which view of happiness is correct.

4. The importance of happiness

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 2000, 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. [ 24 ] (See the entry on 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. The most influential objection of this sort is Robert Nozick’s experience machine case, wherein we are asked to imagine a virtual reality device that can perfectly simulate any reality for its user, who will think the experience is genuine (Nozick 1974). 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. [ 25 ]

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. The most influential of these worries involves adaptation , where individuals facing oppressive circumstances scale back their expectations and find contentment in “small mercies,” as Sen put it. [ 26 ] Even a slave might come to internalize the values of his oppressors and be happy, and this strikes most as an unenviable life indeed. Related worries involve people with diminished capacities (blindness, Down Syndrome), or choosing to lead narrow and cramped or simpleminded lives (e.g., counting blades of grass). 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. Here ‘good life’ means a life that is good all things considered, taking account of all the values that matter in life, whether they benefit the individual or not. 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. [ 27 ] We ought above all to act and live well, or at least not badly or wrongly. 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. But it does mean, at least, that when being happy requires acting badly, one’s happiness must be sacrificed. 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.g., Singer 1972).

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.W. Sumner, identifies well-being with authentic happiness —happiness that is authentic in the sense of being both informed and autonomous (Sumner 1996). The root idea is that well-being involves being happy, where one’s happiness is a response of one’s own (autonomous), to a life that genuinely is one’s own (informed). The authenticity constraint is meant to address both experience machine-type worries and “happy slave” objections relating to adaptation, where happiness may be non-autonomous, depending on manipulation or the uncritical acceptance of oppressive values. Since these have been the most influential objections to mental state accounts of well-being, Sumner’s approach promises to considerably strengthen the position of happiness-centered approaches to well-being, and several philosophers have developed variants or close relations of the authentic happiness theory (Brülde 2007, Haybron 2008a, Tiberius and Plakias 2010, Višak 2015). The approach remains fairly new, however, so its long-term prospects remain unclear. [ 28 ]

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. Shelly Kagan, for instance, has suggested that welfare hedonism could be correct as a theory of how well a person is doing, but not of how well a person’s life is going, which should perhaps be regarded as a distinct value (Kagan 1992, 1994). 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. [ 29 ] An interesting possibility is that the locution ‘happy life’, and the corresponding well-being sense of happiness, actually refers to a specific variety of well-being—perhaps well-being in the wide sense just suggested, or well-being taken as an ideal state, an ultimate goal of deliberation. This might explain the continued use of ‘happiness’ for the well-being notion in the philosophical literature, rather than the more standard ‘wellbeing.’

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 1907 [1966], Brandt 1979, 1989).

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.g., NE , Bk. I 8; Bk. VII 13). 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. Yet ‘happiness’ also serves as a blanket term for a domain of concern that involves both positive and negative states, namely the kinds of mental states involved in being happy or unhappy. Just as “health” care tends to focus mainly on ill health, so might happiness researchers choose to focus much of their effort on the study and alleviation of unhappiness—depression, suffering, anxiety, and other conditions whose importance is uncontroversial. The study of happiness need be no more concerned with smiles than with frowns.

5. The pursuit and promotion of happiness

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. Prudential norms need not be as plain as “don’t shoot yourself in the foot.” On Sumner’s authentic happiness view of well-being, for instance, we stand to gain little by pursuing happiness in inauthentic ways, for instance through self-deception or powerful drugs like Huxley’s soma , which guarantees happiness come what may (Huxley 1932 [2005]). 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. Another possibility is that such drugs sometimes promote authenticity, if for instance a depressive disorder prevents a person from being “himself.”

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.) are not what we normally regard as moral virtues. Some morally permissible methods of pursuing happiness may nonetheless be inappropriate because they conflict with such “ethical” virtues. 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. One might, for instance, engage in philanthropy solely to make oneself happier, and indeed work hard at fine-tuning one’s assistance to maximize the hedonic payoff. This sort of conduct would not obviously instantiate the virtue of compassion or kindness, and indeed might be reasonably deemed contemptible. Similarly, it might be admirable, morally or otherwise, to be grateful for the good things in one’s life. 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. If expressions of gratitude become phony or purely instrumental, the sole reason for giving thanks being to become happy—and not that one actually has something to be thankful for—then the “gratitude” might cease to be admirable, and may indeed be unvirtuous. [ 30 ]

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. One oft-heard claim, commonly called the “paradox of hedonism,” is that the pursuit of happiness is self-defeating; to be happy, don’t pursue happiness. It is not clear how to interpret this dictum, however, so that it is both interesting and true. It is plainly imprudent to make happiness one’s focus at every moment, but doubtful that this has often been denied. 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 . 2003, Lyubomirsky 2007).

That happiness is sometimes worth seeking does not mean we will always do a good job of it (Haybron 2008b). 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):

  • Assessing how happy we are, or were in the past (Haybron 2007)
  • Predicting (“forecasting”) what will make us happy (Gilbert 2006)
  • Choosing rationally (Kahneman and Tversky 2000, Gilovitch, Griffin et al . 2002, Hsee and Hastie 2006)

A related body of literature explores the costs and benefits of (ostensibly) making it easier to pursue happiness by increasing people’s options; it turns out that having more choices might often make people less happy, for instance by increasing the burdens of deliberation or the likelihood of regret (Schwartz 2004). 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 2002, 2015, Haybron 2014). Human functioning, and the pursuit of happiness, may be more profoundly social than many commentators have assumed. [ 31 ]

Taken together, this research bears heavily on two central questions in the philosophical literature: first, the broad character of human nature (e.g., in what sense are we rational animals? How should we conceive of human autonomy?); second, the philosophical ideals of the good society and good government.

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. [ 32 ]

Let’s consider the rationale for policies aimed at promoting well-being. In political thought, the modern liberal tradition has tended to assume an optimistic view of human nature and the individual’s capacities for prudent choice. Partly for this reason, the preservation and expansion of individual freedoms, including people’s options, is widely taken to be a central goal, if not the goal, of legitimate governments. 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. [ 33 ] Of course, government intervention can introduce other sorts of mistakes, and there is some debate about whether such measures are likely to do more harm than good (e.g., Glaeser 2006).

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 2008b). 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. [ 34 ]

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? Some fear a politics that may too closely approximate Huxley’s Brave New World, where the state ensures a drug-induced happiness for all (Huxley 1932 [2005]). Extant policy suggestions, however, have been more modest. Efforts to steer choice, for instance in favor of retirement savings, may be paternalistic, but advocates argue that such policies can be sufficiently light-handed that no one should object to them, in some cases even going so far as to deem it “libertarian paternalism” (Thaler and Sunstein 2008). [ 35 ] The idea is that gentle “nudges,” like setting default options on hiring forms to setting aside money for retirement, interfere only trivially with choice, imposing little or no cost for those who wish to choose differently, and would very likely be welcomed by most of those targeted.

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. Some may deem such measures paternalistic insofar as they trade freedom (in the form of economic prosperity) for a substantive good, happiness, that people value unevenly, though it has also been argued that refusing to take citizens’ values like happiness into consideration in policy deliberation on their behalf can amount to paternalism (Haybron and Alexandrova 2013).

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 1971, Nussbaum 2000, Quong 2011, Sen 2009). Several reasons have been cited for this sort of view, one being that policies aimed at promoting happiness or well-being violate commonly accepted requirements of “liberal neutrality,” according to which policy must be neutral among conceptions of the good. 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. A further worry is that, happiness isn’t really, or primarily, what matters for human well-being (Nussbaum 2008).

