Philosophers have long debated whether moral virtue is necessary for happiness, or whether morality and happiness are incompatible. Yet, little empirical research addresses this fundamental question: Are moral people happier?

Sun, Jessie, Wen Wu, and Geoffrey Goodwin. 2022. “Moral People Tend to Be Happier.” PsyArXiv. July 13. doi:10.31234/osf.io/sd8t4

Abstract: Philosophers have long debated whether moral virtue is necessary for happiness, or whether morality and happiness are incompatible. Yet, little empirical research addresses this fundamental question: Are moral people happier? Here, we examined the association between reputation-based measures of moral character and self-reported well-being in the U.S. and China. Three studies suggest that those who are more moral in the eyes of close others (e.g., friends, family, romantic partners; Studies 1 and 3), coworkers (Study 2), and acquaintances (Study 3) generally experience a greater sense of subjective well-being and meaning in life. Together, these studies provide the most comprehensive evidence to date of a positive association between morality and well-being.

Discussion

In sum, the results of three studies provide evidence for a robust and general positive association between moral character and well-being. These studies represent the most comprehensive investigation to date of this longstanding question about the relation between two fundamental aspects of the good life. However, given the scope of the question and the complexity of conceptualizing and measuring morality, our investigation is far from the last word on whether moral people are happier. Although reputation-based measures of morality have substantial advantages over both self-report and behavioral measures, they have their own limitations.

First, by definition, reputation-based measures of moral character only allow us to draw conclusions about the wellbeing implications of being visibly (im)moral (26, 28). How significant a limitation this is depends on how successfully people can actually hide their immoral traits and behaviors from others. We suspect that while people may be able to conceal some specific immoral behaviors (29), it is a much harder task to permanently conceal one’s genuinely immoral character. If this is true, then reputation-based measures of moral character, particularly when drawn from multiple sources, are unlikely to be substantially distorted in this respect. 

A second potential limitation of reputation-based measures is that moral character judgments could be tainted by irrelevant information. For example, it is plausible that people might use how much they like a person as a heuristic for whether that person is morally good.

However, supplemental analyses suggested that the association between moral character and well-being tended to be robust even when accounting for how much the targets’ informants liked them (see Table S29). Moreover, given that experimental evidence suggests that positive moral character information causally increases perceivers’ overall positive impressions of a hypothetical target (13), the extent to which a perceiver likes a target could be a mechanism that explains why moral people are happier, rather than a confound. Due to the correlational nature of our study designs, the findings of all three studies are causally ambiguous. However, given the paucity of research on this important question, and the difficulty of manipulating morality, our primary goal was to provide a thorough description of the direction, functional form, and specificity of the association between morality and well- being. After all, before we can attempt to explain a phenomenon, it is important to “know the thing we are trying to explain” (30, 31).

Nevertheless, we conducted additional analyses to rule out possible demographic confounds (e.g., age, gender, race, SES, and religiosity). The results of Studies 1 and 2 were generally robust to the inclusion of these control variables, but the results for Study 3 were inconclusive due to the large amounts of missing demographic data (see Table 40 S31). Finally, the question of whether moral people are happier may depend in part on what range of morality is being considered and how morality is conceptualized. Although we made efforts to sample from across the spectrum of moral character, we were unable to sample targets who were either extremely moral or extremely immoral (see Supplemental Materials, Table 45 S28). Nonetheless, our results do indicate that within the normal range of moral functioning inhabited by the large majority of people, people who are more moral are happier than people who are less moral. 6 Morality is notoriously difficult to define; indeed, centuries of philosophical theorizing have not yet resulted in widespread convergence on what it means to be a moral person (32).

We intentionally conceptualized morality in a very broad and ecologically valid way, with a definition that spanned multiple different aspects of moral character that are relevant to everyday social life. It therefore remains possible that the relation we observed may not hold if moral goodness is conceptualized more narrowly (e.g., as constituted by utilitarian attitudes, or a more expansive moral circle; 33, 34). Our results provisionally speak against this possibility, however, since we did not see different relations between two major dimensions of morality (i.e., kindness and integrity) and well-being (see Supplemental Materials, Table S23). Nonetheless, future work might document more distinct connections between other varieties of morality and well-being. Despite these caveats, the research presented here breaks new ground by providing the strongest evidence to date of a positive association between morality and well-being in the U.S. and China. Our findings are incompatible with the idea that a moral life is characterized by onerous self-sacrifice; instead, morality and personal fulfilment seem to go hand in hand