philosophy of happiness essay

1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology

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Happiness: What is it to be Happy?

Author: Kiki Berk Category: Ethics , Phenomenology and Existentialism Words: 992

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Do you want to be happy? If you’re like most people, then yes, you do.

But what is happiness? What does it mean to be “happy”? [1]

This essay discusses four major philosophical theories of happiness. [2]

1. Hedonism

According to hedonism, happiness is simply the experience of pleasure. [3] A happy person has a lot more pleasure than displeasure (pain) in her life. To be happy, then, is just to feel good. In other words, there’s no difference between being happy and feeling happy.

Famous hedonists include the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus and the modern English philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. [4] These philosophers all took happiness to include intellectual pleasures (such as reading a book) in addition to physical pleasures (such as having sex).

Although we associate being happy with feeling good, many philosophers think that hedonism is mistaken.

First, it’s possible to be happy without feeling good (such as when a happy person has a toothache), and it’s also possible to feel good without being happy (such as when an unhappy person gets a massage). Since happiness and pleasure can come apart, they can’t be the same thing.

Second, happiness and pleasure seem to have different properties. Pleasures are often fleeting, simple, and superficial (think of the pleasure involved in eating ice cream), whereas happiness is supposed to be lasting, complex, and profound. Things with different properties can’t be identical, so happiness can’t be the same thing as pleasure.

These arguments suggest that happiness and pleasure aren’t identical. That being said, it’s hard to imagine a happy person who never feels good. So, perhaps happiness involves pleasure without being identical to it.

2. Virtue Theory

According to virtue theory, happiness is the result of cultivating the virtues—both moral and intellectual—such as wisdom, courage, temperance, and patience. A happy person must be sufficiently virtuous. To be happy, then, is to cultivate excellence and to flourish as a result. This view is famously held by Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. [5]

Linking happiness to virtue has the advantage of treating happiness as a lasting, complex, and profound phenomenon. It also explains how happiness and pleasure can come apart, since a person can be virtuous without feeling good, and a person can feel good without being virtuous.

In spite of these advantages, however, virtue theory is questionable. An important part of being virtuous is being morally good. But are immoral people always unhappy? Arguably not. Many bad people seem happy in spite of—or even because of—their unsavory actions. And a similar point can be made about intellectual virtue: unwise or irrational people aren’t always unhappy, either. In fact, some of these people seem happy as a direct result of their intellectual deficiencies. “Ignorance is bliss,” the saying goes!

But virtue theorists have a response here. Maybe some immoral people seem happy, on the surface; but that doesn’t mean that they are truly happy, at some deeper level. And the same thing can be said about people who lack the intellectual virtues: ignorance may lead to bliss, but that bliss isn’t true happiness. So, there seems to be some room for debate on these issues.

3. Desire Satisfaction Theory

According to the desire satisfaction theory, happiness consists in getting what you want—whatever that happens to be. A happy person has many of her desires satisfied; and the more her desires are satisfied, the happier she is.

Even though getting what you want can be a source of happiness, identifying happiness with desire satisfaction is problematic.

To start, this implies that the only way to become happier is by satisfying a desire. This seems wrong. Sometimes our happiness is increased by getting something we didn’t previously want—such as a surprise birthday party or getting stuck taking care of a neighbor’s cat. This implies that desire satisfaction is not necessary for happiness.

Desire satisfaction is not always sufficient for happiness, either. Unfortunately, it is common for people to feel disappointed when they get what they want. Many accomplishments, such as earning a degree or winning a tournament, simply don’t bring the long-lasting happiness that we expect. [6]

So, even if getting what we want sometimes makes us happy, these counterexamples suggest that happiness does not consist in desire satisfaction. [7]

4. Life Satisfaction Theory

According to the life satisfaction theory, happiness consists in being satisfied with your life. A happy person has a positive impression of her life in general, even though she might not be happy about every single aspect of it. To be happy, then, means to be content with your life as a whole.

It’s controversial whether life satisfaction is affective (a feeling) or cognitive (a belief). On the one hand, life satisfaction certainly comes with positive feelings. On the other hand, it’s possible to step back, reflect on your life, and realize that it’s good, even when you’re feeling down. [8]  

One problem for this theory is that it’s difficult for people to distinguish how they feel in the moment from how they feel about their lives overall. Studies have shown that people report feeling more satisfied with their lives when the weather is good, even though this shouldn’t make that much of a difference. But measuring life satisfaction is complicated, so perhaps such studies should be taken with a grain of salt. [9]

5. Conclusion

Understanding what happiness is should enable you to become happier.

First, decide which theory of happiness you think is true, based on the arguments.

Second, pursue whatever happiness is according to that theory: seek pleasure and try to avoid pain (hedonism), cultivate moral and intellectual virtue (virtue theory), decide what you really want and do your best to get it (desire satisfaction theory), or change your life (or your attitude about it) so you feel (or believe) that it’s going well (life satisfaction theory).

And if you’re not sure which theory of happiness is true, then you could always try pursuing all of these things. 😊

[1] This might seem like an empirical (scientific) question rather than a philosophical one. However, this essay asks the conceptual question of what happiness is, and conceptual questions belong to philosophy, not to science.

[2] Happiness is commonly distinguished from “well-being,” i.e., the state of a life that is worth living. Whether or not happiness is the same thing as well-being is an open question, but most philosophers think it isn’t. See, for example, Haybron (2020).

[3] The word “hedonism” has different uses in philosophy. In this paper, it means that happiness is the same thing as pleasure (hedonism about happiness). But sometimes it is used to mean that happiness is the only thing that has intrinsic value (hedonism about value) or that humans are always and only motivated by pleasure (psychological hedonism). It’s important not to confuse these different uses of the word.

[4] For more on Epicurus and happiness, see Konstan (2018). For more on Bentham and Mill on happiness, see Driver (2014), as well as John Stuart Mill on The Good Life: Higher-Quality Pleasures by Dale E. Miller and Consequentialism by Shane Gronholz

[5] For more on Plato and happiness, see Frede (2017); for more on Aristotle and happiness, see Kraut (2018), and on the Stoics and happiness, see Baltzly (2019).

[6] For a discussion of the phenomenon of disappointment in this context see, for example, Ben Shahar (2007).

[7] For more objections to the desire satisfaction theory, see Shafer-Landau (2018) and Vitrano (2013).

[8] If happiness is life satisfaction, then happiness seems to be “subjective” in the sense that a person cannot be mistaken about whether or not she is happy. Whether happiness is subjective in this sense is controversial, and a person who thinks that a person can be mistaken about whether or not she is happy will probably favor a different theory of happiness.

[9] See Weimann, Knabe and Schob (2015) and Berk (2018).

Baltzly, Dirk, “Stoicism”,  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy  (Spring 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/stoicism/>.

Berk, Kiki (2018). “Does Money Make Us Happy? The Prospects and Problems of Happiness Research in Economics,” in Journal of Happiness Studies, 19, 1241-1245.

Ben-Shahar, Tal (2007). Happier . New York: McGraw-Hill.

Driver, Julia, “The History of Utilitarianism”,  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy  (Winter 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/utilitarianism-history/>.

Frede, Dorothea, “Plato’s Ethics: An Overview”,  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy  (Winter 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/plato-ethics/>.

Haybron, Dan, “Happiness”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy  (Summer 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/happiness/>.

Konstan, David, “Epicurus”,  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy  (Summer 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/epicurus/>.

Kraut, Richard, “Aristotle’s Ethics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/aristotle-ethics/>.

Shafer-Landau, Russ (2018). The Ethical Life: Fundamental Readings in Ethics and Moral Problems. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Vitrano, Christine (2013). The Nature and Value of Happiness. Boulder: Westview Press.

Weimann, Joachim, Andreas Knabe, and Ronnie Schob (2015). Measuring Happiness . Cambridge: The MIT Press.

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About the Author

Dr. Kiki Berk is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Southern New Hampshire University. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the VU University Amsterdam in 2010. Her research focuses on Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s philosophies of death and meaning in life.

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The Philosophy of Happiness in Life (+ Aristotle’s View)

We all hope to be happy and live a ‘good life’– whatever that means! Do you wonder, what does it actually mean?

The basic role of ‘philosophy’ is to ask questions, and think about the nature of human thought and the universe. Thus, a discussion of the philosophy of happiness in life can be seen as an examination of the very nature of happiness and what it means for the universe.

Philosophers have been inquiring about happiness since ancient times. Aristotle, when he asked ‘ what is the ultimate purpose of human existence ’ alluded to the fact that purpose was what he argued to be ‘happiness’. He termed this eudaimonia – “ activity expressing virtue ”. This will all be explained shortly.

The purpose of this article is to explore the philosophy of happiness in life, including taking a closer look at Aristotle’s philosophy and answering some of those “big” questions about happiness and living a ‘good life’. In this article, you will also find some practical tips that hopefully you can put in place in your own life. Enjoy!

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Happiness & Subjective Wellbeing Exercises for free . These detailed, science-based exercises will help you or your clients identify sources of authentic happiness and strategies to boost wellbeing.

This Article Contains:

A look at the philosophy of happiness, aristotle on happiness, what is real happiness, the value and importance of having true happiness in life, the biggest causes that bring true happiness in life, 15 ways to create happy moments in life, five reasons to be happy from a philosophical perspective, finding happiness in family life, a look at happiness and productivity, how does loneliness affect life satisfaction, 6 recommended books, a take-home message.

Happiness. It is a term that is taken for granted in this modern age. However, since the dawn of time, philosophers have been pursuing the inquiry of happiness… after all, the purpose of life is not just to live, but to live ‘well’.

Philosophers ask some key questions about happiness: can people be happy? If so, do they want to? If people have both a desire to be happy and the ability to be happy, does this mean that they should, therefore, pursue happiness for themselves and others? If they can, they want to, and they ought to be happy, but how do they achieve this goal?

To explore the philosophy of happiness in life, first, the history of happiness will be examined.

Democritus, a philosopher from Ancient Greece, was the first philosopher in the western world to examine the nature of happiness (Kesebir & Diener, 2008). He put forth a suggestion that, unlike it was previously thought, happiness does not result from ‘favorable fate’ (i.e. good luck) or other external circumstances (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

Democritus contended that happiness was a ‘case of mind’, introducing a subjectivist view as to what happiness is (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

A more objective view of happiness was introduced by Socrates, and his student, Plato.

They put forth the notion that happiness was “ secure enjoyment of what is good and beautiful ” (Plato, 1999, p. 80). Plato developed the idea that the best life is one whereby a person is either pursuing pleasure of exercising intellectual virtues… an argument which, the next key figure in the development of the philosophy of happiness – Aristotle – disagreed with (Waterman, 1993).

The philosophy of Aristotle will be explored in depth in the next section of this article.

Hellenic history (i.e. ancient Greek times) was largely dominated by the prominent theory of hedonism (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

Hedonism is, to put it simply, the pursuit of pleasure as the only intrinsic good (Waterman, 1993). This was the Cyrenaic view of happiness. It was thought that a good life was denoted by seeking pleasure, and satisfying physical, intellectual/social needs (Kashdan, Biswas-Diener & King, 2008).

Kraut (1979, p. 178) describes hedonic happiness as “ the belief that one is getting the important things one wants, as well as certain pleasant affects that normally go along with this belief ” (Waterman, 1993).

In ancient times, it was also thought that it is not possible to live a good life without living in accordance with reason and morality (Kesebir & Diener, 2008). Epicurus, whose work was dominated by hedonism, contended that in fact, virtue (living according to values) and pleasure are interdependent (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

In the middle ages, Christian philosophers said that whilst virtue is essential for a good life, that virtue alone is not sufficient for happiness (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

According to the Christian philosophers, happiness is in the hands of God. Even though the Christians believed that earthly happiness was imperfect, they embraced the idea that Heaven promised eternal happiness (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

A more secular explanation of happiness was introduced in the Age of Enlightenment.

At this time, in the western world pleasure was regarded as the path to, or even the same thing as, happiness (Kesebir & Diener, 2008). From the early nineteenth century, happiness was seen as a value which is derived from maximum pleasure.

Utilitarians, such as the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, suggested the following: “ maximum surplus of pleasure over pain as the cardinal goal of human striving ” (Kesebir & Diener, 2008). Utilitarians believe that morals and legislation should be based on whatever will achieve the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

In the modern era, happiness is something we take for granted. It is assumed that humans are entitled to pursue and attain happiness (Kesebir & Diener, 2008). This is evidenced by the fact that in the US declaration of independence, the pursuit of happiness is protected as a fundamental human right! (Conkle, 2008).

Go into any book store and large sections are dedicated to the wide range of ‘self-help’ books all promoting happiness.

What is This Thing Called Happiness?

It is incredibly challenging to define happiness . Modern psychology describes happiness as subjective wellbeing, or “ people’s evaluations of their lives and encompasses both cognitive judgments of satisfaction and affective appraisals of moods and emotions ” (Kesebir & Diener, 2008, p. 118).

The key components of subjective wellbeing are:

• Life satisfaction
• Satisfaction with important aspects of one’s life (for example work, relationships, health)
• The presence of positive affect
• Low levels of negative affect

These four components have featured in philosophical material on happiness since ancient times.

Subjective life satisfaction is a crucial aspect of happiness, which is consistent with the work of contemporary philosopher Wayne Sumner, who described happiness as ‘ a response by a subject to her life conditions as she sees them ’ (1999, p. 156).

Thus, if happiness is ‘a thing’ how is it measured?

Some contemporary philosophers and psychologists question self-report as an appropriate measure of happiness. However, many studies have found that self-report measures of ‘happiness’ (subjective wellbeing) are valid and reliable (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

Two other accounts of happiness in modern psychology are firstly, the concept of psychological wellbeing (Ryff & Singer, 1996) and secondly, self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000).

Both of these theories are more consistent with the eudaemonist theories of ‘ flourishing ’ (including Aristotle’s ideas) because they describe the phenomenon of needs (such as autonomy, self-acceptance, and mastery) being met (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

Eudaimonia will be explained in detail in the next section of the article (keep reading!) but for now, it suffices to say that eudaemonist theories of happiness define ‘happiness’ (eudaimonia) as a state in which an individual strives for the highest human good.

These days, most empirical psychological research puts forward the theory of subjective wellbeing rather than happiness as defined in a eudaimonic sense (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

Although the terms eudaimonia and subjectivewellbeing are not necessarily interchangeable, Kesebir and Diener (2008) argue that subjective wellbeing can be used to describe wellbeing, even if it may not be an absolutely perfect definition!

Can People be Happy?

In order to adequately address this question, it is necessary to differentiate between ‘ideal’ happiness and ‘actual’ happiness.

‘Ideal’ happiness implies a way of being that is complete, lasting and altogether perfect… probably outside of anyone’s reach! (Kesebir & Diener, 2008). However, despite this, people can actually experience mostly positive emotions and report overall satisfaction with their lives and therefore be deemed ‘happy’.

In fact, most people are happy. In a study conducted by the Pew Research Center in the US (2006), 84% of Americans see themselves as either “very happy” or “pretty happy” (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

Happiness also has an adaptive function. How is happiness adaptive? Well, positivity and wellbeing are also associated with people being confident enough to explore their environments and approach new goals, which increases the likelihood of them collecting resources.

The fact that most people report being happy, and happiness having an adaptive function, leads Kesebir and Diener (2008) to conclude that yes people can, in fact, be happy.

Do People Want to be Happy?

The overwhelming answer is yes! Research has shown that being happy is desirable. Whilst being happy is certainly not the only goal in life, nonetheless, it is necessary for a good life (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

A study by King and Napa (1998) showed that Americans view happiness as more relevant to the judgment of what constitutes a good life, rather than either wealth or ‘moral goodness’.

Should People be Happy?

Another way of putting this, is happiness justifiable? Happiness is not just the result of positive outcomes, such as better health, improved work performance, more ethical behavior, and better social relationships (Kesebir & Diener, 2008). It actually precedes and causes these outcomes!

Happiness leads to better health. For example, research undertaken by Danner, Snowdon & Friesen in 2001 examined the content of handwritten autobiographies of Catholic sisters. They found that expression in the writing that was characterized by positive affect predicted longevity 60 years later!

Achievement

Happiness is derived not from pursuing pleasure, but by working towards goals which are reflected in one’s values (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

Happiness can be predicted not merely by pleasure but by having a sense of meaning , purpose, and fulfillment. Happiness is also associated with better performance in professional life/work.

Social relationships and prosocial behavior

Happiness brings out the best in people… people who are happier are more social, cooperative and ethical (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

Happy individuals have also been shown to evaluate others more positively, show greater interest in interacting with others socially, and even be more likely to engage in self-disclosure (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

Happy individuals are also more likely to behave ethically (for example, choosing not to buy something because it is known to be stolen) (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

How to be happy?

The conditions and sources of happiness will be explored later on, so do keep reading… briefly in the meantime, happiness is caused by wealth, friends and social relationships, religion, and personality. These factors predict happiness.

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Chances are, you have heard of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. Are you aware that it was Aristotle who introduced the ‘science of happiness’? (Pursuit of Happiness, 2018).

Founder of Lyceum, the first scientific institute in Athens, Aristotle delivered a series of lectures termed Nicomachean Ethics to present his theory of happiness (Pursuit of Happiness, 2018).

Aristotle asked, “ what is the ultimate purpose of human existence? ”. He thought that a worthwhile goal should be to pursue “ that which is always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else ” (Pursuit of Happiness, 2018).

However, Aristotle disagreed with the Cyrenaic view that the only intrinsic good is pleasure (Waterman, 1993).

In developing his theory of ‘happiness’, Aristotle drew upon his knowledge about nature. He contended that what separates man from animal is rational capacity – arguing that a human’s unique function is to reason. He went on to say that pleasure alone cannot result in happiness because animals are driven by the pursuit of pleasure and according to Aristotle man has greater capacities than animals (Pursuit of Happiness, 2018).

Instead, he put forward the term ‘ eudaimonia ’.

To explain simply, eudaimonia is defined as ‘ activity expressing virtue ’ or what Aristotle conceived as happiness. Aristotle’s theory of happiness was as follows:

‘the function of man is to live a certain kind of life, and this activity implies a rational principle, and the function of a good man is the good and noble performance of these, and if any action is well performed it is performed in accord with the appropriate excellence: if this is the case, then happiness turns out to be an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue’

(Aristotle, 2004).

A key component of Aristotle’s theory of happiness is the factor of virtue. He contended that in aiming for happiness, the most important factor is to have ‘complete virtue’ or – in other words – good moral character (Pursuit of Happiness, 2008).

Aristotle identified friendship as being one of the most important virtues in achieving the goal of eudaimonia (Pursuit of Happiness, 2008). In fact, he valued friendship very highly, and described a ‘virtuous’ friendship as the most enjoyable, combining both pleasure and virtue.

Aristotle went on to put forward his belief that happiness involves, through the course of an entire life, choosing the ‘greater good’ not necessarily that which brings immediate, short term pleasure (Pursuit of Happiness, 2008).

Thus, according to Aristotle, happiness can only be achieved at the life-end: it is a goal, not a temporary state of being (Pursuit of Happiness, 2008). Aristotle believed that happiness is not short-lived:

‘for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy’

Happiness (eudaimonia), to Aristotle, meant attaining the ‘daimon’ or perfect self (Waterman, 1990). Reaching the ‘ultimate perfection of our natures’, as Aristotle meant by happiness, includes rational reflection (Pursuit of Happiness, 2008).

He argued that education was the embodiment of character refinement (Pursuit of Happiness, 2008). Striving for the daimon (perfect self) gives life meaning and direction (Waterman, 1990). Having a meaningful, purposeful life is valuable.

