Abstract
The academic study of happiness has undergone a revolution in the past 20 years or so. The work of psychologists, economists, sociologists, and other scientists today regularly make news headlines as the latest scientific investigations into happiness are brought to the public’s attention. Most scientific interest has been focused on the “determinants” of happiness: what things make people happier or unhappier. A partial list of possible determinants studied by scientists include genomes, education, health, illness, unemployment, marital status, friendships, altruistic behavior, age, sex, race, TV watching, and income.
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Notes
I am assuming a version of “welfarism.” I believe the argument can incorporate non-welfarist conceptions of “the good,” but ignore that here as an unnecessary complication. On the issue of welfarism, see Simon Keller, “Welfarism,” Philosophy Compass 4, 1 (2009): 82–95.
Thomas Hurka, Perfectionism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
For criticism of perfectionism see L. W. Sumner, “Two Theories of the Good,” in The Good Life and the Human Good, edited by Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller, Jr., and Jeffrey Paul (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 19;
and Mark Walker, Happy-People-Pills for All (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley &; Sons, 2013).
S. Lyubomirsky, L. King, and E. Diener, “The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect: Does Happiness Lead to Success?,” Psychological Bulletin 131 (2005): 803–855.
The term “emotional state view” comes from Daniel Haybron, “Happiness and Pleasure,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62, 3 (2001): 501–528; The Pursuit of Unhappiness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Haybron does not offer the emotional state view as a monistic conception of happiness. He suggests that happiness is a “mongrel” concept that defies such analyzes.
Haybron (D. Haybron, “On Being Happy or Unhappy,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 71, 2 (2005): 287–317.) offers a detailed and slightly different inventory of positive moods and emotions than is typically found in the psychology literature (Cf. Lyubomirsky, King, and Diener, “The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect: Does Happiness Lead to Success?”). This is one of the “details” that we will hope a sufficiently robust emotional state theory will resolve, but one that is not of immediate concern, since the present argument does not turn on how this question is adjudicated.
For more on the question of whether sensory pleasure should be included as part of our understanding of ‘happiness’, see Walker, Happy-People-Pills for All (New York: John Wiley, 2013).
A competitor is Fred Feldman’s “attitudinal hedonism” account of happiness, F. Feldman, What Is This Thing Called Happiness? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). We will not consider this view here. I have argued that there is significant overlap between Feldman’s account and the whole life satisfaction view, so the contrast is not as stark as Feldman suggests. Walker, Happy-People-Pills for All .
R. Veenhoven, “Is Happiness Relative?,” Social Indicators Research 24, 1 (1991): 1–34. R. Veenhoven, “Happiness in Nations,” Subjective Appreciation of Life in 56 (1993): 1946–1992.
E. Diener et al., “The Satisfaction with Life Scale,” Journal of Personality Assessment 49, 1 (1985): 71–75.
W. Tatarkiewicz, Analysis of Happiness, vol. 3 (Warszawa, Poland: Kluwer Academic Press, 1976).
R. Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1981).
E. Telfer, Happiness (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980).
L. W Sumner, Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, “High Income Improves Evaluation of Life but Not Emotional Well-Being,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, 38 (2010): 16489–93.
Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, Subjective Well-Being and Income: Is There Any Evidence of Satiation? (National Bureau of Economic Research, 2013), http://www.nber.org/papers/w18992 .
Daniel W. Sacks, Betsey Stevenson, and Justin Wolfers, “The New Stylized Facts about Income and Subjective Well-Being,” Emotion 12, 6 (2012): 1181–1187.
G. Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011).
Bruno S. Frey, “Happiness: A Revolution in Economics,” MIT Press Books 1 (2008). Carol Graham, Happiness around the World: The Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Millionaires (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
The literature on this topic is enormous, but for some representative articles, see Alan B. Krueger and David A. Schkade, “The Reliability of Subjective Well-Being Measures,” Journal of Public Economics 92, 8 (2008): 1833–45;
Sonja Lyubomirsky and Heidi S. Lepper, “A Measure of Subjective Happiness: Preliminary Reliability and Construct Validation,” Social Indicators Research 46, 2 (1999): 137–155;
Deborah Mattel and Charles Schafer, “An Investigation of Validity of the Subjective Happiness Scale 1,” Psychological Reports 94, 1 (2004): 288–290;
E. Diener, “Subjective Well-Being: The Science of Happiness and a Proposal for a National Index,” American Psychologist 55, 1 (2000): 34.
R. A. Easterlin, Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Nations and Households in Economic Growth: Essays in Honour of Moses Abramovitz. M. Abramovitz, PA David and MW Reder (New York; London: Academic Press, 1974).
E. Diener et al., “Dispositional Affect and Job Outcomes,” Social Indicators Research 59, 3 (2002): 229–259.
Jeffrey Thompson, Raising Revenue from High-Income Households: Should States Continue to Place the Lowest Tax Rates on Those with the Highest Incomes? (Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 2012), https://ideas.repec.org/p/uma/perips/revenue_peri_march5.html .
An analogous point is made by many authors to the effect that welfare is “stigmatizing,” a “visible marker of status.” Birnbaum, Basic Income Reconsidered: Social Justice, Liberalism, and the Demands of Equality (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 50.
See also Catriona McKinnon, “Basic Income, Self-Respect and Reciprocity,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 20, 2 (2003): 143–158.
Giacomo Corneo, “Work Norms and the Welfare State,” CESifo Economic Studies 58, 4 (December 1, 2012): 599–625, doi:10.1093/cesifo/ifs017.
Widerquist and Lewis, “An Eff iciency Argument for the Basic Income Guarantee,” International Journal of Environment, Workplace and Employment 2, 1 (2006): 21–43.
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© 2016 Mark Walker
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Walker, M. (2016). BIG Happiness. In: Free Money for All. Exploring the Basic Income Guarantee. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137471338_6
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