I just finished teaching Kantian ethics in my ethics courses at Truman, and it strikes me now that Kant makes fairly perspicuous something that has long been at the heart of my concern that happiness as "subjective well-being" often gets over-valued (or, its centrality over-emphasized): "...good will appears to constitute the indispensable condition of even being worthy of happiness."
I'm not entirely sure why I haven't noticed clearly that this is the same general position I've staked out, for example, in my article in Philosophy Now, where I suggest that even if an Eichmann feels happy, we may not be inclined to say that he is happy, all things considered. (Sorry, it looks like the access to this article is no longer free...) That's just a way of saying that even if he feels happy, we think that he has no right to--is not worthy of--his happiness. Surely, something similar drives our assessment of why we think it not worthwhile to plug into Nozick's experience machine. And this is all could be linked, I think, to the distinction between authentic and inauthentic forms of happiness discussed by L.W. Sumner.
Of course, it's one thing if we can all agree on a formal level that happiness which is purchased through the most egregious forms of immorality and cruelty is worthless (in the big picture sense). There's still a lot in morality that's "up for grabs," and so questions about forms of "worthwhile happiness" seem to become moral questions.
So that makes me wonder: what are we saying when we opine, "Well, at least he's happy"? (How silver is that lining?)
Friday, October 24, 2008
Kant on Happiness
Monday, October 20, 2008
The Problem With "Happiness"...
...is that it means too many different things. I guess this is why Jonathan Lear has called it an "enigmatic signifier."
(Of course, that's not really a problem, unless you're caught up in a particular picture. I'm slowly trying to claw my way out of a particular (Aristotelian) frame so that I can think more clearly about what is most important to discuss about "happiness." This is the clearest thought I had today.)
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Busy in Kirksville
A few updates:
I'm settling into my new home in Kirksville, Missouri, home of Truman State University. I built a 12 foot x 6.5 foot bookcase, and am starting to load it up. Very happy-making activity. I'm also working on my Truman webpage, here.
Mark Vernon, whose book on The Philosophy of Friendship
I'm short on time for philosophizing about happiness, but want to keep the blog "alive" until the spring semester rolls around, when I'll be thinking about it on the clock, so to speak.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Whence Happiness?
I'm not sorry that I haven't been posting. I've been preparing to move, which is happening this weekend, preparing for my fall classes (modern philosophy, philosophy & public affairs, not to mention the two sections of intro to ethics), and working on some papers/future chapters for another project (a spawn of some of the things I was working on in my dissertation). So happiness is mostly off the radar, and probably will be until I start working on my Happiness & the Good Life class this winter.
That said, the new issue of Philosophy Now features a piece I wrote (some time ago, it seems now) on the tensions between psychological notions of happiness and the philosophical tendency to "moralize" happiness. See here.
I'm also quite looking forward to the release of Dan Haybron's book The Pursuit of Unhappiness in November. (You can see penultimate drafts of chapters here.)
Friday, June 13, 2008
Release Your Inner Riley...
I recently stumbled upon The Short and Incredibly Happy Life of Riley
The book explores the idea that people are miserable because (as Epicurus would have put it), they are plagued with "vain desires" for things that aren't really necessary for happiness. The illustrations of the excessiveness of human desire is vivid and graphic (which is one of the less "childlike" aspects of the book). Riley, on the other hand, is a rat who was "born happy," and who is content with his simple lot in life. The irony here, the author points out, is that Riley is perfectly happy but lives only a short time, while most humans live much longer, and are often miserable. So, it's not a good idea to compare your life to that of an animal, because the results might be depressing.
So, give up all those vain desires, and "Release your inner Riley."
It's a funny book, but as one of the Amazon reviewers (E.R. Bird) points out, raises some philosophical questions, too, such as whether happiness is the only thing that matters. (There's also, of course, Mill's question about whether it would, in this case, be better to be a rat satisfied than a human being dissatisfied.) But the point about desires is well-done, despite the didactic nature of the book.
Of course, we also might worry about the fact that Riley was "born happy," since that more or less seals the deal. Still, it would be a fun book to have laying around, and I'm thinking about having a "storytime" with it in my "Happiness and the Good Life" class, which I'll be teaching this fall at Truman State University.
Oh yeah, I got a job at Truman State University. And I get to teach a (self-designed) course called "Happiness and the Good Life." How great is that!
