The Proper Pursuit of Happiness

Res Philosophica 90 (3):387-411 (2013)
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Abstract

What are the norms governing the pursuit of happiness? Presumably not just anything goes. But are the rules any more interesting than platitudes like “do whatworks, as long as you don’t hurt anyone”? Such questions have become especially salient in light of the development of positive psychology. Yet so far these matters have received relatively little attention, most of it from skeptics who doubt that the pursuit of happiness is an important, or even legitimate, enterprise. This paper examines the normative issues in this realm, arguing that the pursuit of happiness is indeed a legitimate and important endeavor, contra recent criticisms by Aristotelian and other skeptics. Yet it is also subject to strong, nonobvious normative constraints that extend well beyond those typically posited by commonsense and consequentialist thought

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Dan Haybron
Saint Louis University

Citations of this work

Happiness.Dan Haybron - forthcoming - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

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References found in this work

Intelligent Virtue.Julia Annas - 2011 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
The morality of happiness.Julia Annas - 1993 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Welfare, happiness, and ethics.L. W. Sumner - 1996 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Reasons and the Good.Roger Crisp - 2006 - Oxford, GB: Clarendon Press.

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