Can Someone Be Happy If Her Sincere Perception Tha

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Can someone be happy if her sincere perception that her life is going well is false or unjustified?

Say I am in love with a girl who loves me in return. Her love is the source of great pleasure in my life and I would describe my current state as happy, citing her love as the reason for my being so. However it turns out that this girl never loved me, nor even liked me. In fact the only reason she was with me was to get closer to my friend Steve! (*shakes fist* “STEVE!”) This example leads us to question a few characteristics of happiness. The most prevalent of these being can happiness be based on false beliefs?

In the above example it is clear that the source of my happiness was non-existent. With hindsight I would probably argue (as many would,) that I was not truly happy because my happiness was based on a false belief. That being said, a strong part of us would like to say that I was actually happy in the moment despite of the fact that this happiness stemmed from a false belief. I argue that a feeling of happiness experienced by an individual at a point in time feels identical to the subject in both situations regardless of whether their happiness is based on true and false beliefs. Had my girlfriend actually loved me in the previous example, my experience of happiness would have felt the same. So this leaves us stuck in a situation where we want to say that I was happy during that period of time until I became aware that my happiness was based on a false belief, when we want to say that I was not actually happy in that period. How can we justify these intuitions when they appear to contradict each other?

I suggest that through looking at the motivations behind our desire to call the same period of time both happy and not-happy, a useful explanation and solution can be found to this apparent contradiction. In the first instance, before I was
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