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. Happiness could be a poor candidate for the “currency” of justice, yet still remain a major policy concern. Indeed, the chief target of happiness policy advocates has been, not theories of justice, but governments’ overwhelming emphasis on promoting GDP and other indices of economic growth. 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.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.
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Aquinas, 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

Acknowledgments

For helpful comments, many thanks are due to Anna Alexandrova, Robert Biswas-Diener, Thomas Carson, Irwin Goldstein, Richard Lucas, Jason Raibley, Eric Schwitzgebel, Stephen Schueller, Adam Shriver, Edward Zalta, and an anonymous referee for the SEP. Portions of Section 2 are adapted from Haybron 2008, “Philosophy and the Science of Subjective Well-Being,” in Eid and Larsen, The Science of Subjective Well-Being , and used with kind permission of Guilford Press.

Copyright © 2020 by Dan Haybron < dan . haybron @ slu . edu >

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morality and happiness essay

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Happiness according to aristotle.

Citation with persistent identifier: Reece, Bryan C. “Happiness According to Aristotle.”  CHS Research Bulletin  7 (2019). http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:ReeceB.Happiness_According_to_Aristotle.2019

Aristotle thinks that questions about how we should live as individuals and as communities must be answered with reference to a more fundamental question: What is the happy life for a human being? This question about happiness thus holds the key for the entire Aristotelian system of moral and political philosophy. Unfortunately, while the centrality of Aristotle’s theory of happiness is uncontroversial, there is no agreement about the content of his theory. Particularly controversial are his remarks on the relationship between, and especially the relative importance of, theoretical and practical activity in the ideal human life. I here give an outline sketch of a new interpretation of Aristotle’s remarks on this relationship and its ramifications for human happiness.

How should we live? Aristotle proposes to address this fundamental philosophical question by giving interrelated answers to two further questions: What kinds of activities are the best expressions of distinctively human identity? What is the proper balance of theoretical and practical activity in the ideal human life?

Aristotle’s answers have generated abiding interest, but also lingering puzzlement. He thinks that humans are distinctively rational, having the ability to reason theoretically and practically. The best activities for them to perform, and therefore the activities that constitute their happiness (which Aristotle thinks is itself an activity), are virtuous (excellent) rational activities ( Nicomachean Ethics 1.7, 1098 a 16–17): manifestations of reliable practical dispositions like courage, justice, generosity, and self-control, which are exercises of practical wisdom, as well as of reliable theoretical dispositions such as insightfulness, understanding, and theoretical wisdom. The manifestation of theoretical wisdom ( sophia ) turns out to be especially important for Aristotle. He says that this activity, theoretical contemplation ( theôria ), is what human happiness is ( NE 10.8, 1178 b 32). This is surprising, for if human happiness simply consists in theoretical contemplation, we might well wonder what role Aristotle envisions for the practical activities to which he devotes far more space in his ethical and political works than he does to contemplation.

Interpreters have struggled with the problem of reconciling Aristotle’s assignment of preeminent status in his theory of happiness to theoretical contemplation and the natural thought, encouraged by the flow of his discussions of virtuous behavior, that practical activities are permissible and valuable features of happy human lives. [1] I call this ‘the Standard Problem of Happiness.’ But there is an even more difficult version of this interpretive problem, which I call ‘the Hard Problem of Happiness.’ That problem is to explain how Aristotle could have thought that happiness is theoretical contemplation while also affirming that a reliable pattern of virtuous practical activity is non-optional and not coherently regrettable for happy humans. I here offer a very brief outline of my way of addressing this problem. [2]

A major obstacle to solving the Hard Problem is an assumption about the relationship between theoretical wisdom, which is manifested in theoretical contemplation, and practical wisdom, which is manifested in virtuous practical activities. The standard view is that Aristotle thinks that human beings can have and reliably manifest theoretical wisdom without having and reliably manifesting practical wisdom. That view is based on a passage apparently claiming that two pre-Socratic philosophers, Anaxagoras and Thales, had theoretical but not practical wisdom ( NE 6.7, 1141 b 2–16). The evidential value of this passage fades away on closer inspection. It is a report of others’ opinions that Aristotle does not fully endorse, but the appeal of which he explains. Thus, the purported textual evidence for the standard view does not support it. In fact, Aristotle gives strong reasons for thinking that having and reliably manifesting practical wisdom is necessary for having and reliably manifesting theoretical wisdom: only the continual, reliable exercise of practical wisdom, in activities that express such virtues as self-control and justice, makes it behaviorally feasible for embodied, socially situated, choice-making beings like us to develop and exercise theoretical wisdom. This means that a life of theoretical contemplation, in Aristotle’s strict sense, cannot be successfully lived without the level of virtuous public engagement that practical wisdom dictates in each circumstance. This interpretation solves a major problem for the standard view: it is on that view, wrongly, an open question whether any particular instance of theoretical contemplation is performed in the right way, at the right time, and for the right reasons. One who is a contemplator in Aristotle’s strict sense also has practical wisdom, and practical wisdom guarantees that one reliably chooses to act in the right way, at the right time, and for the right reasons.

This interpretation requires, as any solution to the Hard Problem does, that theoretical contemplation and virtuous practical activities are included in one and the same happy life. But Aristotle appears to claim at NE 10. 7, 1178 a 2 – 10. 8, 1178 a 14 that there are two kinds of happy life: one in accordance with theoretical contemplation, the other with virtuous practical activity. This claim is notoriously problematic. Properly interpreted, though, Aristotle does not here distinguish between two kinds of happiness, but rather between two ways of being proper to human beings that apply within one and the same happy life. [3] Theoretical contemplation is proper to humans in one way, virtuous practical activity in another.

But many interpreters see a problem for the idea that theoretical contemplation is proper to human beings: Aristotle also says that divine beings contemplate ( Metaph . 12.7, 1072 b 13–30, NE 10.8, 1178 b 7–32). [4] It would initially appear, then, that Aristotle is committed both to affirming and to denying that theoretical contemplation is proper to humans. However, careful scrutiny of his descriptions of the nature of divine and human contemplation reveals them to be type-distinct activities. On his view, human contemplation, but not divine contemplation, is a manifestation of theoretical wisdom, a virtue that includes two further virtues: a particular sort of nous , the developed capacity to grasp first principles intuitively as first principles, and epistêmê , the developed capacity for scientific demonstration from first principles ( NE 6.7, 1141 a 18–20, 6.3, 1139 b 31–32). So, Aristotle’s claim that divine beings contemplate does not conflict with his view that theoretical contemplation, understood as the manifestation of theoretical wisdom, is proper to human beings.

On the account so far sketched, theoretical contemplation and virtuous practical activities are necessary parts of human happiness, and only happy human beings engage in these activities. So, theoretical contemplation and virtuous practical activities are necessary parts of human happiness and are also unique to it. In short, they are proper to human happiness. But they are not each proper to human happiness in the same way. Theoretical contemplation is necessary for and unique to happiness as what happiness is , whereas virtuous practical activities are necessary and unique parts of happiness in a different, and secondary, way. Aristotle often distinguishes between primary and secondary ways of being proper: one is the essence ( ousia ) and the other is a unique, necessary property ( idion , pl. idia ). Aristotle relies on the theory on which this distinction between two ways of being proper is based in articulating his view of happiness in the Nicomachean Ethics , for he seeks an essence-specifying definition of human happiness from which the unique, necessary parts of happiness can be deduced. Theoretical contemplation is the essence of human happiness, the activity that makes it what it is. That is why Aristotle says that happiness is theoretical contemplation. (This addresses the first half of the Hard Problem.) Virtuous activities are unique, necessary properties of human happiness. Even though they are not what happiness is, Aristotle thinks that they are non-optional and non-regrettable parts of happiness. (This addresses the second half of the Hard Problem). It would be incoherent to wish that happiness did not require engaging in virtuous practical activities, just as it would be incoherent to wish that one were another sort of being without the features that follow from the human essence ( NE 9.4, 1166 a 20–22 and 8.7, 1159 a 5–12).

This solution to the Hard Problem shows Aristotle’s account of happiness to be a distinctive answer to the question of how we ought to balance theoretical and practical activity in our pursuit of the ideal human life.

