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Abstract
The aim of this article is to explore and critique recent aspirations to bridge the traditional divide between subjective and objective accounts of wellbeing through a psychological concordance thesis, according to which flourishing and happiness will, for psychological reasons, go hand in hand. Two varieties of the concordance thesis are explored, one psychological in origin and the other philosophical, with a special focus on the latter (derived from Aristotle) as it makes more radical psychological claims. Counterexamples are provided and discussed of unhappy and not-happy-enough flourishers, and of happy and not-unhappy-enough non-flourishers. The implications of those counterexamples are elicited, with the conclusion being that normative claims about the relative priority of flourishing over happiness (or vice versa) for wellbeing cannot be avoided with impunity. The concordance thesis does not seem to bear scrutiny, at least not as a thesis about ‘psychological necessity’; however, this leaves both a less demanding ‘rule-of-thumb’ concordance thesis, and a host of complementary theses about flourishing and happiness, intact.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank David Carr, Anna Alexandrova, Matt Sinnicks and two anonymous referees of the present journal for helpful comments on an earlier draft. This article was written under the aegis of the Virtue, Happiness, and Meaning of Life Project (University of Chicago).
Notes
1. This will, for many philosophers, seem to involve a conflation of normativity qua evaluativeness with normativity qua prescriptivity (see e.g. Kristjánsson, Citation2013, ch. 4). To cut a long story short, according to the ‘fact–value distinction’, the truth value of normative judgements is, contrary to that of factual judgements, relative to cultures (moral relativism) or individuals (moral subjectivism) – or normative judgements are seen as not having any truth value at all but simply express emotions, on a par with utterances such as ‘hurrah’ and ‘boo’. According to the ‘is–ought distinction’, factual judgements never entail normative claims. There is an ambiguity here, however, in the term ‘normative’. Someone could argue that (some) normative judgements (qua evaluations) have non-relative factual content while still endorsing the thesis that factual judgements never entail normative claims (qua prescriptions about what to do).
2. According to this account, wellbeing comprises the components of positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment.
3. Interestingly, in a large European study, the correlation between life satisfaction and flourishing (as defined there) turned out to be exactly the same, namely 0.32 (Huppert & So, Citation2009, p. 6).
4. This is not to say that subjective (self-report) measures of objective wellbeing cannot yield important information above and beyond SWB measures. For example, Huppert and So’s European study (Citation2013) shows significant and salutary differences between different countries in terms of self-reported flourishing. Moreover, the instrument designed for this study is based on the ingenious idea of identifying and measuring mirror opposites of the symptoms of common mental disorders. What classic flourishing theorists in the Aristotelian tradition will complain about, however, is that this instrument does not measure flourishing objectively and that it misses crucial components such as the exhibition of moral and intellectual virtues (see below in the main text).
5. This would not be my own take on Aristotle (Kristjánsson, Citation2017), but the subtly different exegeses do not matter for present purposes.
6. Cf. Haybron’s claim (Citation2008, p. 32) that Aristotle did not have ‘a theory of happiness’ in the subjective sense.
7. To be sure, Aristotle grants that the virtuous person never becomes wholly miserable even if external misfortune prevents her from acting on, or fully actualising, her virtues (Aristotle, Citation1985, p. 26 [1100b33–35]). However, such a person is not fully flourishing and not fully happy. This idea is part of Aristotle’s 4-level account of flourishing, ranging from misery, to lack of flourishing, to flourishing – and finally up to blessedness (qua flourishing with bonus external goods). See further in Kristjánsson (Citation2017).
8. As an analogy, consider the possibility that a certain brain state were found that turned out to be a necessary and sufficient condition of depression. It would still be impossible to define depression adequately without recourse to the accompanying feelings.
9. To avoid the pathology objection, I leave out of consideration in this section a third possible counterexample, in addition to the Miserable Thinker and the Philistine Do-Gooder (explored below): That of the Disgust-Tainted Flourisher. By that description I mean someone like Nietzsche’s budding Übermensch who may start out following ‘slave morality’ – and to flourish in an ordinary sense – but then come to the conclusion that flourishing in that sense is only fit for pigs: Filling him with revulsion. I take it that the Disgust-Tainted Flourisher may seem to many readers to be teetering at the brink of madness; hence I will not press that case here.
10. The Kantian view here would, obviously, be that David’s moral goodness is enhanced rather than compromised by the non-appearance of an accompanying pleasant feeling – which shows how far removed the Kantian view is from the Aristotelian one, and how far-fetched it is to consider Kant to have subscribed to any sort of wellbeing theory.
11. This is, indeed, a point at which most contemporary Aristotelians would depart from Aristotle’s flourishing theory. While acknowledging that human beings’ flourishing requires a decent exercise of the capacity which most sets them apart from other animals, namely human reason, neo-Aristotelians tend to downplay the intellectual depth that Aristotle considered necessary for flourishing in the ideal sense.
12. For the same reason as in the previous section (see Note 9), I shelve here a third possible counterexample: Of someone who is happy precisely in virtue of not flourishing (in the standard sense). I am thinking here, for instance, of the Successful Sadist. I worry that this case will be too easily susceptible to a pathology objection.
13. For a more detailed account of Ólafur Kárason’s character and its implications for Aristotelian flourishing theory, see Kristjánsson (Citation2016b).
14. The author’s account of the poet’s life and self-perceptions, throughout the novel, may perhaps be read as tongue-in-cheek and sarcastic. However, for present purposes, I take Ólafur’s perceptions of his own life at face value.
15. I do acknowledge that Ólafur seems to satisfy many of the unhappiness characteristics that Aristotle connects to the life of the vicious (Citation1985, p. 247 [1166b11–28]). He suffers, from time to time, from self-hate and regret, and he destroys himself in the end. On Aristotle’s strict conception, these are the results of the specific motivational disunity of the non-virtuous (see Grönroos, Citation2015). However, as I mention in the Concluding Remarks, Aristotle may have had too idealised a view of the motivational unity of the virtuous.
16. In the case of the lower animals, the distinction between objective and subjective wellbeing seems out of place. It would be odd to describe a parrot as flourishing as a parrot, but not sufficiently happy, or vice versa. This may be the reason why we talk about ‘animal welfare’ rather than ‘animal wellbeing’ except in the case of animals high up in the developmental ladder. I am grateful to Alistair Lawrence for helping me think this issue through.