Happiness

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HAPPINESS

As an object of philosophical inquiry, the concept of happiness is as old as philosophy itself. It was central to the ethical thought of the Greeks, most famously Aristotle, and was restored to this position of prominence by the nineteenth-century utilitarians. Whether a principal theme or not, the pursuit of happiness plays some role in virtually all ethical traditions. Indeed, few would deny that happiness is one of the important goals in life, if not the only one. Through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, both philosophers and psychologists have continued to ask questions about happiness. These questions fall into two broad categories: (1) The nature of happiness—in what does it consist? (2) The value of happiness—what is its role in a theory of ethics or of the good life?

What Happiness is

The terms happy and happiness are used in many different ways, and it is important to identify the precise concept that is of philosophical interest. We often speak about being happy with or about something, where this means roughly regarding it favorably or having a positive attitude toward it. The object of such an attitude can, in principle, be anything: a state of oneself or a state of the world. We also speak about feeling happy, where this is an occurrent state of mind characteristically accompanied by energy, vitality, and buoyancy of spirit. Both of these notions need to be distinguished from that of being happy or having a happy life. When philosophers investigate the nature or value of happiness, it is this concept of a happy life that they have in mind.

Accounts of the nature of happiness can be partitioned initially along a subjective–objective dimension. An analysis is subjective if it makes a person's happiness depend, at least in part, on attitudes or feelings. Conversely, it is objective if happiness is taken to be entirely independent of these subjective states so that someone could be happy even if neither feeling happy nor having a positive attitude toward the conditions of life.

The best-known example of an objective conception of happiness is Aristotle's. According to Aristotle, eudaimonia consists in the excellent functioning of the soul, thus the exercise of virtue. While Aristotle allowed, as does common sense, that a person's happiness could also be affected by external goods and circumstances, the stronger view that virtue is not only necessary for happiness but also sufficient was affirmed by the Stoics. Both views, however, have seemed counterintuitive to many. If virtue is necessary for happiness, how is it possible (as it seems to be) for vicious people to be happy? And if virtue is sufficient, then would we not be compelled to call the virtuous happy even if they are consumed by torment and suffering? The seemingly paradoxical implications of linking virtue and happiness in either of these ways has led some commentators on Aristotle to the conclusion that what he means by eudaimonia is not adequately captured by our concept of happiness, so that the Greek term he uses should really be translated in some other way, possibly as well-being.

However this might be, when the utilitarians revived interest in happiness as an object of ethical inquiry, they assumed a subjective analysis of its nature. For Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick, happiness consisted in pleasure and the absence of pain or a surplus of pleasure over pain. The hedonism they espoused represents one of the main options for a subjective analysis of happiness. On the simplest version of it, a person's hedonic state at a particular time is determined by the balance of agreeable and disagreeable feelings at that time. Happiness is then a matter of the longer-term tendencies of these hedonic balances: The greater and more enduring the balance of positive over negative states, the happier the person. In recent years this reduction of happiness to positive and negative affect has been one prominent theme in the emerging field of hedonic or positive psychology. Indeed, a hedonistic or affective state analysis of happiness is now most commonly defended by psychologists such as Daniel Kahneman, though it still has its philosophical advocates as well.

However, many philosophers attracted to the project of a subjective analysis of happiness have found the hedonistic account unsatisfactory. For one thing, the usual sources of pleasure seem too short-term and episodic to tell the whole story of whether a person is happy. The idea that happiness over a lifetime, or a considerable stretch of a life, can be computed simply by adding up episodes of positive and negative affect and finding the balance neglects the role of more global factors, such as the pursuit and achievement of long-term goals or projects. Indeed, there is good empirical evidence that even very intense pleasures on particular occasions add relatively little to a person's overall happiness compared with more stable and enduring sources of fulfillment or satisfaction. Furthermore, there seems to be a cognitive or judgmental aspect to happiness that is not captured by this exclusive focus on occurrent feelings. It seems plausible to think that how happy a person is must have something to do with how well that person thinks life is going, either as a whole or in important sectors (such as work, family, and health). Developing this line of thought has led philosophers and psychologists to develop a conception of happiness as life-satisfaction. This conception is still subjective since it takes someone's happiness to be a matter of how the person thinks life is faring given that person's interests and values. But it makes happiness more a matter of judgment than of feeling. Among psychologists Ed Diener has been the principal exponent of this life-satisfaction view.

