Happy Mind: The Philosophy and Science of Happiness

 

 

 

When we say, then, that pleasure is the end and aim, we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality, as we are understood to do by some through ignorance, prejudice, or wilful misrepresentation," he wrote in a letter to Menoeceus. "By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul. It is not an unbroken succession of drinking-bouts and of revelry, not sexual lust, not the enjoyment of the fish and other delicacies of a luxurious table, which produce a pleasant life; it is sober reasoning, searching out the grounds of every choice and avoidance, and banishing those beliefs through which the greatest tumults take possession of the soul."

Another ethical hedonist, John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), made a distinction between 'higher' (intellectual) pleasures and 'lower' (bodily) pleasures and argued in Utilitarianism (1863) that: "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied."

More recently, Fred Feldman defended in Pleasure and the Good Life: Concerning the Nature, Varieties, and Plausibility of Hedonism (2004) a form of hedonism which emphasises attitudinal pleasure (the pleasure we take when we are pleased about something, such as the health of our children or having learnt a new language), as opposed to sensory pleasure (the pleasurable feelings associated with a massage, tasty food, and sex). "I am like Epicurus," writes Feldman. "I have no interest in defending the idea that sensory pleasure is the chief good for man."

According to Feldman, the intrinsic value of a life is entirely determined by the intrinsic values of the episodes of intrinsic attitudinal pleasure and pain contained in the life. The value of each episode of pleasure and pain is 'attitude-adjusted', which means that the pleasure we take in mental, moral and aesthetic objects is assumed to always be better in itself than the pleasure taken in bodily objects. As Feldman admits, it is not clear why this should be so. "Perhaps it is nothing more than this: if we make these assumptions, the theory will generate the numbers we (or some of us, anyway) want it to generate," he concedes.

Some hedonists, true to reputation, are more enthusiastic about sensory pleasure. Aristippus of Cyrene (435-350 BC) is alleged to have put the senses first. Most of his writings have been lost, so it's difficult to know for certain, but it seems he regarded bodily pleasures as more valuable than intellectual ones, and near-term pleasures as preferable to long-term ones (perhaps because long-term pleasures are less certain).

Unlike Mill, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) made no distinction between 'higher' and 'lower' pleasures. What mattered to Bentham were the intensity, the duration and the certainty associated with episodes of pleasure (and pain). The best actions were those which brought about the most intense, long-lasting and certain pleasure (and the least pain).

Still, even these forms of hedonism don't mean we should necessarily spend our days scoffing cream cakes or downing pints, as these behaviours soon cause indigestion and hangover, not to mention the unpleasant long-term side-effects. According to Feldman, "given an uncontroversial set of assumptions about the pleasures of good health, the possession of a rewarding job, and a happy and secure family life [a form of hedonism of this kind] might imply that the Good Life is much less scandalous."

Hedonism is not just about maximising pleasure. It is also about minimising suffering. Jamie Mayerfeld, author of Suffering and Moral Responsibility (1999), argues that "the relief of suffering is morally more urgent than the promotion of happiness". So, for example, he believes it is morally imperative to anaesthetise patients to spare them the agony of surgery, but there is no comparable obligation to provide them with ecstasy-inducing drugs.

"Relieving agony is morally urgent in a way that bestowing ecstasy is not morally urgent," he says.

According to Mayerfeld all pleasure is intrinsically good and all pain is intrinsically bad, but some pain is instrumentally good (it brings about good consequences), as in the case of educative suffering. In his book, he writes that "both tragedy and comedy narrate the painful learning of valuable lessons". He adds, however, that "we have a tendency to minimise the evil of suffering through retrospective distortions of what suffering really means" and that "while some pain is instrumentally good, a lot of pain is instrumentally bad".

Feldman stresses the importance of defining exactly what ethical hedonism is about and what all ethical hedonist theories have in common. He argues ethical hedonism is a theory about what makes a life good for the one who lives it. A life might be highly beneficial to others, but devoid of joy, or it might be aesthetically good, "a fine subject for a moving and beautiful biography", but again not so pleasant to live. The question which ethical hedonism answers, however, is that of what makes a life good in itself, what makes it an outstanding life for the one who lives it. And the hedonist answer is that the good life is the pleasant life.

An alternative might be to say that the good life is the life in which the one who lives it achieves most of his/hers goals. According to the hedonist, however, such a life would only be a good life if the person enjoyed his/her achievements. Writing a masterpiece, running a charity shop and winning Miss Universe only make a life a good life for the one who lives it if they give pleasure to that person. Which isn't to say that some achievements (such as running a charity shop) won't be beneficial to others; they may well improve the lives of others, but the ethical hedonist, according to Feldman, is dealing with a different question.

Having said this, Bentham and Mill argued that a good action was one which promoted "the greatest happiness for the greatest number", which suggests they had a different form of hedonism in mind, a hedonism which may even motivate someone to lead a life of sacrifice. Indeed, defining what all ethical hedonist theories have in common is hard; Feldan devotes a whole chapter to the subject and comes to the conclusion that "a theory is a form of hedonism [if and only if] it entails that every ultimate atom of value is an attribute of some sort of pleasure".

Feldman and Mayerfeld recognise that ethical and psychological hedonism are not popular theories in philosophy. Feldman thinks that ethical hedonism can be rehabilitated and shows how the form of hedonism he proposes can fend off the objections which have traditionally put people off hedonism. Mayerfeld, on the other hand, does not identify himself as a hedonist. Although he thinks that pleasure is intrinsically good and pain intrinsically bad, he believes that there are other goods beside happiness – such as life, knowledge, virtue, accomplishment, autonomy, liberty, deep personal relationships, beauty, and the natural world – and other evils beside suffering, such as ignorance and wickedness. Feldman denies these are intrinsic goods and evils, although he thinks they are often extrinsic goods.