Efforts that the individual puts in to strive for the daimon are termed ‘ personally expressive ’ (Waterman, 1990).

Personal expressiveness involves intense involvement in an activity, a sense of fulfillment when engaged in an activity, and having a sense of acting in accordance with one’s purpose (Waterman, 1990). It refers to putting in effort, feeling challenged and competent, having clear goals and concentrating (Waterman, 1993).

According to Aristotle, eudaimonia and hedonic enjoyment are separate and distinguishable (Waterman, 1993). However, in a study of university students, personal expressiveness (which is, after all a component of eudaimonia) was found to be positively correlated with hedonic enjoyment (Waterman, 1993).

Telfer (1980), on the other hand, claimed that eudaimonia is a sufficient but not a necessary condition for achieving hedonic enjoyment (Waterman, 1993). How are eudaimonia and hedonic enjoyment different?

Well, personal expressiveness (from striving for eudaimonia) is associated with successfully achieving self-realization, while hedonic enjoyment does not (Waterman, 1993).

Thus, Aristotle identified the best possible life goal and the achievement of the highest level of meeting one’s needs, self-realization many, many years before Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs!

Results from Waterman’s 1993 study provide empirical support for the association between ‘personal expressiveness’ and what was described by Csikszentimikalyi (1975) as “flow” (Waterman, 1993).

Flow , conceptualized as a cognitive-affective state, is an experience whereby the challenge a task presents to a person is aligned with the skills that individual has to deal with such challenges.

Understanding that flow is a distinctive cognitive-affective state combines hedonic enjoyment and personal expressiveness (Waterman, 1993).

Aristotle’s work Nicomachean Ethics contributed a great deal to the understanding of what happiness is. To summarise from Pursuit of Happiness (2018), according to Aristotle, the purpose and ultimate goal in life is to achieve eudaimonia (‘happiness’). He believed that eudaimonia was not simply virtue, nor pleasure, but rather it was the exercise of virtue.

According to Aristotle, eudaimonia is a lifelong goal and depends on rational reflection. To achieve a balance between excess and deficiency (‘temperance’) one displays virtues – for example, generosity, justice, friendship, and citizenship. Eudaimonia requires intellectual contemplation, in order to meet our rational capacities.

To answer Aristotle’s question of “ what is the ultimate purpose of human existence ” is not a simple task, but perhaps the best answer is that the ultimate goal for human beings is to strive for ‘eudaimonia’ (happiness).

Aristotle & virtue theory – CrashCourse

What does ‘true’ happiness look like? Is it landing the dream job? Having a child ? Graduating from university? Whilst happiness is certainly associated with these ‘external’ factors, true happiness is quite different.

To be truly happy, a person’s sense of contentment with their life needs to come from within (Puff, 2018). In other words, real happiness is internal.

There are a few features that characterize ‘true’ (or real) happiness. The first is acceptance . A truly happy individual accepts reality for what it is, and what’s more, they actually come to love ‘what is’ (Puff, 2018).

This acceptance allows a person to feel content. As well as accepting the true state of affairs, real happiness involves accepting the fact that change is inevitable (Puff, 2018). Being willing to accept change as part of life means that truly happy people are in a position to be adaptive.

A state of real happiness is also reflected by a person having an understanding of the transience of life (Puff, 2018). This is important because understanding that in life, both good and ‘bad’ are only short-lived means that truly happy individuals have an understanding that ‘this too shall pass’.

Finally, another aspect of real happiness is an appreciation of the people in an individual’s life. (Puff, 2018). Strong relationships characterize people who are truly ‘flourishing’.

Most people would say that, if they could, they would like to be happy. As well as being desirable, happiness is both important and valuable.

Happy people have better social and work relationships (Conkle, 2008).

In terms of career, happy individuals are more likely to complete college, secure employment, receive positive work evaluations from their superiors, earn higher incomes, and are less likely to lose their job – and, in case of being laid off, people who are happy are re-employed more quickly (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

Positive emotions also precede and promote career success (Lyubomirsky, 2018). Happy workers are less likely to burn out, be absent from work and quit their job (Lyubomirsky, 2018). Further on in this article, the relationship between happiness and productivity will be explored more thoroughly.

It has also been found that people who are happy contribute more to society (Conkle, 2008). There is also an association between happiness and cooperation – those who are happy are more cooperative (Kesebir & Diener, 2008). They are also more likely to display ethical behavior (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

Perhaps the most important reason to have true happiness in life is that it is linked to longevity. True happiness is a significant predictor of a longer, healthier life (Conkle, 2008).

It is not only the effects of happiness that benefit individuals. Whole countries can flourish too – according to research, nations that are rated as happier also score more highly on generalized trust, volunteerism and democratic attitudes (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

However, as well as these objective reasons why happiness is important, happiness also brings with it some positive experiences and feelings. For example, true happiness is related to feelings of meaning and purpose (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

It is also associated with a sense of fulfillment, plus a feeling of achievement that is attained through actively striving for, and making progress towards, valuable goals (Kesebir & Diener, 2008).

Interestingly, objective life circumstances (demographic details) only account for 8% – 15% of the variance in happiness (Kesebir & Diener, 2008). So what causes true happiness? Kesebir and Diener (2008) identified five sources of happiness:

Wealth is the first cause of happiness. Studies have shown a significant positive correlation between wealth and happiness. It is the case that having enough (i.e. adequate) money is necessary for happiness but is not sufficient to cause happiness. Money gives people freedom, and having enough money enables individuals to meet their needs – e.g. housing, food, and health-care.

Satisfaction with income has been shown to be related to happiness (Diener, 1984). However, money is not the guarantee of happiness – consider lottery winners. Whilst it is necessary to have sufficient money this alone will not cause happiness. So, what else is a source of happiness?

Having friends and social relationships has been shown to be a leading cause of happiness. Humans are primarily social beings and have a need for social connection.

A sense of community is associated with life satisfaction (Diener, 1984). Making and keeping friends is positively correlated with wellbeing. Aristotle (2000) stated that “no one would choose to live without friends, even if he had all the other goods” (p. 143).

In fact, the association between friendship/social support and happiness has been supported by empirical research. Furthermore, being satisfied with family life and marriage is the key to subjective wellbeing (Diener, 1984).

Another source of happiness is religion . While not true universally, religion has been associated with greater happiness. Positive effects have been found with taking part in religious services.

Having a strong religious affiliation has also been shown to be of benefit. Engaging in prayer, and having a relationship with God is also related to greater happiness.

Finally, a large determinant of happiness is personality . Research supports the fact that individual differences in how a person responds both to events and also to other people have an impact on the levels of a person’s happiness.

Lykken & Tellegen (1996) found that stable temperamental tendencies (those that are inherited genetically) contribute up to 50% in the total variability in happiness. This research found that many personality factors – extraversion, neuroticism – as well as self-esteem , optimism , trust , agreeableness, repressive defensiveness, a desire for control, and hardiness all play a part in how happy a person is.

We can, to a certain extent, determine how happy we feel. Kane (2017) has come up with 15 ways in which happiness can be increased:

1. Find joy in the little things

Savoring ordinary moments in everyday life is a skill that can be learned (Tartarkovsky, 2016). For most of us, we spend so much time thinking about things we’re not currently even doing! This can make us unhappy.

Happiness can, in fact, be predicted by where our minds wander to when we’re not focused on the present. By appreciating the simple things in life, we foster positive emotions…from admiring a beautiful flower to enjoying a cup of tea, finding joy in the little things is associated with increased happiness.

2. Start each day with a smile

It sounds easy, but smiling is associated with feeling happy. Beginning the day on a positive note can vastly improve wellbeing.

3. Connect with others

As mentioned in the previous section, having friendship and social support is definitely a source of happiness. So, to create more happy moments in life, step away from the desk and initiate a conversation with a work colleague, or send an SMS to someone you have not seen for a while. Take opportunities to interact with other people as they arise.

4. Do what you’re most passionate about

Using your strengths and finding an activity to engage in which leads to ‘flow’ has been identified as an enduring pathway to happiness. Being completely engaged in an activity is termed ‘flow’. What constitutes an experience of flow?

To begin with, the task needs to require skill but not be too challenging (Tartarkovsky, 2016). It should have clear goals and allow you to completely immerse yourself in what you’re doing so your mind doesn’t wander (Tartarkovsky, 2016). It should completely absorb your attention and give a sense of being ‘in the zone’ (Tartarkovsky, 2016). Perhaps the easiest way to identify a flow experience is that you lose track of time.

By doing what you’re most passionate about, you are more likely to use your strengths and find a sense of flow .

5. Count your blessings and be thankful

Gratitude is known to increase happiness. Gratitude has been defined as having an appreciation for what you have, and being able to reflect on that (Tartarkovsky, 2016). Gratitude creates positive emotions, enhances relationships and is associated with better health (Tartarkovsky, 2016).

Examples of ways to engage in gratitude include writing a gratitude journal, or express appreciation – such as, send a ‘thank you’ card to someone.

6. Choose to be positive and see the best in every situation

Taking a ‘glass half full’ attitude to life can certainly enhance feelings of happiness. Finding the positives in even difficult situations helps to foster positive affect. As one psychologist from Harvard Medical School, Siegel, said “relatively small changes in our attitudes can yield relatively big changes in our sense of wellbeing” (Tartarkovsky, 2016).

7. Take steps to enrich your life

A great way to develop a happier life is to learn something new. By being mentally active and developing new skills, this can promote happiness. For example, learn a musical instrument, or a foreign language, the sky’s the limit!

8. Create goals and plans to achieve what you want most

Striving for things we really want can make us feel happy, provided the goals are realistic. Having goals gives life purpose and direction, and a sense of achievement.

9. Live in the moment

Though easier said than done, a helpful way to create happy moments in life is to live for the moment – not to ruminate about the past, or to focus on the future. Staying in the ‘here and now’ can help us feel happier.

10. Be good to yourself

Treat yourself as well as you would treat a person whom you love and care about. Showing self-compassion can lead to happy moments and improve overall wellbeing.

11. Ask for help when you need it

Seeking help may not immediately come to mind when considering how to create happy moments. However, reaching out for support is one way to achieve happiness. As the old adage says “a problem shared is a problem halved”.

Having someone help you is not a sign of weakness. Rather, by asking for help, you are reducing the burden of a problem on yourself.

12. Let go of sadness and disappointment

Negative emotions can compromise one’s sense of happiness, especially if a person ruminates about what ‘could have been’. Whilst everyone feels such emotions at times, holding onto feelings of sadness and disappointment can really weigh a person down and prevent them from feeling happy and content.

13. Practice mindfulness

The positive effects of practicing mindfulness are widespread and numerous, including increasing levels of happiness. There is lots of material on this blog about mindfulness and its’ positive effects. Mindfulness is a skill and, like any skill, it can be learned. Learning to be mindful can help a person become happier.

14. Walk in nature

Exercise is known to release endorphins, and as such engaging in physical activity is one way to lift mood and create happy moments. Even more beneficial than simply walking is to walk in nature, which has been shown to increase happiness.

15. Laugh, and make time to play

Laughter really is the best medicine! Having a laugh is associated with feeling better. Also, it is beneficial for the sense of wellbeing not to take life too seriously. Just as children find joy in simple pleasures, they also love to play. Engaging in ‘play’ – activities done purely for fun – is associated with increased happiness.

Philosophers believe that happiness is not by itself sufficient to achieve a state of wellbeing, but at the same time, they agree that it is one of the primary factors found in individuals who lead a ‘good life’ (Haybron, 2011).

What then, are reasons to be happy from a philosophical perspective… what contributes to a person living a ‘good life’? This can also be understood as a person having ‘psychosocial prosperity’ (Haybron, 2011).

• One reason why a person can feel a sense of happiness is if they have been treated with respect in the last day (Haybron, 2011). How we are treated by others contributes to our overall wellbeing. Being treated with respect helps us develop a sense of self-worth.
• Another reason to feel happy is if one has family and friends they can rely on and count on in times of need (Haybron, 2011). Having a strong social network is an important component of happiness.
• Perhaps a person has learned something new. They may take this for granted, however, learning something new actually contributes to our psychosocial prosperity (Haybron, 2011).
• From a philosophical perspective, a reason to be happy is a person having the opportunity to do what they do best (Haybron, 2011). Using strengths for the greater good is one key to a more meaningful life (Tartarkovsky, 2016). As an example, a musician can derive happiness by creating music and a sports-person can feel happy by training or participating in competitions. Meeting our potential also contributes to wellbeing.
• A final reason to be happy from a philosophical perspective is a person having the liberty to choose how they spend their time (Haybron, 2011). This is a freedom to be celebrated. Being autonomous can contribute to a person living their best life.

Many of us spend a lot of time with our families. However, as much we love our partners, children, siblings, and extended families, at times family relationships can be fraught with challenges and problems. Nonetheless, it is possible for us to find happiness in family life by doing some simple, yet effective things suggested by Mann (2007):

• Enjoy your family’s company
• Exchange stories – for example, about what your day was like in the evening
• Make your marriage, or relationship, the priority
• Take time to eat meals together as a family
• Enjoy simply having fun with one another
• Make sure that your family and its needs come before your friends
• Limit number of extra-curricular activities
• Develop family traditions and honor rituals
• Aim to make your home a calm place to spend time
• Don’t argue in front of children
• Don’t work excessively
• Encourage siblings to get along with one another
• Have family ‘in-jokes’
• Be adaptable
• Communicate, including active listening

Take time to appreciate your family, and focus on the little things you can do to find happiness in family life.

The aim of any workplace is to have productive employees. This leads to the question – can happiness increase productivity? The results are unequivocal!

Researchers Boehm and Lyubomirsky define a ‘happy worker’ as one who frequently experiences positive emotions such as joy, satisfaction, contentment, enthusiasm, and interest (Oswald, Proto & Sgroi, 2009).

They conducted longitudinal as well as experimental studies, and their research clearly showed that people who could be classified as ‘happy’ were more likely to succeed in their careers. Amabile et al. (2005) also found that happiness results in greater creativity.

Why are happy workers more productive?

It has been suggested that the link between positive mood and work appears to be mediated by intrinsic motivation (that is, performing a task due to internal inspiration rather than external reasons) (Oswald et al., 2009). This makes sense because if one is feeling more joyful, the person is more likely to find their work meaningful and intrinsically rewarding.

It has been found by some experimental studies that happiness raises productivity. For example, research has shown that the experience of positive affect means that individuals change their allocation of time to completing more interesting tasks, but still manage to maintain their performance for the less interesting tasks (Oswald et al., 2009).

Other research has reported that positive affect influences memory recall and the likelihood of altruistic actions. However, much of this research has taken place in laboratory sessions where participation was unpaid. Which certainly leads to the obvious question… does happiness actually increase productivity in a true employment situation?

Oswald and colleagues (2009) did some research with very clear results on the relationship between happiness and productivity. They conducted two separate experiments.

The first experiment included 182 participants from the University of Warwick. The study involved some participants watching a short video clip designed to try and increase levels of happiness, and then completing a task which they were paid for in terms of both questions answered and accuracy. The participants who watched the video showed significantly greater productivity.

Most interestingly, however, 16 individuals did not display increased happiness after watching the movie clip, and these people did not show the same increase in productivity! Thus, this experiment certainly supported the notion that an increase in productivity can be linked to happiness.

Oswald and colleagues also conducted a second study which involved a further 179 participants who had not taken part in the first experiment. These individuals reported their level of happiness and were subsequently asked whether they had experienced a ‘bad life event’ (which was defined as bereavement or illness in the family) in the last two years.

A statistically significant effect was found… experiencing a bad life event, which was classified by the experts as ‘happiness shocks’ was related to lower levels of performance on the task.

Examining the evidence certainly makes one thing clear: happiness is certainly related to productivity both in unpaid and paid tasks. This has tremendous implications for the work-force and provides an impetus for working towards happier employees.

According to the Belonging Hypothesis put forth by psychologists Baumeister and Leary in 1995, human beings have an almost universal, fundamental human need to have a certain degree of interaction with others and to form relationships.

Indeed, people who are lonely have an unmet need to belong (Mellor, Stokes, Firth, Hayashi & Cummins, 2008). Loneliness has been found in a plethora of research to have a very negative effect on psychological wellbeing, and also health (Kim, 1997).

What about ‘happiness’? In other words, can loneliness also have an impact on life satisfaction?

There is evidence to suggest that loneliness does affect life satisfaction. Gray, Ventis, and Hayslip (1992) conducted a study of 60 elderly people living in the community. Their findings were clear: the aged person’s sense of isolation, and loneliness , explained the variation in life satisfaction (Gray et al., 1992).

Clearly, lonely older persons were less satisfied with their lives overall. In other research, Mellor and colleagues (2008) found that individuals who were less lonely had higher ratings of life satisfaction.

It may be assumed that only older people are prone to feeling isolated and lonely, however, an interesting study by Neto (1995) looked at satisfaction with life among second-generation migrants.

The researchers studied 519 Portuguese youth who was actually born in France. The study found that loneliness had a clear negative correlation with the satisfaction with life expressed by the young people (Neto, 1995). Indeed, along with the perceived state of health, loneliness was the strongest predictor of satisfaction with life (Neto, 1995).

Therefore, yes, loneliness affects life satisfaction. Loneliness is associated with feeling less satisfied with one’s life, and, presumably, less happy overall.

17 Exercises To Increase Happiness and Wellbeing

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Perhaps you have a desire to understand this topic further… great! Here are some books that you can read to further your understanding:

• Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to brain science – S. Bok (2010) ( Amazon )
• Nicomachean ethics – Aristotle (2000). R Crisp, ed. ( Amazon )
• What is this thing called happiness? – F. Feldman (2010) ( Amazon )
• Authentic happiness: Using the new Positive Psychology to realize your potential for lasting fulfillment – M. Seligman (2004) ( Amazon )
• Philosophy of happiness: A theoretical and practical examination – M. Janello (2014) ( Amazon )
• Happiness: A Philosopher’s guide – F. Lenoir (2015) ( Amazon )

I don’t know about you but, whilst exploring the philosophy of happiness is fascinating, it can be incredibly overwhelming too. I hope that I have managed to simplify some of the ideas about happiness so that you have a better understanding of the nature of happiness and what it means to live a ‘good life’.

Philosophy can be complex, but if you can take one message from this article it is that it is important and worthwhile for humans to strive for wellbeing and ‘true happiness’. Whilst Aristotle argued that ‘eudaimonia’ (happiness) cannot be achieved until the end of one’s life, tips in this article show that each of us has the capacity to create happy moments each and every day.

What can you do today to embrace the ‘good life’? What ideas do you have about happiness – what does real happiness look like for you? What are your opinions as to what the philosophy of happiness in life means?

This article can provide a helpful resource for understanding more about the nature of happiness, so feel free to look back at it down the track. I would love to hear your thoughts on this fascinating topic!

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Happiness Exercises for free .

