Excellent question or set of questions! The Ancient Greeks were especially vexed by this concern, some of them (like the Stoics) stressing happiness as something that is almost always an internal matter, but those influenced by Greek tragedy tended to take the opposite view (chance or fate can have a major impact). Probably the best book on this historically and as a substantial question on its own is The Fragility of Goodness; Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy by Martha Nussbaum (Cambridge University Press, 1986). I suspect that some kind of middle ground is the most reasonable: your flourishing or happiness cannot be entirely internal (it would be hard to be happy while being slowly tortured to death), but it cannot be entirely external (we can imagine a chap having the best conditions possible and yet responding with spiteful unhappiness).

As for your general question on happiness, the current debate is quite interesting! Some philosophers are impressed by some empirical evidence that suggests (to them) that a person is not the best judge of whether he or she is happy. There are studies to the effect that most people report being happy with their lives (see "Most People are Happy" in Psychological Science, vol. 7, 1996). There was a 1978 study that reports that accident victims who become paraplegic usually return to their original state of happiness within one year. And another study in 1996 which suggests that few of us (except in non-fatal conditions of course!) are badly effected after three months of a bad event. (There is an excellent paper on this by Jason Marsh entitled "Quality of Life Assessments, Cognitive Reliability and Procreative Responsibility.") Some philosophers think all this is pretty good news, but others conclude that the data must reveal that people are self-deceived and while they think they are happy, they are not. I personally have a hard time believing these studies (I think it would take me more than a year to recover from being paraplegic), but if these studies are accurate they perhaps support a middle ground position: a person's happiness is neither entirely internal nor entirely external.

I don't think Marsh's paper is published yet; I heard it presented to my department. But keep an eye out for his treatment of such cases!

There are a few reasons to not just give people what they want. First, how do they know unless they are given alternatives? Secondly, what they want may have dangerous consequences for others and be incompatible with life in a civilized society.

The demand for fairness is a basic moral demand and on occasion may well not be popular, but that is irrelevant to its rationale.

It's a good question, but I think it may rest on a misunderstanding of Buddhism. None of the Buddhist teachers I know think that Buddhism is a path to not feeling pain. If even the most enlightened Buddhist puts her hand on a hot stove, it will hurt. If people we love are hurt, we will feel sad. Beware forms of Buddhism (or any other view of the world) that says otherwise. In the Buddhist tradition, there are stories of the Buddha repeatedly meeting Mara. In some of the stories, he invites Mara to tea. Many teachers would say that the point is to remind us: the Buddha was still a human being. He still could feel anger, pain and the like. The difference, the Buddhist would say, is that the Buddha had learned not to get attached to those things They didn't take him over and control him.

Enlightenment and permanent happiness aren't the same thing, on my understanding. The enlightened person is one who's awake - who sees things for what they are. One of the facts about the way things are is that pain is inevitable. What many Buddhist teachers add is that suffering is optional.

This may sound paradoxical or contradictory. Isn't pain just a form of suffering? On one perfectly good use of the words, the answer is yes. But Buddhism claims that we can learn to step back from our pains, small and large, and not become identified with them.

That answer is likely too short to be very helpful, let alone convincing. In any case, the Buddhist would say that if Buddhist teachings are true, this is something we will learn by trying them rather than through some sort of revelation or acquiescence to authority. Though I don't count myself a Buddhist, what impresses me about the versions I've encountered is that there's nothing starry-eyed or blissed-out about them. They're open-eyed, realistic and profoundly practical.

There are many good books that you might turn to if you want to get an idea of what this is supposed to mean in practice. You might read, for example, books by Thich Nhat Hanh or by Pema Chodron or the Dalai Lama - or by Western teachers such as Tara Brach. You might or might not be convinced, but I think you'll end up with a different picture of what Buddhism is trying to offer.

You're making a perfectly good point: no one can figure out what will make people happy just by sitting in their armchair. But there are a lot of things we might mean by the word "happy" and if we just ask the person on the street if they're happy, we may not know what to make of the answer.

There's a recent short essay by Gary Gutting in the New York Times' The Stone series that deals with some of the issues here. and for present purposes I don't have a lot to add. But at the least, we'd want to make a distinction between the passing state of our moods and the condition of our lives overall. Being annoyed of an afternoon doesn't mean that I'm not happy, full stop. And being in a good mood on another afternoon also doesn't mean I'm happy, full stop. To which we can add: part of what Aristotle and other philosophers want to know is what sorts of things make for a life worth living; the word "happiness" is at best a rough translation for "eudaimonia."

There's another problem with just asking people if they're happy and if so why. As mountains of psychological research have made clear, we're often not nearly as good as we think we are at figuring out what's going on in our own minds. And even if I'm right in reporting that I'm happy in some sense or other, I might be wrong about why.

So yes: there's a lot to be learned about happiness by getting out of the armchair. But if we're going to look to the world, we need to have some well-thought-out ideas on what we're really asking and what would count as an answer. That part of the job isn't just for philosophers, but it's the part that philosophers are likely to have the most to say about.

Before I try to give an answer to your question directly, I want to object to the claim that seems to be its basis. I do believe that recent psychological research about happiness supports at least some elements of what might be called "irrationalism." On the other hand, it seems to me that this same research always treats happiness as a purely subjective property, and I want to make clear that this subjectivist treatment of happiness is very much at odds with the objectivist presumption in most of the philosophical literature on happiness.

