It would be hard to identify happiness in French's subjunctive mood endings, however, or in the fact that Mandarin has no word for "the".
Life satisfaction theories identify happiness with having a favorable attitude toward one's life as a whole.
So the Stoics identify happiness with "living coherently" (homologoumenôs zên), and Aristotle says that happiness is "perfect" or "complete" (teleios) and something distinctively human.
In Plato's Protagoras, Socrates seems to identify happiness with pleasure and to explain the various virtues as instrumental means to pleasure.
(Researchers often seem to identify happiness with subjective well-being, sometimes with life satisfaction, and perhaps most commonly with emotional or hedonic state).
A fourth family of views, hybrid theories, attempts an irenic solution to our diverse intuitions about happiness: identify happiness with both life satisfaction and pleasure or emotional state, perhaps along with other states such as domain satisfactions.
But if we identify happiness with life satisfaction, then we may have a problem: maybe Sally is satisfied only because she values being grateful for the good things in life.
Hedonists identify happiness with the individual's balance of pleasant over unpleasant experience, in the same way that welfare hedonists do.[5] The difference is that the hedonist about happiness need not accept the stronger doctrine of welfare hedonism; this emerges clearly in arguments against the classical Utilitarian focus on happiness as the aim of social choice.
Such failures have generated much confusion, sometimes yielding bogus disagreements that prove to be merely verbal.[3] For instance, some psychologists identify "happiness" with attitudes of life satisfaction while remaining neutral on questions of value, or whether Bentham, Mill, Aristotle, or any other thinker about the good life was correct.
Patristic and medieval Christian theologians adopted but transformed philosophical eudaimonism by identifying happiness with post-mortem bliss: the beatific vision, or union with God.
