A THEORY OF WELL-BEING AS APPROPRIATE HAPPINESS

There is an intuitive connection between well-being and happiness. Our goal is to defend a new theory, according to which well-being consists in fitting happiness. Our theory can be considered as the combination of four claims. The first is that happiness consists in a broadly positive balance of affective states such as emotions, moods, and sensory plea-sures. The second is that emotions, moods, and sensory pleasures are different kinds of perceptual experiences of evaluative properties. It follows from this that happiness consists in a broadly positive balance of perceptual experiences of evaluative properties. The third is that insofar as happiness is constituted by states that have fittingness condi-tions, happiness can be assessed as fitting or unfitting. The fourth claim concerns well-being: we claim that well-being consists in fitting happiness as we have defined it.