UPDATE (6/26): It turns out I won't be teaching the happiness class until the Spring, as a result of some other teaching needs that came up last minute. Still, no complaints.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Six Myths
I recently came across Joel Kupperman's Six Myths About the Good Life: Thinking About What Has Value
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
The Experience Machine and the Status Quo
Felipe De Brigard, grad student at UNC Chapel Hill, has done some very interesting work on peoples' intuitions about experience machine scenarios. See his post at Experimental Philosophy: "If you like it, does it matter if it's real?", which includes links to two versions of working papers on his studies.
The most interesting part of De Brigard's research is his "reversed" scenarios, in which respondents are asked to consider scenarios in which they are already plugged into experience machines, and are asked whether they would prefer to "return to reality." There are three versions: one in which your "real life" is as a prisoner for life (the negative scenario), one in which you are actually a multimillionaire artist living in Monaco (positive scenario), and one in which you are just a Joe Regular, whose life is comparable to your experienced life in the machine (neutral). In the negative scenario, most people say they would want to stay plugged in, but in the other two scenarios, respondents are split (exactly evenly in the positive scenario, and only slightly in favor of reality (54%) in the neutral scenario).
De Brigard argues that all of this shows that neither the desire for pleasure nor the desire to be connected to reality has any univocal force. On the one hand, the hedonist needs to explain why people in the positive scenario don't want to go back to being a multimillionaire artist; on the other hand, those who think "reality" has value need to explain why still 46% of respondents in the neutral scenario say they would remain plugged in. (The results of the negative scenario aren't really surprising, since presumably life in prison might count as one of those situations in which Nozick allowed that plugging in would be understandably preferable, but also, hedonists might need to explain why anyone would want to unplug in those circumstances.)
De Brigard proposes that what keeps some people from unplugging when already plugged in (and from plugging in why faced with the option) is what's known as a "status quo bias": some people prefer the status quo, whatever it happens to be. What's important here is that this is a motive distinct from both the preference for the most pleasurable experiences and the preference for "being connected to reality." De Brigard's point is that Nozick's way of interpreting what he thought would be general resistance to plugging in doesn't take the "status quo bias" into consideration as a possible explanation. (Additionally, he discusses the problem that many people seem resistant to plugging in because they are skeptical of the reliability of the machine, or its ability to produce "realistic"--and surprising--experiences. In a modified version, which promises perfect reliability and an element of surprise, respondents are roughly indifferent on whether they would plug in--N.B. that De Brigard used a 7-point scale for respondents to rate how strongly their answer to the question, "Would you plug in?" rather than a yes/no response.)
Importantly, De Brigard is fairly silent on normative questions one might ask about all of this. What he's offering is a more textured explanation as to what might be driving respondents' responses to experience machine scenarios, and his point that something other than the value of reality or pleasure seems to figure in (at least for some respondents) is well illustrated. But if the status quo bias is a bias, then we can, of course, ask whether this psychological inclination should figure in to a decision that affects one's whole life.
This is where things get a bit hairy, even with Nozick's original thought experiment, for there are, as I read him, two different readings of what he sought out to do. The first is that he was making a psychological point about what drives our choices, and on this reading, the thought experiment was supposed to show that we (or some of us) care about more than just pleasure. But if De Brigard is right, then what else we (or some of us) care about isn't anything as high-minded as "reality," but is rather just the status quo. Now even if that is right, that doesn't necessarily show that Nozick is wrong, since preferring the status quo, in some situations, is just a way of preferring something other than the maximal amount of pleasure. So, maybe De Brigard's studies actually support (in a way Nozick might not have anticipated) Nozick's basic point.
On the other reading, Nozick isn't just making a psychological point, but is additionally advancing a normative argument that we should care about other things besides "how things feel on the inside," and is using the experience machine--and the fact that many of us would reject it--as an occasion for laying out other things that should guide our decisions: that there is value in actually doing certain things (which explains why we want to actually do them, not just experience doing them), to become certain kinds of people (ditto last parentheses), and to have a "connection to the real world" (ditto, again). Here, one might say that De Brigard's findings, while informative of the actual psychology behind some peoples' responses, is normatively irrelevant. (To put it in a Kantian idiom, e.g., one might say that people who reject the experience machine due to the status quo bias are acting merely from inclination, rejecting it for the wrong sorts of reasons...) So, (and I take it that this point is often made in connection with experimental philosophy's interest in how the "folk" respond to thought experiments) we can't really assume that a deeper psychological understanding of why people respond as they do to the experience machine scenario settles the underlying normative issues which Nozick was trying to address with this thought experiment. But equally, and De Brigard makes this point well, we shouldn't assume that the thought experiment alone can settle those issues either.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Some Advice from Walt Whitman
From the introduction to Leaves of Grass, 1st Edition (1855):
"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body...."
