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.