85 - Happiness

Summary

Rawls holds that a person is happy “when he is in the way of a successful execution (more or less) of a rational plan of life drawn up under (more or less) favorable conditions, and he is reasonably conident that his intentions can be carried through.” When our rational plans are going reasonably well and our more important aims are being fulilled and we’re with reason optimistic that our good fortune will continue, we are happy (TJ 480). Happiness, then, is dependent in part on luck and circumstance. But it is a matter of objective facts. It is not enough merely to believe that one is successfully executing a rational plan; one must in fact be doing so. It is not enough merely to believe that one’s plan is rational; it must in fact be so and be so in light of the objective circumstances of one’s condition. And it is not enough merely to believe that one will likely continue successfully to execute one’s plan; the facts must support that belief (TJ 481).

Happiness so understood fulills some of the criteria traditionally attached to it. For example, it is a self-contained and self-suficient end. But it would be a mistake to think that the happy person must or should be pursuing happiness. Happiness is just the objective state, welcome to be sure, that she is in when her rational plan is fulilled and she is with good reason conident that it will continue to be fulfilled. It is her rational plan, her consistent, coherent, and not unrealistic system of inal ends, that she is primarily pursuing. Her rational plan is not simply a means to her happiness, as if her happiness were her dominant end. At most her happiness is perhaps an inclusive end, something she aims at in addition to aiming at all the inal ends constitutive of her rational plan and so ingredient in her happiness. But ordinarily happiness is simply the state one is in when one successfully pursues a rational plan with a forward-looking conidence.