• Amabile, T. M., Basade, S. G., Mueller, J. S., & Staw, B. M. (2005). Affect and creativity at work. Administrative Science Quarterly, 50 , 367-403.
• Aristotle (2000). Nicomachean Ethics . R. Crisp (ed.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
• Aristotle (2004). Nicomachean Ethics . Hugh Treddenick (ed.). London: Penguin.
• Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117 , 498 – 529.
• Conkle, A. (2008). Serious research on happiness. Association for Psychological Science . Retrieved from https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observe/serious-research-on-happiness
• Danner, D., Snowdon, D., & Friesen, W. (2001). Positive emotions in early life and longevity: Findings from the nun study. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80 , 804 – 813.
• Diener, E. (1984). Subjective well-being. Psychological Bulletin, 95 , 542 – 575
• Gray, G. R., Ventis, D. G., & Hayslip, B. (1992). Socio-cognitive skills as a determinant of life satisfaction in aged persons. The International Journal of Aging & Human Development , 35, 205 – 218.
• Haybron, D. (2011). Happiness. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/happiness
• Kane, S. (2017). 15 ways to increase your happiness. Psych Central. Retrieved from https://psychcentral.com/lib/15-ways-to-increase-your-happiness
• Kashdan, T. B., Biswas-Diener, R., & King, L. A. (2008). Reconsidering happiness: the costs of distinguishing between hedonics and eudaimonia. Journal of Positive Psychology, 3 , 219 – 233.
• Kesebir, P., & Diener, E. (2008). In pursuit of happiness: empirical answers to philosophical questions. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3 , 117-125.
• Kim, O. S. (1997). Korean version of the revised UCLA loneliness scale: reliability and validity test. Journal of Korean Academy of Nursing,? , 871 – 879.
• King, L. A., & Napa, C. K. (1998). What makes a life good? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75 , 156 – 165.
• Lykken, D., & Tellegan, A. (1996). Happiness is a stochastic phenomenon. Psychological Science, 7 , 186-189.
• Lyubomirsky, S. (2018). Is happiness a consequence or cause of career success? Psychology Today . Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/how-happiness/201808/is-happiness-consequence-or-cause-career-success
• Mann, D. (2007). 15 secrets of happy families. Web MD. Retrieved from https://www.webmd.com/parenting/features/15-secrets-to-have-a-happy-family
• Mellor, D., Stokes, M., Firth, L., Hayashi, Y. & Cummins, R. (2008). Need for belonging, relationship satisfaction, loneliness and life satisfaction. Personality and Individual Differences, 45 , 213 – 218.
• Neto, F. (1995). Predictors of satisfaction with life among second generation migrants. Social Indicators Research, 35 , 93-116.
• Oswald, A. J., Proto, E., & Sgroi, D. (2009). Happiness and productivity, IZA Discussion Papers, No. 4645, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/10419/35451
• Plato (1999). The Symposium . Walter Hamilton (ed). London: Penguin Classics
• Puff, R. (2018). The pitfalls to pursuing happiness. Psychology Today. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/meditation-modern-life/201809/the-pitfalls-pursuing-happiness
• Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development and wellbeing. American Psychologist, 55 , 68 – 78.
• Ryff, C. D., & Singer, B. (1996). Psychological wellbeing: meaning, measurement, and implications for psychotherapy research. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 65 , 14 – 23.
• Tartarkovsky, M. (2016). Five pathways to happiness. Psych Central. Retrieved from https://psychcentral.com/lib/five-pathways-to-happiness
• The Pursuit of Happiness (2018). Aristotle. Retrieved from https://www.pursuit-of-happiness.org/history-of-happiness/aristotle
• Waterman, A. S. (1990). The relevance of Aristotle’s conception of eudaimonia for the psychological study of happiness. Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 10 , 39 – 44
• Waterman, A. S. (1993). Two conceptions of happiness: Contrasts of personal expressiveness (eudaimonia) and hedonic enjoyment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64 , 678 – 691.

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18 Introduction to Philosophical Approaches to Happiness

James O. Pawelski, University of Pennsylvania

• Published: 01 August 2013
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For at least 2500 years, philosophers in the East and West have debated the nature and cultivation of happiness, generating a rich historical collection of theories, definitions, and insights. Philosophers have also developed valuable methods that can be used effectively in the study of happiness. The chapters in this section explore some of the central ideas about happiness from the history of philosophy, as well as some of the key methodological contributions of philosophy to current debates about happiness. The historical chapters show that there has been widespread disagreement about happiness, point out the importance of avoiding presentism in its study, and raise questions regarding the ethical application of knowledge about happiness. The analytical chapters show how philosophy can help in the normative quest for more satisfactory theories of happiness and point to the importance of collaborating with empirical psychology and other disciplines in the study of happiness.

Happiness is one of the most central concerns of individual human experience and of collective human culture. It should come as no surprise, then, that it has been a perennial theme throughout the history of philosophical thought. For at least 2500 years, philosophers in the East and the West have paid considerable attention to the nature and cultivation of happiness. Most philosophers have agreed that happiness is an important part of human life, but they have disagreed widely on just what happiness is. Some have argued that happiness is pleasure, others that it is virtue, and still others that it is the fulfillment of human nature. Some have argued that happiness is our natural end; others, that it is something impossible for us to obtain. Some have argued that the pursuit of happiness should be our top priority; others, that we should not pursue happiness at all—and indeed that the pursuit of happiness is one of the greatest causes of human misery. With this long tradition of debate on the topic, philosophy has much to offer the contemporary study of happiness.

In addition to a rich collection of theories, definitions, and insights about happiness, philosophy also has much to contribute in the way of method. With its emphasis on clarity and precision, philosophical thinking can help us sort our way through the bewildering number of meanings happiness has taken on, and it may also help us develop more robust and satisfactory theories of happiness than are currently available.

This section on philosophical approaches to happiness is comprised of this introduction and seven other chapters. The following chapters are evenly balanced between historical and contemporary philosophical considerations, with the first chapters tending more toward historical topics and the later ones toward current philosophical analysis. Given the long history and conceptual complexity of philosophical investigations into happiness, this section can only hope, of course, to provide a sampling of some of this work.

In Chapter 19 , Darrin M. McMahon writes on “The Pursuit of Happiness in History,” presenting some key points in the intellectual history of the notion of happiness in Western culture. McMahon begins with an analysis of Ancient Greek perspectives on happiness, in which luck plays a key role. The happy person is one on whom fortune smiles. But given the reversibility of fortune, the truly happy person is one on whom fortune smiles over the course of the entire life span. With the rise of Classical Greek philosophy, McMahon points out, perspectives on happiness changed considerably. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and other philosophers argued that happiness is something noble souls can influence through their own efforts of philosophical reflection and virtuous activity. In the Christian era, attempts to achieve happiness on earth were often considered futile, or at best, reminders of our separation from the ultimate happiness that will be enjoyed only by the elect and only in the life to come. Later in the Christian era, thinkers like Aquinas saw earthly happiness as important in its own right but always as a very distant second to the joys of heaven. With the emphasis on reason and scientific investigation in the Enlightenment, perspectives on happiness shifted again, with the dominant view being that happiness is a right of all human beings, and that the proper kind of investigation and action will lead us to the full enjoyment of those rights. Indeed, in the United States Declaration of Independence, a document heavily influenced by the Enlightenment, the pursuit of happiness is identified as an inalienable right.

McMahon's analysis makes clear several important points about perspectives on happiness throughout history. First, these perspectives shift dramatically. What is taken for granted about happiness in one cultural context seems foreign in other cultural contexts. Second, because of these dramatic shifts, we must avoid the mistake of thinking that our current views on happiness necessarily hold true for cultural contexts different than our own. Third, these different perspectives can help us understand our own more deeply. Fourth, we must avoid mistakes others have made in the pursuit of happiness, mistakes like thinking that the attainment of happiness is easy, that we can force people to be happy, and that we can ignore paradoxes in the pursuit of happiness. Indeed, McMahon points out that, while there may be a dominant perspective in each cultural context, there are plenty of countervailing voices and paradoxical results of attempts to attain happiness. Perhaps the most obvious and the most tragic are the numerous post-Enlightenment revolutions that promised to bring happiness to the masses and instead brought widespread misery. McMahon concludes with a paradoxical claim from John Stuart Mill that perhaps the best way to achieve happiness is in the purposeful pursuit of something else.

While Chapter 19 concentrates on different cultural perspectives in Western thought, Chapter 20 shifts to an analysis of views of happiness in Eastern thought. Philip J. Ivanhoe writes about “Happiness in Early Chinese Thought,” focusing particularly on Confucianism and Daoism. (For an analysis of happiness in Hindu and Buddhist thought, see Chapters 27 , 28 , and 29 in this volume.) Ivanhoe focuses on the views of two of the founding figures of these traditions: Kongzi (also known as Confucius) and Zhuangzi. Both the Confucians, as represented by Kongzi, and the Daoists, as represented by Zhuangzi, critique the common search for happiness through such things as wealth, power, and prestige. Instead, they teach that happiness consists in following the Dao (the “Way”), the patterns and processes of Nature. People who follow the Dao, argued Kongzi and Zhuangzi, will experience a state of joy that includes both a freedom from common human concerns, fears, and anxieties and a sense of being a part of something larger than the self. Ivanhoe observes that, although this latter point seems to involve a loss of the self, it is really only the loss of the narrow, small view we often have of the self. Much as these thinkers agree, Ivanhoe observes, there are also significant differences in their understanding of the Dao and of how it can best be followed. Kongzi tended to emphasize the importance of friends, family, and culture; whereas Zhuangzi taught the importance of overcoming socialization in order to connect directly to what is most natural.

Chapter 21 explores the work of philosophers with much less sanguine views about happiness. In her piece entitled “Continental Contributions to our Understanding of Happiness and Suffering,” Emmy Van Deurzen explores the views of continental philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. For these thinkers, she argues, happiness is seen as an obstacle to the deeper goal of wisdom. To the extent that we try to focus on what is pleasant and easy, we ignore the realities of the human situation. It is only by facing up to these difficult realities and allowing ourselves to experience the attendant suffering that we can mature and become wise. This is certainly a devastating critique of forms of happiness that value unruffled pleasantness of experience over truth and wisdom, and it raises the question of how these continental philosophers might have responded to the more authentic, nuanced, and full-bodied conceptions of happiness explored in this volume.

In Chapter 22 , Raymond Angelo Belliotti begins to answer this question by considering what he calls “worthwhile happiness.” In his piece on “The Seductions of Happiness,” he argues that Schopenhauer's critique of happiness—that it is an illusion whose pursuit is futile—is misguided, but that the popular understanding of happiness as “an accurate self-report of a person's predominantly positive state of mind” is overrated. Through a series of illustrative cases, Belliotti argues that happiness so conceived is often at odds with the good. For happiness to be worthwhile, he contends, it must be attained in the right way and connected properly to higher values. He then considers various philosophical perspectives on the connection between happiness and values, concluding that defining happiness as an accurate positive self-appraisal is the most effective of these approaches. Finally, he argues that even worthwhile happiness is not the greatest good, since a robustly meaningful, valuable life is even better than a life of worthwhile happiness. All things considered, Belliotti concludes, it is best to have a life of both worthwhile happiness and robust meaning, but if one can have only one or the other one should choose the life of robust meaning.

Daniel M. Haybron agrees with Belliotti on this point. In Chapter 23 , “The Nature and Significance of Happiness,” Haybron argues that virtue and right action are more important than happiness. He is quick to point out, however, that this does not mean happiness is unimportant. Happiness is pleasant, certainly, but more than that it helps determine how we will live our lives. The trajectory of our individual lives is heavily influenced by the level of happiness we experience, and the trajectory of nations and societies is guided by the dominant definitions of happiness they hold. Haybron distinguishes between the well-being sense of happiness (including hedonism, desire satisfaction, and objectivist accounts) and the psychological sense of happiness (including life satisfaction accounts and emotional state accounts), choosing to focus on the latter in this chapter. He critiques life satisfaction accounts of happiness on the grounds that they are dependent, not just on how one's life is going, but on the standards one uses to assess it. If I have high expectations for my life, then I may have lower life satisfaction than someone with lower expectations—even if my life is actually closer to my ideal than the other person's life is to theirs. So satisfaction with life may tell us less about one's life than about one's expectations for that life. Haybron explores emotional state views of happiness in some detail, arguing that they go far beyond one's mere feeling states to a condition of what he calls “psychic flourishing.” Because of the complexity and nuances of different types of happiness, Haybron calls for more care in the measurement of happiness and implies that we may need more precise scales to measure these different types more accurately.

In Chapter 24 on “Philosophical methods in happiness research,” Valerie Tiberius takes up the question of what philosophy can uniquely contribute to the investigation of happiness. She argues that although many questions about happiness (questions like how people define happiness) are in the domain of empirical researchers, normative questions about happiness (questions about how people should define happiness) cannot be answered through empirical methods alone and require the help of philosophers. She explores in detail philosophical methods that are important for addressing normative questions and creating adequate theories about happiness. (Where Haybron focuses on the psychological sense of happiness, Tiberius focuses on its well-being sense.) Tiberius describes in detail the method of “reflective equilibrium,” which seeks to create theories that have both descriptive and normative adequacy by bringing into equilibrium ordinary judgments, putative normative principles, and background theories. In addition to discussing how this method is used in debates about theories of happiness, she also demonstrates the use of other specific methods as well, including thought experiments, intuition pumps, counter-examples, literary examples, and surveys. She concludes the chapter by emphasizing the importance of using philosophical and empirical methods in tandem, and thus of philosophers and psychologists continuing to work collaboratively in the ongoing study of happiness.

The final chapter in the section is “Happiness and its Opposites.” In this chapter, I examine what happiness is by looking at what it is not. I point out that, although we typically think of happiness and unhappiness as opposites, empirical research is showing that they are not—at least not on the commonsense understanding of what opposites are. Different definitions of happiness have different opposites, but underlying all of them is the important insight that happiness is not simply the absence of unhappiness. This has important implications for the pursuit of happiness, since happiness involves both the presence of certain states or conditions and the absence of others. I examine the importance of these points for understanding philosophical advice on the pursuit of happiness, focusing on the works of Epictetus and Boethius. I also point out the need for more empirical study on the proper balance between the pursuit of happiness and the avoidance of unhappiness.

Much important work remains to be done in the philosophical investigation of happiness. With the rich tradition of philosophical debate on this topic for the last two-and-a-half millennia, there is an ongoing need for scholars to continue to analyze and understand that work. Such effort is important because it gives us access to the best ideas of thoughtful scholars in times and places other than our own. It is also important because it can help us avoid the dangers of presentism, a kind of temporal ethnocentrism that assumes our own views on happiness to be identical both to the views that have been held by others in the past and to those that will be held by others in the future. The avoidance of presentism is especially important when individuals and governments make decisions and adopt policies intended to increase the happiness of future generations. It is critical that this happiness be of the sort that those future generations will actually value. Related to this concern is the question of how the new knowledge being created about happiness will be applied in our own day. History is fraught with cases where knowledge was used for immoral purposes, and this is especially true in the domain of happiness. There will be much ethical work for philosophers to do to make sure, for example, that knowledge about happiness is not used to oppress others.

In addition to work in the history of philosophy, there is much yet to be done on the continued development and application of the philosophical methods explored in this section. Philosophical analysis can continue to help us disambiguate various definitions of happiness, render more precise the various dimensions of happiness studied as empirical constructs, develop more satisfactory theories of happiness, and generate suggestions for further empirical research.

Philosophers have many historical and methodological contributions to make to the study of happiness. Collaboration with other scholars coming from different traditions and using different types of methods will enable important progress in the continued study of a subject so central to human experience.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Ilona Boniwell, Susan David, Daniel Haybron, and Valerie Tiberius for their suggestions on the overall plan for this section. I am especially indebted to Behdad Bozorgnia for help in making a variety of crucial editing decisions, and I am grateful to Xuan Gao for her keen eye in helping to prepare this section for publication.

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

1.1 Two senses of ‘happiness’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Theories of happiness

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

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

A third theory, the emotional state view, departs from hedonism in a different way: instead of identifying happiness with pleasant experience, it identifies happiness with an agent's emotional condition as a whole. [ 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. 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 has 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 (Haybron 2008). Given the departures from commonsensical notions of being in a “good mood,” happiness is characterized in this proposal as “psychic affirmation,” or “psychic flourishing” in pronounced forms.

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

How do we determine which theory is correct? Traditional philosophical methods of conceptual or linguistic analysis can give us some guidance, indicating that some accounts offer a better fit with the ordinary concept of happiness. Thus it has been argued that hedonism is false to the concept of happiness as we know it; the intuitions taken to support hedonism point instead to an emotional state view (Haybron 2001, 2005, 2008c). 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, 2008c, 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, 2008c). 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 states that interest us.

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

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

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

The third objection is somewhat intricate, so it will require some explaining. The claim is that a wide range of life satisfaction attitudes might be consistent with individuals' perceptions of how well their lives are going relative to what they care about, raising doubts about the importance of life satisfaction (Haybron 2005, 2007b, 2008c). 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.

These criticisms of life satisfaction theories are for the most part fairly recent, so it remains to be seen how the debate will play out. Perhaps a different way of conceiving life satisfaction, for instance dispensing with the global judgment and aggregating particular satisfactions and dissatisfactions, would lessen the force of these objections. Alternatively, it is possible that idealized or qualified forms of life satisfaction would mitigate these concerns for some purposes, such as a theory of well-being. [ 10 ]

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

One argument for taking such a view is intuitive: some find it implausible to think that psychologically superficial pleasures invariably make a difference in how happy one is—the typical pleasure of eating a cracker, say, or even the intense pleasure of an orgasm that nonetheless fails to move one, as can happen with meaningless sexual activity. The intuitive distinction seems akin to distinctions made by some ancient philosophers; consider, for instance, the following passage from Epictetus's Discourses : “‘I have a headache.’ Well, do not say ‘Alas!’ ‘I have an earache.’ Do not say ‘Alas!’ And I am not saying that it is not permissible to groan, only do not groan in the centre of your being ” (1925, 1.18.19, emph. 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.

Since emotional state theories have only recently received explicit defense, it is not clear how the debate with hedonism will proceed, though the latter view certainly remains a major contender in the literature (Feldman 2010, Morris 2011). And all affect-based theories confront the worries, noted earlier, that motivate life satisfaction views—notably, their looser connection with people's priorities, as well as their limited ability to reflect the quality of people's lives taken as a whole.

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

3. The science of happiness

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

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

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

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

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

The idea that sincere self-reports of happiness are incorrigible can only be correct, it seems, given a quite specific conception of happiness—a kind of life satisfaction theory of happiness on which people count as satisfied with their lives so long as they are disposed to judge explicitly that they are satisfied with their lives on the whole. Also assumed here is that self-reports of happiness are in fact wholly grounded in life satisfaction judgments like these—that is, that people take questions about “happiness” to be questions about life satisfaction. Given these assumptions, we can plausibly conclude that self-reports of happiness are incorrigible. One question is whether happiness, thus conceived, is very important. As well, it is unlikely that respondents invariably interpret happiness questions as being about life satisfaction. At any rate, even life satisfaction theorists might balk at this variant of the account, since life satisfaction is sometimes taken to involve, not just explicit global judgments of life satisfaction, but also our responses to the particular things or domains we care about. Some will hesitate to deem satisfied people who hate many of the important things in their lives, however satisfied they claim to be with their lives as a whole.

In a similar vein, the common practice of measuring happiness simply by asking people to report explicitly on how “happy” they are is sometimes defended on the grounds that it lets people decide for themselves what happiness is. The reasoning again seems to presuppose, controversially, that self-reports of happiness employ a life satisfaction view of happiness, the idea being that whether you are satisfied (“happy”) will depend on what you care about. Alternatively, the point might be literally to leave it up to the respondent to decide whether ‘happy’ means hedonic state, emotional state, life satisfaction, or something else. Thus one respondent's “I'm happy” might mean “my experience is generally pleasant,” while another's might mean “I am satisfied with my life as a whole.” It is not clear, however, that asking ambiguous questions of this sort is a useful enterprise, since different respondents will in effect be answering different questions.

