preview

Haybron Vs Happiness

Better Essays
Open Document

“Happiness is important, but is not everything, well-being and virtue are also important, and unhappiness also has its place,” (4). According to Haybron, happiness is a combination of both pleasure and life satisfaction and is most of what matters, but well-being is more important in what makes a life worth living. If happiness was equal to pleasure, then happiness could be comparable to giddiness or moments of great elation. If it were equal to life satisfaction, then happiness could be comparable to the sensation felt when you land a new job, or are surrounded by family. Life satisfaction is determined by your personal attitude towards life at a given time, but should not be a reliable metric in tracking happiness. Haybron writes, “we are interested not mainly in what experiences have been passing through her head lately, but in …show more content…

Since his emotional state theory involves unconscious processes, physiological states, life satisfaction and other phenomena there is no proper way to measure it. And, according to Haybron himself, people undergo a phenomenon he calls “affective ignorance” (200), which causes us to be ignorant to both past and present affects. The affects that encompass happiness seem to be broader and less intense than fleeting feelings of pain, fear, or euphoria and many psychological studies have shown that people can show signs of a given mental state and fail to recognize it. It is true that often, many people discover what they are feeling through close observations made by family and friends rather than through personal self-reflection. So, not only can we not tell how happy we are, but we also fail to make the right choices when it comes to our own well-being. Therefore, how certain is Haybron on his own theory of happiness, if the only people who can measure their deep emotional states are themselves and they do not do a good job of

Get Access