Hi, and thank you for your comment! I think our difference here comes from the fact that you see Paul’s happiness from his own (subjective) point of view, while I was looking at it objectively, from the outside. (So the sentence you quote should have read: “Paul can indeed be mistaken about being objectively happy”). I believe that you are right about the fact that Paul himself would die happy, and therefore we should be able to say that he has been (subjectively) happy. But still, something smells a bit wrong about such happiness, and I think this is because we do expect our happiness to also have some objective truth to it. Happiness that is only based on deception rings wrong, or seems incomplete. We don’t believe that someone who is happy only when playing an immersive game, or when he takes drugs, is “truly” happy — or that Paul in the example was. He *thought* he was happy, but — we can say — we knew better: he wasn’t.

So we can probably defend both positions, depending on how strong our intuition is that one’s happiness must be possible to be validated in an objective way, looked at from the outside. How much value we ascribe to such objectivity might be a matter of individual taste, or perhaps connected to past experiences, other values held, and upbringing; so that perhaps some of us are more likely to see Paul as a happy person, while others wouldn’t — without anyone being “objectively” more right than the other.