Saturday, May 03, 2008
Beyond Happiness
Some time ago, I mentioned that I'd been thinking about a better way to approach the topic of happiness (or perhaps a novel way of discussing the issues). Here are the first fruits of that re-thinking.
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Happiness: Who's to Judge?
The first thing that any careful discussion of happiness has to deal with is the fact that the term happiness has many distinctive uses. We speak of happy moments and happy lives. Thoughts about what would count as happiness may conjure visions of pleasure on the one hand, and success or achievement on the other. At times, we might think that happiness is just getting what we really want. Sometimes we say that happiness is what really matters in life; other times, we say that there’s more to life than mere happiness (as when we claim that someone is happy when she shouldn’t be). At the root of the term, of course, is the notion of hap or happenstance, and so happiness is also connected to the notion of good fortune, or luck. And yet we often think of happiness as something that is not simply a matter of luck, but something that we can bring into our lives by effort. Claims that any one of these ways of using the term happiness points toward the correct definition of happiness are mere assertions, which turn a blind eye to the other ways we use this term to successfully communicate something about a moment, a person, or the ideal of happiness itself. It is quite easy, when discussing the nature of happiness, to descend into a verbal quibble which simply has no principled resolution.
If we try to take some particular way of thinking about happiness and make it our standard, then we always run into problematic cases. Suppose we hold that happiness is pleasure, and that a happy life is one that is full of pleasure (and relatively devoid of pain and suffering). Then it seems we must say that someone who spend her entire life high on the soma of Huxley’s Brave New World (a perfect drug with amazing highs and no side effects) is possibly living the happiest of lives: her pleasure could not be increased nor her pain (of which she has none) decreased. But when we say things like, “All I want for my children is for them to be happy,” I presume we would not thereby approve of the soma peddler’s proposal that we could give our children this happiness by enrolling in a program that would ensure them of a lifetime supply of soma. Our resistance here shows that in thinking about our children’s happiness, we were thinking about more than pleasure. So, either we were speaking falsely, or there is more to happiness than pleasure. Either way, we’re not enrolling our children in the soma-for-life program.
Or suppose that we hold that happiness is getting what one wants, satisfying one’s desires, and that a happy life is one in which one’s desires are fulfilled. On the one hand, this implies that if we have very few desires—say, just the desire to be alive—then we will be happy. Of course, it’s psychologically impossible to restrict our desires that far, but the point is that we could imagine a very psychologically impoverished person—one who became this way due to political brainwashing, systematic enslavement, and a lack of education—who desired very little, and who was satisfied with her life of involuntary service to a totalitarian power. That isn’t what we want for our children (or whomever else we wish happiness), and so again, either there’s more to life (and what we want for those we love) than happiness, or happiness is more than desire-satisfaction. On the other hand, such a view commits us to the claim that if a moral monster such as Ted Bundy satisfied his desires (in raping and murdering young women), then such people are happy. It is confrontation with cases such as these when we are most ready to give up on happiness, and to declare that other things matter, too, and perhaps to a much greater degree. But why should we sacrifice happiness—this notion which has such a captivating and motivating quality—because some particular conception of happiness implies that such monsters are happy? Why not instead abandon, or qualify, that conception? This is a particularly sticky point for empirical researchers who study (or claim to study) happiness, because they do not want to make judgments about who is happy, or who ought to be counted as happy, based on “normative” or moral considerations. (That’s because science isn’t suppose to tell us what ought to be true, but rather what is true.) At the same time, the most useful conceptions of happiness for empirical research—the view that happiness is pleasure and that it is desire-satisfaction—are precisely the ones that inherit the sorts of problem cases just mentioned.
Finally, suppose we go in for the view that happiness is a matter of achieving or succeeding in certain things. First, of course, we must ask: which things? If we say that it is achieving the satisfaction of our desires, or achieving a high level of pleasure, then we haven’t gotten beyond either of the previous two proposals. If instead we say that happiness involves some particular achievement like becoming a certain kind of person (such as a moral person, a creative person, a socially accomplished person, a healthy person, a rich and famous person, etc.), then we have to explain why that sort of person (or those sorts of achievements) are exactly those which parallel happiness, such that you aren’t happy unless you are that kind of person, and all persons of that kind are, by definition, happy. Such views will often contradict the psychological uses we make of happiness, since we can think of people who have achieved great things, but didn’t feel happy, as well as people whose lives have fallen short of success (in various ways) but who nevertheless manage to see the silver