The European Culture for Human Rights. The Right to Happiness

This book represents a collection of a selected papers from an international conference focusing on “the right to happiness”, held in Bucharest in December 2012, organized by Dimitie Cantemir Christian Bucharest University, the Romanian Academy’s Research Institute for Quality of Life – Bucharest and the Romanian Institute for Human Rights – Bucharest. The analysis of happiness from the perspective of the quality of life is a unique development in human rights literature. This analysis is based on people having an active role in bestowing meaning on different components of their life. People have the means and the power to decide whether their life is good or bad by taking into account their subjective perceptions, such as how different domains, such as the family, professional, and civic realms, of their lives interact and what their meanings for their entire lives are. In truth, modern society, faced with multiple risks of development, has to be controlled by the wisdom or rationality of collective ethics principles in order to grant individual satisfaction. Its means of development through cutting edge technology can contribute to human accomplishments, but also to human downfalls. Thus, in a modern culture, responsible control of technology becomes mandatory. In today’s world, it is impossible to talk about individual satisfaction without collective morals, without the collective responsibility that guides the directions of development of humankind. This book discusses the issue of quality of life, and sustains a pragmatic vision of the pursuit of happiness and well-being, based on changes aimed at the continual improvement of one’s interior and exterior universe.