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Philosophy of Happiness
PHIL2467 • PART I WHAT IS HAPPINESS? A simple test 20% 46% 27% 4% 2% 1% 0% Source: Andrews and Withey, Social Indicators of Well-Being: Americans’ Perceptions of Life Quality, 1976 How happy are you? Psychological‘happiness’ 1. Psychological (“internalist”) theories • Happiness is a subjective psychological state. Which state? – Affective (sensations, feelings, moods) – Cognitive (beliefs/thoughts) – Conative (desires) – A combination of these: e.g., Psychologist’s ‘subjective well-being’ Cause vs. Constitution • “Happiness is…” – “a warm puppy” Charles M. Schulz – “having a large, loving, close-knit family in another city” George Burns – “finding two olives in your Martini when you’re hungry” Johnny Carson Cause vs. Constitution • Happiness is not a baby mammal! What causes happiness is different from What happiness is This lecture… Affective (feeling-based) theories of happiness • 1. The hedonic conception Happiness = a surplus of pleasure/enjoyment over pain/suffering. (i) The sensation view (Bentham) (ii) The attitude approach (Sidgwick) Is it pain, or only suffering, that diminishes happiness? • 2. Emotional State Theory Happiness is an emotional state (distinct from pleasure) Two more internalist theories Cognitive (belief-based) theories of happiness • 3. Perceived Desire-Fulfillment Happiness is believing that your desires are fulfilled • 4. Life-Satisfaction Happiness is being satisfied with your life Hedonic Happiness • Pleasure includes Intellectual, emotional and aesthetic pleasures, as well as bodily Epicurus & The Buddha • “When we say that pleasure is the goal we do not mean the pleasure of the profligate or the pleasures of consumption…but rather the lack of pain in the body and disturbance in the mind.” Menoeceus (341-270BCE)
What is pleasure? • The ‘Sensation View’ (Bentham) • Pleasure is a distinctive felt sensation Sensory Hedonism • Pleasant feeling • Painful feeling Is there a “distinctive feeling tone”? The Attitude View (Sidgwick) • “[W]hen I reflect on the notion of pleasure,—using the term in the comprehensive sense…to include the most refined and subtle intellectual and emotional gratifications, no less than the coarser and more definite sensual enjoyments,— the only common quality that I can find in the feelings so designated seems to be that relation to desire and volition expressed by the general term ‘desirable.’…I propose therefore to define Pleasure…as a feeling which, when experienced by intelligent beings, is at least implicitly apprehended as desirable or—in the case of comparison—preferable.” (Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics) The attitude view (also known as ‘preference hedonism’) • Pleasure is an attitude to an experience. • Pleasure is “desirable consciousness”— experience that, when felt, is liked for its own sake because of the way it feels • What makes an experience pleasant is that it is desired; the more it is wanted, the more pleasant it is • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvQViPB AvPk Enjoyable Pains? Enjoyable Pains? Sensation vs attitude • The sensation and attitude views can potentially give quite different verdicts on happiness. How happy is Lawrence while putting out the match? – Sensation view: In pain = unhappy! – Attitude view: In pain but not suffering = not unhappy at all! • Important value question for later: is it pain or only suffering that reduces our well-being? “Happiness Hedonism” The hedonic conception sometimes goes by “hedonism”; this label is potentially highly misleading as it suggests narrow short-term, selfish pleasure-seeking. Long-term hedonic happiness = a positive balance of pleasure over pain (suffering) over the long term All are desirable experiences “Happiness hedonism” • The hedonic conception is sometimes called “hedonism” but this label is potentially highly misleading as it suggests short-term selfish sensory pleasure-seeking. • The hedonic theory does *NOT* say that happiness consists in short-term, selfish sensory pleasure-seeking. The hedonic conception • A person is happy at a time if and only if she feels more pain than pleasure at that time • Long-term hedonic happiness = a positive balance of pleasure over pain (suffering) over the long term • A person has a happy life if and only if she experienced more pain than pleasure over her whole life The ‘Felicific’ Calculus We can measure• Discrete moments • Discrete moments • Total happiness • Average happiness Quantitative vs. Qualitative Hedonism • Bentham says: “Quantity of pleasure being equal, pushpin is as good as poetry” • Mill says: quality of pleasure matters too. ‘Higher’ pleasures are more central to happiness: “Better to be Socrates dissatisfied, than a pig satisfied” ‘The Paradox of Hedonism’ • The self-conscious pursuit of pleasure is self-defeating • “Those only are happy ... who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness... Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness along the way... Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so” (Mill, Autobiography, 1909, p. 64). Empirical Evidence • Schooler, Ariely, Lowenstein. (See also, for e.g., Elizabeth Dunn (2008)) Emotional State Theory • Happiness is an affective (felt) state distinct from pleasure, which involves not just having many pleasant experiences, but more importantly being in an underlying psychological state that disposes you to have lots of pleasant experiences • E.g. irritability • Occurrent versus dispositional states Emotional State Theory • Need not involve conscious pleasure/enjoyment • E.g.