AFFECTIVE STATES, HAPPINESS, AND WELL-BEING INTRODUCTION

Affective states and happiness have been the subject of much philosophical discussion over the last decades. The roles that desire and pleasure are likely to play in our being happy have received considerable attention. Intuitively, one might think that it is indeed enough to experience many pleasures or to satisfy most of our desires to be happy, but things are obviously far from being that simple. Many pleasures seem to compromise our happiness in the more-or-less long term, while the satisfaction of many desires may leave us indifferent or give way to bitter disappointments. Moreover, understanding happiness only in terms of pleasures or satisfied desires may oversimplify the picture. Our different positive emotions also probably play an important role in happiness. Whereas pleasure is often characterized as a felt sensation with a positive valence, but without intentionality, it is generally agreed that emotions have a richer evaluative aspect, notably because they have intentionality: to feel pride about an achievement, for instance, is a state that is directed at this achievement, which consists in evaluating it as a success, and that is at the same time endowed with a positive valence. From this point of view, emotions seem to play an important role in the appraisal of what is important for our happiness. More generally, the idea that people can be happy simply because they feel a lot of pleasure or because their desires are satisfied, and this independently of their overall emotional life, is implausible. The emotions that people feel, in fact, also say something about their relation to the world and about the way events affect them, and they are in this sense richer than the simple positive feeling of a pleasure or the satisfaction of a desire. The picture becomes even more complex because philosophers have also distinguished between happiness and well-being. A typical way to understand this distinction is to say that happiness is a descriptive concept that refers to the psychological state of a person, whereas well-being is a normative concept, used to determine whether a person’s life is going well or is flourishing, according to a certain standard. Haybron (2008) offers the following example, inspired by Kagan’s “deceived businessman” objection (Kagan, 1994): let’s imagine that George is completely satisfied with his life, that he feels fulfilled, while those close to him mock him without his knowledge. They all make him believe that they love him because he is rich, whereas they cannot stand him. Intuitively, it seems that George is happy, but that his life does not conform to some of our expectations about what a flourishing life is supposed to be. It seems indeed conceivable that people can feel happy while their levels of well-being remain low. Theories of well-being, from this point of view, usually try to specify which things are likely to be good for an individual in themselves, in a non-instrumental way (Fletcher, 2016). Thus, things that are likely to increase an individual’s well-being are said to have prudential value. While happiness thus designates the psychological state of a person, well-being will rather refer to a normative evaluation of that person’s life. A crucial question is then to determine the weight to be given to happiness in the well-being of an individual. To assert that happiness is an essential component of an individual’s well-being is to assert that happiness also has a prudential value. The aim of this issue is to explore the different links between affective states, happiness, and well-being, and its focus will be on the psychological and metaethical issues that these questions raise. While some contributions focus on …