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Philosophy of Happiness
PHIL2467
• PART I WHAT IS HAPPINESS?
A simple test
20% 46% 27% 4% 2% 1% 0%
Source: Andrews and Withey, Social Indicators of Well-Being: Americans’ Perceptions of Life
Quality, 1976
How happy are you?
Psychological‘happiness’
1. Psychological (“internalist”) theories
• Happiness is a subjective psychological state.
Which state?
– Affective (sensations, feelings, moods)
– Cognitive (beliefs/thoughts)
– Conative (desires)
– A combination of these: e.g., Psychologist’s
‘subjective well-being’
Cause vs. Constitution
• “Happiness is…”
– “a warm puppy” Charles
M. Schulz
– “having a large, loving,
close-knit family in
another city” George
Burns
– “finding two olives in
your Martini when
you’re hungry” Johnny
Carson
Cause vs. Constitution
• Happiness is not a baby
mammal!
What causes happiness
is different from
What happiness is
This lecture…
Affective (feeling-based) theories of happiness
• 1. The hedonic conception Happiness = a surplus of
pleasure/enjoyment over pain/suffering.
(i) The sensation view (Bentham)
(ii) The attitude approach (Sidgwick)
Is it pain, or only suffering, that diminishes happiness?
• 2. Emotional State Theory Happiness is an emotional state
(distinct from pleasure)
Two more internalist theories
Cognitive (belief-based) theories of happiness
• 3. Perceived Desire-Fulfillment Happiness is
believing that your desires are fulfilled
• 4. Life-Satisfaction Happiness is being satisfied
with your life
Hedonic Happiness
• Pleasure includes
Intellectual, emotional
and aesthetic pleasures,
as well as bodily
Epicurus & The Buddha
• “When we say that
pleasure is the goal we
do not mean the
pleasure of the
profligate or the
pleasures of
consumption…but
rather the lack of pain
in the body and
disturbance in the
mind.” Menoeceus
(341-270BCE)
What is pleasure?
• The ‘Sensation View’
(Bentham)
• Pleasure is a distinctive
felt sensation
Sensory Hedonism
• Pleasant feeling • Painful feeling
Is there a “distinctive feeling tone”?
The Attitude View (Sidgwick)
• “[W]hen I reflect on the notion of pleasure,—using the
term in the comprehensive sense…to include the most
refined and subtle intellectual and emotional
gratifications, no less than the coarser and more
definite sensual enjoyments,— the only common
quality that I can find in the feelings so designated
seems to be that relation to desire and volition
expressed by the general term ‘desirable.’…I propose
therefore to define Pleasure…as a feeling which, when
experienced by intelligent beings, is at least implicitly
apprehended as desirable or—in the case of
comparison—preferable.” (Henry Sidgwick, The
Methods of Ethics)
The attitude view
(also known as ‘preference hedonism’)
• Pleasure is an attitude to an experience.
• Pleasure is “desirable consciousness”—
experience that, when felt, is liked for its own
sake because of the way it feels
• What makes an experience pleasant is that it
is desired; the more it is wanted, the more
pleasant it is
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvQViPB
AvPk
Enjoyable Pains?
Enjoyable Pains?
Sensation vs attitude
• The sensation and attitude views can
potentially give quite different verdicts on
happiness. How happy is Lawrence while
putting out the match?
– Sensation view: In pain = unhappy!
– Attitude view: In pain but not suffering = not
unhappy at all!
• Important value question for later: is it pain or
only suffering that reduces our well-being?
“Happiness Hedonism”
The hedonic conception sometimes goes by
“hedonism”; this label is potentially highly
misleading as it suggests narrow short-term,
selfish pleasure-seeking.
Long-term hedonic happiness = a positive
balance of pleasure over pain (suffering)
over the long term
All are desirable experiences
“Happiness hedonism”
• The hedonic conception is sometimes called
“hedonism” but this label is potentially highly
misleading as it suggests short-term selfish
sensory pleasure-seeking.
• The hedonic theory does *NOT* say that
happiness consists in short-term, selfish
sensory pleasure-seeking.
The hedonic conception
• A person is happy at a time if and only if she
feels more pain than pleasure at that time
• Long-term hedonic happiness = a positive
balance of pleasure over pain (suffering) over
the long term
• A person has a happy life if and only if she
experienced more pain than pleasure over her
whole life
The ‘Felicific’ Calculus
We can measure• Discrete moments
• Discrete moments
• Total happiness
• Average happiness
Quantitative vs. Qualitative Hedonism
• Bentham says:
“Quantity of pleasure
being equal, pushpin is as
good as poetry”
• Mill says: quality of pleasure
matters too. ‘Higher’
pleasures are more central
to happiness: “Better to be
Socrates dissatisfied, than a
pig satisfied”
‘The Paradox of Hedonism’
• The self-conscious pursuit of
pleasure is self-defeating
• “Those only are happy ... who have
their minds fixed on some object other
than their own happiness... Aiming thus
at something else, they find happiness
along the way... Ask yourself whether
you are happy, and you cease to be so”
(Mill, Autobiography, 1909, p. 64).
Empirical Evidence
• Schooler, Ariely, Lowenstein. (See also, for e.g., Elizabeth Dunn (2008))
Emotional State Theory
• Happiness is an affective (felt) state distinct
from pleasure, which involves not just having
many pleasant experiences, but more
importantly being in an underlying
psychological state that disposes you to have
lots of pleasant experiences
• E.g. irritability
• Occurrent versus dispositional states
Emotional State Theory
• Need not involve conscious
pleasure/enjoyment
• E.g.“Flow”: valued activity, clear goals,
concentration, a loss of self-
consciousness, a distorted sense of
time, immediacy, a balance between
skill and ability, personal control
(Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi).