Bibliography

Annas, Julia. 1993. The Morality of Happiness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Aufderheide, Joachim. 2015. “The Content of Happiness: A New Case for Theôria.” In The Highest Good in Aristotle and Kant , ed. Joachim Aufderheide and Ralf M. Bader, 36–59. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Charles, David. 2017. “Aristotle on Virtue and Happiness.” In The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Ethics , ed. Christopher Bobonich, 105–123. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cooper, John. 1975. Reason and Human Good in Aristotle. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Devereux, Daniel. 1981. “Aristotle on the Essence of Happiness.” In Studies in Aristotle , ed. Dominic J. O’Meara, 247–260. Washington: Catholic University of America Press.

Gauthier, René Antoine. 1958. La Morale d’ Aristote. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Gigon, Olof. 1975. “Phronêsis und Sophia in der Nicomachischen Ethik des Aristoteles.” In Kephalaion: Studies in Greek Philosophy and its Continuation offered to Professor C. J. de Vogel , ed. Jaap Mansfeld and L. M. de Rijk, 91–104. Assen: Van Gorcum.

Gottlieb, Paula. 1994. “Aristotle on Dividing the Soul and Uniting the Virtues.” Phronesis 39:275–290.

Irwin, Terence. 1980. “The Metaphysical and Psychological Basis of Aristotle’s Ethics.” In Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics , ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, 35–53. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kenny, Anthony. 1992. Aristotle on the Perfect Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Keyt, David. 1983. “Intellectualism in Aristotle .” In Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy , vol. 2, ed. John P. Anton and Anthony Preus, 364–387. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Kosman, Aryeh. 2000. “ Metaphysics Λ 9: Divine Thought.” In Aristotle’s Metaphysics Lambda:    Symposium Aristotelicum , ed. Michael Frede and David Charles, 307–326. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kraut, Richard. 1989. Aristotle on the Human Good. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Laks, André. 2000. “ Metaphysics Λ 7.” In Aristotle’s Metaphysics Lambda: Symposium Aristotelicum , ed. Michael Frede and David Charles, 207–243. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lear, Gabriel Richardson. 2004. Happy Lives and the Highest Good: An Essay on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics . Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Natali, Carlo. 1989. La Saggezza di Aristotele. Naples: Bibliopolis.

Nightingale, Andrea Wilson. 2004. Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in its Cultural Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Price, Anthony W. 2011. Virtue and Reason in Plato and Aristotle. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Reece, Bryan C. forthcoming. “Are There Really Two Kinds of Happiness in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics ?” Classical Philology.

Scott, Dominic. 1999. “Primary and Secondary Eudaimonia.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 73:225–242.

* My research on this topic has been generously supported by The Center for Hellenic Studies. I am grateful to everyone involved with the CHS, especially to Gregory Nagy, Mark Schiefsky, Richard Martin, and the library staff: Erika Bainbridge, Sophie Boisseau, Lanah Koelle, Michael Strickland, and Temple Wright.

[1] Many have offered interpretations of Aristotle’s remarks on practical and intellectual virtue, or their relationship to each other or to happiness. I list only a few here: (Annas 1993), (Aufderheide 2015), (Charles 2017), (Cooper 1975), (Devereux 1981), (Gauthier 1958), (Gigon 1975), (Gottlieb 1994), (Irwin 1980), (Kenny 1992), (Keyt 1983), (Kraut 1989), (Lear 2004), (Natali 1989), (Nightingale 2004), (Price 2011), (Scott 1999).

[2] The paragraphs that follow summarize parts of this research project that I drafted or revised during my fellowship at The Center for Hellenic Studies. The project as a whole is under contract with Cambridge University Press as a monograph called Aristotle on Happiness, Virtue, and Wisdom .

[3] I give a detailed defense of this interpretation in (Reece forthcoming).

[4] There are many who discuss the nature of divine contemplation, including (Kosman 2000) and (Laks 2000), as well as the problem that it initially appears to pose for Aristotle’s account of human happiness, including (Charles 2017), (Keyt 1983), (Kraut 1989, 312–319), and (Lear 2004, 189–193).

On Virtue and Happiness, by John Stuart Mill

"There is in reality nothing desired except happiness"

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English philosopher and social reformer John Stuart Mill was one of the major intellectual figures of the 19th century and a founding member of the Utilitarian Society. In the following excerpt from his long philosophical essay Utilitarianism , Mill relies on strategies of classification and division to defend the utilitarian doctrine that "happiness is the sole end of human action."

Excerpt from John Stuart Mill's 'Utilitarianism'

Virtue and happiness.

The utilitarian doctrine is, that happiness is desirable, and the only thing desirable, as an end; all other things being only desirable as means to that end. What ought to be required of this doctrine, what conditions is it requisite that the doctrine should fulfill, to make good its claim to be believed?

The only proof capable of being given that an object is visible, is that people actually see it. The only proof that a sound is audible, is that people hear it; and so of the other sources of our experience. In like manner, I apprehend, the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it. If the end which the utilitarian doctrine proposes to itself were not, in theory and in practice, acknowledged to be an end, nothing could ever convince any person that it was so. No reason can be given why the general happiness is desirable, except that each person, so far as he believes it to be attainable, desires his own happiness. This, however, being a fact, we have not only all the proof which the case admits of, but all which it is possible to require, that happiness is a good, that each person's happiness is a good to that person, and the general happiness, therefore, a good to the aggregate of all persons. Happiness has made out its title as one of the ends of conduct, and consequently one of the criteria of morality.

But it has not, by this alone, proved itself to be the sole criterion. To do that, it would seem, by the same rule, necessary to show, not only that people desire happiness, but that they never desire anything else. Now it is palpable that they do desire things which, in common language, are decidedly distinguished from happiness. They desire, for example, virtue, and the absence of vice, no less really than pleasure and the absence of pain. The desire of virtue is not as universal, but it is as authentic a fact, as the desire of happiness. And hence the opponents of the utilitarian standard deem that they have a right to infer that there are other ends of human action besides happiness, and that happiness is not the standard of approbation and disapprobation.

