Dan Haybron

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

This paper argues that a specifically environmental ethic is neither needed nor perhaps desirable for effecting the change in values for which many environmentalists have rightly called. Rather, familiar values such as beauty and excellence, and especially an outlook that regards those values as central aspects of a good life, may be all that is needed. The requisite ethic of appreciation is already embedded to some degree in a wide range of cultures, so no radical shift in values is called for, nor convergence on a tendentious moral framework. But this outlook meets with skepticism from the dominant public ethos, as embodied for instance in mainstream economics. While this paper does not offer a full-blooded defense of an aesthetic grounding for environmental concern, it does suggest that the skepticism about such a grounding is considerably overblown.

This paper argues that a specifically environmental ethic is neither needed nor perhaps desirable for effecting the change in values for which many environmentalists have rightly called. Rather, familiar values such as beauty and excellence, and especially an outlook that regards those values as central aspects of a good life, may be all that is needed. The requisite ethic of appreciation is already embedded to some degree in a wide range of cultures, so no radical shift in values is called for, nor convergence on a tendentious moral framework. But this outlook meets with skepticism from the dominant public ethos, as embodied for instance in mainstream economics. While this paper does not offer a full-blooded defense of an aesthetic grounding for environmental concern, it does suggest that the skepticism about such a grounding is considerably overblown.

Daniel M. Haybron Cet article présente une catégorie de conditions fonctionnelles pour aborder certaines difficultés qui ont surgi dans le travail philosophique sur la nature du bonheur. Dans des travaux antérieurs, j’ai défendu une théorie du bonheur comme état émotionnel selon laquelle être heureux consiste essentiellement en des états dispositionnels, tels que la propension à une humeur détendue ou ravie. Les conceptions hédonistes du bonheur, qui le réduisent à des expériences de plaisir, ont été rejetées en partie parce qu’elles semblent commettre une erreur de catégorie. Cependant, la nature de cette erreur de catégorie est restée incertaine, et la dispositionnalité revendiquée du bonheur a également été contestée même par des commentateurs par ailleurs sympathiques à une théorie de l’état émotionnel. Ici, je réponds à ces inquiétudes en précisant les fondements métaphysiques de la conception de l’état émotionnel telle que je l’ai articulée. Comprendre le bonheur en termes de condition fonctionnelle d’un individu résout ces énigmes d’une manière qui aide à expliquer la signification distinctive du bonheur.

The Renaissance of Prudential Psychology Philosophical reflection on the good life in coming decades will likely owe a tremendous debt to the burgeoning science of subjective well-being and the pioneers, like Ed Diener, who brought it to fruition. While the psychological dimensions of human welfare now occupy a prominent position in the social sciences, they have gotten surprisingly little attention in the recent philosophical literature. The situation appears to be changing, however, as philosophers inspired by the empirical research begin to examine more seriously the psychology of human flourishing. This is not to say that the philosophers of any era have kept entirely silent about such matters. While the term ‘subjective well-being’ has yet to take a significant place in the philosophical lexicon, philosophers have always evinced some interest in the subjective or psychological dimensions of human welfare, and sometimes quite a lot. Philosophical work on the good life has traditionally been the province of ethical theory, which may be understood broadly to include all aspects of value theory. Ethics in this broad sense is one of three main branches of philosophical inquiry, alongside metaphysics and epistemology. Philosophers sometimes use ‘ethics’ more narrowly, as a synonym for ‘morality’ or ‘moral theory’. But ethical theorists frequently claim to be in the business of trying to answer Socrates’ question: how ought one to live? And this question ranges well beyond matters of right and wrong, dealing also with matters of well-being, flourishing, welfare, eudaimonia, or pruden- tial value. There is some dispute about the precise equivalence of these expressions, which carry differing connotations. But all seem to concern the same cluster of issues: what benefits a person, is in her interest, or makes a person’s life go best for her. Thus contemporary theories of “wellbeing” or “welfare” appear to be direct competitors to ancient theories of “eudaimonia.” It can be useful, then, to employ these expressions interchangeably, whether or not they are strictly synonymous..