Pleasure lacks ‘causal depth’
• Pleasures and pains are occurrent episodes, but happiness is
essentially dispositional
• “Hedonistic happiness is an essentially episodic …phenomenon. But
happiness is obviously not just the having of a certain kind of
experience, or even lots of them. It is rather a deeper psychological
condition incorporating the more or less stable underlying mental
states that determine, in part and among other things, the kind of
experience that will occur. It is a substantially dispositional
phenomenon. It tells us not just about subjects’ histories, but also
about their current conditions and propensities for the near future.
It is forward-looking…Hedonism is thus fundamentally wrong about
the kind of mental state that happiness is. It appears to commit
something of a category mistake” (Haybron 2001, p. 510. It. added).
“Shallow and Fleeting Pleasures”
• Hedonism is too inclusive: it allows all sorts of pleasures—even the most
(psychologically) “shallow” and “fleeting”—to count toward happiness:
• “Yet such pleasures manifestly play no constitutive role in determining how
happy a person is. One’s enjoyment of eating crackers, hearing a good song,
sexual intercourse, scratching an itch, solving a puzzle, playing football, and so
forth, need not have the slightest impact on one’s level of happiness (though,
of course, they may). I enjoy, get pleasure from, a cheeseburger, yet I am
patently not happier thereby” (Daniel Haybron, 2001, p. 505).
• “Intuitively, the problem seems to be that such [“shallow” and “fleeting”]
pleasures don’t reach “deeply” enough… They just don’t get to us; they flit
through consciousness and that’s the end of it….This consideration alone
appears to undermine any hedonistic account of [happiness]” (Haybron 2001,
p. 505).
Emotional State Theory
• “To be happy is for one’s overall emotional
condition to be broadly positive—involving
stances of attunement, engagement and
endorsement—with negative central affective
states and mood propensities only to a minor
extent” (Haybron, The Pursuit of Unhappiness,
Oxford: OUP, 2008, p. 147).
‘Three Faces of Happiness’
(Daniel Haybron, The Pursuit of Unhappiness 2008, pp. 111-122)
• 1. Endorsement
– Joy (sadness);
– Cheeriness (irritability)
• 2. Engagement
– Openness & Exuberance (listlessness);
– Flow (boredom/ennui)
• 3. Attunement
– Peace of Mind (anxiety)
– Confidence (insecurity)
– Uncompression (compression)
Questions/Objections
• 1. Is Haybron correct that shallow and fleeting
pleasures and pains don’t many any difference to
happiness? e.g. Suppose you’re feeling grumpy. A friend gives you a
shoulder rub. It’s not enough to cheer you up, but it feels nice, and
temporarily takes your mind off feeling grumpy. Did the rub make you a bit
happier?
• 2. Is Haybron correct that you literally can’t be happy
if your mood base isn’t positive, even though your
actual experience is pleasant?
Review
• Is happiness a feeling?
• If so, is this feeling captured by the hedonic
conception?
• Or emotional state theory?
Review
• Is happiness a feeling?
• If so, is this feeling captured by hedonism?
• Or affective state theory?
So far…
We’ve considered
affective (“feel-good”)
theories of happiness
• The Hedonic conception,
and
• Emotional State Theory
Happiness as feeling good
Happiness as (perceived) success
• Now, we’ll consider two more theories of happiness
• 3. Perceived Desire-Fulfillment Theory
Happiness = fulfilling your desires—or at least
believing that you are
• 4. Life satisfaction Theory
Happiness = a positive attitude to your life. Do you
have—or do you think you have—the life that you
want?
Perceived Desire-Fulfillment Theory
• To be happy is to believe that you are satisfying
(fulfilling) your desires, apart from how you feel
Desire “Fulfillment”
• N.B. “Fulfillment” here is a semi-technical
term, meaning that what you desire has come
true; it does not refer to a feeling
E.g. “She fulfilled the degree requirements”
Wanting vs Liking
• Can you satisfy your desires without feeling
good?
wanting vs. liking
• Can people really get what they want and feel
bad?
Decision vs. Experience Utility
• We often make choices that don’t maximise
good feelings long-term (Daniel Kahneman)
“miswanting” (Glibert & Wilson)
• We want what we do
not like and we fail to
want what we do like
• Miswanting is the
explanation for why we
fail to maximise
enjoyment
Miswanting occurs because
• we imagine the wrong
effect e.g. celebrity
Wanting ≠ Liking
Perceived Desire-Fulfillment Theory
• “Take every proposition A is
thinking at the moment, multiply
the degree to which it is believed
by the degree to which it is
desired, add up all the products,
and the sum is A’s degree of
happiness”
(Wayne Davis, “A Theory of Happiness”, American
Philosophical Quarterly 18,2 (April, 1981), p. 113.)
Perceived desire fulfillment is different from the
hedonic conception because the perceived
satisfaction of all your desires (not just desired
feelings) counts directly toward your happiness
And allows that you can be happy without
experiencing pleasure (e.g. ‘suffering artist’)
Local vs. Global Satisfaction
• Local fulfillments—even many of them—
need not add up to a fulfilling life
• Happiness is more global: To be happy is
to be satisfied with your life
The Life-Satisfaction Theory is
• Widely accepted among
• Philosophers: Tatarkiewicz, Telfer, Brandt,
Sumner, Nozick, and Kekes
• Psychologists and empirical researchers:
“Considering everything, how satisfied are
you with your life? Very satisfied?
Moderately Satisfied? Not at all satisfied?”
Judgement or Emotion?