But does the utilitarian doctrine deny that people desire virtue, or maintain that virtue is not a thing to be desired? The very reverse. It maintains not only that virtue is to be desired, but that it is to be desired disinterestedly, for itself. Whatever may be the opinion of utilitarian moralists as to the original conditions by which virtue is made virtue, however they may believe (as they do) that actions and dispositions are only virtuous because they promote another end than virtue, yet this being granted, and it having been decided, from considerations of this description, what is virtuous, they not only place virtue at the very head of the things which are good as means to the ultimate end, but they also recognize as a psychological fact the possibility of its being, to the individual, a good in itself, without looking to any end beyond it; and hold, that the mind is not in a right state, not in a state conformable to Utility, not in the state most conducive to the general happiness, unless it does love virtue in this manner—as a thing desirable in itself, even although, in the individual instance, it should not produce those other desirable consequences which it tends to produce, and on account of which it is held to be virtue. This opinion is not, in the smallest degree, a departure from the Happiness principle. The ingredients of happiness are very various, and each of them is desirable in itself, and not merely when considered as swelling an aggregate. The principle of utility does not mean that any given pleasure, as music, for instance, or any given exemption from pain, as for example health, is to be looked upon as means to a collective something termed happiness, and to be desired on that account. They are desired and desirable in and for themselves; besides being means, they are a part of the end. Virtue, according to the utilitarian doctrine, is not naturally and originally part of the end, but it is capable of becoming so; and in those who love it disinterestedly it has become so, and is desired and cherished, not as a means to happiness, but as a part of their happiness. To illustrate this farther, we may remember that virtue is not the only thing, originally a means, and which if it were not a means to anything else, would be and remain indifferent, but which by association with what it is a means to, comes to be desired for itself, and that too with the utmost intensity. What, for example, shall we say of the love of money? There is nothing originally more desirable about money than about any heap of glittering pebbles. Its worth is solely that of the things which it will buy; the desires for other things than itself, which it is a means of gratifying. Yet the love of money is not only one of the strongest moving forces of human life, but money is, in many cases, desired in and for itself; the desire to possess it is often stronger than the desire to use it, and goes on increasing when all the desires which point to ends beyond it, to be compassed by it, are falling off. It may, then, be said truly, that money is desired not for the sake of an end, but as part of the end. From being a means to happiness, it has come to be itself a principal ingredient of the individual's conception of happiness. The same may be said of the majority of the great objects of human life:power, for example, or fame; except that to each of these there is a certain amount of immediate pleasure annexed, which has at least the semblance of being naturally inherent in them—a thing which cannot be said of money. Still, however, the strongest natural attraction, both of power and of fame, is the immense aid they give to the attainment of our other wishes; and it is the strong association thus generated between them and all our objects of desire, which gives to the direct desire of them the intensity it often assumes, so as in some characters to surpass in strength all other desires. In these cases the means have become a part of the end, and a more important part of it than any of the things which they are means to. What was once desired as an instrument for the attainment of happiness, has come to be desired for its own sake. In being desired for its own sake it is, however, desired as part of happiness. The person is made, or thinks he would be made, happy by its mere possession; and is made unhappy by failure to obtain it. The desire of it is not a different thing from the desire of happiness, any more than the love of music, or the desire of health. They are included in happiness. They are some of the elements of which the desire of happiness is made up. Happiness is not an abstract idea, but a concrete whole; and these are some of its parts. And the utilitarian standard sanctions and approves their being so. Life would be a poor thing, very ill provided with sources of happiness, if there were not this provision of nature, by which things originally indifferent, but conducive to, or otherwise associated with, the satisfaction of our primitive desires, become in themselves sources of pleasure more valuable than the primitive pleasures, both in permanency, in the space of human existence that they are capable of covering, and even in intensity.

Virtue, according to the utilitarian conception, is a good of this description. There was no original desire of it, or motive to it, save its conduciveness to pleasure, and especially to protection from pain. But through the association thus formed, it may be felt a good in itself, and desired as such with as great intensity as any other good; and with this difference between it and the love of money, of power, or of fame—that all of these may, and often do, render the individual noxious to the other members of the society to which he belongs, whereas there is nothing which makes him so much a blessing to them as the cultivation of the disinterested love of virtue. And consequently, the utilitarian standard, while it tolerates and approves those other acquired desires, up to the point beyond which they would be more injurious to the general happiness than promotive of it, enjoins and requires the cultivation of the love of virtue up to the greatest strength possible, as being above all things important to the general happiness.

It results from the preceding considerations, that there is in reality nothing desired except happiness. Whatever is desired otherwise than as a means to some end beyond itself, and ultimately to happiness, is desired as itself a part of happiness, and is not desired for itself until it has become so. Those who desire virtue for its own sake, desire it either because the consciousness of it is a pleasure, or because the consciousness of being without it is a pain, or for both reasons united; as in truth the pleasure and pain seldom exist separately, but almost always together—the same person feeling pleasure in the degree of virtue attained, and pain in not having attained more. If one of these gave him no pleasure, and the other no pain, he would not love or desire virtue, or would desire it only for the other benefits which it might produce to himself or to persons whom he cared for.

We have now, then, an answer to the question, of what sort of proof the principle of utility is susceptible. If the opinion which I have now stated is psychologically true—if human nature is so constituted as to desire nothing which is not either a part of happiness or a means of happiness, we can have no other proof, and we require no other, that these are the only things desirable. If so, happiness is the sole end of human action, and the promotion of it the test by which to judge of all human conduct; from whence it necessarily follows that it must be the criterion of morality, since a part is included in the whole.

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Taking the Morality Out of Happiness

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In an important and widely discussed series of studies, Jonathan Phillips and colleagues have suggested that the ordinary concept of happiness has a substantial moral component. For instance, two persons who enjoy the same extent of positive emotions and are equally satisfied with their lives are judged as happy to different degrees if one is less moral than the other. Considering that the relation between morality and happiness or self-interest has been one of the central questions of moral philosophy since at least Plato, such a result would be of considerable philosophical interest. On closer examination of the original research and new studies, we suggest that the data point to a different conclusion: in the dominant folk understanding of happiness, morality has no fundamental role. Findings seeming to indicate a moralized concept are better explained, we suggest, by folk theories on which extreme moral turpitude indicates that an individual suffers from psychological dysfunction.

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morality and happiness essay

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What can the wisdom of virtue teach us about imperfection, mediocrity, and the pursuit of happiness? Aristotle says that the virtues are the character traits needed for happiness. Rosalind Hursthouse’s analysis of this premise, called Plato’s requirement on the virtues, is made up of three theses, the first of which is the claim that the virtues benefit their possessor from within an ethical outlook. In this paper, I defend the neo-Aristotelian version of the view that morality is a form of enlightened self-interest. In the first section, I offer an analysis of Plato’s requirement on the virtues. In the second section, I respond to David Copp and David Sobel’s objection that the less-than-full virtues sometimes benefit their possessor more than the full virtues. In the third section, I respond to Nomy Arpaly’s objection that moral mediocrity benefits its possessor more than moral excellence. In the fourth section, I argue that the full virtues benefit their possessor. My conclusion is that truly comprehending Plato’s first requirement can clear out of the way some misconceived criticisms of it, making room for a genuinely promising track to the rationality of morality.

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Morality and the Pursuit of Happiness: Understanding the Meaning and Relevance of Eudaimonism

morality and happiness essay

  • December 11, 2014

Peter Koritansky

  • Articles , Philosophy Articles

“Why Be Moral?”

Among the many questions that contemporary moral philosophers have raised over the past few decades is the question: Why be Moral? Nearly all contemporary scholars that address the issue seem to understand that this question is anything but new, but a much smaller number of such scholars seem to understand the meaning or the importance of the question. For example, in response to the question of why one should act morally, Princeton ethicist Peter Singer, toward the end of his book Practical Ethics , argues that this “is a question about the ethical point of view, asked from a position outside it. But what,” Singer continues, “is the ethical point of view?” I have suggested that a distinguishing feature of ethics is that ethical judgments are universalizable. Ethics requires us to go beyond our own personal point of view to a standpoint like that of the impartial spectator who takes a universal point of view.” [1]

This does not mean that Singer considers it wrong or irrational for one to ask the question of a moral imperative, “what’s in it for me?” It is, rather, that he considers this self-interested question essentially amoral . It is not, he says, a question that is asked “from the ethical point of view, but from outside it.” Again, Singer would readily admit that people often do have self-interested reasons to act morally, whether those reasons are based upon long term self-interest or short term psychological satisfaction (as when acting morally “just feels good”). But Singer, and many other contemporary moralists like him, understands the self-interested question – Why be moral? – to be something we ask only once the requirements of morality have already been determined or derived , and so the answer to this crucial question does not really factor in to determining or deriving what those requirements actually are .

Singer’s presumptions about the relation between morality and self-interest appear to be shared by the major moral normative theories of ethics one finds today among professional philosophers. Let us very briefly examine three of those theories.

The first and most obvious is Kantian deontological ethics. One might even say that Kant built his entire moral worldview around rejecting the question – Why be Moral? – as an illegitimate question. To ask such a question is to derive morality from considerations that are essentially sub-moral, such as pleasure, advantage, or happiness, and is therefore to demonstrate that one does not really understand morality at all, or what Singer would later call “the ethical point of view.” Hence Kant’s distinction between hypothetical imperatives and the categorical imperative, where only the latter is morally significant. Working to help the poor may feel good, it may contribute to deep and lasting happiness in one’s soul, and it may even be in one’s immediate personal interest. But none of these answers to our question – Why be moral? – have anything to do with determining that helping the poor is something that morality requires of us. Kant, therefore, leaves himself very little to say in response to the moral skeptic, other than that demanding reasons to act morally other than morality itself would lead to abandoning morality altogether. Powerful stuff, perhaps, for the early nineteenth century, but since Nietzsche inspired a whole generation of philosophers who have been all too happy to throw away morality altogether, the argument falls somewhat flat. It seems the question – Why be moral? – cannot be dismissed so easily.

