Authentic happiness

Utilitas

Volumn 22, Issue 3, 2010, Pages 272-284

  Bognar, Greg ^a  

^a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79956350596     PISSN: 09538208     EISSN: 17416183     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0953820810000191     Document Type: Article

References (13)

1. L. Wayne Sumner, Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics (Oxford, 1996), p. 38. (Otherwise unattributed page references are always to this book in this article.) The book contains material from a number of papers Sumner had written on well-being before, thus I will treat it as the conclusive statement of his theory.
2. For a more recent summary of his view, see L. W. Sumner, 'Something in Between', Well-Being and Morality: Essays in Honour of James Griffin, ed. R. Crisp and B. Hooker (Oxford, 2000), pp. 1-19.
3. For a similar point, see David Sobel, 'On the Subjectivity of Welfare', Ethics 107 (1997), pp. 501-8.
4. To the best I could ascertain, there has been very little general discussion of Sumner's theory, as opposed to some of his particular arguments, in the literature. For the latter, see, for instance, David Sobel, 'Sumner on Welfare', Dialogue 37 (1998), pp. 571-7;
5. Richard J. Arneson, 'Human Flourishing versus Desire Satisfaction', Social Philosophy & Policy 16 (1999), pp. 113-42;
6. and Krister Bykvist, 'Sumner on Desires and Well-Being', Canadian Journal of Philosophy 32 (2002), pp. 475-90.
7. A classical work of this research direction is Angus Campbell, Philip E. Converse, and Willard L. Rogers, The Quality of American Life: Perceptions, Evaluations, and Satisfactions (New York, 1976).
8. For amodern treatment, seeWell-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, ed. Daniel Kahneman, Ed Diener, and Norbert Schwarz (New York, 1999).
9. For a thorough survey, see Norbert Schwarz and Fritz Strack, 'Reports of Subjective Well-Being: Judgmental Processes and their Methodological Implications', in Kahneman et al. (eds.), Well-Being, pp. 61-84.
10. For some of the philosophical issues that welfare measurement through people's own evaluations raise, see my 'The Concept of Quality of Life', Social Theory and Practice 31 (2005), pp. 561-80.
11. The argument I discuss is to be found on pp. 42-4. An earlier version appears in L. Wayne Sumner, 'The Subjectivity of Welfare', Ethics 105 (1995), pp. 764-90.
12. For an argument showing that even Plato's objective theory of goodness can satisfy subject-relativity, see Jyl Gentzler, 'The Attractions and Delights of Goodness', The Philosophical Quarterly 54 (2004), pp. 353-67.
13. I examine this distinction in more detail in 'Welfare Judgments and Risk', The Ethics of Technological Risk, ed. L. Asveld and S. Roeser (Earthscan, 2009), pp. 144-60.