Happiness and Wellbeing
Authors: Vittersø Joar 
Published: February 2025

A variety of meanings are applied to the terms happiness and wellbeing (H&W). The growing literature on H&W suffers much conceptual confusion, such as the jingle fallacy (that a single term means diverse things) and the jangle fallacy (that different words are used to refer to the same concept). The philosophy of H&W is old and aims at answering questions such as what makes a life go better or what it is for someone’s life to go well or badly. Three clusters of philosophical H&W theories have traditionally been identified: hedonistic theories claim that only pleasure net of pain (alternatively only positive affect minus negative affect) matters for a good life and that this mental state should be maximized. Satisfactionism or desire-fulfillment theories argue that a good life depends exclusively on getting whatever we want and that desire-fulfillment should be maximized. Objective list theories hold that some things are good for us, regardless of whether we, as individuals, like or want them. Other taxonomies have been added more recently, and there is much disagreement among philosophers about how H&W theories should be categorized and how their core concepts should be defined.

The science of H&W is young, yet the field already offers a surprisingly high number of models and theories. The most frequently used term in H&W research is subjective wellbeing (SWB), which is sometimes defined as “all of the various types of evaluations people make of their lives.” SWB is also presented as a three-dimensional concept, comprising life satisfaction, positive affect, and negative affect. There is currently no consensus as to how the three components of SWB should be conceptualized. Despite these disagreements, the most frequently used measures of SWB are reliable, which means that they can be measured with relatively high precision. Controversies remain in regard to their validity, however. For an instrument to be valid, it must measure what it intends to measure. Until an agreement has been established about what indicators of SWB are intended to measure, their validity cannot be estimated.

The term objective happiness was introduced by Kahneman. It refers to a combination of a logical set of rules about the relations between pleasure-like feelings as experienced moment by moment and a measurement procedure to capture those experiences. For Kahneman, the distinction between feelings as experienced here and now and feelings as they are remembered is important. He later came to acknowledge that it is not only what people feel that is valuable. What people want is important to them as well. Kahneman’s revised theory therefore added life satisfaction to his H&W theory. He articulated the difference between a feeling component and a life satisfaction component of H&W as one between being happy IN your life versus being happy WITH your life.

It is critical for the study of H&W to clarify the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity. The question is about definitional ownership and asks who can decide if a person’s life goes well. Is it a personal decision or is it a cultural decision? Perhaps it is a combination of subjective and objective perspectives? With reference to Searle’s distinction between objective and subjective statements about things that exist ontologically, the chapter hypothesizes that scientific reasoning enables some objective norms about the goodness of a subjective mental state to be established.