Utilitarian thought appears to take the question more seriously than Kant, but in the end provides an answer that is no more satisfying. To be sure, utilitarians do not simply dismiss the question as irrelevant. The compelling reason for acting morally is the achievement of a state of affairs that is essentially better than what we might expect were we to act immorally. And so Peter Singer, himself a utilitarian, argues that we have an obligation to contribute to famine relief, since doing so will result in a net-gain of universal happiness compared with not doing so. In fact, utilitarians like Singer, and Bentham before him, argue that essential to acting morally is the realization that one’s own happiness is no more a compelling reason for action than the happiness of others. What matters is not pursuing happiness, but maximizing it. Therefore the question – Why be moral? – looms just as large for the utilitarian as for the Kantian. Why should one act in such a way as to maximize happiness if doing so minimizes one’s own happiness? Singer and Bentham, though conceiving of morality very differently than Kant, would complain that this very question is not asked from the ethical perspective. Why be moral? Shame on me for even asking such a thing!

Even the modern virtue ethics movement, with roots in the philosophies of Alasdair MacIntyre and G.E.M. Anscombe, [2] has failed to meet the challenge of the moral skeptic head on. Contemporary virtue ethics proposes conformity with virtue as the criteria for distinguishing between morally good and bad human actions. But what is our reason for choosing virtuous actions as opposed to vicious ones? In other words, what if the virtue ethicist replaces the question – Why be moral? – with the question – Why be virtuous? Of course, the ancient and medieval thinkers were ready with a response to this question: acting virtuously is a necessary condition for happiness (a notion I will consider in greater depth in a moment). But modern virtue ethics, for its part, does not appear to have the same unified response. Virtues are themselves worth cultivating for many reasons, one of which may involve personal flourishing, but may be recommended to us for their social utility. Modern virtue ethicists also tend to reject the teleology inherent in Aristotelian (and other pre-modern) moralities, an aspect of classical virtue theory that was central to it. In any case, whereas contemporary virtue ethics may be inspired by the Aristotelian tradition as far as its extolling of certain virtuous habits is concerned, it seems rather far from adopting the philosophical anthropology and metaethics that lie at the core of that tradition. [3]

What We Can Learn From Plato’s Answer to the Moral Skeptic

If the modern responses to the all-important question – Why be moral? – are unsatisfying, perhaps we should consider a pre-modern response. It was, of course, not Aristotle but his master Plato who first articulated just how profound and disturbing moral skepticism can be. It was also Plato who first suggested that morality is only a serious endeavour if it is capable of overcoming moral skepticism in its most powerful form. Plato’s dialogues provide powerful insight into moral skepticism because the moral skepticism they address is not just expressed in arguments, but is embodied in actual people, such as Protagoras, Calicles, or Thrasymachus. It is, I believe, Socrates’ response to Thrasymachus in the Republic , where one finds Plato’s most mature and formidable response to moral skepticism, but this is at least in part because of the fact that moral skepticism is given such an impressive voice, not only with Thrasymachus, but also with the young brothers of Plato, Glaucon and Adeimantus, who restore and revitalize Thrasymachus’ argument.

Let us briefly review. The Republic recalls a conversation about justice between Socrates and several interlocutors that lasts long into the night. Toward the beginning of that conversation, Thrasymachus, a sophist, infamously defines justice as the “advantage of the stronger.” [4] It is the first overtly political definition of justice given in the dialogue, since by “stronger” Thrasymachus clearly means those with political might. Since those in power make the laws and those laws are always to their own advantage, justice simply amounts to obedience to those laws. Socrates’ initial challenge to this position is unimpressive. First he points out that sometimes lawgivers fail to legislate to their own advantage, and so “doing justice” in those cases would mean, not obedience, but disobedience. Next, he employs an analogy in order to show that good rulers seek, not their own advantage, but that of their subjects, just as good navigators seek the advantage of their passengers and good physicians the advantage of their patients.

For these responses, Thrasymachus mocks the seemingly naïve Socrates and in so doing allows us to see into the core of his worldview. For him, Socrates is confused because he presumes that there is a meaningful distinction between justice and injustice. The real distinction, however, is between the weak and the strong. Those with reputations for injustice, moreover, come to light as the only ones worthy of real admiration. And not those with small-time reputations, such as “temple robbers . . . housebreakers, defrauders, and thieves,” but tyrants, who not only steal from their people, but “kidnap and enslave them too.” [5] And then Thrasymachus lets fall his most revealing statement of all: “For it is not because they fear doing unjust deeds, but because they fear suffering them, that those who blame injustice do so.” [6] In other words, justice and injustice are neither virtues nor vices nor objective realities of which we can have any knowledge, but merely words invented by the weak, invented so that the weak can find their subjugation more comprehensible or tolerable. Sure, they are weak and oppressed, but at least now they can console themselves with the fabricated belief that they are “just” and their oppressors “unjust.”

Time does not permit me to discuss Socrates’ attempt to refute Thrasymachus in book one of the Republic , an argument that eventually results in Thrasymachus blushing. But it is clear that, whatever the merits of his argument, it is entirely unpersuasive to Glaucon and his brother Adeimantus. Glaucon in particular is not persuaded that Socrates has proven that justice is more advantageous than injustice. In fact, Socrates’ remark that a band of unjust thieves must exhibit a certain degree of justice in order to accomplish their unjust goals only seems to underscore Thrasymachus’ essential claim: that one puts up with only so much justice as one must and that injustice is what we all truly want.

Before going any further with the analysis we must observe some critical aspects of how Plato sets these philosophical questions before us. Most important, we must understand the terms by which Socrates agrees to defend justice. Namely, he agrees to demonstrate justice’s superiority over injustice on the basis of the claim that justice is more advantageous than injustice. In other words, he sets out to show, in light of Thrasymachus’ argument, that justice is better for the just person (not simply the ones to whom justice is directed). The real test of justice’s superiority, Socrates appears to concede, is whether or not one is better off for living justly. In this we must not fail to observe that Socrates and Glaucon are in agreement with one of Thrasymachus’ fundamental premises, namely, that what matters first is one’s own happiness. If justice is to be more than a mere word, therefore, it must be shown to serve that happiness above its contrary. This, Socrates admits, will not be easy to do since justice (among all the virtues) seems to be the one virtue that, by its very nature, has to do with, not one’s own good, but with the good of others.

It is especially in Glaucon’s reformulation of Thrasymachus’ argument [7] that this point is fully driven home. As he states, most people tacitly believe that Thrasymachus is right, or that justice is only something we tolerate as members of a kind of Hobbesian social contract. We, fearing retaliation, agree to abandon our designs to harm and take from others, and those others, also fearing retaliation, agree to do the same vis-a-vis us. And yet, in an imaginary world in which the fear of retaliation is taken away, the reason to live justly evaporates. Glaucon famously makes his point with two thought experiments. The first is the Ring of Gyges myth (earlier told by Herodotus), whereby a young man discovers in a cave a ring with the power to turn him invisible. Eventually realizing that the ring allows him to commit injustice with impunity, he uses it to commit adultery with the queen, murder to king, and take over political rule himself, thus becoming one of those tyrants admired so much and praised so highly by Thrasymachus. Why would anyone, Glaucon asks, not follow Gyges’ example and choose injustice under the same conditions?

