On this view, the experiencer is always right. This computed aggregate of "experienced utility" becomes the criterion of truth about how genuinely happy your vacation (your childhood, your life) should be taken to be. At the hands of an experimental psychologist, hedonism becomes a methodological commitment: your "objective happiness" for a given time period is computed by adding up your on-line hedonic assessments of all the individual moments that comprise that period. Remember your last vacation? "Yes, it was great!" you might say, even though if beeped during it, the mosquitoes, the traffic, the sunburn, and the overpriced food might gainsay your summary judgment. They also ask the same people afterwards "how happy was your week?" The retrospective summary judgment of happiness often differs greatly from the extrapolated total of experienced happiness. His theory must wrestle with an important question: Whose life is it anyway, the experiencer or the retrospective judge of pleasure?Ĭonsider the following scenario: researchers beep people at random during the day, ask how much pleasure or pain a person is experiencing right now (the Experience Sampling Method, ESM), and extrapolate to an approximate total for the experienced happiness over the week. This theory has its modern conceptual roots in Bentham's utilitarianism (Bentham, 1978), its contagion in Hollywood entertainment, its grossest manifestation in American consumerism, and one of its most sophisticated incarnations in the views of our fellow positive psychologist, Danny Kahneman, who recently won the Nobel Prize in economics. A happy person smiles a lot, is ebullient, bright eyed and bushy tailed her pleasures are intense and many, her pains are few and far between. A happy life maximizes feelings of pleasure and minimizes pain. In all its variants, it holds that happiness is a matter of raw subjective feeling.
Which one you believe has implications for how you lead your life, raise your child, or even cast your vote.
There are, in our view, three types of traditional theories of happiness.
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