Abstract

This paper introduces "scope leakage of happiness" as a moral-psychological phenomenon in which perceived responsibility expands beyond legitimate culpability and practical remedial power, producing losses in subjective well-being that are not redeemed by corresponding improvements in the world. Contemporary persons are exposed to global harms with historically unusual immediacy and frequency, yet their causal role in producing those harms and their power to remedy them often remain partial, indirect, or negligible. Existing literatures on moral demandingness, global justice, moral distress, climate anxiety, problematic news consumption, perceived control, and pathological altruism illuminate parts of this problem, but they rarely provide a formal model of the mismatch between perceived moral burden and legitimate agency. This paper addresses that lacuna by distinguishing legitimate culpability scope, legitimate power scope, perceived culpability scope, and perceived remedial-obligation scope. It then proposes a pseudo-formal model in which happiness loss increases as perceived culpability and perceived remedial obligation exceed legitimate culpability and legitimate remedial power, especially when the two forms of leakage interact. The model supports a principle of bounded compassionate agency: persons should convert moral concern into proportionate action where they possess causal contribution, role-based duty, or realistic collective leverage, while resisting self-punitive responsibility for harms beyond their control. The argument does not defend indifference. It defends the ethical importance of preserving finite human well-being from unproductive moral overextension.