Not content to leave it there, Glaucon heaps more upon Socrates. Not only must he show that it is advantageous to remain just even with the magic ring. He must also show that justice is advantageous even when choosing it results in terrible suffering. Socrates is to imagine conditions under which the unjust man is rewarded with wealth, power and reputation (such as that enjoyed by Gyges) and the just man is stricken with poverty and suffering. As Glaucon puts it, “ the just man . . . will be whipped . . . racked . . . bound . . . have both his eyes burned out . . . [and be] crucified.” Here again we must avoid making a crucial interpretive mistake. Glaucon is not asking Socrates to prove why it is worth it to be just even when justice makes one unhappy and injustice results in happiness. What he is asking is that Socrates demonstrate the happiness inherent in living justly to be greater, more profound, more deeply satisfying, from which no degree of suffering could deter us.

And here is where Glaucon’s primary character trait, and perhaps his very reason for being included in Plato’s greatest dialogue, comes to light. It is Glaucon’s eroticism that sets the terms of everything that will be said about justice in the Republic from that moment forward. Glaucon is profoundly erotic, and his eroticism takes two forms. The first is a very base and carnal form. Whereas Herodotus’ telling of the ring of Gyges myth portrays Gyges as only a reluctant usurper urged on (in fact blackmailed) by the queen, Glaucon’s retelling of the myth transforms Gyges into a power hungry and lustful usurper. Later in the Republic , Socrates will also tease Glaucon about his inordinate lust for young boys. But Glaucon’s erotic soul also expresses itself in a much higher way by what he pleads with Socrates to do. For it to withstand Thrasymachus’ assault, justice must be something worth dying for, and even more, being tortured for, like the object of a great love affair, something akin to what satisfies the deepest longings of the human heart. [8] If it is not this, it is nothing.

This is the context in which to view all of the famous doctrines later seen in the dialogue, from the tri-partite soul to the theory of the forms and of the good. With the help of those doctrines Socrates paints a picture of the universe in which morality or justice is profoundly advantageous. According to this picture, the only truly just person is the philosopher, who alone is aware of the transcendent realities of the eternal ideas and of the good . . . the idea of ideas. The philosopher contemplates those ideas and comes more fully into communion with the good as he does so. Thus the philosopher (and only the philosopher) approaches not only human perfection, but perfection itself. The good, the closest thing we have to Plato’s god, is at once the source of all intelligibility and the fulfillment of every desire. The reason to live morally, we are given to understand, is that morality, rightly conceived, is nothing more than the kind of life one must lead in order to philosophize and pursue the good in the most unfettered way possible.

This is precisely why conventional understandings of morality (not to mention those of modern moral philosophy) are so unpersuasive. It is also, perhaps, why, by most conventional accounts, Socrates and other philosophers like him are not “moral” in any recognizable way. Like the Kantian, the philosopher will be unlikely to make a false promise, but not because he cannot “will his maxim to be a universal law,” but because he has no real desire for those things, like wealth or power, that people usually make false promises for . Like the utilitarian, the philosopher will be unlikely to commit murder or assault, but not because this will result in a net loss of happiness for the people in his moral circle, but because the philosopher (preoccupied with the transcendent) cares little for those things for which murder is usually committed: material gain, vengeance, (or worst of all) idle amusement. Finally, like the “virtue ethicist” the philosopher will be unlikely to display vices such as gluttony, and likely to display at least what looks like generosity, but not because these actions are consistent with certain arbitrarily agreed upon virtues, but because what the philosopher loves is so much higher than food and drink (in the case of gluttony) and he cares so little for material wealth that it causes him no inconvenience to give away what little wealth he has (as in the case of generosity).

The Essence of a Eudaimonist Moral Philosophy

It is usually Aristotle that is credited with being the father of what is now called eudaimonism, the concept of eudaimomia having been formalized in the doctrine of his Nicomachean Ethics . Read carefully, one comes to understand that he is merely expounding, refining, and carrying forth the implications of Plato’s teaching about morality in the Republic . Let us not forget Aristotle’s famous remarks that Plato was a man “who showed in his life and teachings how to be happy and good at the same time.” [9] What is remarkable, however, is the degree to which Aristotelian and Platonic eudaimonism remained the dominant moral philosophy for the next 1700 years. To be sure, in that span of time eudaimonism is expressed in a variety of ways, some religious, some not, some that claim that virtue is sufficient for happiness, some that deny that claim.

But the common thread throughout all these centuries of philosophizing is that moral norms derive their prescriptive force and relevance from the degree to which they direct us toward our ultimate end: eudaimonia. Theologian and intellectual historian Servais Pinckaers describes this as a “morality of happiness,” which was only replaced by what he calls the “morality of obligation” in the fourteenth century. [10] For the remainder of this talk, I would like to expound upon four critical features of this so-called “morality of happiness” (or eudaimonism) that must be grasped before we even begin to compare it with the many competing moralities of today. I do not claim that this is an exhaustive account of eudaimonist morality, nor do I even claim these are eudaimonism’s four most important properties. To a Plato, an Aristotle, an Augustine, or an Aquinas, they may even seem obvious. But to those, like us, living in an age where eudaimonism has been long displaced and defended only by minority voices, they are, perhaps, where one needs to begin.

1. For the Eudaimonist, The Pursuit of Happiness is the Basis for All Moral Oughts

This is clearly one of the most controversial aspects of eudaimonism, and the origins of the controversy trace back at least to David Hume’s famous remark that one can never validly derive an “ought” from an “is.” Although Hume made the remark, it was Kant who developed a comprehensive moral teaching with an explicit view to avoiding this apparent fallacy committed by most, if not all, previous thinkers. As Kant would argue, even if it could be demonstrated that all human beings pursue happiness and that human happiness consisted, as Aristotle suggests, in some identifiable activity or way of life, that would still not be sufficient to give us any direction of how we ought to act in any meaningful moral sense. Moral oughts or imperatives, as opposed to hypothetical oughts or imperatives, do not direct us in how to act so as to be happy, but in how to act so as to fulfill our duties and obligations to ourselves and others. One especially pernicious effect of the eudaimonist’s position is that all imperatives become hypothetical and, therefore, in some sense, optional . Instead of “do not lie” or “do not make a promise you don’t intend to keep,” one is given “do not lie or promise falsely if doing so hinders you from your happiness.” The implication seems to be that if lying does not hinder you from your happiness, by all means lie.

Without a doubt, Kant had it right that, for eudaimonism, all imperatives are, in his words, hypothetical. And yet one should not conclude that the eudaimonist must also believe that all imperatives are merely optional. In a very insightful forthcoming study of this very issue as it applies to the natural law tradition, Steven Jensen observes [11] that a broadly Aristotelian and Thomistic eudaimonism is able to distinguish quite easily between moral oughts and non-moral oughts. Non-moral oughts derive from our desire for things upon which our happiness simply does not depend. I may want to learn about the Franco-Prussian war. In Thomistic moral psychology, this desire of the will (or intention) immediately sets my intellect to thinking about the means necessary to fulfill that desire (what is called council or deliberation). I then discover that reading about the Franco-Prussian war is necessary for obtaining my goal and doing that reading becomes a kind of imperative. If, however, I lose interest in this period of history, become extremely busy, or develop a new interest that supersedes my previous one, I may simply abandon my goal and hence the imperative of reading about the Franco-Prussian war goes away just as easily as it arrived.

Whereas the eudaimonist would certainly agree that all imperatives are hypothetical, he would still be able to distinguish between those that are merely optional and those one would rightly describe as “binding” or “obligatory.” If it can be determined that certain kinds of actions are incompatible, not just with any old desire of the will, but with our ultimate happiness, we are dealing with a “hypothetical” imperative of a very different sort. Those actions would become the objects the same universal proscription against which Kant’s categorical imperative was directed. Happiness is not just the ultimate end because it is the last thing desired in a long list of more proximate desires. It is also the ultimate end, according to Aristotle, Aquinas, and many others, because human beings cannot-not desire it.