This paper aims to show that widespread, serious errors in the self-assessment of affect are a genuine possibility—one worth taking very seriously. For we are subject to a variety of errors concerning the character of our present and past affective states, or “affective ignorance.” For example, some affects, particularly moods, can greatly affect the quality of our experience even when we are unable to discern them. I note several implications of these arguments. First, we may be less competent pursuers of happiness than is commonly believed, raising difficult questions for political thought. Second, some of the errors discussed ramify for our understanding of consciousness, including Ned Block’s controversial distinction between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. Third, empirical results based on self-reports about affect may be systematically misleading in certain ways.

We can distinguish the evil person in two ways. One is to pick out some trait, or narrow cluster of traits, and argue that individuals are evil if they possess those traits to a sufficiently extreme degree. Call theories that characterize evil in this manner extremity views. The second method takes evil to consist in being vicious, not just in one respect, but thoroughly or consistently. Call this the consistency approach. Thus understood, evil persons lack any significant moral virtues, having no “good side.” According to stronger versions of the consistency theory, evil persons lack morally redeeming qualities of even the most modest sort. They are moved and motivated little or not at all, or even perversely, by morality and the good. In this chapter I will defend such a view of evil character. Naturally, even consistency theories grant that evil involves a kind of extreme viciousness. But this is not the sort of extremity that requires having particular traits to an extraordinary degree, beyond those needed to lack virtues or redeeming qualities. Consistency theorists could require extreme vices in addition to those implied by the consistency requirement, but I will not do so. What about extremity views? Extremity of vice in the present sense concerns the degree to which someone possesses a given vice. If a person’s viciousness consists in cruelty, then that individual earns the title of evil by having cruel propensities to the highest degree: tending to perform many cruel acts, and tending to perform the cruelest acts. The extremity method appears to be the standard approach among commentators in this area. For example, Laurence Thomas claims that to have an evil character is to be “often enough prone to do evil acts” (1993, p. 82). Someone commits an evil act if the individual “delights in performing a harmful act that has a certain moral gravity to it . . . and if the person is not animated by understandable considerations” (p. 77). Similarly, John Kekes has argued that evil persons are those who are....

Ethical theorists often refer to the psychological condition of happiness as a crucial part, if not the whole, of human well-being. Yet few have made a serious effort to determine just what this condition is. For the most part theorists have either assumed or stipulated a particular conception of happiness, or simply taken happiness to be whatever their preferred axiology deems important. This dissertation aims to shed light on the nature of human well-being by taking seriously the psychological states that are widely thought to be important for welfare, happiness in particular. ;The inquiry proceeds in three stages. The first part of the dissertation addresses a badly neglected question: what is a theory of happiness supposed to do? Existing methods have failed badly, with the result that there has been little discussion of the principled merits of various proposals. Worse, there is no coherent body of literature on happiness: philosophical work under the rubric of 'happiness' actually concerns at least three quite distinct subject matters that are often confused. Our project focuses on happiness understood as a psychological condition. There are seven desiderata that accounts of happiness should satisfy. In a nutshell, the best conception will be both intuitively acceptable and enable us to satisfy our practical and theoretical interests in happiness. There are three basic views of note: the life satisfaction theory, hedonism, and the affective state theory. The second part of the dissertation argues against the first two and defends a version of the third. According to this view, happiness consists in a person's overall mood state---what we might call a person's "thymic state." This includes moods, mood-related emotions, and a variable disposition to experience moods. ;The final part of the dissertation considers the normative import of happiness, arguing that happiness is important both hedonically and through its relation to matters of identity. Happiness appears to be an objective good. Though not sufficient for well-being, happiness is central to it, and sometimes serves as a proxy for well-being. Happiness is a major concern for ethical theory