What Is More Important For A Good Life?

We examined how happiness and morality shape judgments about whether a person is happy, morally good, and living a good life overall. In two preregistered studies combined here, 1,412 participants from eight countries across five continents evaluated brief descriptions of a person’s life in which we independently varied whether the person was happy or unhappy and whether they behaved morally well or badly. Across countries, moral information influenced attributions of happiness, replicating and extending prior findings. Happiness also influenced moral judgments, but only when the person behaved morally well. Both factors had large effects on overall life evaluations, with morality showing the stronger causal impact across experimental conditions. However, analyses of the relationships among participants’ judgments indicated that happiness was at least as strongly associated with overall evaluations as morality. In addition, happiness and morality interacted synergistically: a life described as both happy and moral was judged better than the sum of each component alone. These findings suggest that ordinary conceptions of the good life tightly integrate happiness and morality.

Prof. Vazquez will also be delivering a talk at 12:15pm in the Gendebien Room Skillman 206 titled "Does Studying Philosophy Make You A Better Thinker?"