Subjective Well-Being and Prosociality Around the Globe: Happy People Give More of Their Time and Money to Others

Subjective well-being (SWB) is positively related to prosocial giving and helping others, but so far, research has not explored the association of individual aspects of well-being with prosocial behavior across the world. We used a representative sample from the Gallup World Poll across 163 countries from 2006 to 2017 to explore the relationship between each aspect of well-being and prosocial behavior ( N = 1,797,630). We found that different aspects of SWB are not equally associated with prosocial behavior: While life satisfaction and positive affect consistently predicted being more prosocial across the globe, negative affect did not consistently predict being more or less prosocial. We further explore economic and cultural moderators of these relationships. Our findings underline the importance of studying the effects of the different components of SWB separately, indicating that life satisfaction and positive emotions—more so than negative emotions—consistently predict being more prosocial across the globe.

The Lutheran Imaginary That Underpins Social Democracy

Scandinavian social democracy is increasingly upheld as an alternative that could reform capitalism. The Nordic Model produces income equality, low-conflict politics, and happy people. When half of young Americans express that they would prefer “socialism,” they generally mean to live in a society that provides for its citizens as the Nordics do. Such aspirations are complicated by how social democracy can be viewed as a secularized form of Lutheranism, the Protestant creed that the Nordic region embraced in the 16th century. Lutheran norms and values carried into the modern era and made possible social democracy's two distinguishing features: fascist corporatism and socialist redistribution. A strong state facilitates statist individualism, which empowers individuals vis-à-vis employers, parents, and spouses. The outcome could be cross-culturally salient, as it brings people closer to our species' fission-fusion baseline. Yet in the modern environment, only Nordics seem to have a cultural imaginary that makes compelling the politics that drive such high levels of both productivity and egalitarianism. The region's storytelling reflects this Lutheran past and is used to negotiate modern adaptations. A better understanding of social democracy could help prevent that demands for “socialism” motivate a turn to actual socialism.

Pedagogy of Happiness: A Russian View

For thousands of years the topic of happiness has attracted attention from the representatives of various sciences. However, until now there has been no unity in understanding the essence, sources, and components of happiness. Quite often, the interpretation of the phenomenon of happiness is limited to the analysis of the works of philosophers of antiquity, the European Middle Ages, modern and recent history, and many researchers are in a kind of Eurocentric captivity. Consciously or accidentally, the works of Russian thinkers are often not considered. This hinders the creation of a holistic and more objective picture of such an important aspect of every person’s life. In order to overcome this Eurocentric bias, this study suggests tracing back the main stages of the development of the idea of happiness in Russia from the era of Peter the Great to the present. For this purpose, the authors used the methods of theoretical, comparative, and retrospective analysis. The authors believe that currently the pedagogy of happiness is being actively formed. To educate happy people, teachers should master the art of the pedagogy of happiness.

The Ever Conscious View and the Contingency of Moral Status

It is common to think that if something has moral status, then, necessarily, it has moral status. This chapter argues for a view of moral status, the Ever Conscious View, which holds that a living being has moral status throughout its life just in case it is ever conscious, at any point in its life. Moral status is contingent: some beings that have moral status might have lacked moral status, and some beings that lack moral status might have had moral status. The author explains and addresses the Objection to Contingency; it can be answered by recognition of the Good Method of finding our harm-based and benefit-based moral reasons. We should embrace the Good Method for reasons wholly independent of the Ever Conscious View; so, a defense of the Ever Conscious View using the Good Method is a principled defense. She also defends the Good Method in the face of an objection from “The Asymmetry,” according to which we have reasons not to create miserable people, but we have no reasons to create happy people; she responds that we do have reasons to create happy people, but there is nothing at all wrong with failing to do so.

Beneficence, Numbers, and the Procreation Asymmetry

According to the Weak Procreation Asymmetry, there are weighty reasons not to create miserable people and only weaker reasons to create happy people. This view has several advantages over the Strong Procreation Asymmetry, which holds that there are no reasons to create happy people. Nonetheless, it faces a serious problem: according to some critics, it suggests that our reasons to create lives are as strong as our reasons to save lives. In response, this essay draws on the intuition that we have reason to maximize the number of lives saved, even when doing so would not secure a greater benefit. Numbers are not comparably relevant, however, to choices involving the creation of people. Taken together, these judgments show that there is typically an “extra” consideration that favors saving lives over creating lives. They thereby help to defuse a common objection to the Weak Procreation Asymmetry.

Population ethical intuitions

We investigated lay people’s population ethical intuitions (N = 4,374), i.e., their moral evaluations of populations that differ in size and composition. First, we found that people place greater relative weight on, and are more sensitive to, suffering compared to happiness. Participants, on average, believed that more happy people are needed to outweigh a given amount of unhappy people in a population (Studies 1a-c). Second, we found that—in contrast to so-called person-affecting views—people do not consider the creation of new people as morally neutral. Participants considered it good to create a new happy person and bad to create a new unhappy person (Study 2). Third, we found that people take into account both the average level (averagism) and the total level (totalism) of happiness when evaluating populations. Participants preferred populations with greater total happiness levels when the average level remained constant (Study 3) and populations with greater average happiness levels when the total level remained constant (Study 4). When the two principles were in conflict, participants’ preferences lay in between the recommendations of the two principles, suggesting that both are applied simultaneously (Study 5). In certain cases, participants even showed averagist preferences when averagism disfavors adding more happy people and favors adding more unhappy people to a population (Study 6). However, when participants were prompted to reflect as opposed to rely on their intuitions, their preferences became more totalist (Studies 5-6). Our findings have implications for moral psychology, philosophy and policy making.