Dan Haybron (Ph.D., Rutgers, 2001) is one of the newest members of the Philosophy Department at Saint Louis University. His research interests center on several issues in ethics: well-being and the good life, moral evil, and the virtues. He is particularly interested in bringing empirical psychological work to bear on philosophical problems in ethics.

His work on well-being and the good life aims, most broadly, at exploring ways in which the notion of a good life can occupy a more central place in ethical inquiry than it traditionally has. This work currently focuses on the nature and significance of happiness (the psychological state). He is developing an emotional state conception of happiness, as against views that identify happiness either with having pleasant experiences or being satisfied with one’s life as a whole. Happiness on the emotional state view is like a positive counterpart to depression. Thus understood, happiness is deeply connected with the self and thus contributes to well-being as a central part of self-fulfillment. Another aspect of this research program concerns our competence in the pursuit of happiness: are we reliable judges of our own happiness, and are we effective pursuers of happiness? The answer to both questions may well be “no.”

His work in moral theory has focused primarily on moral evil, in particular the question of what counts as an evil person. An answer to this question can shed light on what matters for character generally and how we ought to evaluate persons’ characters. He has argued that having an evil character consists in having certain motivational and affective dispositions, specifically such that morality has no significant hold on one. He is currently extending this framework to the case of evil actions. An understanding of evil actions can also have broad implications, namely for how we ought to evaluate actions in general.

These two lines of research are converging on a broadly virtue-oriented approach to ethics that centers on the notion of a good life (as distinct from the narrower notion of well-being).

His publications include:

• "On Being Happy or Unhappy." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, forthcoming.
• "Happiness, the Self, and Human Flourishing." Utilitas, Forthcoming.
• "Life Satisfaction, Ethical Reflection, and the Science of Happiness." The Journal of Happiness Studies. Forthcoming.
• Editor, Earth’s Abominations: Philosophical Studies of Evil. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002.
• “What Do We Want from a Theory of Happiness?” Metaphilosophy, 34:3 (2003), pp. 305-329.
• “Moral Monsters and Saints.” The Monist, 85:2 (2002), pp. 260-284.
• “Consistency of Character and the Character of Evil.” In Haybron, Daniel M., ed. Earth’s Abominations: Philosophical Studies of Evil. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002.
• “Introduction: Evil as a Philosophical Concern.” In Haybron, Daniel M., ed. Earth’s Abominations: Philosophical Studies of Evil. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002.
• “Happiness and Pleasure.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 62:3 (2001), pp. 501-528.
• “Review of Jonathan Lear, Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life.” Philosophical Inquiry, 23:1-2 (2001), pp. 172-174.
• “The Causal and Explanatory Role of Information Stored in Connectionist Networks.” Minds and Machines, 10:3 (2000), pp. 361-380.
• “Two Philosophical Problems in the Study of Happiness.” The Journal of Happiness Studies, 1:2 (2000), pp. 207-225.
• “Evil Characters.” American Philosophical Quarterly, 36:2 (April 1999), pp. 131-148.

Selected Papers
See personal site for current versions of unpublished work.