To measure happiness through self-reports, then, it may be wiser to employ terms other than ‘happiness’ and its cognates—terms whose meaning is relatively well-known and fixed. In other words, researchers should decide in advance what they want to measure—be it life satisfaction, hedonic state, emotional state, or something else—and then ask questions that refer unambiguously to those states. [ 14 ] This stratagem may be all the more necessary in cross-cultural work, where finding suitable translations of ‘happy’ can be daunting—particularly when the English meaning of the term remains a matter of contention (Wierzbicka 2004).

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

The scientific literature on happiness has grown to proportions far too large for this article to do more than briefly touch on a few highlights. [ 16 ] Here is a sampling of oft-cited claims:

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

The first claim, that most people are happy, appears to be a consensus position among subjective well-being researchers (for a seminal argument, see Diener and Diener 1996). The contention reflects three lines of evidence: most people, in most places, report being happy; most people report being satisfied with their lives; and most people experience more positive affect than negative. On any of the major theories of happiness, then, the evidence seems to show that most people are, indeed, happy. Yet this conclusion might be resisted, on a couple of grounds. First, life satisfaction theorists might question whether self-reports of life satisfaction suffice to establish that people are in fact satisfied with their lives. Perhaps self-reports can be mistaken, say if the individual believes herself satisfied yet shows many signs of dissatisfaction in her behavior, for instance complaining about or striving to change important things in her life. Second, defenders of affect-based theories—hedonistic and emotional state views—might reject the notion that a bare majority of positive affect suffices for happiness. While the traditional view among hedonists has indeed been that happiness requires no more than a >1:1 ratio of positive to negative affect, this contention has received little defense and has been disputed in the recent literature (Haybron 2008c). Some investigators have claimed that “flourishing” requires greater than a 3:1 ratio of positive to negative affect, as this ratio is thought to represent a threshold for broadly favorable psychological functioning (Fredrickson and Losada 2005; Larsen and Prizmic 2008). If a similar 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 tend to return to a level of happiness not very different from before. [ 17 ] As well, twin studies have found that subjective well-being is substantially heritable, with .50 being a commonly accepted figure. Consequently many researchers have posited that each individual has a characteristic “set point” level of happiness, toward which he tends to gravitate over time. Such claims have caused some consternation over whether the pursuit and promotion of happiness are largely futile enterprises (Lykken and Tellegen 1996; Millgram 2000). However, the dominant view now seems to be that the early claims about extreme adaptation and set points were exaggerated: while adaptation is a very real phenomenon, many factors—including disability—can have substantial, and lasting, effects on how happy people are. [ 18 ] This point was already apparent from the literature on correlates and causes of happiness, discussed below: if things like relationships and engaging work are important for happiness, then happiness is probably not simply a matter of personality or temperament. As well, the large cross-national differences in measured happiness are unlikely to be entirely an artifact of personality variables. Note that even highly heritable traits can be strongly susceptible to improvement. Better living conditions have raised the stature of men in the Netherlands by eight inches—going from short (five foot four) to tall (over six feet)—in the last 150 years (Fogel 2005). Yet height is considered much more heritable than happiness, with typical heritability estimates ranging from .60 to over .90 (e.g., Silventoinen, Sammalisto et al . 2003). [ 19 ]

The question of mistakes will be taken up in section 5.2. But the last claim—that material prosperity has relatively modest impacts on happiness—has lately become the subject of heated debate. For some time the standard view among subjective well-being researchers was that, beyond a low threshold where basic needs are met, economic gains have only a small impact on happiness levels. According to the well-known “Easterlin Paradox,” for instance, wealthier people do tend to be happier within nations, but richer nations are little happier than less prosperous counterparts, and—most strikingly—economic growth has virtually no impact (Easterlin 1974). In the U.S., for example, measured happiness has not increased significantly since at least 1947, despite massive increases in wealth and income. In short, once you're out of poverty, absolute levels of wealth and income make little difference in how happy people are.

Against these claims, some authors have recently 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). If the results hold up, the upshot appears to be that income is pretty strongly related to life satisfaction, but weakly related to emotional well-being, at least above a certain threshold.

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: 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 perhaps also connection with the natural environment. [ 22 ]

Perhaps the best single snapshot of the correlates of happiness from a global perspective is the Gallup World Poll study noted earlier (Diener, Ng et al . 2010). 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 (e.g., Stevenson and Wolfers 2008), so they are unlikely to be entirely an artifact of the instruments used in this study. [ 23 ] A further point of uncertainty is the causal story behind the correlations—whether the correlates, like psychosocial prosperity, cause happiness; whether happiness causes them; whether other factors cause both; or, as is likely, some combination of the three.

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

4. The importance of happiness

Were you to survey public attitudes about the value of happiness, at least in liberal Western democracies, you would likely find considerable support for the proposition that happiness is all that really matters for human well-being. Many philosophers over the ages have likewise endorsed such a view, typically assuming a hedonistic account of happiness. (A few, like Almeder 2000, have identified well-being with happiness understood as life satisfaction.)

Most philosophers, however, have rejected hedonistic and other mental state accounts of well-being, and with them the idea that happiness could suffice for well-being. [ 24 ] (See the entry on well-being .) Objections to mental state theories of well-being tend to cluster around two sets of concerns. First, it is widely believed that the non-mental conditions of our lives matter for well-being: whether our families really love us, whether our putative achievements are genuine, whether the things we care about actually obtain. The most influential objection of this sort is Robert Nozick's experience machine case, wherein we are asked to imagine a virtual reality device that can perfectly simulate any reality for its user, who will think the experience is genuine (Nozick 1974). Would you plug in to such a machine for life? Most people would not, and the case is widely taken to vitiate mental state theories of well-being. Beyond having positive mental states, it seems to matter both that our lives go well and that our state of mind is appropriately related to how things are.

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. [ 25 ] 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. [ 26 ] We ought above all to act and live well, or at least not badly or wrongly. This view need not take the strong form of insisting that we must always act as virtuously as possible, or that moral reasons always take precedence. But it does mean, at least, that when being happy requires acting badly, one's happiness must be sacrificed. If it would be wrong to leave your family, in which you are unhappy, then you must remain unhappy, or find more acceptable ways to seek happiness.

The mainstream views in all three of the major approaches to ethical theory—consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics—agree on some form of the priority of virtue. Where these views chiefly differ is not on the importance of being good, but on whether being good necessarily benefits us. Virtue ethicists tend to answer in the affirmative, the other two schools in the negative. Building virtue into well-being, as Aristotelians do, may seem to yield a more demanding ethics, and in some ways it does. Yet many deontologists and consequentialists—notably Kant—advocate sterner, more starkly moralistic visions of the good life than Aristotle would ever have dreamt of (e.g., Singer 1972).

Happiness, in short, is believed by most philosophers to be insufficient for well-being, and still less important for the good life. These points may seem to vitiate any substantial role for happiness in ethical thought. However, well-being itself is still regarded as a central concept in ethical thought, denoting one of the chief elements of a good life even if not the sole element. And there are reasons for thinking happiness important, both practically and theoretically, despite the worries noted above.

Even if happiness does not suffice for well-being—a point that not all philosophers would accept—it might still rate a privileged spot in theories of well-being. This could happen in either of two ways.

First, happiness could be a major component of a theory of well-being. Objective list theories of well-being sometimes include happiness or related mental states such as enjoyment among the fundamental constituents of well-being. A more ambitious proposal, originated by L.W. Sumner, identifies well-being with authentic happiness —happiness that is authentic in the sense of being both informed and autonomous (Sumner 1996). The root idea is that well-being involves being happy, where one's happiness is a response of one's own (autonomous), to a life that genuinely is one's own (informed). The authenticity constraint is meant to address both experience machine-type worries and “happy slave” objections relating to adaptation, where happiness may be non-autonomous, depending on manipulation or the uncritical acceptance of oppressive values. Since these have been the most influential objections to mental state accounts of well-being, Sumner's approach promises to considerably strengthen the position of happiness-centered approaches to well-being, and several philosophers have developed variants or close relations of the authentic happiness theory (Brülde 2007, Haybron 2008a, c, Tiberius and Plakias 2010). The approach remains fairly new, however, so its long-term prospects remain unclear.

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. [ 27 ] An interesting possibility is that the locution ‘happy life’, and the corresponding well-being sense of happiness, actually refers to a specific variety of well-being—perhaps well-being in the wide sense just suggested, or well-being taken as an ideal state, an ultimate goal of deliberation. This might explain the continued use of ‘happiness’ for the well-being notion in the philosophical literature, rather than the more standard ‘wellbeing.’

The preceding section discussed ways that happiness might figure prominently even in non-mental state theories of well-being. The question there concerned the role of happiness in theories of well-being. This is a different question from how important happiness is for well-being itself. Even a theory of well-being that includes no mention at all of happiness can allow that happiness is nonetheless a major component or contributor to well-being, because of its relation to the things that ultimately constitute well-being. If you hold a desire theory of well-being, for instance, you will very likely allow that, for most people, happiness is a central aspect of well-being, since most people very much desire to be happy. Indeed, some desire theorists have argued that the account actually yields a form of hedonism, on the grounds that people ultimately desire nothing else but happiness or pleasure (Sidgwick 1907/1966, Brandt 1979, 1989).

Happiness may be thought important even on theories normally believed to take a dismissive view of it. Aristotelians identify well-being with virtuous activity, yet Aristotle plainly takes this to be a highly pleasant condition, indeed the most pleasant kind of life there is (see, e.g., NE , Bk. I 8; Bk. VII 13). You cannot flourish, on Aristotelian terms, without being happy, and unhappiness is clearly incompatible with well-being. Even the Stoics, who notoriously regard all but a virtuous inner state as at best indifferent, would still assign happiness a kind of importance: at the very least, to be unhappy would be unvirtuous; and virtue itself arguably entails a kind of happiness, namely a pleasant state of tranquility. As well, happiness would likely be a preferred indifferent in most cases, to be chosen over unhappiness. To be sure, both Aristotelian and Stoic accounts are clear that happiness alone does not suffice for well-being, that its significance is not what common opinion takes it to be, and that some kinds of happiness can be worthless or even bad. But neither denies that happiness is somehow quite important for human well-being.

In fact it is questionable whether any major school of philosophical thought denies outright the importance of happiness, at least on one of the plausible accounts of the matter. Doubts about its significance probably owe to several factors. Some skeptics, for example, focus on relatively weak conceptions of happiness, such as the idea that it is little more than the simple emotion of feeling happy—an idea that few hedonists or emotional state theorists would accept. Or, alternatively, assuming that a concern for happiness has only to do with positive states. Yet ‘happiness’ also serves as a blanket term for a domain of concern that involves both positive and negative states, namely the kinds of mental states involved in being happy or unhappy. Just as “health” care tends to focus mainly on ill health, so might happiness researchers choose to focus much of their effort on the study and alleviation of unhappiness—depression, suffering, anxiety, and other conditions whose importance is uncontroversial. The study of happiness need be no more concerned with smiles than with frowns.

5. The pursuit and promotion of happiness

The last set of questions we will examine centers on the pursuit of happiness, both individual and collective. Most of the popular literature on happiness discusses how to make oneself happier, with little attention given to whether this is an appropriate goal, or how various means of pursuing happiness measure up from an ethical standpoint. More broadly, how if at all should one pursue happiness as part of a good life?

We saw earlier that most philosophers regard happiness as secondary to morality in a good life. The individual pursuit of happiness may be subject to nonmoral norms as well, prudence being the most obvious among them. Prudential norms need not be as plain as “don't shoot yourself in the foot.” On Sumner's authentic happiness view of well-being, for instance, we stand to gain little by pursuing happiness in inauthentic ways, for instance through self-deception or powerful drugs like Huxley's soma , which guarantees happiness come what may (Huxley 1932 [2005]). The view raises interesting questions about the benefits of less extreme pharmaceuticals, such as the therapeutic use of antidepressants; such medications can make life more pleasant, but many people worry whether they pose a threat to authenticity, perhaps undercutting their benefits. It is possible that such drugs involve prudential tradeoffs, promoting well-being in some ways while undermining it in others; whether the tradeoffs are worth it will depend on how, in a given case, the balance is struck. Another possibility is that such drugs sometimes promote authenticity, if for instance a depressive disorder prevents a person from being “himself.”

Looking to more broadly ethical, but not yet moral, norms, it may be possible to act badly without acting either immorally or imprudently. While Aristotle himself regarded acting badly as inherently imprudent, his catalogue of virtues is instructive, as many of them (wit, friendliness, etc.) are not what we normally regard as moral virtues. Some morally permissible methods of pursuing happiness may nonetheless be inappropriate because they conflict with such “ethical” virtues. They might, for instance, be undignified or imbecilic.

Outwardly virtuous conduct undertaken in the name of personal happiness might, if wrongly motivated, be incompatible with genuine virtue. One might, for instance, engage in philanthropy solely to make oneself happier, and indeed work hard at fine-tuning one's assistance to maximize the hedonic payoff. This sort of conduct would not obviously instantiate the virtue of compassion or kindness, and indeed might be reasonably deemed contemptible. Similarly, it might be admirable, morally or otherwise, to be grateful for the good things in one's life. Yet the virtue of gratitude might be undermined by certain kinds of gratitude intervention, whereby one tries to become happier by focusing on the things one is grateful for. If expressions of gratitude become phony or purely instrumental, the sole reason for giving thanks being to become happy—and not that one actually has something to be thankful for—then the “gratitude” might cease to be admirable, and may indeed be unvirtuous.

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. In recent decades a massive body of empirical evidence has gathered on various ways in which people seem systematically prone to make mistakes in the pursuit of their interests, including happiness. Such tendencies have been suggested in several domains relating to the pursuit of happiness, including (with recent surveys cited):

• Assessing how happy we are, or were in the past (Haybron 2007a, 2008c)
• Predicting (“forecasting”) what will make us happy (Gilbert 2006)
• Choosing rationally (Kahneman and Tversky 2000, Gilovitch, Griffin et al . 2002, Hsee and Hastie 2006)

A related body of literature explores the costs and benefits of (ostensibly) making it easier to pursue happiness by increasing people's options; it turns out that having more choices might often make people less happy, for instance by increasing the burdens of deliberation or the likelihood of regret (Schwartz 2004). Less discussed in this context, but highly relevant, is the large body of research indicating that human psychology and behavior are remarkably prone to unconscious social and other situational influences, most infamously reported in the Milgram obedience experiments (Doris 2002). Human functioning, and the pursuit of happiness, may be more profoundly social than many commentators have assumed.

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.

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 are increasingly the subject of controversy. 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. [ 28 ] 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 (Glaeser 2006).

But even if governments cannot effectively counteract human imprudence, it may still be that people fare better in social forms that constrain or influence 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 2008c). Recent contextualists include communitarians, though contextualism is not a political doctrine and is compatible with liberalism. 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. [ 29 ]

Quite apart from matters of efficacy, there are moral questions about the state promotion of happiness, which has recently become 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 weak impact on happiness. [ 30 ] 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). [ 31 ] 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. (A similar objection holds that such policies 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.)

Yet even these weak forms of paternalism may be morally problematical, and of course happiness-based policies can be less gentle than that. Bhutan's widely reported policy of “Gross National Happiness,” for instance, involves a variety of more strongly paternalistic measures, including a legally enforced dress code and (until recently) the prohibition of television. It is possible that such policies have succeeded in promoting happiness, but there are significant moral concerns to be addressed.

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, Sen 2009). Several reasons have been cited for this sort of view, one being that happiness isn't really, or primarily, what matters for human well-being (Nussbaum 2008). 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.

But a major motivation for thinking happiness the wrong object of policy is that neither happiness nor well-being are the appropriate focus of a theory of justice . What justice requires of society, on this view, is not that it make us happy; we do not have a right to be happy. Rather, justice demands only that each has sufficient opportunity (in the form of resources or capabilities, say) to achieve a good life, or that each gets a fair share of the benefits of social cooperation. However plausible such points may be, it is not clear how far they apply to many proposals for happiness-based policy, save the strongest claims that happiness should be the sole aim of policy: many policy decisions are not primarily concerned with questions of social justice, nor with constitutional fundamentals, the focus of some theories of justice. Happiness could be a poor candidate for the “currency” of justice, yet still remain a major policy concern. Indeed, the chief target of happiness policy advocates has been, not theories of justice, but governments' overwhelming emphasis on promoting GDP and other indices of economic growth. This is not, in the main, a debate about justice, and as of yet the philosophical literature has not extensively engaged with it.

However, the push for happiness-based policy is a recent development. In coming years, such questions will likely receive considerably more attention in the philosophical literature.

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Aquinas, Saint Thomas | Aristotle | Bentham, Jeremy | character, moral: empirical approaches | communitarianism | consequentialism | economics, philosophy of | emotion | ethics: ancient | ethics: virtue | hedonism | Kant, Immanuel | liberalism | Mill, John Stuart | moral psychology: empirical approaches | pain | paternalism | Plato | pleasure | well-being

Acknowledgments

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

Copyright © 2011 by Dan Haybron < haybrond @ slu . edu >

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Philosophies of happiness.

A Comparative Introduction to the Flourishing Life

Diana Lobel

Columbia University Press

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An impressive comparative study of conceptions of happiness found in East Asian, South Asian, and Western traditions of thought that will be read with interest by a wide range of scholars in religious studies, philosophy, and psychology. Philip J. Ivanhoe, City University of Hong Kong

I know of no other work that engages so many traditions comparatively; this work stands to make a significant contribution to our understanding of happiness across different religious and philosophical traditions. Erin M. Cline, Georgetown University

Diana Lobel's Philosophies of Happiness: A Comparative Introduction to the Flourishing Life is a long-awaited contribution to comparative philosophy and religion. In considering how happiness has been conceived in different cultures, she investigates traditions from Aristotle, Augustine, and Maimonides to Confucianism, Daoism, the Bhagavad Gītā, and Japanese Zen Buddhism. This book is a major contribution to the emerging fields of world philosophy and global ethics. Ithamar Theodor, author of Exploring the Bhagavad Gītā: Philosophy, Structure, and Meaning

Informative, innovative, and timely, Diana Lobel’s Philosophies of Happiness engagingly examines a broad range of perspectives—encompassing the ancient Greeks, key Asian traditions, and central figures in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—to conclude with more contemporary approaches such as mindfulness. On Lobel’s model, “the first building block of a life of happiness is attentive awareness.” This keen insight underlies not only her approach to flourishing but also the very spirit of this outstanding book. John D. Dunne, University of Wisconsin–Madison, author of Foundations of Dharmakīrti’s Philosophy

Well informed and informative, Diana Lobel’s Philosophies of Happiness is likely to become a welcome go-to source for scholars in religious studies, theology, philosophy, and potentially, moral psychology. Reading Religion

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Handbook of Virtue Ethics in Business and Management pp 827–834 Cite as

Happiness: A Philosophical and Historical Perspective

• Surendra Arjoon 7 ,
• Álvaro Turriago-Hoyos 8 &
• Bradley M. Braun 9  
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• First Online: 04 January 2017

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Part of the book series: International Handbooks in Business Ethics ((IHBE))

This essay discusses “happiness” from a philosophical and historical perspective. Also discussed are attempts to measure happiness and to identify goods used to pursue and promote happiness. The focus is on two related but distinguishable concepts called hedonic and eudaimonic. We find that eudaimonic is fundamental to a person’s moral and psychological well-being. We also find that hedonic happiness is unsustainable in the absence of eudaimonic well-being. If these findings are true, we are one step closer to understanding what constitutes human nature and the goods a person ought to pursue to attain happiness, and what should guide government policies to promote social well-being.

