ABSTRACT
I want to stress right from the beginning that economists working today on the “happiness paradox” are normally far from the eudaimonistic tradition. An economist who is moving along a line of research very similar to the Aristotelian one is Amartya Sen. Although he cannot be considered a “scholar of happiness”,24 on the whole his work reminds economists that happiness, in order to be a proxy of a good life, must be translatable into human flourishing, in terms of capabilities and functionings, human rights and freedom:
If we have reasons to want more wealth, we have to ask: What precisely are these reasons, how do they work, on what are they contingent and what are the things we can “do” with more wealth? In fact, we generally have excellent reasons for wanting more income or wealth. This is not because income and wealth are desirable for their own sake, but because typically, they are admirable general-purpose means for having more freedom to lead the kind of lives we have reasons to value. The usefulness of wealth lies in the things that it allows us to do – the substantive freedom it helps us to achieve. But this relation is neither exclusive (since there are significant influences on our lives other than wealth) nor uniform (since the impact of wealth on our lives varies with other influences). It is as important to recognize the crucial role of wealth in determining living conditions and the quality of life as it is to understand the qualified and contingent nature of this relationship.
