Abstract

Accounts of happiness in the philosophical literature see it as either a judgment of satisfaction with one’s life or as a balance of positive over negative feelings or emotional states. There are sound objections to both types of account, although each captures part of what happiness is. Seeing it as an emotion allows us to incorporate both features of the accounts thought to be incompatible. Emotions are analyzed as multicomponent states including judgments, feelings, physical symptoms, and behavioral dispositions. It is shown that prototypical happiness contains all these components, and each is explicated. The concept of happiness, like the concepts of other emotions, is a cluster concept. The features of such concepts are made clear. Happiness is shown to be similar to other emotions in many respects, including the phenomenon of adaptation, the “paradox of happiness,” and the existence of both paradigm and borderline instances. The account allows us to capture all that was right in earlier accounts while avoiding objections to them.