It brings us great joy to announce that episode four of The Philosofa is all about happiness! In this latest episode, Omar Hamdi and guest co-host Jenny Collier flex their philosophical feathers with the question – what is happiness and can it be measured? To help them crack it, they are joined in the studio by Professor of Philosophy and Dean of the Arts and Humanities at University College London, Jonathan Wolff; freelance journalist and author of, Sex, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll: the science of hedonism and the hedonism of science, Zoe Cormier; and writer, psychotherapist and former priest in the Church of England, Mark Vernon.

Whatever our path to it, we are all interested in happiness. The Ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle, described happiness as “the only goal chosen for its own sake and never as a means to something else”. However, today the word feels so overused, even misused, it’s high time we stopped and took a gander at this most elusive of concepts.

There has been an array of ideas about happiness in the history of Western philosophy. On the one hand, there are theories that treat happiness as consisting in a life lived well. On this picture, happiness is not so much a matter of feeling a certain way, but of living a certain way. For example, Aristotle held that happiness consists in living virtuously. For Aristotle, virtue is about responding to situations with appropriately balanced feelings and actions.

On the flipside, there are theories that identify happiness with a state of mind. For instance, the Ancient Greek philosopher, Epicurus, thought that true happiness is an abiding state of freedom from mental and bodily distress. He described this as the state of simply ‘enjoying one’s natural constitution’. Or there is ‘utilitarianism’. First articulated by the Enlightenment philosophers Jeremy Bentham and his protégé John Stuart Mill, utilitarianism defines happiness in terms of pleasure or ‘utility’. According to utilitarianism, if you want to know how happy or good your life is, you need to calculate how much pleasure it contains versus how much suffering.

One of the complications with defining happiness in terms of pleasure is that there are many different kinds. In her book, Sex, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll: the science of hedonism and the hedonism of science, Zoe Cormier focuses on three of the big ones. She argues that the unique capacity of human beings to derive intense pleasure from sex, drugs and music is one of the gifts of our evolutionary past. According to Zoe, these sensual self-indulgences are not sinful, but to be celebrated. They not only make life worth living, but traditionally have also been important tools for self-exploration.

Over the last few decades, happiness has started to occupy an increasingly important role in the political agenda. As more and more politicians and experts have grown dissatisfied with GDP as a measure of standard of living, an alternative measure has been sought. Happiness has become a serious contender. However, promoting happiness among people requires the ability to measure it. How do you go about doing that? One way is simply to design surveys and go around asking people. However, psychotherapist Mark Vernon has his doubts. He argues that there are many subtle facets to fulfillment that are simply not picked up by such surveys, such as a sense of connection to others, or a feeling of fully participating in your life.

If all this tickles your interest then join us for another episode of The Philosofa. After all, who says you can’t have problems and smile – even big philosophical ones.