Philosophy and Happiness addresses the need to situate any meaningful discourse about happiness in a wider context of human interests, capacities and circumstances. How is happiness manifested and expressed? Can there be any happiness if no worthy life projects are pursued? How is happiness affected by relationships, illness, or cultural variants? Can it be reduced to preference satisfaction? Is it a temporary feeling or a persistent way of being? Is reflection conducive to happiness? Is mortality necessary for it? These are (...) the questions people ask themselves when they stop and think about how they feel, how their lives are going, and how they would be going if different choices had been made or different values had been prioritized. These are the questions that contributors to this volume begin to answer, adopting different methodologies, among which the analysis of widespread intuitions about imaginary and real-life scenarios, and reflection on the interpretation of the relevant empirical evidence emerging from psychology and economics. (shrink)

A number of theoretical ideas have emerged recently in the legal, bioethical and philosophical fields that could usefully be applied to these and other issues ...

In this paper we claim that individual subjects do not have so much control over sleep that it is aptly characterized as a personal choice; and that normative implications related to public health and sleep hygiene do not necessarily follow from current findings. It should be true of any empirical study that normative implications do not necessarily follow, but we think that many public health sleep recommendations falsely infer these implications from a flawed explanatory account of the decision to sleep: (...) the consumer choice view. This view, which we criticize here, proposes that sleep duration and sleep quality be understood as one choice among many. (shrink)

The ethics of medically-authorized limb amputation in individuals with Body integrity identity disorder (BIID) remains extremely controversial. One factor to consider is the putative locus of a disease process, and whether the proposed treatment--in this case, limb amputation—reasonably addresses the issue of what organ is mediating the patient’s complaint.