Can climate change make us happy? The question might seem glib, but we ask it in earnest. Happiness, for Aristotle, was the goal of all deliberation. Without showing that he cared first and foremost about the happiness of his audience, a speaker was sunk. Deliberation over climate change is no different. And climate science cannot tell us how to be happy.

Others have made the same point, but they have tended to conceive of happiness in restrictive ways: ethical, psychological, economic. We conceive of happiness in more inclusive sociological terms. It is about more than feelings of security or the promise of prosperity. In the Aristotelian tradition, happiness (eudemonia) is not simply pleasure or contentment but “is something like flourishing human living, a kind of living that is active, inclusive of all that has intrinsic value, and complete” (Nussbaum 2012, 342). In American civil discourse, something like this view of flourishing has echoes in talk of “community” or even “freedom” in the way that they capture the societal actualization of latent possibility. From the perspective of cultural sociology, happiness is, above all, socially integrative. As Durkheim (1965) argued in the Elementary Forms, it arises in the form of solidarity from a complex mixture of shared memories, shared emotions, shared ends, shared activity, and shared symbolic systems.

It also arises from shared beliefs, which, in Aristotle's view (and Durkheim's), are closely linked to shared emotions, including fear. Consensus matters.