Imagining Sisyphus Happy, Sen on the Failure of Subjective Well-Being

Sen's account and rejection of realtive happiness struck me as an intresting and contentious point brought up in the reading. Who are we to say someone is worse off if they do not feel worse off? Stripping subjective experience from our account of well-being looks quite paternalistic initially, althought I think the contrary is true. Sen argues that "the view... can be easily swayed by mental conditioning and adaptive attitudes" (62). Consider the average citizen of North Korea, obvisouly their perception of happiness is wildly different than ours, as putting any person in a relatively free situation in that situation would result in a deep unhappiness that we do not see in North Korea. Their reported happiness is not a reflection of well-being. It is a product of total informational control and the absence of any accessible alternative against which to measure their condition. Camus correctly asks us to imagine Sisyphus happy but this is not an endorsement of eternal boulder pushing. The utilitarian framework cannot distinguish between a person who is happy because their life is genuinely going well and a person who is happy because they have never been permitted to know that it is not. Sen points to the example of gender disparities in health reporting across Indian states where women in states with higher female literacy and better healthcare actually report higher rates of perceived illness than women in states with worse objective conditions. In order to disregard adaptive preference, one must accept that with enough narrowing of options, any situation can result in full satisfaction. In order to respect the agency of an individual we do not have to accept their subjective preferences. Sen argues that under unfree circumstances that a person does not actually have the agency they think they do in evaluating their life condition. Sen makes a very strong point that we cannot build a theory of justice on relative happiness. 

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