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Department of Management Studies/Arthur Lok Jack Graduate School of Business, The University of the West Indies, St Augustine Campus, Trinidad

Surendra Arjoon

Department of Economics and International Finance, Universidad de La Sabana, International School of Economics and Business Administration, Chía, Colombia

Álvaro Turriago-Hoyos

Department of Economics, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, 32816, USA

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Alejo José G. Sison

Department of Philosophy, Saint Louis University , St. Louis, Missouri, USA

Gregory R. Beabout

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Arjoon, S., Turriago-Hoyos, Á., Braun, B.M. (2017). Happiness: A Philosophical and Historical Perspective. In: Sison, A., Beabout, G., Ferrero, I. (eds) Handbook of Virtue Ethics in Business and Management. International Handbooks in Business Ethics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6510-8_120

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Happiness according to aristotle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cogut Institute for the Humanities

10. happiness in psychology and philosophy.

• Meeting Street

Meeting Street: Conversations in the Humanities

Podcast host Amanda Anderson explores topics of vital societal interest through conversations with scholars and writers whose voices have helped define issues and shape debates.

Is pleasure the measure of happiness? Does happiness make life meaningful? How does it factor in economic and political life?

The boom of contemporary research on happiness has been driven by psychologists, though historically philosophy has long examined the subject. What happens when philosophy and psychology enter into conversation?

While happiness may be found through a walk in the woods with a friend, happiness research also illuminates social and public issues ranging from social media to authoritarianism. In this episode of Meeting Street, psychologist Joachim Krueger and philosopher Bernard Reginster explore with host Amanda Anderson the factors that contribute to or impact happiness and the ways in which happiness and meaningfulness can diverge. They talk about the benefits of conducting and teaching happiness research together and discuss how collaboration could shed light on related topics like social status.

Music and production:   Jacob Sokolov-Gonzalez. Administrative support: Damien Mahiet and Gregory Kimbrell.

You can also listen to Meeting Street on Amazon Music , Apple Podcast , Google Podcast ,  Radio Public ,  Player FM ,  Spotify , and Stitcher .

Go to the show’s main page.

Amanda Anderson:  From the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University, this is Meeting Street. I’m Amanda Anderson, the show’s host and director of the institute. In today’s episode, I’m joined by two scholars — one, a social psychologist, and the other, a philosopher — who have several times partnered to teach a course here at Brown on the philosophy and psychology of happiness. The most recent iteration of the course was offered under the aegis of a collaborative humanities initiative that promotes research-based, team-taught courses on important cultural topics. The aim is to see what happens when a humanities perspective is brought into conversation with a disciplinary perspective outside of the humanities.

One striking fact about the boom in happiness research over the past couple of decades is that it has largely been driven by the field of psychology, a social science, even though historically philosophy, a core humanities discipline, has had much to say about the topic. So I’m very excited to speak with my two guests today. Let me now introduce them.

Joachim Krueger is professor of cognitive and behavioral sciences. He studies topics in social judgment and decision-making, such as self-perception, strategic interpersonal behavior, and inter-group relations. He has published widely on these research topics and also has a vibrant blog hosted by Psychology Today. His more occasional writings on happiness have been collected in the book The Quest for Happiness in 31 Essays , published in 2016.

Bernard Reginster is a professor in the philosophy department. His research areas include ethics and moral psychology in 19th-century European philosophy and psychoanalytic theory. He is the author of The Affirmation of Life , published in 2006, and The Will to Nothingness: An Essay on Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality, published in 2021. Bernard is also the founder and director of the Program for Ethical Inquiry at Brown. Joachim and Bernard, welcome to Meeting Street.

Joachim Krueger:  Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Bernard Reginster:  It’s great to be here, Amanda. Thank you for having us.

Amanda Anderson:  So, as I mentioned in the intro, the past few decades have seen a large increase in research on happiness, much of it within psychology, although ideas from the history of philosophy certainly exert an influence on happiness studies. Your course explores the question of happiness by means of an encounter between the two disciplines. Why do you think an approach that juxtaposes the two disciplinary frameworks of psychology and philosophy is important or useful? Joachim, as the psychologist, perhaps you could begin.

Joachim Krueger:  Yeah, thank you. It’s an encounter all right, both for the instructors and for the students. And it’s fun. And it’s also educational because disciplines have different modes of thinking and different paradigms and differences in how they do their scholarship, and we bring that into the same room in our course. So we can tell the students, we can share with the students what we’ve learned about the differences in our theoretical pre-commitments, conceptualization of the issues, and the methods that we use in our efforts to find answers to the questions that we care about.

Amanda Anderson:  Bernard, how would you answer the same question?

Bernard Reginster:  Well, I mean, I agree with what Joachim just said about the confrontation of different methods, different approaches, right? And I can give a specific example if you’d like. So one of the things that philosophers do is that they emphasize the importance of conceptual analysis. So they try to understand what the concept of happiness really is, what it covers, what it doesn’t cover, and so on and so forth.

But from the point of view of a psychologist — and I learned that of course by talking to Joachim about this — is that what philosophers first called conceptual analysis looks very much like armchair psychology, and perhaps we would be better served by a rigorous empirical investigation of what’s really going on in the minds of people who describe themselves as happy.

Well, as it turns out, on reflection, both of these approaches are equally indispensable. On the one hand, the empirical investigation of a topic like happiness is only going to be as good as the initial conceptualization that frames the hypothesis that guides the inquiry. If you ask the wrong questions, obviously the answers you get are not going to be very helpful. But on the other hand, if the empirical hypothesis your initial conceptualization supplied [is] not confirmed by the empirical inquiries, then your initial conceptualization probably missed something and you need to revise it.

The other thing that I want to say is that, precisely because, as you noted in your introduction, the study of happiness has been mostly done by empirical psychologists, it makes it incumbent on philosophers to find out what psychologists have to say and see whether the empirical investigations might in some way force us to revise our concept of happiness. One of the things that’s been very striking to me is the way in which the psychological study of happiness has made it necessary for philosophers to become very careful in the way in which they, so to speak, map out the conceptual territory.

So when psychologists study happiness, obviously they will by trade define it as a state of mind of one sort or another. So the main views here are that happiness is a preponderance of positive over negative affect, or happiness is a sense of satisfaction with your life, things of that nature. But in any event, they define it as a state of mind.

Now in philosophy, happiness has been used virtually as synonymous for the good life in the sense of the life that’s good for the person living it. As philosophers tend to talk about it, it’s been synonymous with wellbeing. But it’s a real question, when you think about it, whether all that matters to your life going well for you is that you be in a certain state of mind. OK. And so philosophers had already started to talk about this kind of issue, but the prevalence of psychological research has really put it front and center. Is being in a certain state of mind all that really matters to your life going well for you?

“ [I]n philosophy, happiness has been used virtually as synonymous for the good life in the sense of the life that’s good for the person living it. As philosophers tend to talk about it, it’s been synonymous with wellbeing. But it’s a real question, when you think about it, whether all that matters to your life going well for you is that you be in a certain state of mind [...] ”

Amanda Anderson:  Yes, let me press on this a little bit by asking Joachim what precisely are the different conceptions of happiness at play in happiness research? And what do you think some of the major contributions of happiness studies and positive psychology have been? I mean, Bernard has been stressing state of mind, or what we might call self-report, but one thing I would be really curious to hear is how happiness is conceived, apart from the question of whether or not the subject is saying that they feel happiness.

Joachim Krueger:  Right, yeah. So what we tell our students, we give them some distinctions that are heuristic and useful, but they’re not categorically true, but they’re helpful for us to think about the issues. And one distinction is between the normative and the descriptive, and we say that by and large philosophers tend to gravitate to normative questions, and normative has a feeling of “Now we have a fix on how things should be or what happiness really is.”

And psychologists tend to shy away from that because then you get to judge people. So if we have a normative standard, we can judge people — or ourselves: “Am I as happy as I should be, or am I thinking about happiness in the correct way?” And so we lay it out for the students that psychologists are empirically working on a descriptive game and philosophers on a normative game, but there is overlap and we need to talk to one another. But it’s not categorically 100% true because there are, of course, many psychological enterprises that are normative.

So for example, when we study judgment and decision-making or choice, we use normative models. So it’s not entirely descriptive and that’s the end of the story. And likewise in the study of happiness and subjective wellbeing, once we’ve discovered, or we have empirical and theoretical grounds, that certain things are better for us and our wellbeing, then we have one foot in the normative territory: “Should you be doing this? Shouldn’t you be exposing yourself more to nature and give pro-socially and hang out more with your friends, because we know it will be good for you?” So the descriptive and the normative are continually in a dance with one another, and we hope we make progress by dancing the dance and understanding where we’re headed.

“ [T]he descriptive and the normative are continually in a dance with one another, and we hope we make progress by dancing the dance and understanding where we’re headed. ”

Amanda Anderson:  Is part of what is at stake here between the normative and, let’s just say, the state of mind orientation competing temporal perspectives, where happiness can be the report of a state of mind in a kind of punctual sense, but the good life can only be known over the course of longer spans of time, or even perhaps the course of a life? I mean, I guess I would pose that question to Bernard.

Bernard Reginster:  When psychologists talk about happiness, they talk about a state of mind, but they tend to talk about a long-term state of mind. So a moment of pleasure does not happiness make, right? On one of the models there’s got to be a preponderance of pleasure over pain, presumably over a certain period of time. I mean, it doesn’t have to cover your entire life, but it has to cover a protracted period of it.

The other point I would make in connection to the previous discussion is that it may very well be that there is something that psychologists call happiness and that is in fact good for you. The question, and I guess it has something to do with the normative question, is that, while it’s very likely to be good for you, is that the only way in which your life can go well for you? Or is this what you should be aiming at? Or are there other things that you might, and perhaps should, aim at if you want to have a life that’s really going well for you?

Amanda Anderson:  Right. I mean, I think it comes down to value commitments, right? I mean, what are one’s primary value commitments? And certain forms of believing one’s life to be meaningful and important might not foreground feelings of pleasure and happiness. Joachim, did you want to speak to that?

Joachim Krueger:  Yeah, I haven’t really answered your question on the state of mind, and that’s the orientation that psychologists take. And again, by and large, that’s true, but not entirely. So it’s not entirely true that this is all — as psychologists — what we think of as states of mind. And some are fleeting, some are longer lasting, but at the end of the day, we want to integrate them and have a whole of how happy the life has been. It’s actually the case that in psychology there’s a long tradition of also talking about deeper psychological constructs that are not states of mind, but whatever it is that gives rise to the state of mind. And that, of course, we know from the study of attitudes.

So you may have a strong ecological attitude — wanting to be green and wanting to do the necessary things — and from time to time, at the right conditions, things will pop into consciousness. But we assume, from what we see in people’s behavior and what they tell us and how they seem to be feeling, that there’s a latent state that gives rise to it, and this latent state or entity we can’t really see. It’s a hypothetical construct that we use to explain what we do see. So in that sense, we have much more common ground with the philosophers who are particularly interested in the deep, the ontology, what is happiness aside from the phenomena that we get to experience and witness in everyday life.

Bernard Reginster:  Yeah, yeah. So to give you an example, I mean, one of the things that we discuss in the course is the question of whether the state of mind that is supposed to [be] considered happiness is an experiential state, a conscious experience, or something that underlies conscious experience,  that’s still a condition of the mind — something like emotional health, for example — that is manifest in experience, but is not simply reducible to it.

Amanda Anderson:  That’s very helpful. Joachim, what do you think made you particularly open to working with a humanities scholar on this particular topic?

Joachim Krueger:  It has a lot to do with how Bernard, my friend and colleague, approached me to collaborate on this. So he kicked in the door, but the door was half open anyway, because I’ve always felt in my scholarly work that interdisciplinary thinking and interdisciplinary contacts are vital for — actually for my own happiness. When thinking is fun, you look for inspiration, and one way to get inspired in scholarship is to look beyond the confines of your little silo or discipline. So I’ve always read widely. I’ve never taken a philosophy course in my life, but I’m self-educated — and then to see the opportunity to work with a liked and loved and respected colleague, and to bring that attitude of excitement and inspiration to the students, how could I have said no?

Amanda Anderson:  Bernard, what aspects of your own research or intellectual commitments or academic history drew you to this collaboration?

Bernard Reginster:  Well, first of all, I have one of my undergraduate degrees in psychology, so I already have a separate interest in it. I was also very struck by the increasing interaction between philosophy, my discipline, and the social sciences and how that interaction proved to be very fruitful. And then, I discovered, and that was a bit unexpected, that in fact Joachim is a kind of a closet philosopher himself. So even though he never took a philosophy [course] in his life, he clearly has a bent towards it. So that really helped, but the interaction between the two disciplines can be amazingly fruitful, which is why philosophers engage in it.

So psychologists, for example, expose correlations, and sometimes those correlations can be quite eye-opening and striking and they merit consideration. If you want a couple of examples, one of the striking correlations is between positive affect, or happiness in that sense, and pro-social giving, when you spend more of your money on other people than on yourself, which goes against, of course, you know, what people tend to believe. And also more recently, the correlation established by some psychologists between the attraction towards authoritarianism and a sense of meaningfulness in life. So those, when they are well documented — these correlations cannot be dismissed, and they cry out for exploration.

“ [P]sychologists, for example, expose correlations, and sometimes those correlations can be quite eye-opening and striking and they merit consideration. [... O]ne of the striking correlations is between positive affect, or happiness in that sense, and pro-social giving, when you spend more of your money on other people than on yourself, which goes against, of course, you know, what people tend to believe. ”

Amanda Anderson: Bernard, let me follow that up by asking you, why do you think positive psychology and happiness research emerged when it did and has enjoyed such success? Do you have any thoughts about that from a cultural, or historical, or disciplinary perspective?

Bernard Reginster:  Well, the emergence of that trend in the field of social psychology is something that I will let Joachim address, but I can say a few words about why it’s been so influential and successful. Certainly one reason for this is the fact that, at least in the 20th century and at least in the English-speaking world, the study of happiness was in some disrepute in my own discipline. So it was not really examined very much, and as a result there was a vacuum. And I think that the studies of happiness by social psychologists basically took over in this way. Increasingly then the psychological study of happiness has replaced philosophy, but also non-scientific [sic] self-help, as the go-to place where people who seek practical guidance will go in their quest for happiness.

Amanda Anderson:  Joachim, how would you account for the rise of the field?

Joachim Krueger:  Well, the term “positive psychology” was coined deliberately about 20 years ago by the president of the American Psychological Association at the time [Martin Seligman]. That was 1999, and that was kind of a heyday. Culturally and economically, the United States was the only superpower, everybody was happy already, but we can be even happier, and how do we go about it?

And the claim was that the discipline of psychology had ignored happiness, not necessarily about being negative psychology, clinical, but just having this blind spot on: “Can we be happier? And if we can, doesn’t psychology have an obligation to help us find out how?” But we live in quite a different world now [from] 20 years ago. Climate change is now climate crisis, the infrastructure is crumbling in this country, the democratic institution is under duress, and I can tell that our young students can feel that. That’s a different crowd of students than we had 20 years ago.

And I’m not ready to conclude that happiness can be studied only under the best of times — but also under the worst of times, or when times are more challenging, and that’s where we are now. And now, perhaps even more so we have an obligation to do our best to find our way forward.

You might think there is a tendency or risk that the study of happiness becomes overly individualized: Here is this person, and this person wants to be happy, and that’s the end of that. But the happiness of people, individual people, is embedded in a social context. And that’s another one of the major lessons we have for our students, that we are social creatures, and we are not islands or unto ourselves, but our happiness is something that we see and try to optimize within a social context in which we live.

“ You might think there is a tendency or risk that the study of happiness becomes overly individualized: Here is this person, and this person wants to be happy, and that’s the end of that. But the happiness of people, individual people, is embedded in a social context. And that’s another one of the major lessons we have for our students, that we are social creatures, and we are not islands or unto ourselves, but our happiness is something that we see and try to optimize within a social context in which we live. ”

Amanda Anderson:  This connects to my very next question which is to ask the two of you to both talk a little bit about what role larger economic and social factors play in individual happiness. For instance, there are reports about how income inequality or social media negatively affect happiness, but happiness research, as you’re just saying, Joachim, often stresses more immediate factors such as close relations with others or the cultivation of certain practices of affirmation or compassion. So how do larger structural conditions affect happiness or interact with these individual or small-scale practices? Joachim?

Joachim Krueger:  That’s a very delicate thing because we can, of course, study the larger context, and we do, so there’s another interdisciplinary frontier with sociology, political science, and economics. So we try to think and understand things globally, but we have to act locally because that’s all we can do. So we tell our students about the research that we see on the correlations between wealth and income inequality, and inequality and life satisfaction.

The data are pretty clear now: If you have extreme inequality in wealth and income, it leaves a footprint on average happiness. What is probably the most provocative findings within this literature is that these extreme discrepancies are not even good for those who have the most money, and that will probably be the hardest to see for them, that it’s not actually in their higher-order interest to maximize even more, to soak up even more, of a nation’s or global wealth within a few hands.

But hey, what can we do about that? Not that much. So that might require another course or another type of scholarship to go there, but what we can do is put that on the radar screen for ourselves and for our students.

Amanda Anderson:  Bernard, would you like to add anything?

Bernard Reginster:  Well, I might say that that’s true: We can’t do much about macro-economical conditions. But we did have a segment on happiness and social media, the use of social media, especially in young people, which was truly frightening. There’s a correlation between the number of times you spent on social media and suicidal tendencies. So that was problematic. But I would say that, you know, even though we cannot intervene necessarily, we can clarify what the issues are.

And another interesting example, I think, is the fact that some countries — I mean, it started in the country of Bhutan, but now the British government does it and other countries as well — started to sort of switch to a way of assessing the success and therefore the viability of a particular type of social organization, not in economic measures such as the gross domestic product for example, but in terms of something that is being called global national happiness.

I have to mention, again, something that I just found out recently about this, is that when it comes to the viability of the type of social organization under which we operate, some interesting research that just came out [is] showing that there’s actually a strong negative correlation between happiness, or positive affect, and the inclination towards authoritarianism.

So the people who are inclined towards authoritarianism tend to be very unhappy, but at the same time, there is also some research that shows that the inclination towards authoritarianism is not strongly correlated with low economic standing. So, of course, that might suggest that then we have political reason to care for the global national happiness as much as for the GDP since the very survival of our democratic political system seems to depend upon it.

But it turns out that things are even more complicated than this, because the same research that I mentioned a moment ago also shows a positive correlation between the inclination towards authoritarianism and meaningfulness. And that might suggest that the deep political problem is not that we don’t care enough about happiness. The deep political problem might be that we don’t care enough about meaningfulness, and that the survival of our republic depends upon that. So these are the kinds of concern, we can’t do anything about them, but at least we can expose them, bring them to the right.

“ [T]he deep political problem is not that we don’t care enough about happiness. The deep political problem might be that we don’t care enough about meaningfulness, and that the survival of our republic depends upon that. ”

Amanda Anderson: That’s fascinating. You’ve both talked about how your two approaches complement one another and are both necessary for the study of happiness. But let me also ask you, were there substantive disagreements between the two of you in your approach to the topic of happiness, and have there been cases in which those disagreements were productive for the course or for the collaboration? Bernard?

Bernard Reginster:  One disagreement that we have had for some time now is about hedonism, which is the view that happiness consists of a preponderance of pleasure over pain. Joachim has been inclined towards it. I have been more skeptical. But the interesting thing is that once you start looking closely, you realize that the disagreement might be more apparent than real. So two examples: One is that when Joachim talks about happiness, of course what he has in mind is happiness in the fairly restricted psychological sense, and it may well be that happiness in that sense consists of pleasure. But when I talk about happiness, I talk about a broader concept of wellbeing, and there, there are reasons to think that maybe while pleasure may be part of it, it’s not the whole of it.

