## 1. The meanings of 'happiness'


### 1.1 Two senses 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:


1. A state of mind
2. 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.


### 1.2 Clarifying our inquiry



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


### 2.1 The chief candidates



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.


### 2.2 Methodology: settling on a theory



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.


### 2.3 Life satisfaction versus affect-based accounts



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]


### 2.4 Hedonism versus emotional state



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.


### 2.5 Hybrid accounts



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


### 3.1 Can happiness be measured?



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.


### 3.2 Empirical findings: overview



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:


1. Most people are happy
2. People adapt to most changes, tending to return over time to their
happiness "set point"
3. People are prone to make serious mistakes in assessing and
pursuing happiness
4. 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]


### 3.3 The sources of happiness



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


### 4.1 Doubts about the value 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.


### 4.2 Restoring happiness to the theory of well-being



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 (Brulde 2007, Haybron 2008a,
Tiberius and Plakias 2010, Visak 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.'


### 4.3 Is happiness overrated?



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


### 5.1 Normative issues



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]


### 5.2 Mistakes in the pursuit of happiness



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):


1. Assessing how happy we are, or were in the past (Haybron 2007)
2. Predicting ("forecasting") what will make us happy
(Gilbert 2006)
3. 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.


### 5.3 The politics of happiness



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.