Take in your hen: fittingness and hedonic adaptation
Take in your hen: fittingness and hedonic adaptation
Humans have a strong tendency to hedonically adapt to their circumstances, so that something that once brought joy eventually brings only indifference. Does this tendency guarantee a kind of failure on our part? Happiness, like other emotions, seems subject to evaluation in terms of its fittingness. But it’s not clear how hedonic adaptation could possibly maintain fittingness: it involves changing one’s level of happiness in a way that doesn’t track the absolute goodness of one’s circumstances. This paper mounts a defence of hedonic adaptation against this concern. It does so by articulating a key difference between the scale of happiness and the scale of goodness, and shows how that difference guarantees an inability to track absolute levels of goodness with our levels of happiness. Given this background constraint, hedonic adaptation may be the most appropriate way for our happiness to change over time.
Gregory, Alex
4f392d61-1825-4ee5-bc21-18922c89d80f
Gregory, Alex
4f392d61-1825-4ee5-bc21-18922c89d80f
Gregory, Alex
(2025)
Take in your hen: fittingness and hedonic adaptation.
Philosophers Imprint.
(doi:10.3998/phimp.5641).
(In Press)
Abstract
Humans have a strong tendency to hedonically adapt to their circumstances, so that something that once brought joy eventually brings only indifference. Does this tendency guarantee a kind of failure on our part? Happiness, like other emotions, seems subject to evaluation in terms of its fittingness. But it’s not clear how hedonic adaptation could possibly maintain fittingness: it involves changing one’s level of happiness in a way that doesn’t track the absolute goodness of one’s circumstances. This paper mounts a defence of hedonic adaptation against this concern. It does so by articulating a key difference between the scale of happiness and the scale of goodness, and shows how that difference guarantees an inability to track absolute levels of goodness with our levels of happiness. Given this background constraint, hedonic adaptation may be the most appropriate way for our happiness to change over time.
Text
Take in your hen FINAL
- Accepted Manuscript
More information
Accepted/In Press date: 18 February 2025
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 499275
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/499275
ISSN: 1533-628X
PURE UUID: 7f176cba-d103-4b56-b726-76c47aab2ccf
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Date deposited: 13 Mar 2025 17:38
Last modified: 22 Aug 2025 02:09
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