Why is it that summing utilities does not produce a total that is equivalent to happiness? Indeed, given their diversity, is it possible to sum utilities at all? And if they may be summed, can we avoid mixing the sources of utility, like income and commodities, with the consumption process that yields the final pleasure, that is, utility? In concluding Part VII on happiness, I cannot avoid these questions. In seeking to answer them, I am also adding to earlier discussions on how we may best understand the idea of happiness (Chapter 22), on the nature of wants and their satisfaction (Chapter 23), on the relation between pleasure and pain (Chapter 24), and especially on the various structures of happiness (Chapter 25). Indeed, the problem of summing utilities is a facet of the structure of happiness neglected by economists, but fortunately treated by utilitarian philosophers, some of whom, however, confound the idea of a happy life with the idea of a valuable life. In this chapter we seek to find reasonable answers to the questions raised by those discussions.

Summing market utilities

The summing of utilities is an analytic device, not a description of a cognitive process. People may “count their blessings,” but they do not count their utilities or their satisfactions. They do have two mental states that serve as substitutes, however: (1) summary views of their happiness or overall satisfactions with their lives that provide a strategic criterion of how a life plan is progressing, and (2) preferences that people treat in ordinal fashion to provide tactical criteria on smaller matters.