Live as you wish and ruin your life : Haybron on unhappiness and well-being

Abstract

This thesis examines the concepts of happiness, unhappiness and well-being developed by philosopher Daniel Haybron in his book The Pursuit of Unhappiness. The central thesis of this book is that human beings are not psychologically well-adapted to live in liberal societies, which are understood in this approach as option-rich environments. According to Haybron, in liberal societies people have freedom to choose whatever they want from a myriad of options in the pursuit of happiness. This condition, however, makes people prone to committing serious mistakes in choosing the options that are prudentially good for them. Haybron calls this phenomenon “systematic imprudence.” This systematic imprudence is the main explanation for the high rate of unhappiness and ill-being in liberal societies.

In order to provide a solution to this problematic, Haybron develops two theories of well-being: self-fulfilment and contextualism. The former theory sets up prudential values on the self: by fulfilling the inclinations and dispositions of the self (especially the emotional self) is how people achieve happiness and well-being. The latter theory sets up the prudential values on ways of living that are in accordance with psychological and anthropological facts of human beings as members of a hunter-gatherer species. I argue in this work that these two theories are incompatible with each other and they present serious inconsistencies at the conceptual level, which make them implausible. As a consequence of these problems, Haybron is unable to provide an answer to the problematic he raises with the thesis of systematic imprudence.

As a response to this theoretical gap, my thesis offers an Aristotelian interpretation of good life and emotional flourishing which can face the problems systematic imprudence represents to liberal societies. This goal is attained by introducing the concepts of narrative self and practice developed by Alasdair MacIntyre in his work After Virtue, and a cognitivist concept of emotion. In this interpretation, good life and emotional flourishing are in relation to the fulfilment of a person’s roles in the framework of social practices. In this approach, a person is capable of attaining the good life when she chooses, after critical reflexion, the standards of the different practices in which she participates as a member of a community. This thesis explains systematic imprudence as the result of choosing options following one’s transient desires without taking care of the roles one embodies within different practices.