Happiness as achievement

Abstract

Daedalus Spring 2004 Ten years ago, shortly after publishing a book called The Morality of Happiness about the structure of ancient ethical theory, I received an email informing me that I had been added to a bibliography of “happiness researchers” on a website called the World Database of Happiness. I explored this site with interest, only to 1⁄2nd that this was not a research program that I felt myself to be part of. The website assumes, without discussion, that happiness is “subjective,” that it is enjoyment or pleasure, and that it should be studied “empirically.” Philosophy is then derided for failing to “operationalize” happiness and to produce “measures” of it. (Philosophy has a meager 88 entries in the bibliography, compared to 2,927 for the social sciences.) Empirical studies are lauded for their measures of happiness, while the website claims that “preliminary questions about conceptualization and measurement are now fairly well solved.” The website, however, gives off a definite air of disappointment. No sound body of knowledge on happiness, it admits, has yet been achieved. In the present state of research, we can claim only that “there are obviously several universal requirements for a happy life (such as food and possibly meaning).” Philosophers (and some psychologists, too) will 1⁄2nd it unsurprising that if you rush to look for empirical measures of an unanalyzed ‘subjective’ phenomenon, the result will be confusion and banality.1 After all, what is it that the social scientists on the World Database of Happiness are actually measuring? Here is the heart of the problem. Is happiness really something subjective? Is it simply a matter of pleasure, a positive feeling? We can at least hope that it is not, and that we can come to conclusions better than the claim that what anyone needs to be happy is food and possibly meaning. Julia Annas