Why life satisfaction is (and isn’t) worth measuring (by guest blogger Dan Haybron)
A lot of people think of happiness in terms of life satisfaction, and take life satisfaction measures to tell us about how happy people are. There is something to this. But no one ever said “I just want my kids to be satisfied with their lives,” and for good reason: life satisfaction is very easy to come by. To be satisfied with your life, you don’t even have to see it as a good life: it just has to be good enough, and what counts as good enough can be pretty modest. If you assess life satisfaction in Tiny Timsylvania, where everyone is crippled and mildly depressed but likes to count their blessings, you may find very high levels of life satisfaction. This may even be reasonable on their part: your life may stink, but so does everyone’s, so be grateful for what you’ve got. Things could be a lot worse.
Many people would find it odd to call the folks of Tiny Timsylvania happy. At least, you would be surprised to pick up the paper and read about a study claiming that the depressed residents of that world are happy. If that’s happiness, who needs it? For this and other reasons, I think that life satisfaction does not have the sort of value we normally think happiness has, and that researchers should avoid couching life satisfaction studies as findings on “happiness.” To do so is misleading about their significance.
So are life satisfaction measures are pointless? No: we might still regard them as useful measures of how well people’s lives are going relative to their priorities. Even if they don’t tell you whether people’s lives are going well, for reasons just noted, they might still tell you who’s doing better and worse on this count: namely, if people whose lives are going better by their standards tend to report higher life satisfaction than those whose lives are going worse. This might well be the case, even in Tiny Timsylvania. (Though caution may be in order when comparing life satisfaction between that nation and Archie Bunkerton, where people like to kvetch no matter how well things are going.)
This kind of measure may be important, either because we think well-being includes success relative to your priorities, or because respect for persons requires considering their opinions about their lives when making decisions on their behalf. The government of Wittgensteinia, populated entirely by dysthymic philosophers who don’t mind being melancholy as long as they get to do philosophy, should take into account the fact that its citizens are satisfied with their lives, even if they aren’t happy.
Note that the present rationale for life satisfaction as a social indicator takes it to be potentially important, but not as a mental state good. Rather, it matters as an indicator of conditions in people’s lives. Concern for life satisfaction is not, primarily, concern about people’s mental states. So rejecting mentalistic views of well-being is no reason for skepticism about life satisfaction.