So here comes another book about how to be happy, written by Professor Dolan, an ‘internationally renowned expert’ at the LSE. The key evidently lies in ‘pleasure and purpose’, derived from your ‘daily felt experiences’, an analysis hymned in the introduction by a Nobel prize-winner as a ‘bold and original move’. Really?
Since Dolan asserts that happiness derives from your ‘felt experiences’ (or ‘paying attention to the things that make you happy’), he is simply saying that it is a state of mind. Very original. This old hat is a form of 4th century bc Stoicism, which asserted that happiness depended on what went on inside your head, because that was all that you could ultimately control. And the ‘pleasure’ principle is, of course, pure Epicurus, inventor of hedonism (341-270 bc).
To the objection that moral value appears not to play any part in the equation, Dolan asserts that ‘happiness is the arbiter of the rightness of what makes you happy’.
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