But another issue is that sometimes it looks as though a disagreement over hedonism is a disagreement about the importance of pleasure in happiness, and in fact, we don’t disagree about that. I mean, it would be insane of me to disagree that pleasure is an important, common, maybe even necessary part of happiness. The question really is, you know, what this means — the fact that pleasure and happiness are strongly correlated, what it means about our understanding of happiness. And there, there might be room for disagreement, right? I mean, so I tend to believe that happiness doesn’t consist of pleasure, but that pleasure is an indication of a state, which is a state of happiness, or that being happy tends to produce more pleasure than being unhappy, for example, and maybe Joachim disagrees with that.

Joachim Krueger:  Yeah [chuckles]. It’s an unfolding story. We’ve taught the course now four times, and when I listened to my colleague, Bernard, I noticed all the critiques on hedonism, and so I found myself resisting that: “Come on, we can’t throw the baby out of the bath water. There’s something to be said for pleasure. Would you really? I mean, more pleasure is good, right? More pleasure, less pain, yes, sign me up.” And the question is rather, is that all that people want?

And so I find myself — yes, pleasure, and more pleasure, less pain, that fits my definition of happiness. But of course, when we ask, “What do people want and need?” this conception of happiness doesn’t exhaust it. And I’m reminded of my favorite book review that I ever read. It was published in 1940, it was one paragraph, and it was George Orwell’s review of an English translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf . And Orwell didn’t really go into critiquing the book, which could have gone on for pages.

He made one point, and the point was that Hitler understood that the Enlightenment idea of happiness is not the only thing that drives people. That as a dictator, as a tyrant, as a populist, you can actually exploit other needs that people have and their willingness to actually accept pain or suffering. And that is a very deep lesson, and that’s an ongoing question in our course: happiness — yes, pleasure, less pain, but what else is going on? And so some of our disagreements about how we frame [the course] was the domain that we look at. Do we include meaning, let’s say, into our definition of subjective wellbeing or not? And that’s arguable.

Amanda Anderson:  Joachim, are there things that you feel that you learned from the students, particularly through the group projects or the collaborative dimensions of the course?

Joachim Krueger:  Yes, I did, at two levels. So the last time we taught the course, we introduced group work. We had over 200 students and we had over 30 groups of eight, and they were told to generate a hypothesis and a tractable empirical problem, and collect data, analyze them, and write a report. And they did, and I was just amazed how well that went. There was not a single group out of the 32 groups that imploded or collapsed.

And what I learned was a) the students can do it and most of them like it, and [b)] their reports were very good, addressing a lot of problems of our current time — there were many projects addressed to COVID-related issues and social media related issues. I learned, we learned, that the students got into it and they were not defensive or resistant, and that they embraced this opportunity to study, to themselves do some study and grow with that, and that was delightful.

Amanda Anderson:  I mean, it’s interesting. You did teach the course during what many people would describe as a distinctly unhappy time, which is to say during the second spring of COVID-19, and that’s striking that it informed some of the group projects. And I know you talked earlier in the interview about how the cultural context for happiness studies is very different from the moment historically in which it emerged. I’m just wondering, Bernard, do you have thoughts on teaching the course and thinking about the topic of happiness during the pandemic? Do you feel that that affected the course in significant ways?

Bernard Reginster:  I only have a few anecdotes from some individual students I’ve spoken with, so I don’t have any sort of a general sense of how the students fared. Part of the issue for us, I think, is that because we were teaching the course as the pandemic was happening, we didn’t have the distance that’s necessary to be able to assess the impact of such a massive event on the happiness of people.

I mean, we know now that obviously it wasn’t good in many respects, but we don’t know yet, for example, whether the changes that it will bring, for example, in the way in which people conceive of the place of work in their lives, will in fact be beneficial. They could well be, or maybe simply the fact that people recognize that getting along, you know, having social interaction with people, is actually quite important to your happiness and that the self-imposed isolation of COVID made that very clear to them. So there could still be beneficial effects, but we have to wait and see.

Amanda Anderson:  Those are very interesting reflections. It is fascinating to think about how important it’s going to be to allow some time to pass before we can really assess the last couple of years. So as a last question, I’d like to ask you: This has been such a fruitful collaboration for the two of you, I can tell. I mean, even when you talk about disagreement within the conversation itself, during this interview, there was a dynamism and a kind of a rethinking in relation to the other person’s position. Is there another topic that you think might profit from collaboration between a psychologist and a philosopher? Joachim?

Joachim Krueger:  Yeah, I’d love to answer that, but I can’t resist going back to the previous question really quickly. And that is, times change, cultures change, and our challenges change, but also some things are timeless. And students have never asked me point blank, "Professor, what’s the secret to happiness?" — I’m still waiting for somebody to ask me that because I have an answer, and I told them anyway, and I’m going to tell you now.

There is no “the secret,” but there are a number of little secrets. And one is — if I have one sentence to give one piece of advice is — it’s this: Go take a walk in the woods with a friend. Because you get three for one: The walk is good because the body likes to move. You get physiological benefits. We do know that people feel better when exposed and within nature as opposed to a human-made environment. And somebody you love, or like. That’s pro-sociality.

“ Go take a walk in the woods with a friend. Because you get three for one: The walk is good because the body likes to move. You get physiological benefits. We do know that people feel better when exposed and within nature as opposed to a human-made environment. And somebody you love, or like. That’s pro-sociality. ”

Joachim Krueger:  As to other topics, there are many. Now Bernard and I are both interested in social life, the social world and how people navigate it, and one particularly intriguing concept on which we both have our perspectives is social status — which is something most people want, it’s very difficult to get, it’s easy to lose, and it has a dialectical challenge because, as you gain status, you go above others in your group, so you have a reduction of that kind of affinity or closeness when everybody’s equal. Yet most of us want to be better in some ways. So, that’s a balance we have to find, and I think that’s a topic where we can both take a look using psychological and philosophical concepts and methods.

Amanda Anderson:  Bernard, do you have thoughts about that question?

Bernard Reginster:  I would love to collaborate on the issue of social status. My interest in social status is that I understand status as the fact of enjoying a certain kind of social respect or esteem. You know, you want to be valued by your group or by significant others in your group. And I find it fascinating to understand why. And the standard view in social psychology, which I’ve learned from Joachim, is that the esteem of others is valued as a condition of your own self-esteem, but I just don’t think that’s ... I mean, that may be true in some cases, it’s certainly not true in all cases.

I mean, in many cases you want the esteem of others because you firmly believe, and you have no doubt about that, that you deserve it. And the question is, why is it so important to us? What is it that we want when we want the esteem of others if it’s not simply to bolster or validate one’s self-esteem? So that’s a fascinating question to me, and I know that Joachim has written a lot about this, so I would likely learn very much from him on this particular topic.

Another topic of collaboration on which I have a longstanding interest would be the importance of meaningfulness in a good life. What is it? Psychologists have started to talk about this. They have started to realize that the psychological markers for meaningfulness are different from the psychological markers for happiness, so there’s a budding science of meaningfulness in psychology, but philosophers, of course, have long been interested in that, and so that would be interesting as well.

Amanda Anderson:  Could you just say a little bit more about what the different markers are for meaningfulness versus happiness?

Bernard Reginster:  Well, for instance, I mean, the research I mentioned earlier shows that the marker for meaningfulness is a preponderance of negative affect over positive affect, and the marker for happiness is exactly the opposite. So it shows that meaningfulness and happiness can really diverge. They don’t need to. The argument can be made that if you are happy, your chances of having a life that’s also meaningful are greater. But they can also diverge. I mean, it makes sense for people to say that they are willing to sacrifice their happiness for a meaningful cause.

But the interesting fact is that both happiness and meaningfulness are part of what makes a life good for you. Your having a meaningful life doesn’t make the world better, doesn’t benefit the world. It benefits you. Likewise, your being happy doesn’t necessarily benefit the world. It benefits you primarily. And so you have this strange sort of a shape of the territory of wellbeing that you have these different components of it that can pull in different directions. So part of my motivation for studying meaningfulness in collaboration with Joachim would be to explore that peculiar fact.

Amanda Anderson:  That’s fascinating. I want to thank both of you so much for taking the time to talk today. This has been a wonderful conversation. Thanks so much for being on the show.

Bernard Reginster:  Thank you, Amanda. Thank you very much.

Joachim Krueger:  Thank you, Amanda. It was a pleasure and no pain. Thank you.

Amanda Anderson:  Meeting Street explores some of the most important and creative work being done in the humanities today through conversations with scholars and thinkers who are extending the boundaries of their respective fields. The show is produced by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University. Damien Mahiet is our production manager. Our sound editor is Jake Sokolov-Gonzalez. If you enjoyed this week’s episode of Meeting Street, please leave a review wherever you listen to your favorite podcast.

A Short History of Happiness From Eudaimonia to Gross National Happiness

By Kunal Kashyap

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Isn’t happiness unanimously desired by every human being on Earth? Humans have strived for happiness from the very beginning. However, ‘happiness’ is one of the most variable emotions known to mankind as its meaning and the way of achieving it varies from person to person. Still, in every era philosophers have attempted to define happiness and ways to attain it. The philosophical understanding of ‘happiness’ changed through the passage of time. In the ancient world, Aristotle held virtues as the way of attaining happiness. With the commencement of the Middle Ages, philosophers like Al Ghazali and Thomas Aquinas identified the love of God as the only path to achieve happiness. In the late 18th century, Jeremy Bentham introduced the hedonistic approach to happiness. Furthermore, in the contemporary world, as happiness is also being promoted as a political objective, it has gained a new dimension.

Happiness through virtues

In the ancient period, Aristotle defined happiness as the chief human good in his book ‘Nicomachean Ethics’. His understanding of happiness is different from the regular connotation of the word ‘happiness’. He introduced the concept of happiness known as ‘Eudaimonia’. Eudaimonia is not concerned with the momentary happiness caused by a particular event. Instead, it implies that the person is admirable and lives life to its best. Aristotle held virtues like courage, temperance, justice, etc. to be the fundamental guides for a well-lived life. He held that a happy man is “one who exercises his faculties in accordance with perfect excellence, being duly furnished with external goods, not for any chance of time, but for a full term of years … and who shall continue to live so, and shall die as he lived.” 1

Moreover, Aristotle described that every ethical virtue is the intermediate state between the two extremes of that virtue. The two extremes consist of excess and deficiency of a particular virtue. For instance, the virtue of ‘courage’ is the mean between two extremes, one being ‘cowardice’ and the other being ‘foolhardiness’.

Aristotle’s theory of happiness rests on three concepts: (1) the virtues; (2) phronesis or practical wisdom; and (3) eudaimonia or flourishing.

Like Aristotle, Plato also maintained a virtue based eudaemonistic approach towards happiness. In The Republic , Plato poses two questions: “what is justice?” and “what is the relation between justice and happiness?” In the dialogue, Socrates considers justice as one of the four cardinal virtues. Plato also argued that justice is virtue and wisdom, and injustice is vice and ignorance. To answer the second question, Socrates argued that the just is better off than the unjust. The Republic establishes the relation between justice and happiness as follows:

“But furthermore, he who lives well is blessed and happy, and he who does not the contrary.” – “Of course. Then the just is happy and the unjust miserable.” 2

So Plato in The Republic advocates that a just person is likely to be happier than an unjust person.

Image: Dreamstudio.ai

From virtues to religion

There was a huge shift in the philosophical understanding of happiness from the ancient era to the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages, the love of God became the chief idea of happiness. Purification of the soul and knowledge of one’s self and God are some common aspects which can be seen in the descriptions of happiness.

The monotheism of Christianity was considered offensive against the polytheism of the Roman Empire. In the Roman Empire, Christians repeatedly faced persecution. However, the majority of Christians managed to avoid punishment and the empire failed to check the rise of Christianity. By 324, Emperor Constantine, a Christian convert, rose to power and Christianity became the state religion. The Roman people considered their Emperor as God. Christianity, however, believed in one God, who was not the emperor. This led to a weakening of the emperor’s authority and credibility. Eventually, when the Byzantine Empire emerged from the ruins of the Roman Empire, orthodox Christianity became the dominant religion. The popularity of Christianity may have contributed to the religious shift in how happiness was viewed at the time. Moreover, Christianity is predominantly based on scripture. It is noteworthy that one can easily draw parallels between Saint Augustine’s and Thomas Aquinas’ concepts of happiness and verses in the Bible.

Though St. Augustine was born in 354 AD, his work continued to be of significance in the Middle Ages as well. He held that happiness is the ultimate goal of human life and considered God as the true source of happiness as compared to the other lesser sources. He held that we are doomed to be miserable and wicked if we divert our attention from the love of God to the love of bodies. He believed that happiness is already within us and faith in God helps us to unveil it. Augustine precisely stated in De beata vita “Happy is he who has God”. A similar line of thought can be found in the Bible, John 14:20, as it states: “On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you”. The verse implies that the believers will eventually realise the immanence of the Son in the Father, which will further lead to the appreciation of their own union with God.

In this mini-series of posts, we trace the history of the concept of love from Plato and Aristotle through the Christian world to the Desert Fathers.

Another philosopher of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas, denied the possibility of perfect happiness on this Earth. However, he held that imperfect happiness is possible, which he called Felicitas . According to him, when a purified soul attains true knowledge of God, that soul will experience a pure and eternal bliss that will satisfy every human desire and demolish every sadness and worry. In his book, Summa Theologiae, he proposed that the mystical (beatific) vision of God is true happiness, which can only be achieved in the afterlife. One could find a parallel to this in the Bible, where it is written (“Sermon on the Mount”):

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

The above phrases are known as ‘beatitudes’, which comes from a Latin word beatus , which means blessed or happy. They seek to assure the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, and the peacemakers that they will be granted mercy and the view of God in the kingdom of heaven. Furthermore, in heaven, the mournful will be comforted, the hungry will be fed and they will be called sons of God.

The Middle Ages were not only marked by the rise of Christianity. The era also saw the development of Islamic mysticism, popularly known as Sufism. Al Ghazali, a prominent Islamic philosopher of the Middle Ages, was a follower of and contributor to the Sufi tradition. He wrote extensively on the topic of happiness. Sufi mystics held that the way to illumination culminates in maʿrifah (“interior knowledge”) and in maḥabbah (“love”). It implied the union of lover and beloved. Self or interior knowledge and love are the central themes in the philosophy of Al Ghazali.

Al Ghazali, in his book The Alchemy of Happiness, considered knowledge of the self the key to the knowledge of God; and the knowledge of God the key to happiness. According to Al Ghazali, knowledge of the self consists in the answers to the following questions: “What art thou in thyself, and from whence hast thou come? Whither art thou going, and for what purpose hast thou come to tarry here awhile, and in what does thy real happiness and misery consist?” 3 He considered love as the seed of happiness; therefore, ‘love of God’ is necessary for attaining happiness. He advocated that love of God is fostered by constant worship and remembrance of God.

Source: Dreamstudio.ai

From religion to hedonism

There was a shift in the idea of happiness from a religious orientation in the Middle Ages to hedonism in the eighteenth century. The term hedonism comes from the Greek word hēdonē, which means pleasure. Hedonism advocates that pleasure and pain are the two most important elements of human life and human behaviour must be guided in such a way that it increases pleasure and decreases pain.

The 18th century saw the industrial revolution in Europe, which was marked by the rise of materialism, hints of which can be found in the concept of hedonism. Jeremy Bentham was the pioneer of hedonism in which wealth was one of the elements of measuring happiness. Bentham held that “Of two individuals with unequal fortunes, he who has the most wealth has the most happiness”. 4 However, he was conscious of the limitations of this approach. He thought that the successive addition to the wealth of a rich person will not result in the addition of pleasure of the same amount every time. The addition of pleasure or happiness will decrease with every successive addition, so that a poor person will profit more than a rich one from being given a particular sum of money.

Bentham introduced the ‘hedonic calculus’ to measure the amount of pleasure a specific action is likely to produce. The calculus was based on intensity, duration, certainty or uncertainty, propinquity or remoteness, fecundity, purity, and the extent (reach) of an action.

Bentham was also a political reformer. Therefore, his idea of happiness was also modelled on good governance, laws and social utility. Bentham proposed that the government should apply the hedonic calculus in its decision making, and thus achieve the good (happiness or pleasure) for many and pain for few. In his later writings, he related the idea of happiness to personal security, enhanced health facilities, lower crime rates, education, and keeping check on diseases caused by sewage pollution.

The 18th century also witnessed the French revolution in 1789. The aim of the revolution was to overthrow monarchy in order to establish a republican regime and to achieve the equality of all citizens. Bentham agreed with these goals of the French Revolution, and the notion of equality is immanent in the idea of happiness proposed by Bentham. He held that “when one maximizes the good, it is the good impartially considered. My good counts for no more than anyone else’s good. Further, the reason I have to promote the overall good is the same reason anyone else has to so promote the good. It is not peculiar to me.” 5

Another adherent of hedonism, John Stuart Mill held that “By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.” 6 He went along with most of Bentham’s ideas on happiness. However, he introduced a qualitative distinction of different types of pleasures, which was lacking in Bentham’s hedonism. He thought that intellectual pleasures such as ‘learning’ occupy a higher position than sensual pleasures such as eating and drinking. He believed that it was better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. Mill also assumed that everyone’s happiness counted the same, as he argued that the principle of utility “is a mere form of words without rational signification, unless one person’s happiness, supposed equal in degree …, is counted for exactly as much as another’s.” 7

Live Happier with Aristotle: Inspiration and Workbook (Daily Philosophy Guides to Happiness). In this book, philosophy professor, founder and editor of the Daily Philosophy web magazine, Dr Andreas Matthias takes us all the way back to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle in the search for wisdom and guidance on how we can live better, happier and more satisfying lives today. Get it now on Amazon! Click here!

Back to virtues

With the advent of the 20th century, criticisms of hedonism emerged and Aristotelian philosophy became popular again. Moreover, happiness was now being promoted as a political goal.

Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe has been credited with the revival of Aristotelian virtue ethics in the modern era. Her essay Modern Moral Philosophy, which was published in 1958, revitalized the interest in virtue ethics in Western academic philosophy, and Aristotelian philosophy got popularised in the following years. She criticized the hedonistic approach to happiness by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill as a hopelessly simplistic notion of happiness.

The perhaps most prominent critic of hedonism of the 20th century was Robert Nozick. He put forward the ‘Experience Machine’ thought experiment in his book Anarchy, State and Utopia in 1974. In the experiment, Nozick gives us the option of plugging up into a machine for life, which will flawlessly create a string of utmost happy experiences. Most importantly, once plugged in, one will not be conscious of being plugged into the machine. For the person inside the machines, all the experiences they make will feel real. Most people rejected being plugged into the machine as they agreed with Nozick that living in reality is far more important than living an unreal pleasurable life.

Another concept of happiness, based on whole life satisfaction, was proposed by Władysław Tatarkiewicz. In his book Analysis of Happiness, he held that in antiquity philosophers associated happiness with the possession of some particular highest good, whether wealth, qualities or virtues. He advocated that for a person to be happy, they must be satisfied with their lives as a whole. He noted that every kind of happiness leads to satisfaction but that not every kind of satisfaction leads to happiness. Partial satisfaction cannot bring happiness. Only full satisfaction with one’s life will cause one to be happy. Moreover, Tatarkiewicz stressed that one must be satisfied with both the past and the future expectations of one’s life, in addition to the way one’s life is in the present.