To quote myself (the easiest author for me to remember!), "Giddy morons may suppose they pursue their interest by doing what only makes them giddier and more foolish, but sensible evaluation will conclude that such lives are nothing to envy. The addict's high, even secured by ba lifetime supply of intoxicants, is no model of surpassing success in the pursuit of self-interest" (T. C. Brickhouse and N. D. Smith, Socratic Moral Psychology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 46). In other words, one who might be counted as "supremely happy" from a subjective point of view only, could still count as a complete wretch to a sensible objective observer. In the philosophical tradition known as "eudaimonism" (from the Greek word, eudaimonia, which is often translated as "happiness," but which is also reasonably well translated as "flourishing," "thriving," or "well-being"), happiness does have some important entailments with respect to subjectivity, but the achievement of actual happiness will not be exhausted by subjective considerations alone.

But if we take this objectivist stance, it starts to look like the hypothesis that forms the basis of your question may not be one to which we can really give our assent: One who thinks or acts irrationally is not one who seems to us to think or act in a way that is objectively choiceworthy. Maybe thinking or acting irrationally can provide subjective advantages (just think how happy I might be if I could convince myself that absolutely everybody loves and cares about me!!!), but if we (more sensibly, I contend) bring the objective point of view to bear on the question, I don't think we would ever suppose the irrationalism was preferable to rationalism.

Although there may at least initially appear to be something inconsistent in being happy with one's life at one time and being sad about one's life at another time even though nothing has changed with respect to one's life, provided that one is not happy and sad about one's life in the same respect, there is no paradox--neither a logical paradox nor a paradox of rationality--in such a case. For it is plausible that there could be aspects of one's life about which one had reason to be happy and other aspects of one's life about which one had reason to be sad, and so, depending on which aspects of one's life one focused, one could be happy with one's life at one time and then sad about one's life at a different time, even though nothing had changed in one's life between the times in question. While there is no logical contradiction here, however, such a situation could suggest that one hasn't fully integrated one's attitudes towards the various aspects of one's life. I am inclined to think that the persistence of such opposed attitudes reveals ambivalence about one's life, ambivalence of the sort that can only be resolved by reflecting on one's life and trying to integrate its different aspects into a whole. Such ambivalence does not, in my opinion, manifest any irrationality, and although I am inclined to think that ambivalence is natural and perhaps even maybe the human condition, it may nevertheless be symptomatic of some deeper dissatisfaction with one's life as a whole which thereby merits attention.

What a wonderful question! You are right about there being a long tradition of sage advise on moderating desire. There is an excellent review of this tradition in the west along with some very insightful observations in the book Emotion and Peace of Mind by Richard Sorabji (Oxford University Press, 2002). He considers philosophical projects of moderating desires and the more radical projects of seeking the complete eradication of passion/desire. Not all philosophers have cautioned us about acting on passion; Pascal, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and others seem rather immoderate in their advice and lives. But in any case, I suggest that the case for moderation goes hand in glove with the case for the virtue of integrity and freedom. Having sufficient self-mastery and self-understanding to know when one's anger is way out of proportion to the event at hand seems essential for personal integrity. Similarly, one may lose one's ability to think freely and deliberately about one's action if one is consumed with a passionate, but blind lust or jealousy or an unchecked seemingly limitless desire for drink and drugs, and so on. So, I suggest the good of moderation is as important today as in the teaching of the ancient Greco-Roman moral philosophers. In any case, check out Sorabji's fascination book. Good wishes, CT

Here's one way to respond. If one were to suppose, with Kant, that human dignity is intinsically valuable, and that lying to another--even if that lie would promote the other's happiness, say by sparing that person a harsh and painful truth--does not respect that person' dignity, by failing to--in Kant' terminology--treat that person as an end-in-itself worthy of respect--then one might therefore conclude that one has a duty to tell others the truth, and, since, again according to Kant, duty does not admit of exceptions, one cannot compromise that duty in any cae whatsoever, regardless of the consequences of so doing.

Of course, this response presupposes some very strong claims about the nature of human beings and the significance of duty. Implicit, too, is the assumption that morality is more intrinsically valuable than happiness. This is not to say that Kant, or a Kantian, wouldn't recognize the significance of promoting the happiness of others--if I remember correctly, Kant does so, explicitly, in Groundwork 1--but rather that the demands of duty, for Kant, take precedence over promoting the happiness of others.

If, by contrast, one took the maximization of happiness as the basis for deciding which acts are permissible, one might have reason to tell a lie in order to promote the happiness of another. (Although it's not clear that in the case under consideration, even a utilitarian who takes as her ultimate end the maximization of happiness would endorse lying. Her reasons for so doing, of course, would differ significantly from that of the Kantian, and, I must confess that I find the Kantian approach more intuitively attractive than other alternatives.)

I'm not sure that the goal of procreation trumps all others for human beings, so I can't accept your premise here. But I'm afraid that the world is in fact such that there are certain things that are beyond our powers that have an enormous impact on our "quality of life." I understand that it grinds against our need to feel in control, but I think a person who lives in abject poverty and can do next to nothing to help his or her family and friends, is more poorly positioned to lead a full life, than someone born in better circumstances. And if having friends is an important element of a good life, and I think it is , then being good looking is probably an asset. Of course, a person who relied on this quality too much might not develop sufficient depth to develop powerful relations but that is another issue.

This interesting thought experiment and associated questions deserves a substantial response. Alas, for now, I can only suggest that you read Robert Nozick's discussion of happiness and the "pleasure machine" thought experiment, a nice discussion of which was offered in the New York Times by David Sosa here.