As there is a growing consensus among economists that utility can be measured by self-reported happiness or satisfaction with life, we propose to considered the assumption that the level of happiness depends not only on material goods (and services), as suggested by mainstream economics, but also on other ethical or moral values.

The justification of an economist’s interest in ethic or moral values can be summarized as follows: ”Ethics determines the ends, and economics defines the means” as highlighted by Hausman & McPherson (1993). These authors advance four reasons why ethics should be important for economists:

- “the morality of economic agents influences their behaviour and hence influences economic outcomes”.

- “to assess and to develop welfare economics …requires attention to morality”.

- the conclusions of economics must be linked to the moral commitments that drive public policy”.

- “to understand the moral relevance of positive economics requires an understanding of the moral principles that determine this relevance”.

The theoretical background of our analysis will be Becker’s extended utility function (1996) which allows us to consider not only material goods but also personal and social capital as arguments of the utility function. Becker’s definitions of personal and social capital allow us to consider moral values, measured by individual attitudes and social behaviour, as determinants of individual utility.

Following Becker’s (1976) economic approach to human behavior we consider that individuals maximize their well-being as they conceive it, in a market context that allows to coordinate the actions of different individuals with stable preferences that refer to “underlying objects of choice that are produced by each household using market goods and services, their own time and other inputs”.

In this context, individuals maximize their utility with endogenous preferences that depend not only on the commodities that they consume but also on personal habits and addictions, peer pressure, parental influences on the tastes of children, advertising, love, sympathy, the utility or consumption levels of other individuals and other neglected behaviour by the standard utility function (Becker 1996, Hausman & McPherson, 2006).

The empirical counterpart of our model will be an microeconometric happiness function using the empirical data of the European Values Study 1999 (EVS) and based on the assumption that the individual’s utility can be approximated by such an happiness function as suggested by Frey & Stutzer (2002), Blanchflower & Oswald (2004 and 2007) or Di Tella & MacCulloch (2006).

The use of the 1999 EVS database allows us to have a first appreciation of the effects of values, as measured by the responses to the different questions considered as representing social and personal capital, on self-reported well-being or happiness. The results suggest that individuals not only look for material well-being but that they also have a need for postmodern values as defined by Inglehart (1999) and especially a need for self-expression. This need can be seen in the importance of the marginal effects of the personal capital variables. The tendency to an individualistic and postmodern society seems to be confirmed by the EVS data.

The materialistic values, measured by income, still have a positive impact on the dependent variables, but the marginal effects of the postmodern values, measured by the feelings of freedom of choice and control over one’s life, by the rating of governments and partly by the feeling for the respect of the human rights, are more important.

In general, the use of an extended utility function that represents a much better hypothesis for the analysis of human behaviour than the standard utility function, should be based on survey data including more precise measures of materialistic values (types of consumption and income, for example) and of the major values described in the economic literature to get a better understanding of the relations between values and human behaviour.