Happiness as a political goal

Towards the end of the twentieth century, happiness began to be promoted as a political goal. Several indices were introduced for measuring the happiness of the citizens of a country. One such index is the Gross National Happiness Index. The term ‘Gross National Happiness’ was coined in 1976 by the then King of Bhutan, Jigme Singye Wangchuck. He held that the Gross National Happiness of a country is more important than its Gross Domestic Product. The GNH is an approach towards development which balances both materialistic and non-materialistic values with the belief that the ultimate end of humans is happiness. It is one the most popular attempts to objectify the notion of happiness. The GNH consists of nine domains to assess happiness: psychological well-being, time use, health, education, cultural diversity and resilience, good governance, community vitality, ecological diversity and resilience and living standards.

In 2011, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution titled Happiness: Towards a Holistic Definition of Development and appealed to its member states to measure the happiness of their people and to use the data to improve public policies.

Even if the government of a nation does not consider promoting happiness as a moral obligation, it does have an interest in gaining popular support and maximizing the happiness of the people in the country. Furthermore, a government’s control over institutional and social factors, which play a significant role in ensuring the happiness of people, has made the government’s role indispensable in promoting happiness.

The philosophical understanding of happiness has been subjected to change through the passage of time. Events from within as well as from outside the philosophical world have affected the definition of happiness in every era. There cannot be a universal definition of happiness. A virtuous person would be happy if they are living their life in accordance with their morals; an acquisitive person would be happy if they are making a fortune; and a monk or nun would be happy if they are entirely immersed in the devotion of God. The way of attaining happiness might differ between persons to the extent that the happiness of one can be misery for the other. An extrovert would be happy in a group of people while, on the other hand, being amongst many people would be a misery for an introvert. Therefore, everyone’s happiness cannot be put in the same mould. It is still true and widely held, however, that happiness is the ultimate end of every human action and that it is unanimously sought by everyone.

Kunal Kashyap on Daily Philosophy:

• A Short History of Happiness. From Eudaimonia to Gross National Happiness

Cover image: Dreamstudio.ai with prompt “Ancient Greek temple in Picasso style cubist colorful.” – Church window prompt: “church window stained glass with light shining through it showing a scene from the Bible colorful on a dark background.” – Picasso people prompt: “two happy friends hugging each other picasso colourful style.” Learn more about AI art in our article “Stunning AI-Generated Art.”

F. H PETERS,  The Nicomachean Ethics Of Aristotle , 10th ed. (repr., London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1906), 27.  ↩︎

Plato. United Kingdom: W. Heinemann, 1982.  ↩︎

Al Ghazālī and Claud Field,  The Alchemy Of Happiness  (repr., New York: Cosimo Classics, 2005), 1.  ↩︎

Jeremy Bentham, Etienne Dumont and Richard Hildreth,  Theory Of Legislation  (repr., London: Trübner, 1864), 103-105.  ↩︎

Julia Driver, “The History Of Utilitarianism”, Plato.Stanford.Edu, 2014, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/utilitarianism-history/ .  ↩︎

John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, 4th ed. (repr., London: Longmans, Green, Reader & Dyer, 1871), 10.  ↩︎

John Stuart Mill et al.,  Essays On Ethics, Religion And Society Essay On Mill’s Utilitarianism  (repr., Toronto University of Toronto Press London Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 257.  ↩︎

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Robert Waldinger, director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, says one of the biggest surprises they encountered was that what makes people happy is also what helps keep them healthy—relationships.

A pet can change your life

Animals ease loneliness and boost oxytocin—the love hormone.

Mending fences

In a society roiled by division, how can we find common ground and build relationships with those who don’t share our views?

Reaching out

Research offers new reasons to pick up the phone and reconnect with that old friend.

Forgiveness can heal

Forgiveness transcends mere spiritual practice or good behavior—it fosters good mental health.

How do you measure and govern for happiness?

An international conference of academics, practitioners, corporate managers, and spiritual leaders at the Harvard Divinity School sought answers to the question of universal happiness.

Explore videos from the conference

Finding joy in our work

When working harder doesn’t work, reinvent your career

Playful summer learning

Fulfillment doesn't require big change

This summer, remember to refresh

Want to be happier? Make more free time.

Get out of your own way

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Happiness/Philosophy of Happiness

< Happiness The philosophy of happiness deals with the nature of happiness and the ways for attaining happiness. ---> School:Philosophy

• 2 Aristippus of Cyrene
• 3 Antisthenes
• 6 Enlightenment
• 7 Undemandingness
• 8 Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand
• 9 What is Your Way?
• 10 See also
• 11 External links

Socrates [ edit | edit source ]

Socrates (469 BC in Athens – 399 BC) is fundamental for Western thinking. Almost all the major philosophical schools of antiquity have to rely on Socrates. Michel de Montaigne called him the "master of masters" and Karl Jaspers wrote, "Socrates to have in mind is one of the essential conditions of our philosophy". (Eva-Maria Kaufmann: Sokrates. Munich 2000, p. 93 (Montaigne), p. 8 (Jaspers).)

Socrates was a mystic. There are many accounts of his extraordinary abilities. He could fall for hours in meditation, go barefoot in winter and consume excessive amounts of alcohol, without ever showing signs of intoxication. He lived in strict guidance by his inner voice, whose origin he regarded as divine. He prayed regularly. About life after death, he preferred an open perspective, "Either it is a non-being, and we have no sensation after death - or, as it is told, it is a migration of the soul from this place to another." (Plato, Apologie, Stuttgart 1982, p. 36) It is interesting to note that a significant portion of Plato's Pheado is concerned with various arguments whose purpose can be seen to prove the existence of life after death.(Plato, Phaedo, 66a-67d.)

We can regard Socrates as the spiritual father of today's scientific thinking time. He was an advocate of reason. He was highly involved with the question of the truth. What is true and what is wrong? What is the way of a true life? Socrates had no ready answers. He left it to each of his students themselves, to find their own way of truth. Three things he gave them along the way: 1. Keep interested in the truth. 2. Make sure that your soul is as good as possible. 3. To get a good soul, maintain the four virtues of prudence, temperance, courage and justice (charity).(Plato, Apologie, Stuttgart 1982, p. 36)

Aristippus of Cyrene [ edit | edit source ]

Perhaps the first philosopher who has developed a complete philosophy of happiness was Aristippus . He was a student of Socrates, but adopted a very different philosophical outlook, teaching that the goal of life was to seek external pleasure. Aristippus lived luxuriously. He is considered the founder of hedonism .

Antisthenes [ edit | edit source ]

Antisthenes (c. 445 BCE – c. 365 BCE) was also a student of Socrates. He adopted and developed the ethical side of Socrates' teachings, advocating an ascetic life lived in accordance with virtue. Later writers regarded him as the founder of Cynic philosophy . His most important disciple was Diogenes , who lived after a legend in a barrel. The way of happiness of Antisthenes is similar to the Enlightenment philosophy of Buddhism, Indian Yoga and Chinese Taoism. Through a life of peace, simplicity, naturalness, modesty and virtue (mental work) dissolve the inner tensions. Inner happiness and enlightenment appear. We find Antisthenes praising the pleasures which spring "from out of one's soul."(Xenophon, Symposium, iv. 41.)

Plato [ edit | edit source ]

Plato lived from 428/427 BC to 348/347 BC in Athens. He was a student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. According to Plato the human soul consists of three parts: The reason, the will and the desire. A man is happy when all three parts of the soul are in balance. Plato has thought about how to build a good society. He proposed to transfer the leadership of a society to the wise. One could say that science (the philosophy of happiness) should be the center of happy society.

A student of Plato was Aristotle . According to Aristotle, happy is he who develops his virtues and abilities. A man can be called perfectly happy if he is sufficiently equipped with external goods and spends his life according to virtue.(Nicomachean Ethics Book I.)

Epicurus [ edit | edit source ]

For Epicurus, the purpose of philosophy was to attain a happy, tranquil life, characterized by peace, freedom from fear, the absence of pain, and by living a self-sufficient life surrounded by friends. A life after Epicurus (341-270 BC) is happy when you live everything in the right degree. Everyone should know his point of enough. "Whom is enough too little, nothing is enough." (Johannes Mewaldt: Epikur. Philosophie der Freude. Stuttgart 1973, page 71.)

Epicureans often confounded with the hedonists. Both are completely different philosophical paths. An Epicurean embodies a moderate path of asceticism and a hedonist a path of extreme external pleasure. Epicureanism is wisdom and hedonism is unwisdom. Epicureanism leads to enlightenment (inner happiness) and hedonism to unenlightenment (inner tensions, addictions).

Epicurus taught positive thinking. A life will be happy when we constantly train positive thinking. Epicurus called it "philosophize." A person should philosophize every day. One should think about the meaning of life and reflect again and again to his positive goals. One should avoid it, to worry too much.

The inner happiness comes from inner peace. When a person calms down, inner happiness appears. Epicurus recommended it to live in inner peace, "Then you live like a God (Buddha) among your unwise fellow men," (Johannes Mewaldt, ibid, page 48.) which an Epicurean also helps on the way: "The friendship dances around the globe, all of us announcing that we shall awaken to bliss." (Johannes Mewaldt, ibid, page 70.)

Enlightenment [ edit | edit source ]

Enlightenment is the central point to understand the philosophy of happiness. According to Swami Sivananda , there are three main paths to enlightenment, the path of peace (live in rest), the path of love (do good) and the path of practicing (yoga, meditation). The best way is to practice all three ways.

Everyone should find the spiritual exercises that suit him well. In order to resolve our internal tensions and to awaken our inner happiness, we need exercises for the body (yoga, walking, meditation) and exercises for the mind (self-reflection, thoughts control, doing good) . Basically you get to the enlightenment (to a life in the light / in God) through the personally right combination from meditation and mental work.

The basic principle of Epicurus was, "A philosopher lives like a God (Buddha, Enlightened) among the people." The most important enlightenment technique for Epicurus was next to a life in stillness the daily positive thinking. Epicurus called it "philosophize." A life will be happy when we constantly think positive and live with enough rest. A person should philosophize every day. He should think about the meaning of life, reflect on his positive goals and consistently go his path of truth and wisdom.

Undemandingness [ edit | edit source ]

Epicurus taught to be frugal in external things and to focus on the inner happiness. His goal was to overcome all fears and to live as a God (Buddha) among men. He recommended the path of small pleasure. He was famous for the phrase, "Send me a small piece of cheese, then I can really enjoy."

Nils was from the beginning of his life in search of the great good fortune. He was looking for happiness in relationships, career and beautiful journeys. When he was thirty years old, there was a good opportunity to deepen his knowledge. He stood at the end of his legal studies. The written work of the exam had been completed. Now he had to wait three months until the inspectors had evaluated the work. These three months he was free. He wondered what he should do with this many leisure. Nils remembered his previously unsuccessful search for lasting happiness. He came up with the idea to read all books about happiness systematically. Maybe the happiness books could help him in his personal search?

He scoured in the libraries for scientific happiness literature. He looked through the whole literature on the word "happiness". He bought all the books that seemed to be helpful in this quest. Overall, he bought some twenty books. Then he retired to his study and read them all consecutively. At first he was confused by the diversity of views about happiness. But after about two months ago, he saw things more clearly. He recognized that some authors were on the wrong track. Most authors were groping in the dark in their search for happiness. They had actually understood anything. Nils recognized this by comparing their results with his own experiences of happiness. Some authors, however, had an eye for the true way. They watched the people who are happy in their lifes. And found that these people are essentially characterized by two special qualities: their positivity and their modesty. The most happiest men first thought positive and secondly, had a modest nature.

That positive thinking contributes to inner happiness is understandable. If you think positive, positive feelings are generated in your psyche. This is also confirmed by the happiness research. But what is going on with the property "modesty"? This property is at the present time very forgotten. We live in a first-person company. Modesty is considered to be unwise. Immodesty is the great idea of ​​life. The more you want, the more you're gonna get. The problem of today's doctrine of immodesty is that the goal of life is located on the wrong place. The goal of life is seen outside. Today's consumer prophets suggest that maximum external pleasure automatically leads to maximum inner happiness. This is a false doctrine that is clearly contradicted by reality.

In particular, this approach does not work long term. May the outward pleasure be as great as it wants. After some time the mind becomes accustomed and will hardly notice it as something special. Even large external wealth does not make you happy on a deep level in the long run. You even get used to an attractive partner and good regular sex. You seek for decades after Prince Charming or work for material wealth. And then all additional happiness disappears a short time after you have reached your goals. Today's happiness research has found out that a sufficient material basis of life is important for the inner happiness. But then inner happiness is not growing more by external goods, but by psychological factors.

The pursuit of external wealth, professional success and the perfect soul mate turns out to be always after a while as a mistake. Some time after happy external events every man turns back to his normal mental happiness level. Who in his life wants to be happy at a deep level must focus on his inner happiness. He must reduce his inner tensions and maintain qualities such as inner peace, love and positivity. The real goal of life is the greatest possible inner happiness. We have to be immodest at inner happiness. We must strive for enlightenment. But we must be modest in outer pleasure. Most people confuse these two things. In Yoga we consider the more inner peace as the basis of happiness as positive thinking. Who is relaxed internally automatically thinks positive. This is the main direction of Yoga . Who wants to force his inner happiness by positive thinking easily gets inner tensions. He is only superficially positive. Anyone who is enlightened, is positive deeply in his soul.

Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand [ edit | edit source ]

Rand believed human beings, and the rest of the universe, all follow the The Law of Identity . Happiness is a person's emotional state when they are living in a manner aligned to their own identity, and the identity of their environment. For example, certain foods and drinks effect a person positively, and others negatively. If a person purposefully ingests the negative things, that will act against his life, and he will feel unhappy about it since he did it knowingly.

Now, perhaps another person likes to be sociable, have many friends, and contribute to the well-being of her community. Her psychological nature, i.e. identity, has this social requirement. If that requirement is met, it will contribute to her happiness.

Sometimes bad things happen in life, and people suffer. There are diseases with no cure. Storms wreck villages, and loved ones are lost. Such occurrences are no ones fault. As long as an individuals' choices are aligned with the Law of Identity, they are honest and true. The suffering will only go so deep. Underneath the grief, the individual will still feel fit to live. If, on the other hand, the person was attempting to defy the Law of Identity, eventually it will catch him, and he will know that it was his own doing, and that he is not fit. That's when the suffering reaches the core of a person.

An outstanding example of how people can be happy in a harsh environment is the true story of "Shackleton's Incredible Voyage" .

Consciousness is part of the universe. Just like everything else, it also follows the Law of Identity. Science, and Physics rest on this law, along with a belief in Reason as the means to knowledge. These disciplines continue to explain more and more about how phenomena work. See the The Universal Law of Happiness for additional discussion on the physics of happiness.

What is Your Way? [ edit | edit source ]

The center of philosophy is the question of the meaning of life. Who goes through life without this issue, lives unconscious. A person is one only by thinking philosophical. Everyone should be a philosopher. Blessed is the one, who finds his purpose of life through his philosophical thinking. He can live wisely and strategically. He will receive a full life. Live happily. Live with the happiness research and the philosophy of happiness.

Basically, the way of the outer pleasure and the way of the inner happiness are opposites. Follow the right principles of life. The way of the outer pleasure creates tensions (a big ego, wishes, inner stress) and you become inwardly unhappy. The path of the outer pleasure causes at the long-term a growth into the inner unhappiness. We are never internally really satisfied, and thus we seek to go more extreme the way of the external pleasure. Until we recognize its failure.

On the path of inner happiness, all inner tensions dissolve . We systematically resolve the tensions from the body and the mind. If the spirit becomes free of his fears (attachment to suffering situations) and desires (attachment to external pleasures), inner peace appears. We get into a cosmic consciousness. Lasting inner happiness evolves. We are content with ourselfes and our lifes. We have released all external things at a deeper level and thus realize our true self.

The people are different and have different ways of inner happiness. For some people it is good to live as an extreme ascetic (Diogenes). For some people it is right to try the path of the outer pleasure enough, until they are ready for the path of inner happiness. For most people, a mean way with some outer joy is the best spiritual way.

1. Think about life. What are your goals? What do you want to reach in your life? "My goals are ... "

2. Think about inner and outer happiness. The happiness research found out, that happiness comes to 90% from inside and only to 10 % from outer things like a great partner, much money or a big career ( Sonja Lyubomirsky ). As a philosopher invest your energy in a healthy life, in meditation, in positive thinking and in working for a happy world.

3. Think about enlightenment. Enlightenment is the biggest happiness. Find your personal way of spirituality. Center your life in Logic (in a higher reason like truth, love, inner happiness or enlightenment). What are the spiritual exercise you want to do daily (yoga, meditation, reading, positiv thinking, walking, praying, doing good)?

4. Make a good plan of your life. In yoga there are four phases of a full life, learning in the childhood, work as adult, relationship or family and selfrealization.

5. Live as a philosopher of happiness. You can go the fast way to enlightenment like Diogenes (live like a yogi), the middle way to enlightenment like Epicurus (live inner and outer happiness at the same time) or the way of unenlightenment like Aristippus (outer pleasure and inner suffering). Test the best!!

See also [ edit | edit source ]

• A World of Peace, Love and Happiness
• Yoga and the dance of life (a yogi life)
• Spiritual Almanac

External links [ edit | edit source ]

• Do the Philosophy of Happiness (Diogenes, Epicurus)
• Philosophy of Happiness (Be Happy-Be Optimistic)
• The Words of Epicurus: 1. Principal Doctrines I-XX (Video, 5 minutes)
• History of Western Philosophy (Funny Video, 3 minutes)

• Resources with related material at Wikibooks
• Resources with related material at Wikiquote
• Resources with related material at Wikipedia

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13 Oct Philosophy of Happiness [Happiness]

We know happiness really matters, but do we really know what happiness is? Is it reachable? Do we have a right to happiness? Do we have a duty to be happy? What is the difference between being happy and leading a happy life? In this course, we will examine these, and other questions related to happiness.

We will learn what Western philosophers—who have a rich tradition of thinking and writing about happiness— understand by the concept of happiness; how this notion has evolved over time throughout history, and how happiness relates to other concepts such as virtue, pleasure, beatitude, utility, self-sufficiency, will, pain, subjectivism, rights, and duty. We will also learn about and compare how other non-Western traditions understand the meaning of happiness in their cultures and how they experience it, and we will conclude the class by probing into what science and religion have to say about happiness.

Happiness is something we all have experienced in our lives and will continue to do so. So, I hope that once you have acquired a solid grasp of its different meanings in history and across different cultures, your knowledge of the concept of happiness will continue to enrich your debates outside the classroom and make you a little wiser in understanding your own path to happiness.

Mariana Niethardt 

Mariana Niethardt holds a PhD in Political Philosophy and a Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy by Universidad Pontificia Comillas. She also teaches “Legal Thought” and “Modern and Contemporary Political Philosophy” at IE. She has worked for many years at “The School of Philosophy” in Madrid.

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309 Happiness Essay Topics & Research Questions

What is happiness? This is one of the fundamental questions discussed in philosophy, psychology, religion, sociology, and other sciences. Many research papers and essays explore this phenomenon, and the topic of happiness is an infinite source of inspiration.

If you decide to write a paper on happiness, this is a great chance to learn what happiness is for you. To help you create outstanding writing, our expert team has collected the best happiness essay topics.

🔝 Top 10 Happiness Essay Topics

✍️ happiness essay prompts, ❓ happiness research questions.

• ⚖️ Happiness Argumentative Essay
• ➡️ Essay about Cause and Effect of Happiness

🤩 More Happiness Essay Titles

✏️ writing about happiness: step by step, 🔗 references.

