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Int Rev Econ (2012) 59:335361
DOI 10.1007/s12232-012-0168-7
Martha C. Nussbaum
Received: 5 November 2011 / Accepted: 7 February 2012 / Published online: 23 October 2012 Springer-Verlag 2012
Who is the happy warrior? Who is he.
That every man in arms should wish to be?
Wordsworth, Character of the Happy Warrior.
Man does not strive after happiness; only the Englishman does that.
Nietzsche, Maxims and Arrows.
Psychology has recently focused attention on subjective states of pleasure, satisfaction, and what is called happiness. The suggestion has been made in some quarters that a study of these subjective states has important implications for public policy. Sometimes, as in the case of Martin Seligmans positive psychology movement, attempts are made to link the empirical ndings and the related normative judgments directly to the descriptive and normative insights of ancient Greek ethics and modern virtue ethics. At other times, as with Daniel Kahnemans work, the connection to Aristotle and other ancient Greek thinkers is only indirect, and the connection to British Utilitarianism is paramount; nonetheless, judgments are made that could be illuminated by an examination of the rich philosophical tradition that runs from Aristotle through to J. S. Mills criticisms of Bentham.
This paper is a revised and updated version of a paper entitled Who is the Happy Warrior? Philosophy Poses Questions to Psychology, which appeared in Law and Happiness, edited by Eric A. Posner and CassR. Sunstein, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 81-114. I am grateful to Eric Posner for guidance, comments, and suggestions, to all the participants in a conference on happiness in spring 2007 for their helpful input, and to an anonymous referee. I am grateful to Luigino Bruni and Pier Luigi Porta for inviting me to a conference on happiness in Milan in June, 2011, and for their suggestions for revision.
M. C. Nussbaum (&)
Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, Law School and Philosophy Department, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected]
Who is the happy warrior? Philosophy, happiness research, and public policy
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The aim of my paper is to confront this increasingly inuential movement within psychology with a range of questions from the side of philosophy. Often these questions have a...