So whereas I may simply drop my desire to learn about the Franco-Prussian war and thus the imperative to read about it, I may not simply drop my desire for happiness and, along with it, the imperatives that are necessary for getting me there. It may very well turn out that eating and drinking in moderation, dealing fairly with others, and not becoming a slave to fear are all necessary for happiness, and are thus the basis even for exceptionless moral norms. Aristotle himself seemed to imply this in his remark that some emotions, such as spite, shamelessness, and envy, and some actions such as adultery, theft, and murder, are so base that they are never compatible with someone pursuing happiness rightly understood. [12] To be sure, explaining precisely how specific moral norms are derived from the pursuit of happiness requires a sophisticated moral psychology and philosophical anthropology equal to the task. Be that as it may, it seems apparent that eudaimonism is quite capable of distinguishing between moral oughts and non-moral oughts and of dispensing with the very un problematic “is/ought problem.”

2. For the Eudaimonist, Virtue is not an End in Itself   

Whereas eudaimonists are profoundly concerned with morality, they should not be described as “moralists,” and that, whereas eudaimonists often place enormous emphasis upon acquiring the virtues, their ethics does not ultimately constitute a “virtue ethics.” [13] This is, at times, especially difficult to see in the moral philosophies of Aristotle and Aquinas. Whereas Aristotle devotes book one of the Nicomachean Ethics to providing an argument for the centrality of happiness, the five books that follow constitute an analysis of the moral and intellectual virtues that does not frequently harken back to the discussion of happiness or even provide explicit arguments as to how certain virtues have anything to do with pursuing happiness. This is most problematic in Aristotle’s discussion of that virtue which, at least intuitively, seems to have the least to do with one’s own happiness, namely, justice. Unlike the Kantian and the utilitarian, the eudaimonist is admittedly concerned with the happiness or well-being of others only in a kind of derivative sense. According to Aristotle, living justly makes one a more excellent human being, an excellence that is necessary (though not sufficient) for happiness, the ultimate end.

To be sure, much of this appears to fly in the face of many of Aristotle’s remarks in the Nicomachean Ethics . For instance, what do I make of Aristotle’s famous statement that friendship between virtuous people is one in which friends “wish goods to each other for each other’s own sake”? [14] Although this may first appear to imply a thoroughly disinterested love for another, one in which the desire for one’s own happiness is not even present, the context says otherwise. Aristotle’s intention is to distinguish between genuine or virtuous friendship and the pseudo-friendship based on utility. In those latter friendships, the friendship is maintained as a means strictly for some sub-moral end, such as is the case in various forms of business partnerships. Virtuous friendships, on the other hand, involve a love for one’s friend for his own sake.

But we should not understand “for his own sake” here to mean disconnected from any higher good whatsoever. In this sense, even virtuous friendships are still a means to an end, not to sub-moral ends but to an end that surpasses morality altogether. To those (like the Kantian) who see morality, or even friendship, as an end in itself, this aspect of eudaimonism will come across just as selfishly as the preoccupation with utility. For Aristotle, however, two friends accused of “using one another” to better pursue eudaimonia will always take it as a compliment of their friendship regardless of how the accusation was intended. At any rate, Aristotle himself anticipated this criticism, not only of his account of friendship, but of his moral teaching as a whole. As he says:

Those who make self-love a matter for reproach ascribe it to those who award the biggest share of money, honors, and bodily pleasures to themselves. For these are the goods desired and eagerly pursued by the many on the assumption that they are best. That is why they are also contested. Those who overreach for these goods gratify their appetites and in general their feelings and the non-rational part of the soul; and this is the character of the many. That is why the application of the term [self-love] is derived from the most frequent [kind of self-love] which is base. This type of self-lover, then, is justifiably reproached.

And plainly it is the person who awards himself these goods whom the many habitually call a self-lover. For if someone is always eager above all to do just or temperate actions or any other actions in accord with the virtues, and in general always gains for himself what is fine, no one will call him a self-lover or blame him for it. This sort of person, however, more than the other sort, seems to be a self-lover. At any rate he awards himself what is finest and best of all, and gratifies the most controlling part of himself, obeying it in everything. And just as a city and every other composite system seems to be above all its most controlling part, the same is true for a human being; hence someone loves himself most if he likes and gratifies this part. [15]

So it is the eudaimonist’s claim that happiness consists in the primarily non-physical or non-material goods and activities that make genuinely other-regarding virtues like justice and friendship possible within a moral philosophy where the pursuit of one’s own happiness is of paramount importance. The one who pursues happiness rightly understood pursues goods that are, by nature, sharable. Unlike the so-called “external” goods of money or possessions, spiritual goods like virtue and knowledge are not lost once they are given. If I give you $100, I am ipso facto $100 poorer. But if I succeed in imparting knowledge or virtue, I am not thereby that much more ignorant or vicious. In fact (and I speak more from personal experience here than as an interpreter of Aristotle) if I fail to share such non-material goods with others, I do in fact run the risk of losing them.

3.  For the Eudaimonist, Happiness is Distinct from Joy or Pleasure

From the foregoing remarks, it should be obvious that eudaimonism is largely incomprehensible to a materialist, for whom the term happiness is usually taken to be a synonym for pleasure. Aristotle himself makes the distinction at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics during a rough survey of the many things with which people tend to identify happiness. Among them are wealth, honor, and, most commonly, pleasure. In book one of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle tends to dismiss pleasure as something that only the most vulgar (even if the majority) of people pursue above all else, and this sort of life is to be rejected as a “one suitable for grazing animals.” [16]

Nonetheless, Aristotle’s somewhat cavalier dismissal of pleasure at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics is redeemed by a much fuller treatment of it in book 10, where the advocates of pleasure are taken much more seriously, and where their valid insights are acknowledged. The identification of happiness with pleasure, though, is ruled out by Aristotle’s earlier argument that happiness must be a kind of activity. To be sure, human beings take pleasure in various kinds of activity, but one should not confuse the pleasure enjoyed with the activity itself. The real question, the controversial question, is in what activity happiness consists. Once that it determined, one can go further to assert what is the highest form of pleasure, but one should not confuse the activity with the pleasure itself.

In discussing this, I am always reminded of a scene in film Conan the Barbarian (starring Arnold Schwarzenegger) in which a damsel in awe of the great barbarian says, “I suppose nothing hurts you,” to which Conan responds, “only pain.” As humorous as this is, Aristotle would say the person who identifies happiness with pleasure is equally confused. Pleasures should not only be ranked according to greater or lesser intensity, but according to the different kinds of activity in which we take pleasure, which may be more or less (shall we say) sublime. The real question for happiness, then, is not “in what activity to we experience the most intense pleasure?” but rather “what is the highest, most noble activity?” It will then follow that the pleasure we take in that activity will be the most sublime pleasure.

A similar mistake is made if one identifies happiness with joy. As Josef Pieper observed, “happiness and joy are not the same. For what does the fervent craving of joy mean? It does not mean that we wish at any cost to experience the psychic state of being joyful. We want to have reason for joy, for an unceasing joy that fills us utterly, sweeps all before it, exceeds all measure. This reason is, if it exists, anterior to joy, and is in itself something different from joy. Joyousness necessarily implies an “about something”; we cannot rejoice in the absolute; there is no joy for joy’s sake. This something, this reason, is our possessing or receiving a thing we desire. [As Aquinas remarked], “Possession of the good is the cause of rejoicing.” This having and partaking of the good is primary; joy is secondary. In the Summa Theologiae , these ideas are expressed in the following manner: “Therefore a person rejoices because he possesses a good appropriate to him—whether in reality, or in hope, or at least in memory. The appropriate good, however, if it is perfect, is precisely the man’s happiness . . . Thus it is evident that not even the joy which follows the possession of the perfect good is the essence of happiness itself.” [17]

4. For the Eudaimonist, Human Nature is Inherently Teleological

Perhaps this has been the elephant in the room for many of you. To be sure, this is where the eudaimonist will lose most, otherwise sympathetic, people. For the whole project of rooting morality in the pursuit of an objective and ultimate end, and of distinguishing that ultimate end from the fickle pursuits of pleasure, depends on the claim that there is, indeed, such an end to be pursued. But has not, one might argue, this entire view of human nature, along with the view of nature of which it is a part, been debunked by modern science and especially by modern evolutionary theory? Is not the belief that humans have a purpose to fulfill not of their own choosing counter to Darwin’s discovery, according to which no special is goal directed, regarding the evolution of species?

