Mood and Wellbeing

ABSTRACT

The two main subjectivist accounts of wellbeing, hedonism and desire-satisfactionism, focus on pleasure and desire (respectively) as the subjective states relevant to evaluating the goodness of a life. In this paper, I argue that another type of subjective state, mood, is much more central to wellbeing. After a general characterization of some central features of mood (§1), I argue that the folk concept of happiness construes it as preponderance of good mood (§2). I then leverage this connection between mood and happiness to argue that having certain mood patterns in one’s life is sufficient for having a good life (§3), and explore their potential necessity for a good life (§4). I close with discussion of the role that mood patterns might play within the three leading philosophical theories of wellbeing: hedonism (§5), desire-satisfactionism (§6), and objective-list theory (§7).

KEYWORDS:

• Mood
• wellbeing
• happiness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Most or all of these words can be used to talk about something other than a mood, but all can also be used to pick out a mood.

2 Standing beliefs and desires can also last long – indeed, they can last a lifetime – but they are not experiential states. A person’s standing belief that 13.762 is greater than 9.5753 does not contribute anything to the overall way it is like to that person at the time (constitutively, at any rate – it may yet contribute causally!). But a person’s depressive or anxious mood does make a difference to what it is like to be them, if only very subtly.

3 It might be objected that the notion of depression used by clinicians is not just the notion of a preponderance of depressive mood. It also, and crucially, refers to various motivational effects (notably a generalized loss of motivation), certain thought patterns (in particular hopelessness), a measure of anhedonia, and so on. But first of all, even if this were true, there would still be the narrower phenomenon I described in terms of the preponderance of depressive moods, and so there would still be a useful notion of that phenomenon; we would just need to re-label it. And secondly, although clinicians ply their trade, as they must, using an operational definition of depression, which refers to observable and reportable symptoms (notably the motivational and cognitive ones cited above), these are expressly considered to be symptoms, and thus are presumably symptomatic of something. Of what? I say: of depression as the persistent condition marked by a preponderance of depressed moods.

4 Some other uses include happiness as a short-term emotion (where ‘happiness’ is essentially synonymous with ‘joy’) and for one specific mood – something like cheerfulness.

5 Thanks to Guy Fletcher for pointing this out to me.

6 As Wolf stresses, the second aspect she has in mind is not just the subjective sense of meaningfulness, but real meaningfulness. Suppose Sisyphus derives a great sense of meaning and personal fulfillment from pushing his rock up the hill. This does not make Sisyphus’ life meaningful, though it does give him the illusion of its being meaningful.

7 This is consistent, of course, with a happy life not being a morally good life. All I insist on is that it is a prudentially good life – good for the one who lives it.

8 To me, it seems natural to reserve the locution ‘S’s life is good’ for the third-person variety and use ‘S’s life is good for S’ for the first-person variety. However, in the extant wellbeing literature the latter locution is used indiscriminately, and this use is by now entrenched. For this reason, I will use the otherwise unlovely ‘S’s life is third-personally good’ and ‘S’s life is first-personally good’ to track this distinction.

9 Or, at least, they have a pleasant dimension. Nostalgia and gratitude, for instance, have a pleasant dimension, even if additionally they can have an unpleasant one – missing the lost past in one case, the “debt of gratitude” in the other. Their pleasant dimension, in any case, will contribute positively to the subject’s wellbeing, even if their unpleasant dimension will also contribute negatively.

10 Note that just as we formulated above a brand of hedonism in which only punctate pleasures contribute to the good life, while good moods don’t, we could also formulate a version where only good moods contribute and punctate pleasures don’t; if we called the former ‘punctate hedonism,’ we might call the latter ‘humoric hedonism.’ Humoric hedonism is far stronger than [T1]: it doesn’t claim just that certain mood patterns are sufficient for a good life, but, in a sense, that the good life is identical to the life marked by those patterns. But just as we complained against the restrictive version of hedonism that it arbitrarily excludes some experiences that feel good from the hedonistic calculus, we could make the same complaint against humoric hedonism: there seems to be no good motivation, given the hedonist’s sensibilities, to discount punctate pleasures.

11 I say “not only” because there are certain further benefits to being happy, which someone might appreciate, and this could make one’s desire for happiness not merely derivative. For instance, I did think that if I were happier, I would likely be more productive, and being more productive is something that I want. So being happy did have its instrumental lures. What matters, though, is that I wanted to be happy not only for its instrumental value but also for its own sake (i.e., quite independently of how productive it would make me). In fact, part of the lure of being productive is that it would make me happier to know that I have been productive.

12 For comments on a previous draft, I am grateful to Roger Crisp, Guy Fletcher, Anna Giustina, Jonathan Mitchell, and an anonymous reviewer for Inquiry. I also benefited from presenting the first part of the paper to the undergraduate philosophy club at Rice University. I am grateful to the audience there, in particular Diego Delgado, Jonathan Dunbar, Kathryn Flanagan, Amanda Lopatin, Charles Siewert, and Lily Wieland.