Most of us have experienced both how good it can feel and how hard it can be to do the right thing. Helping strangers or supporting a friend can leave you with a deep sense of satisfaction at making a difference in someone’s life. But you’ve likely also felt the strain of showing up for others when you’re already stretched thin, or the discomfort of being honest about a difficult truth. In other words, being good is sometimes uplifting, and sometimes it’s a bit of a drag. These ordinary moments speak to a puzzle that philosophers have long debated: are moral people happier? Or is there some tradeoff between doing good and feeling good?
People have different intuitions about this. Some might assume that morality and happiness naturally go together. If you take a moment to think about what qualities you want in a friend, romantic partner or coworker, it seems self-evident that a person who constantly acts in selfish, inconsiderate and dishonest ways risks becoming a pariah. Doing the right thing is also conducive to a clear conscience and a sense of inner peace. Perhaps for this reason, the American philosopher and psychologist William James in 1878 claimed that ‘the joy of moral self-approbation … [may be] required to make the notion of mere existence tolerable.’
Still, others might reason that moral behaviour often requires self-restraint and self-sacrifice, and that ‘nice guys finish last’. In line with this view, the philosopher Susan Wolf in 1982 painted a portrait of a joyless ‘moral saint’ who is ‘too good for his own wellbeing’ and lives a ‘strangely barren’ life because he devotes all his time to helping others. Friedrich Nietzsche likewise suggested that moral ideals rooted in selfless devotion to others can stifle individual growth and vitality. Clearly, different views exist, both in everyday intuitions and in philosophy.
Until recently, empirical evidence had largely been limited to one aspect of morality: kindness. Past studies clearly show that people feel good when they help or perform acts of kindness for others. There is also reason to think that people who act morally might feel that their experiences are more meaningful. But researchers had not directly examined whether moral character, broadly speaking, is linked to wellbeing. This might be in part because of the difficulties of defining and measuring morality. So my colleagues and I – a team of social, personality, and organisational psychologists – conducted a set of studies that were designed to take these challenges seriously.
To measure how morally good a person is, all things considered, we first need to decide which traits are relevant. Despite centuries of debate, there’s still no consensus – among philosophers, or across cultures, religions or political perspectives – on what it means to be a morally good person. But it’s likely that, within a given society, some traits are widely seen as moral. To find out which traits these might be, we asked people in the United States to rate the moral relevance of a wide range of traits taken from various personality questionnaires. People thought that compassion, respectfulness, honesty, fairness, loyalty and dependability were most morally relevant. So, we developed a commonsense, consensus-based measure of moral character using these traits.
When psychologists measure people’s personality traits, they often use self-report questionnaires, in which a person rates how much they agree with statements such as ‘I am someone who is outgoing, sociable’ (a measure of extraversion). Self-report measures work well in many contexts, predicting a variety of important life outcomes. But we were sceptical that people would give fully candid and unbiased reports about their own moral character.
Instead, we relied on the judgments of observers. Everyday social interactions provide plenty of opportunities to notice how kind, honest, fair and dependable another person is. And unlike judging your own morality, you don’t have as much at stake when judging someone else’s. Importantly, observers agree to some extent on who is more moral, which indicates that their impressions aren’t just in their own heads. All of this suggests that a person’s moral reputation says something about their actual moral character.
People who were more moral in the eyes of close others reported greater happiness
In one of our studies, undergraduate students from two US universities reported on their own wellbeing, rating their happiness (ie, typical levels of positive and negative emotions, and overall life satisfaction) as well as their sense of how meaningful their life is. They also gave us contact information for people who know them, such as friends, family members and romantic partners. These close others then rated the participant’s moral character using our questionnaire, which asked how much that person had the various traits identified as most morally relevant.
What did we find? As might have been expected, people who were more moral in the eyes of close others tended to experience a greater sense of meaning in life. What’s more, in one sample of undergraduates, those rated as more moral reported greater happiness, too. We found further support for this relationship when we broadened the scope beyond US students – asking Chinese engineers who worked in small teams to confidentially rate each other’s moral character. Again, individuals who were more moral in the eyes of those who knew them tended to report not only greater meaning in life, but greater happiness.
These results seem to tell us something about how happiness relates to being good, at least when it comes to ordinary people. But what about those who are either highly moral or highly immoral? In a final study, we tried to better capture these individuals as well. Because questionnaires can’t encompass everything about a person’s moral character, we wanted to test a more open-ended approach. This time, we asked participants in the US to nominate six people who they personally knew: two of the most moral; two of the least moral; and two morally average people. We then invited these nominees to rate their own wellbeing and to name their own contacts, who in turn provided additional ratings of the nominees’ moral character. Across these different ways of assessing character, we found the same pattern: moral people were happier.
You might be wondering what this means for you. Would you be happier if you became more moral? Our studies can’t speak directly to that, because we tested only whether moral character and wellbeing go together – not whether moral character causes greater wellbeing. We could also speculate that (un)happiness causes (im)morality; for example, some people might be less moral because they are too preoccupied with their own distress to care much about others. Other studies I’ve conducted show that people believe that becoming more moral would increase their wellbeing – but whether it actually does remains an open question.
If being more moral does make people happier, however, our studies provide some tentative clues about why, suggesting it could be partly because moral people have better relationships and are more liked and respected by others. But I also suspect that the reasons why moral people are happier might depend somewhat on the particular moral virtue. For example, a kind person might be happier in part because they experience more empathetic joy, whereas an honest person might be happier in part because they are less burdened by the need to hide information (lest they be ‘found out’). My research lab is currently planning future studies to test these possibilities.
Doing the right thing is not always easy. Telling the truth, standing up for someone who is being treated unfairly, or honouring commitments can feel uncomfortable or burdensome. But our findings indicate that, in general, there is no tradeoff between morality and wellbeing. Instead, people with stronger moral character tend to experience greater meaning in life and happiness. This suggests that moments of moral effort may be part of a life that, taken as a whole, feels more satisfying. For those striving to live ethically, this offers some reassurance that being good and feeling good are not mutually exclusive but, instead, go hand in hand.
