the happiness and the satisfaction are very important in one's life(errors)
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Answer:
The conclusions for which I have argued are significant for a number of reasons. First, how
we understand happiness can substantially influence the way we conduct our lives. For one thing,
there are good reasons for thinking that happiness serves as a proxy for well-being in ordinary practical reasoning.50 If you want to know how your friend is doing, learning that she is happy will typically be sufficient to persuade you that she is doing well. And if a moralist tries to convince us that
an evil dictator cannot be faring well, we may reply, “Why not? He seems to be perfectly happy.”
Similarly, the knowledge that one’s parents are unhappy amounts, for all intents and purposes, to
knowing that they are doing poorly. There is no reason to think we are using ‘happy’ in the Aristotelian sense, where it is essentially synonymous with ‘well-being’, in these cases. 51 If we were, we
should feel more comfortable talking in terms of a happy life than simply of being happy: the latter
locution is clearly psychological in contemporary usage. Yet well-being seems to involve more than
just a state of mind; it more plausibly concerns how well our lives are going for us. Talk of happiness in the Aristotelian sense is more naturally framed in terms of a happy life. But that is not how
it is in these cases. Moreover, consider the proper response to someone who points out that happiness doesn’t prove the evil dictator to be well off, for maybe he is badly deceived about his situation. We don’t reply by qualifying our ascription of happiness; we grant the possibility and berate
the quibbler for nitpicking: “Obviously happiness doesn’t prove him well-off. Anything is possible.
But are you really worried he’s radically deceived? Don’t you have better things to do?”
Our focus in such cases is purely psychological. Yet this information about a person’s psychological condition is sufficiently important that it licenses a strong inference about that individual’s welfare. Indeed, it amounts to a short-hand way of talking about people’s welfare. Moreover,
this seems perfectly reasonable: barring seriously deflationary conclusions about the value of happiness, it is plausible that happiness and well-being will correlate very strongly, at least when we
are talking about the broad quality of a person’s life as opposed to the details. There are exceptions,
such as those involving radical deception or adaptation to terrible conditions, but normally the fact
that someone is happy indicates that she is doing reasonably well with respect to the things that
really matter in life.52 Or so we may reasonably think.
Suppose this is correct. Suppose further that most people accepted a (thin) life satisfaction
theory of happiness, when in fact the correct theory is an affective state view. Given that the vast
majority of people are in fact (thinly) satisfied with their lives,53 and given that most people may
not be happy,54 this mistake may have the consequence that most people falsely believe themselves