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The Politics of Happiness: Britian and the "Department of Happiness"

January 16th, 2007

By Matthew Lee Anderson

From the Christian Science Monitor comes this report that "subjective well being" is quickly becoming the measuring rod for British policy.  Of course, that's just a high-falutin way of measuring whether governments are succeeding in enabling individuals to find the happiness that all those political philosophers say is their true end.  Of course, empirically measuring "happiness" can be pretty difficult without first understanding what happiness is, but that might entail understanding what a human is.  Might as well simply revive the "Ministry of Silly Walks."

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Matthew Lee Anderson

Matthew Lee Anderson is an Associate Professor of Ethics and Theology in Baylor University's Honors College. He has a D.Phil. in Christian Ethics from Oxford University, and is a Perpetual Member of Biola University's Torrey Honors College. In 2005, he founded Mere Orthodoxy.