So there are two principal subjective analyses of happiness: in terms of affective states or life-satisfaction. Each seems to capture a dimension of the phenomenon that eludes the other. On the one hand we would be reluctant to call anyone happy whose dominant state of mind tended toward the gloomy, dejected, or depressed. Here the affective state account seems to yield the intuitively right result. On the other hand we would be similarly reluctant if the subject were to report that in every important sector, life was failing to measure up to aspirations and expectations for it. This time the life-satisfaction account seems to be on the right track. Perhaps, then, the best theory of the nature of happiness will be a hybrid that takes both dimensions into account, looking for a preponderance of positive affect over time together with an endorsement of the conditions of one's life. Such a theory will not yield a determinate result if these dimensions can come apart, as seems both logically and psychologically possible. But in that case the right response might be to question whether our common notion of happiness is internally unified or whether it looks to both of these factors. If the latter is the case, then the hybrid theory might just be the best fit for it.

Why Happiness Matters: Well-Being

Whether construed objectively or subjectively, happiness has been thought to be normatively important either as a part of the good life or as an ethically valuable goal. When inquiring into the role of happiness in the good life, we must be mindful of the multiple ambiguities of this latter notion. A good life is a life high in some particular type of value, but there are many such types (such as aesthetic, perfectionist, and ethical). The dimension of value to which happiness seems most relevant is prudential: the value of a life for the person who is living it. But prudential value is a piece of technical philosophical terminology; its ordinary language equivalent is well-being.

Is happiness equivalent to well-being, thus to a good life, in this particular sense? There is some reason to think so. After all, we commonly wish people happiness at critical junctures in their lives, such as birthdays and anniversaries, seeming to imply that this is the best, most optimistic, hope we can have for them. Furthermore, there is much plausibility in the idea that any other of our life's conditions—health, income, job, family—is of little or no value if it does not make us happy. Perhaps then, as Mill claimed, "happiness is desirable, and the only thing desirable, as an end; all other things being only desirable as a means to that end" (Mill 1969, p. 234).

But there is also reason to doubt the equation of happiness and well-being, especially if we assume a subjective conception of happiness. For one thing, since on either version of a subjective analysis happiness is a state of mind, it can in principle be synthesized in the manner made famous by Robert Nozick's science-fiction example of the experience machine. But we would be reluctant to think that the good life for a person could consist in a thorough-going illusion completely divorced from reality. In addition, people's subjective responses to their lives are notoriously subject to manipulation through such mechanisms as oppression and socialization. As a result, people's self-assessments of happiness will be dependent on their expectations for themselves, which may be artificially lowered through internalized conceptions of their social role or status. In order to correct for these distortions, some philosophers have suggested that self-assessed happiness is a reliable indicator of well-being only under conditions of information and autonomy. Others have taken the further step of suggesting that real or genuine happiness consists in the subject's endorsement of the right kinds of objects or states of affairs—those with independent value. Taking this route will lead to a hybrid subjective/objective theory, not of happiness (which is still interpreted subjectively), but of well-being.

Why Happiness Matters: Ethics

As noted at the outset, happiness has been a central theme in ethical theories, both ancient and modern. The most natural route to treating happiness as an intrinsic ethical good is through its role in well-being. The argument would then be something like this: Well-being matters in its own right, happiness is at least an essential ingredient in well-being, therefore happiness matters in its own right. Some such argument, in one form or another, seems to have influenced both the Greeks and the utilitarians. However, it is also possible in principle (though perhaps less plausible) to hold that happiness is intrinsically valuable just in its own right, independently of its connection to well-being.

Where well-being is concerned, there is an easy answer to the question whose happiness matters: my happiness is central to my well-being, yours to yours, and so on. But the question takes on a more acute importance when we turn to ethics. For the Greeks, and for some contemporary versions of virtue ethics, the primary focus is on showing the agent how to live a good—that is to say, happy—life. The link to the happiness of others is then through the account of the virtues necessary for the agent's own happiness. This argumentative route, needless to say, is plausible only if we presuppose an objective conception of happiness.

For the utilitarians, by contrast, everyone's happiness is equally valuable: As Mill put it, citing Bentham, "everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one" (Mill 1969, p. 257). Another way of stating this contrast is that for the virtue theorists, happiness provides an agent-relative goal: Everyone has an ultimate reason to pursue their own happiness. For the utilitarians happiness provides an agent-neutral goal: Everyone has an ultimate reason to promote happiness, regardless of whose it is. In this respect Kant's deontological theory occupied the middle ground: We have no duty to pursue our own happiness (since Kant thought that we inevitably did that anyway), but we do have a duty to promote the happiness of others.

Bibliography

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