“Flow”: valued activity, clear goals, concentration, a loss of self- consciousness, a distorted sense of time, immediacy, a balance between skill and ability, personal control (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi). Pleasure lacks ‘causal depth’ • Pleasures and pains are occurrent episodes, but happiness is essentially dispositional • “Hedonistic happiness is an essentially episodic …phenomenon. But happiness is obviously not just the having of a certain kind of experience, or even lots of them. It is rather a deeper psychological condition incorporating the more or less stable underlying mental states that determine, in part and among other things, the kind of experience that will occur. It is a substantially dispositional phenomenon. It tells us not just about subjects’ histories, but also about their current conditions and propensities for the near future. It is forward-looking…Hedonism is thus fundamentally wrong about the kind of mental state that happiness is. It appears to commit something of a category mistake” (Haybron 2001, p. 510. It. added). “Shallow and Fleeting Pleasures” • Hedonism is too inclusive: it allows all sorts of pleasures—even the most (psychologically) “shallow” and “fleeting”—to count toward happiness: • “Yet such pleasures manifestly play no constitutive role in determining how happy a person is. One’s enjoyment of eating crackers, hearing a good song, sexual intercourse, scratching an itch, solving a puzzle, playing football, and so forth, need not have the slightest impact on one’s level of happiness (though, of course, they may). I enjoy, get pleasure from, a cheeseburger, yet I am patently not happier thereby” (Daniel Haybron, 2001, p. 505). • “Intuitively, the problem seems to be that such [“shallow” and “fleeting”] pleasures don’t reach “deeply” enough… They just don’t get to us; they flit through consciousness and that’s the end of it….This consideration alone appears to undermine any hedonistic account of [happiness]” (Haybron 2001, p. 505). Emotional State Theory • “To be happy is for one’s overall emotional condition to be broadly positive—involving stances of attunement, engagement and endorsement—with negative central affective states and mood propensities only to a minor extent” (Haybron, The Pursuit of Unhappiness, Oxford: OUP, 2008, p. 147). ‘Three Faces of Happiness’ (Daniel Haybron, The Pursuit of Unhappiness 2008, pp. 111-122) • 1. Endorsement – Joy (sadness); – Cheeriness (irritability) • 2. Engagement – Openness & Exuberance (listlessness); – Flow (boredom/ennui) • 3. Attunement – Peace of Mind (anxiety) – Confidence (insecurity) – Uncompression (compression) Questions/Objections • 1. Is Haybron correct that shallow and fleeting pleasures and pains don’t many any difference to happiness? e.g. Suppose you’re feeling grumpy. A friend gives you a shoulder rub. It’s not enough to cheer you up, but it feels nice, and temporarily takes your mind off feeling grumpy. Did the rub make you a bit happier? • 2. Is Haybron correct that you literally can’t be happy if your mood base isn’t positive, even though your actual experience is pleasant? Review • Is happiness a feeling? • If so, is this feeling captured by the hedonic conception? • Or emotional state theory? Review • Is happiness a feeling? • If so, is this feeling captured by hedonism? • Or affective state theory? So far… We’ve considered affective (“feel-good”) theories of happiness • The Hedonic conception, and • Emotional State Theory Happiness as feeling good Happiness as (perceived) success • Now, we’ll consider two more theories of happiness • 3. Perceived Desire-Fulfillment Theory Happiness = fulfilling your desires—or at least believing that you are • 4. Life satisfaction Theory Happiness = a positive attitude to your life. Do you have—or do you think you have—the life that you want? Perceived Desire-Fulfillment Theory • To be happy is to believe that you are satisfying (fulfilling) your desires, apart from how you feel Desire “Fulfillment” • N.B. “Fulfillment” here is a semi-technical term, meaning that what you desire has come true; it does not refer to a feeling E.g. “She fulfilled the degree requirements” Wanting vs Liking • Can you satisfy your desires without feeling good? wanting vs. liking • Can people really get what they want and feel bad? Decision vs. Experience Utility • We often make choices that don’t maximise good feelings long-term (Daniel Kahneman) “miswanting” (Glibert & Wilson) • We want what we do not like and we fail to want what we do like • Miswanting is the explanation for why we fail to maximise enjoyment Miswanting occurs because • we imagine the wrong effect e.g. celebrity Wanting ≠ Liking Perceived Desire-Fulfillment Theory • “Take every proposition A is thinking at the moment, multiply the degree to which it is believed by the degree to which it is desired, add up all the products, and the sum is A’s degree of happiness” (Wayne Davis, “A Theory of Happiness”, American Philosophical Quarterly 18,2 (April, 1981), p. 113.) Perceived desire fulfillment is different from the hedonic conception because the perceived satisfaction of all your desires (not just desired feelings) counts directly toward your happiness And allows that you can be happy without experiencing pleasure (e.g. ‘suffering artist’) Local vs. Global Satisfaction • Local fulfillments—even many of them— need not add up to a fulfilling life • Happiness is more global: To be happy is to be satisfied with your life The Life-Satisfaction Theory is • Widely accepted among • Philosophers: Tatarkiewicz, Telfer, Brandt, Sumner, Nozick, and Kekes • Psychologists and empirical researchers: “Considering everything, how satisfied are you with your life? Very satisfied? Moderately Satisfied? Not at all satisfied?” Judgement or Emotion?