But is the refutation of eudaimonism really just a matter of settled science? Hardly. Granted that Darwin’s account of how the human species evolves avoids any appeal to teleology or purposefulness, it does not follow that teleological understandings of human nature are refuted by it. Even granting that Darwin’s claims about the origin of the human species are true (as most educated people acknowledge it is), it is quite another thing to say that Darwinian science provides a sufficient account of the human species. To do so is essentially to assume that a comprehensive anthropology can be given strictly on the basis of material causes. I use the word “assume” here quite intentionally, because nothing in Darwinian science provides one with reasons for thinking that material causes are the only kinds of causes there are. The mere fact that modern science limits itself to material causes is not reason for thinking that formal and final causality have been displaced by modern science. True, philosophical arguments have certainly been given for an exclusively materialist worldview, but they hardly belong to the canons of modern science, let alone settled science.

These are just some of the reasons why a broadly Platonic or Aristotelian eudaimonist morality is still relevant today, if only defended by a minority of philosophers. I have attempted in this talk to outline some of the distinctive features of that morality, and I have done so without discussing what its primary adherents have claimed the activity of happiness to consist in, namely, contemplation. Of course, to do so would require another lecture of greater length and significantly greater complexity. Aristotle’s own emphasis in the Nicomachean Ethics is upon the activity of contemplation, which he says is best because it’s a function of what is highest or most divine in us. [18]

This should be juxtaposed with Plato’s and Aquinas’ emphasis upon the object of contemplation, for human happiness certainly does not consist in the contemplation of fruit flies, but in the intellectual gaze, in Aquinas’ words, upon the uncreated good, the unmoved mover, or God. This final good, or whole good, is the only thing in Plato’s mind capable of deterring the erotic Glaucon, and perhaps our own restless hearts, from the seductive amoral life of power and acquisition represented by Thrasymachus. In the end, that amoral life will never be rivalled by an argument that it’s better to be moral, but only by one that points to something much sweeter and richer and by which we are much better off allowing ourselves to be seduced. This is the essence of eudaimonism.

[1] Singer, Peter, Practical Ethics , 2 nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1999), 317.

[2] See Anscombe, G.E.M., “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 33, no. 124 (1958), 1-19, and MacIntyre, After Virtue (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). Although MacIntyre’s work is influential in the contemporary virtue ethics movement, one should be careful not to conclude that he is in any way part of that movement.

[3] Due to lack of space, I have had to speak somewhat dogmatically in this paragraph. For a recent and full critique of the contemporary virtue ethics movement in light of the Aristotelian tradition, see Jonathan Sanford’s forthcoming Before Virtue: Assessing Contemporary Virtue Ethics (Washington DC: CUA Press, 2015).

[4] Plato , The Republic , Allan Bloom, trans. (Basic Books: 1991), 338c.

[5] Ibid., 344b

[6] Ibid., 344c

[7] Ibid., 357a-362c

[8] I am indebted to Thomas L. Pangle for showing me the central role that Glaucon’s eroticism plays in the teaching of the Republic .

[9] Copleston, Frederick, A History of Philosophy , vol. 1 (New York: Image Books, 1993), 266.

[10] See Pinckaers, Morality: The Catholic View (South Bend, IN: Saint Augustine’s Press, 2001), chapters 3 and 4.

[11] Jensen, Steven, Knowing the Natural Law: From Preceptsand Inclinations to Deriving Oughts , forthcoming from The Catholic University of America Press (Washington D.C., 2015), ch. 8.

[12] Nicomachean Ethics , 1107a10

[13] See, for instance, Julia Driver’s observation that having a virtue theory does not necessarily imply a virtue ethics in “The Virtues and Human Nature,” in How Should One Live? ed. Roger Crisp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), n 1.

[14] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics , Terence Irwin, trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999), 1156b10

[15] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics , Terrence Irwin, trans. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1999), 1168b23-35

[16] Ibid., 1095b20

[17] Pieper, Josef, Happiness and Contemplation (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 1988), 45-46. The quotations from Aquinas are from the Summa Theologiae , Prima Secundae , Q. 2, a. 6 and Q. 2, a. 7, respectively.

[18] NE , 1177a15

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Peter Koritansky is an Associate Professor of History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies at the University of Prince Edward Island in Canada. He is author and editor of several books, with the latest being Human Nature, Contemplation, and the Political Order: Essays Inspired by Jacques Maritain's Scholasticism and Politics (Catholic University, 2014).

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Morality and Happiness: Philosophical Concept

Introduction.

Moral issues often appear in philosophy, literature, and even politics, since morality forms the basis of human activity. Morality is a set of norms of behavior adopted in a particular society or the mind of a specific person. People acquire morality in the process of life, and it can change over time, but it is always associated with society. Concerning morality, it is also essential to mention the concept of happiness: a state when people are delighted with themselves and the world around them. This condition largely depends on the moral qualities of people and their relevance to the surrounding society. If this correspondence is violated, people feel an ethical conflict and cannot be entirely happy (Wallenborn 19). Thus, the philosophy of morality considers the moral qualities and principles of people and their interaction with the environment. The purpose of this paper is to discuss this interaction and identify its main components.

The central point of the morally correct activity is the action itself. It characterizes a person’s ability to consciously set goals, choose the appropriate means, and act independently, freely, and responsibly. The action is related to two main components: motive and assessment. The motive plays the role of an impulse, a stimulus to action, and indicates the individual’s preference for specific values. Motives are based on the basic moral principles of a person. Therefore, these principles must be correct from the point of view of society. In this case, when committing this act, no one’s rights will be violated, and a moral conflict will not arise.

The motives and results of the action may not coincide or correspond to each other. A motive can push a person to different activities; at the same time, similar behavior can be dictated by different motives. Therefore, an assessment of the moral status of people should depend not only on the results but also on the motives that drive their actions. Ethical assessment involves the condemnation or approval of an activity, behavior, and way of thinking based on moral requirements. It plays a significant role in the moral regulation of behavior since all people crave approval either by doing good deeds or avoiding bad ones. The basis for the assessment is ethical principles, norms, ideals, and moral qualities.

The main components of a person’s ethical worldview are justice, kindness, and responsibility. Undoubtedly, everyone can define these concepts in different ways, but modern society can give people a shared understanding of each of them. They can be considered as “rules for helping one to work out what one ought or ought not to do in a given situation: (O’Hara 85). Thanks to this, people can have a guide for their actions and consult with it if necessary. This guide allows them to build a highly moral personality and live ethically correct life, which benefits both people and their loved ones.

Thus, in the framework of the philosophy of morality, people are considered as creatures with certain ethical principles, motivating them to act and allowing them to evaluate their results. This behavior helps people to manage their own lives and interact productively with others. Thanks to faithful and balanced principles, people can act without harming others. Consequently, the right actions can bring positive emotions and even benefit in different areas of life. Thanks to this, people feel happy and live a fuller, more joyful life.

O’Hara, Neil. Moral Certainty and the Foundations of Morality. Springer, 2018.

Wallenborn, Ralph. Morality. To What Ends in Modern Times?: About the Modernistic Aspects of Antique and Renaissance Morals . GRIN Verlag: 2016.

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