Matthew Cashen

Historically, philosophers have identified happiness with, among other things, pleasure, contentment, desire satisfaction, and, if we count the Greek eudaimonia as happiness, the life of virtue. When faced with competing theories of happiness, we need a way to decide which theory is more accurate. According to Larry Wayne Sumner's principle of descriptive adequacy, the best theory of happiness is the theory that best describes our ordinary, pretheoretical beliefs and intuitions. The chief aim of this article is to show that the principle of descriptive adequacy is mistaken. To do this, it shows how the principle breaks down when applied to Aristotle's theory of eudaimonia, a theory Sumner claims to be descriptively inadequate as a theory of happiness. The article argues that we should reject descriptive adequacy as a metaphilosophical principle on the grounds that our intuitions and beliefs about happiness are too inchoate for any theory adequately to describe.

The idea that a person's happiness depends singly on her own subjective assessment and sunilarly subjectivist views of happiness have become philosophical orthodoxy lately. Against such views, I defend the claim that people do falsely judge themselves happy. I begin by clarifying the issues: what I mean by happiness and what I have in mind in claiming that happiness can be false. I then substantiate my claim by contrasting it with, and defending it against, a subjectivist view that makes happiness depend singly on a person's own self-assessment