• How to find happiness?
• What are the signs of a happy person?
• The most common myths around happiness.
• The effects of positive psychology on happiness.
• How does happiness change over the lifespan?
• The effects of happiness on physical well-being.
• The most popular theories of happiness.
• The world’s happiest countries.
• The definition of family happiness.
• Can money buy happiness?

Writing an essay on happiness can be tricky since this is a very complex phenomenon. However, if you focus on its specific aspect, you can easily do research and write a well-crafted paper. Consider our ideas on how you can narrow the topic of happiness.

Can Money Buy Happiness: Argumentative Essay Prompt

There’s an ongoing debate about the connections between happiness and money. If you want to investigate this controversial topic in your essay, it’s essential to consider both sides before jumping to conclusions.

Recent research by Kahneman, Killingsworth, and Mellers suggests that people are generally happier as they earn more. More than 30,000 adults aged between 18 and 65 living in the US with different incomes participated in a survey. Researchers measured their happiness at random intervals in the day via an app called Track Your Happiness.

The results revealed that happiness rises with income, even in the high salary range. However, there was a so-called “unhappy minority” — about 20 percent of participants, whose happiness didn’t progress after the person reached a certain income level. You might want to mention this research as an argument in your essay.

What Does Happiness Mean to You: Essay Prompt

There’s no one universal definition of happiness. It differs from person to person. If you’re writing a narrative essay , you can describe what happiness is for you. For more formal assignments, you might want to define happiness from a psychological, philosophical, or religious perspective.

Neuroscientists have demonstrated a great interest over the past years in what happens in our brains when we’re happy. According to neuroscience , happiness is the release of dopamine and serotonin (two types of neurotransmitters) in response to external factors.

While medical studies see happiness as a physiological process, in religion, happiness is sacral. To be precise, biblical scholar Jonathan Pennington defines happiness as something that cannot be found outside since this is a feeling of complete alignment with God and his coming kingdom.

Aristotle Happiness: Essay Prompt

When writing a happiness essay, it’s almost impossible not to mention the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. In one of his works, The Nicomachean Ethics , he presented one of the first happiness theories, which is still relevant today.

According to Aristotle, happiness lies in achieving all the good, such as health, knowledge, wealth, and friends , which leads to the perfection of human nature. Often, happiness requires us to make choices, some of which may be very challenging. For example, the lesser good sometimes promises immediate pleasure, while the greater good requires sacrifice. Aristotle’s theory of happiness remains one of the most influential frameworks and is worth mentioning in your writing.

Prompt for Happiness Is a Choice Essay

Is happiness a choice? This is another complex question you can build your essay around.

To give you some food for thought, psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky believes that roughly 50 percent of people’s natural happiness level is genetically determined . However, if we work on our happiness consistently, with effort and dedication, we can boost it.

It sounds shocking, but we make around 35,000 conscious decisions daily, each contributing to our happiness. As mentioned earlier, genetics make up roughly half of the happiness levels. The rest depends on our choices, and only 10% of happiness depends on circumstances.

• How do sociological perspectives shed light on factors contributing to happiness?
• How does a cross-disciplinary approach enrich our understanding of happiness?
• What is the impact of relationships on well-being?
• How can happiness be measured subjectively and objectively?
• What does the economics of happiness say about human well-being ?
• How does health contribute to human happiness?
• Does income directly relate to happiness ?
• What are the socio-economic and sociodemographic characteristics of happiness?
• How do classical and neo-classical economic theories conceptualize happiness?
• How do social security and welfare contribute to happiness?
• Can employment affect happiness?
• Who is happier: self-employed or those working for hire ?
• What is the impact of retirement on happiness?
• What is the link between female happiness and marital status?
• Should sacrifices be made for the sake of children’s well-being?
• How do meaningful personal relationships contribute to happiness?
• How does feeling in control of one’s life affect happiness?
• What is the relationship between freedom and happiness ?
• What is the connection between a community’s religious diversity and happiness?
• What is the link between the amount of leisure time and happiness?
• How do outdoor activities affect happiness?
• How does culture affect the way people evaluate happiness?
• How do social networks influence a person’s happiness?
• What is the difference between top-down and bottom-up theories of life satisfaction ?
• What is the impact of regular involvement in sports on happiness?
• How often should one meet with friends to feel happy?
• Is loneliness inversely related to happiness?
• What is the impact of political stability on happiness?
• Is living in a democratic state a determinant of happiness?
• Can economic freedom contribute to one’s happiness levels?
• What are the economic consequences of social happiness?
• Is happiness a fundamental goal of a democratic society ?
• Can happiness be attained by well-organized governmental efforts?
• Happiness versus well-being: are these concepts the same?
• What is the math behind the Gross National Happiness (GNH) index?

Questions about Happiness: Psychology

• What is the impact of family bonds on subjective well-being?
• Psychology Answers Whether Money Buys Happiness .
• Can physical health be a reflection of internal happiness?
• Are life challenges a stimulant of happiness?
• How to Increase Happiness Across All Three Types of Subjective Well-Being .
• Are psychometric scales valid and reliable for measuring happiness?
• What is the role of gratitude in positive psychology?
• Does Your Personality Predict Your Happiness?
• What is the link between gratitude and happiness?
• Is gratitude an alternative to materialism and a tool for attaining happiness?
• Happiness and Academic Success Relationship .
• What is the concept of “good human life” in psychology?
• How does evolutionary psychology explain the origins of happiness?
• How has the concept of happiness evolved across different psychological theories?
• Self-Esteem and Happiness Analysis .
• How does subjective well-being vary across different age groups?
• What is the role of social support in happiness?
• To what extent does genetics determine the baseline happiness level?
• The Happiness Tips and Examples from Real Life .
• How do cultural norms influence the understanding of happiness?
• How does the experience of flow states contribute to happiness?
• How can mindfulness meditations increase happiness?
• Do Stay-at-Home Mothers Exhibit More Indicators of Happiness Than Full-Time Working Mothers ?
• Is there a genuine science of happiness?
• Positive psychology : a new science of happiness or old data in a new package?
• How does the quality of interpersonal relationships affect happiness?
• What cognitive and emotional processes are involved in positive self-appraisal ?
• Generosity Motivating Factors and Wellbeing .
• What are the dimensions of psychological well-being?
• How does the engagement in prosocial behaviors contribute to happiness?
• What is the impact of pursuing extrinsic and intrinsic goals on happiness?
• How does having a life purpose contribute to happiness?
• Spiritual Satisfaction of Basic Psychological Needs .
• Positive psychology coaching: how to learn to help others attain happiness?
• What are the neurobiological correlates of happiness?
• Relationship of Proactive Personality, Financial Planning Behavior, and Life Satisfaction .
• What is the impact of spiritual well-being on happiness?
• Happiness on prescription: do anti-depressants contribute to well-being?
• What personality traits are associated with sustained happiness levels?
• How Does Regular Alcohol Consumption Affect Happiness?
• How do positive psychology interventions at school affect young adults’ happiness?
• What is the link between physical attractiveness and subjective happiness?
• What is the connection between happiness and neuroticism?
• What are the positive psychology teachings of Buddhism ?
• Is yoga a path to mature happiness?
• What is the impact of social comparison on happiness?

Philosophical Questions about Happiness

• How to achieve ultimate happiness?
• The dark side of happiness: what are the wrong ways of pursuing happiness?
• Can there be wrong types of happiness?
• Bhutanese Views on Happiness and Subjective Wellbeing .
• Is happiness egoistic self-indulgence?
• What are the philosophical problems in the study of happiness?
• Is there a link between happiness and compassion?
• Philosophy on Knowledge, Reality, and Good Life .
• Can happiness be universally possible?
• What are the conditions and causes of happiness?
• Relativity of happiness: are lottery winners happier than accident survivors?
• People and the Meaning of Life .
• How do emotional styles contribute to happiness?
• What are the personality traits of a happy person?
• What is Carson’s approach to happiness and satisfaction?
• Philosophical Views and Cultural Influences .
• What is the philosophical stance on happiness and pleasure?
• Can happiness be equated to hedonism?
• How can the pursuit of happiness be analyzed from a utilitarian perspective ?
• What is Benditt’s view of happiness and contentment?
• What were Aristotle’s ideas on the human good?
• What is the difference between classical and contemporary philosophy readings on happiness?
• What is the link between happiness and the meaning of life ?
• What is eudaimonic well-being ?
• What are the features of Diener’s happiness philosophy?
• What is the happiness philosophy of Plato?
• How has happiness research in philosophy progressed over time?
• Money Cannot Bring True Happiness .
• What is the concept of happiness in English sayings?
• Is ancient happiness wisdom applicable to modern times?
• What are the contributions of the world’s famous happiness philosophers?
• What does Islam say about happiness?
• What were John Stuart Mill’s views on the moral and political philosophy of happiness?
• Personal happiness or societal well-being: what should be prioritized?
• How do Foucault’s teachings describe children’s happiness?
• What were Ibn Rushd’s ideas on happiness?
• How have ancient philosophers influenced contemporary debates on the nature of happiness?
• Human Development and Wellbeing .
• How do Eastern and Western approaches to happiness differ?
• How did stoics achieve happiness?
• Is greater happiness for a greater number of people desirable?

⚖️ Happiness Argumentative Essay: Topic Ideas

• Nature vs. nurture : the role of personal choices in achieving happiness.
• Can happiness be increased by technological advancements?
• The Relationship between Money and Happiness .
• Happiness can’t be achieved with anti-depressants.
• Cultivating positive brains is vital for happiness.
• Happiness levels in rich and poor nations .
• Is unhappiness more important in moral terms than happiness?
• Gay Marriages: Isn’t It Time to Allow Them Feel Happy?
• Emotional control plays a vital role in a person’s ability to be happy.
• Happiness is inseparable from pleasure.
• Happiness inevitably leads to human flourishing.
• Are there moral limits to satisfaction?
• Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness .
• There should always be a place for virtue in happiness.
• Happiness is a stochastic phenomenon: examining Lykken and Tellegen’s views.
• Suffering is not mutually exclusive with happiness.
• Technological progress distances people from simple happiness.
• Goodness means different things to people.
• Health, Wealth, and Happiness: Government’s Responsibility .
• Happiness and meaning are two main aspects of a virtuous life.
• Is happiness research relevant for economists?
• Happiness research can offer implications for public policy .
• Happiness: a contribution to an economic revolution.
• How To Achieve Well-being and Enjoyment in Life?
• The paradox of choice: does an abundance of options lead to greater happiness?
• Implications of happiness research for environmental economics .
• Diversity is a vital determinant in modern happiness research.
• Happiness research should be country-specific.
• National Well-Being Before and During the Pandemic .
• A need for more programs for increasing personal happiness.
• Happiness is a relative concept .
• Happiness can prosper only in democracies.
• Collective and individual happiness are interrelated.
• Psychological Well-Being, Self-Efficacy, and Personal Growth .
• Happiness affects mental and physical health in many ways.
• The impact of happiness on achievement.
• Do acts of kindness increase happiness levels?
• The impact of relationships on individual happiness: quantity vs. quality.
• Hedonism vs. eudaimonism: which leads to a more fulfilling life?
• Happiness depends on income, but not exclusively.
• Should maximizing happiness be the government’s social policy ?
• Insights of happiness research for public policy and administration.
• Democracy: Equality of Income and Egalitarianism .
• Human happiness is impossible without favorable social conditions.
• Happiness scales don’t work.
• There’s a tangible degree of utility for human happiness.
• Instagram Use and Psychological Well-Being in Women .
• The significance of adaptation and change in sustaining lasting happiness.
• Happiness is culturally constructed.
• Happiness is not equal to well-being.
• Personal happiness is a principal element of productivity .
• Preventive healthcare can boost people’s well-being and happiness.
• Happiness at work determines general happiness to a large degree.
• Morality plays a huge role in the folk conceptions of happiness.

➡️ Essay about Cause and Effect of Happiness: Topics

• Causes of happiness and unhappiness.
• Culturally specific causes of happiness.
• Physical appearance peculiarities and happiness.
• Individual traits’ impact on perceived happiness.
• Chinese Population: Future Growth and Wellbeing .
• Effect of overestimating and underestimating the importance of happiness on well-being.
• Influence of happiness on one’s body and mind.
• Absence of happiness as a probable cause of mental health disorders .
• Can unhappiness cause cancer?
• The Citizen Science: Impact on Personal Wellbeing .
• Causes of marital unhappiness.
• Effects of chronic stress and unhappiness at work .
• Unhappiness as a cause or effect of loneliness .
• Happiness and success – what’s the cause in this relationship?
• Effect of wealth on happiness.
• Social Justice, Feminism and Well-Being .
• The impact of living in a democracy versus autocracy on people’s perceived happiness.
• Causes of male happiness.
• The influence of consumerism culture on happiness.
• Differences between the causes of male and female happiness.
• Instagram Use and Psychological Well-Being .
• How do the causes and effects of happiness change with age?
• Effects of happiness on the elderly.
• The impact of education level on happiness.
• Causes of happiness in Eastern and Western cultures.
• Can a cause of happiness in one culture be a cause of unhappiness in another one?
• Divorce of Parents and Impact on Child’s Well-Being .
• The influence of the number of children one has on the perceived happiness level.
• Can the pursuit of one’s dream be a cause of happiness?
• Freedom as a cause of happiness.
• The causes of material versus spiritual happiness.
• Video Gaming and Children’s Psychosocial Well-Being .
• Causes of happiness in the workplace.
• Effects of being happy and emotionally stable on academic performance.
• The impact of happiness on the quality of social relationships.
• Can happiness be a source of productivity?
• The Impact of Self-Care on Well-Being among Practicing Psychologists .
• Individually determined causes of happiness and misery.
• Environmental causes of human happiness.
• How do causes of happiness change over time?
• The COVID-19 Pandemic Impact on Social Well-Being .
• Can happiness cause health improvements?
• Moral causes of happiness.
• The effect of positive body image on a person’s happiness.
• How does high self-esteem affect one’s happiness?
• People’s recipes for long-term happiness across cultures.
• Polling Exercise: Self-Fulfillment Over Self-Indulgence .
• Effects of happiness on sociability.
• Happiness causes in single-parent families and double-parent families.
• Causes of happiness among very wealthy people.
• Positive Impact of the Environment on Families .
• Is happiness a stable concept? What causes happiness to change?
• Causes of happiness as seen by feminists .
• Strong friendship bonds as a cause of happiness.
• Psychological wealth as a precondition of happiness.

Pursuit of Happiness Essay Topics

• The unending pursuit of happiness is too commercialized.
• Pursuit of happiness in the movies.
• History: In Search of the American Dream .
• The scientific pursuit of happiness: approaches from different sciences’ perspectives.
• People often get lonely in the pursuit of happiness.
• Self-defeating pursuit of happiness.
• Historical cases of happiness pursuits.
• Materialism and pursuit of happiness.
• Positive Psychology to Lead a Normal Life .
• Experientialism and happiness.
• Time, money, and social connections in the happiness equation.
• Therapy vs. medications in the pursuit of happiness.
• What should a person know to pursue happiness successfully?
• Pursuit of happiness: rural vs. urban perspectives.
• Pursuit of happiness in the Age of Enlightenment .
• How do advances in biotechnology serve the pursuit of happiness?
• Psychobiotics and gut-brain relationships: happiness via nutrition.
• Downshifting for the sake of happiness.
• The impact of race on the choice of happiness pursuit methods.
• Perceived security and pursuit of happiness.
• Experiential consumption in the pursuit of happiness.
• The origins of the hunt for happiness.

Happiness at Work: Topic Ideas

• The benefits of happy employees for the organization.
• The reciprocal relationship between happiness and success.
• Job Satisfaction and Ethical Behavior in Prisons .
• Impact of happiness and optimism on performance .
• Waiting to become happy as the greatest success limitation.
• Police: Issue of Job Satisfaction, Hazards and Risks .
• Cultivation of positive brains for motivation, workplace creativity, and resilience.
• Escaping the cult of the average for the sake of happiness.
• Psychological flexibility is the key to workplace success.
• Human Resource Regulations: Working Hours and Minimum Salary .
• Independence as a cause of happiness at work.
• Work-life balance and happiness.
• Attaining happiness in the knowledge-intensive workplace.
• Approaches to measuring happiness at work.
• Diversity at the Workplace: Problem and Importance .
• Happiness at work: small firms, SMBs, and corporations.
• Cross-cultural correlates of happiness at work.
• The art of staying happy in the workplace.
• Work-Life Balance in the Last Decade .
• The quality of relationships with colleagues as a determinant of happiness.
• Workplace conflict and happiness.
• Happiness and financial/non-financial rewards.
• Positive psychology coaching for staff.
• Impacts of Parenting on Work, Life, and Family .
• Can a person working nine-to-five be really happy?
• Happiness and overtime work.
• Happiness in the educational workplace.
• Steps to Reduce Stress at Work .
• Happy doctors and nurses: can seeing suffering every day align with happiness?
• Anger control and happiness at work.
• Culture of respect and workplace happiness.
• Exploring the Concepts of Productivity and Stress Levels in the Workplace .
• Happiness at work and broader life satisfaction.
• Happiness among emergency workers.
• Happiness and workplace burnout.
• Work Efficiency Impact Factors .
• Can real happiness be attained through work?
• Organizational learning measures for supporting staff happiness.
• Happiness at work and organizational effectiveness.
• Human Factors: Workload and Stress Relationship .
• Are happy employees more committed to their employer?
• Happiness at work and motivation.
• Happy staff and growth mindsets.
• Work-Related Stress and Meditation & Mindfulness .
• How do workers of different ages conceptualize happiness at work?
• Self- and peer-related orientations and happiness at work.

We’ve prepared a small writing guide to help you make a well-structured and captivating happiness essay. Consider the best tips for the introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion .

Happiness Essay Introduction

The introduction is an essential part of an academic essay that presents the topic, provides background information, and catches readers’ attention. Here are the three main elements to include in your introduction.

Body Paragraphs about Happiness

The body is the longest essay part, leading readers through your ideas, arguments, and evidence for your thesis . It’s always divided into two or more paragraphs, each centering around a topic sentence.

A topic sentence describes the paragraph’s central idea and should be expanded with evidence and examples. It also helps to transition smoothly from one section to another.

Remember, we’ve already developed a thesis statement about the connection between happiness and productivity. An example of a happiness topic sentence for this essay is shown below.

To find supporting evidence for your thesis, you can check out major theories, previously done research, statistics , case studies, and articles on the topic.

Happiness Essay Conclusion

The conclusion is a vital part of an essay that reminds readers of your thesis statement and summarizes the main points. Nothing new is presented in this section, but you might want to encourage readers to think deeper about the topic.

The critical requirement for the conclusion is paraphrasing your thesis statement from the introduction. You can keep the keywords but change the rest.

Happiness is a complex phenomenon many writers, poets, and scientists try to explore. If you also want to contribute to happiness discussion and share your ideas, writing an essay is a great opportunity. Consider our top happiness essay topics and writing tips to write a memorable paper.

• Happiness | Harvard Business School
• Happiness | TED
• Research Topic: Happiness | Association for Psychological Science
• Three New Ideas About Happiness and Well-Being | Greater Good Magazine
• Happiness Articles & More | Greater Good Magazine
• Happiness in Psychology and Philosophy | Cogut Institute for the Humanities
• Happiness | UCLA Anderson Review
• The Five Big Questions of Happiness Research | Longevity
• 10 Questions: How Can We Be Happy? | CBS News
• Can Money Buy Happiness? Scientists Say It Can. | The Washington Post

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