"I would also say that an intrinsically good thing happens when someone takes pleasure in knowledge, or beauty, or virtue," he says. "They are things that deserve to have pleasure taken in them; so when someone takes pleasure in one of them, that's extra good."

Both philosophers are critical of psychological hedonism, the theory that we are motivated by pleasure and pain alone.  "I dismiss psychological hedonism without much discussion," says Feldman. "It's a non-starter." Mayerfeld agrees: "Psychological hedonism is very obviously wrong. People often chose goods other than personal pleasure. There are endless examples. When psychological hedonists are presented with these examples they answer with strained and implausible responses."

A psychological hedonist may say a mother who puts the good of her children first does so because it brings her pleasure. Since pleasure and pain are the means evolution fashioned to motivate us, the psychological hedonist will say we must be motivated by them, even when it does not seem so at first; it's in our nature, it's how motivation works. But, according to Mayerfeld, "the strict psychological hedonist only re-describes our desires, but not in a particularly persuasive way. The point is that we have all sorts of desires for all sorts of things, and our desires come in all shapes and sizes. We have short-term and long-term desires, lower-order and higher-order desires [desires about what sort of desires we should have], conscious and semi-conscious desires, local and global desires [...], appetites and volitions, cravings and ambitions, desires concerning ourselves and desires concerning other people [...] We desire a great many things besides pleasure."

True, natural selection makes us seek the things that promote our survival and the reproduction of our genes by making these things pleasurable and making pleasure a powerful motive, but Mayerfeld argues that it can also make us desire these things independently of the pleasure they bring.

"My armchair intuition is that natural selection very cleverly employs both of these mechanisms," he says. "The first complies with psychological hedonism, while the second contradicts it. I see the second mechanism at work in what seems to me the clear evidence of experience that we desire survival, sex, companionship, power, status, and children, even beyond the pleasure associated with these things."

It doesn't seem as if pleasure and the absence of pain are all we desire – certainly that is not most people's conscious experience – but we might agree with Feldamn and other ethical hedonists that a good life is a pleasurable life. Or we might agree with Mayerfeld that pleasure and the absence of pain are amongst the many things which make life a good life. If so, how far are we prepared to go to get rid of suffering and maximise pleasure? We can take indirect steps, such as creating better living conditions for ourselves and others, but there is also a more direct strategy. If pleasure and pain are realised in the brain – if the brain is the hardware on which our feelings, emotions and thoughts run – then it should be possible to create more joy and reduce suffering by altering our brain states through drugs or other interventions.

In The Hedonistic Imperative David Pearce argues that permanent bliss is biologically possible, and can be obtained by following a twin-track approach in which subtypes of both dopaminergic and serotonergic function are boosted. He believes that thanks to genetic engineering and nanotechnology we will be in a position to abolish suffering in all sentient life. What he has in mind is a future in which we will redesign our neural architectures, replacing the metabolic pathways of pain and malaise with a motivational system based on gradients of bliss. Pearce recognised the project is extremely ambitious, but he reckons it is nevertheless feasible. He also argues it is ethically mandatory.

Pablo Stafforini believes that Pearce's ideas follow straightforwardly from a utilitarian moral theory (a theory according to which an action is a good action to the extent that it maximises pleasure and happiness and minimises suffering).

"Assuming that the sort of technologies that [Pearce] anticipates, like genetic engineering and nanotechnology, eventually become accessible to human agents, they will dramatically increase the number of options available to them, and will correlatively alter their utilitarian moral priorities," Stafforini says. "A few hundred years ago it was impossible for someone living in the US or the UK to use her Mastercard to make a $200 donation to Oxfam; today this alternative is open to any middle class westerner. Since such a donation can do lots of good, a technical advance in telecommunications gave also rise to a new kind of moral duty. Similarly, the day our descendants reach a level of technological development such that they can rewrite the human genotype and redesign the global ecosystem will also be the day when they will face the duty to use that technology to promote happiness more effectively."

What's more Stafforini thinks this duty has retrospective consequences: "If our present choices can determine whether these future agents will successfully develop this technology, we also have a moral duty to make sure that they do. This is because utilitarians not only have a moral obligation to do the best they can, but to ensure other agents, even those in different temporal locations, do their best too. And since the possible amount of goodness that these future people could do is so fabulously great, I believe it quite follows that the first priority for utilitarians who find themselves living in the dawn of the third millennium is to do whatever they can to ensure that anticipated technologies are used by future people in the best possible way – to make the sentient world as good as possible."

Not everyone embraces Pearce's ideas like Stafforini. Feldman, for example, says he would need to know a lot more about the costs and benefits of this imagined abolition. He points out that blowing up the world would also abolish suffering (as there would be no sentient creatures left to experience unpleasant feelings), but that would hardly be an improvement. Mayerfeld thinks the idea of replacing pain and malaise with gradients of pleasure is worth pondering. He shares Pearce's condemnation of suffering, but stresses there is "a world of difference between transient moderate pains and extreme suffering" and thinks our priority should be to eliminate the latter, by preventing and ending violent conflicts of all kinds, as well as the abuse of human rights, and by putting an end to preventable diseases, providing universal education and the possibility of employment, and putting a stop to the mistreatment of animals.