Nine domains, thirty-three indicators: a government choosing between three theories in a questionnaire.
Happiness
Well-being or a life going well - and the argument over whether that is a feeling, a judgement or a condition.
- Theme
- Ethics and character
- Tradition
- Cross-tradition
- Term
- εὐδαιμονία · eudaimonia
- Term fixed
- c. 340 BC
In plain terms
Three different things get called happiness and they come apart.
One is how you feel right now. One is how you judge your life when you consider it. One is whether your life is actually going well, which might be true while you feel wretched and false while you feel fine.
The ancient traditions almost all meant the third. A happy life on Aristotle's account is a life well lived across its whole span, and someone could be cheerful and not have one. Modern usage means mostly the first, and modern measurement mostly the second, because it is the only one you can ask about.
Which means that when a government announces it will measure happiness, the first question is which of the three - and the answer determines what the policy will do.
As a philosopher would put it
The standard division is between hedonic accounts, on which well-being consists in pleasant experience; desire-satisfaction accounts, on which it consists in getting what one wants; and objective list accounts, on which certain things - knowledge, friendship, health, achievement - constitute a good life whether or not they are enjoyed or desired.
Each faces a standing counterexample. Hedonism meets Nozick's experience machine: if only feeling mattered, plugging in would be rational, and almost nobody says it would. Desire theories meet the problem of adaptive preferences, where deprivation lowers what people want and the theory then scores them well. Objective lists have to justify the list without circularity.
Aristotle's eudaimonia is not a psychological state at all but activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, over a complete life, requiring some external goods. The Stoics narrow this to virtue alone as sufficient; Epicurus makes it ataraxia, freedom from disturbance; and the Buddhist traditions treat ordinary happiness as unstable by nature and locate the aim elsewhere.
Where you meet it
Bhutan began using Gross National Happiness as an explicit alternative to GDP in the 1970s, and in 2008 wrote it into the constitution. The measurement instrument was formalised as a survey of thirty-three indicators across nine domains, including health, education, ecological diversity, cultural resilience, time use and community vitality.
What is notable is that most of the indicators are not about feeling. Only a small part of the index asks how satisfied people are; the rest asks what they have, do and can do - which makes it an objective-list account in survey form, not a hedonic one.
The index is contested on its own terms, and the country's treatment of its Lhotshampa minority in the early 1990s is the standard criticism of the framework's application. What it establishes philosophically is narrower and still substantial: a government that decided to measure happiness had to choose between three incompatible theories of what it is, chose one, and had to defend the choice in the design of a questionnaire.
What is actually disputed
Whether happiness is subjective.
If it is, then a person is the authority on their own well-being and the measurement problem is solved by asking. That has the awkward result that adaptive preference counts as success - people in deprived conditions frequently report high satisfaction, and a theory that treats the report as decisive endorses the deprivation.
If it is objective, someone else is deciding what is good for you, and the list has to be justified without appealing to what people actually want. Aristotle's confidence about the content of a good life is exactly what modern readers find hardest in him.
Most working accounts are hybrids, requiring both that a life go well by some standard and that the person endorse it. That handles the counterexamples and inherits the difficulty of saying what happens when the two come apart, which is the case that matters.
Commonly confused with
- Pleasure c. 300 BC Pleasure is an experience. Happiness on most ancient accounts is a condition of a life, and a life full of pleasure can fail to be happy.
- feeling cheerful Mood is short-term and largely temperamental. The question is about how a life is going, which mood tracks unreliably.
Defined against
- Suffering The pair organises most practical ethics, and the traditions divide on whether the aim is to increase one or to end the other
Philosophers
- Aristotle Eudaimonia as activity over a complete life
- Epicurus Happiness as freedom from disturbance
- Epictetus Happiness secured by restricting concern to what is up to us
- John Stuart Mill Happiness as the criterion, with higher and lower kinds
- Buddha Ordinary happiness as unstable, and the aim relocated
Works
- Nicomachean Ethics The classical account
- Principal Doctrines Ataraxia, specified
- Discourses and Enchiridion The Stoic discipline
- An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation Happiness made measurable
- An Inquiry into the Good Nishida's reworking of the question outside the European frame
Schools
- Peripatetic school (Aristotelianism) Where happiness is a life rather than a state
- Epicureanism Where it is tranquillity
- Early Stoicism Where virtue alone suffices
- Classical Utilitarianism Where it becomes the measure of policy
- Early Theravada Buddhism Where ordinary happiness is diagnosed as unreliable
Related concepts
Pleasure c. 300 BC · Flourishing c. 340 BC · The good life c. 400 BC · Suffering c. 450 BC · Utility 1789
Aristotle's eudaimonia is a life going well over its whole course, not a mood; the modern sense of happiness as a pleasant feeling is a later narrowing, and translating one by the other causes most of the confusion in the subject.