Premium
Whole Life Satisfaction Concepts of Happiness
Author(s) -
FELDMAN FRED
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
theoria
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.34
H-Index - 16
eISSN - 1755-2567
pISSN - 0040-5825
DOI - 10.1111/j.1755-2567.2008.00019.x
Subject(s) - happiness , life satisfaction , psychology , social psychology
The most popular concepts of happiness among psychologists and philosophers nowadays are concepts of happiness according to which happiness is defined as “satisfaction with life as a whole”. Such concepts are “Whole Life Satisfaction” (WLS) concepts of happiness. I show that there are hundreds of non‐equivalent ways in which a WLS conception of happiness can be developed. However, every precise conception either requires actual satisfaction with life as a whole or requires hypothetical satisfaction with life as a whole. I show that a person can be “happy” (in any familiar sense that might be relevant to eudaimonism) at a time even though he is not actually satisfied with his life as a whole at that time. I also show that a person can be “happy” at a time even though it is not correct to say that if he were to think about his life at that time, he would be satisfied with it as a whole. My thesis is that if you think that happiness is the Good, you should avoid defining happiness as whole life satisfaction.