Happiness & Public Policy

If you want to be happpy, marriage, family, & friendship matter way more than money. In The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies, Robert Lane’s argument is that market societies induce people to spend their time and energy acquiring greater material wealth at the expense of companionship, and, as a consequence, happiness suffers.

But if companionship makes us happier than stuff, why don’t we demand more companionship and less stuff? Lane seems to hypothesize that there is a diffference in the salience of satisfaction that biases us in favor of stuff. I found this interesting:

Adaptation is the key. If people can adapt to the chronic absence of their arms and legs [ww: as opposed to their temporary or intermittent absence?]– as they do — they will also adapt to absence of friendship, and it is this adaptation that accounts for the lack of demand by the lonely for friends. But, as with the elderly, this adaptation may have a hidden cost, for “the presence of a familiar person lowers blood pressure under stress, [and] . . . people whose heart rates rise more in [certain] experiments have high blood pressure two to 15 years later, whether or not they acknowledge being under stress or feeling intense emotion

What I take Lane to be saying is that companionship adds a subtle positive tone to experience, and we report ourselves much happier when our experience is shot through with that tone. The positive tone is the correlate of an objective organic good. (Not clear the way the causation goes here.) But the quality of the experience is subtle, the source is not easily attributable, and we quickly adapt to its absence, and so are not easily motivated to seek out its cause.

The hedonic surge from material consumption, however, is intense and immediate, and its source is easily attributable. However, due to habituation to the presence of new stuff, there is little lasting satisfaction from consumption. We’d be better off cultivating our relationships. However, because the fleeting hedonic payoff of consumption is more psychologically salient, we’re more easily moved to go for a fresh consumption high. Thus, we’ll tend to make ourselves less happy, and less healthy, as we consume.

Do you find this convincing?

Brad DeLong takes issue with my recent attacks no utilitarianism. In reply to my claim, against Layard, that if happiness is self-evidently good, then so are lots of other things, such as freedom, DeLong writes:

The response–against which Wilkinson has no defense except to issue squidlike clouds of obfuscating ink–would be that Wilkinson believes that if he were to sacrifice his freedom for his happiness, that if he were to do so he would then look back on the choices he made and look ahead to his future life, and that he would be unhappy. If Wilkinson says otherwise–that he would look back on the choices he made and look ahead to his future life and be happy, but that he would still regret what he had done and wish he had done otherwise–Wilkinson is simply saying, “Baa baa buff.” He would be demonstrating that he does not understand the rules of conversation using the English language.

I wonder if DeLong has carried on a conversation in the English language. Games of rational and moral justification sometimes but rarely terminate in reasons of happiness, much less in reasons of pleasure. He must hear “Baa baa buff” almost every time someone explains himself. Or BD just refuses to listen, uncharitably reads his philosophical theories into people’s heads, and so assumes that they are offering reasons of happiness when they are evidently not. DeLong’s argument, if I am making it out correctly, is that the following proposition deserves a little linguist’s star of semantic deviance:

(a) Happiness without freedom is not worth having.

English speakers, lend me your ears! Does (a) violate the intuitive semantic constraints of it’s constituent terms?

Well, if “worth having” in English means “conducive to pleasure” it sure does. But that’s not what “worth having” means in English. That’s what it means in Benthamese, the vulgar dialect of the morally insensate (economists, Asperger’s cases, etc.) “Worth having” in English means something like” valuable” or “good,” and there is surpassingly little evidence to be gleaned from the semantic practice of competent English speakers that “valuable” and “good” are synonymous with “pleasurable” or “happy making”. (a) is far from “Baa baa buff.” In context, it’s surely true!

My defense, then, is the truth of the claim that there are conditions under which being happy would be worse than not being happy. I take it that DeLong would agree that if a mad scientist rigged his brain such that slaughtering his own beloved children would bring him the most exalted, never-ending, guilt-free bliss, this would not be happiness worth having. Or is this, too, just “baa baa buff?”

Anyway, refusing to do violence to one’s language, or, more importantly, the complexity of moral experience, in the service of an ill-supported theory does not strike me as a project of obfuscation.

More later on Delong’s inability to understand the experience machine thought experiment.

I think I need to stop arguing with Layard about utilitarianism because he’s really just too philosophically inept to take all that seriously. The chapter at the middle of Happiness defending the principle of utility as the sole standard for judging right action and public policy is just laughably dumb.

If I was still TA-ing ethical theory classes, and Layard turned this in, he’d get a solid “B”:

Why should we take the greatest happiness as the goal for society? Why not some other goal–or indeed many? What about health, autonomy, accomplishment or freedom? The problem with many goals is that they often conflict, and then we have to balance them against each other. So we naturally look for one ultimate goal that enables us to judge other goals by how they contribute to it.

Happiness is that ultimate goal because, unlike all other goals, it is self-evidently good.

How is it that health, autonomy, accomplishment, and freedom are not self-evidently good? Layard will want to insist that we only want these other things for the sake of happiness. But that is just so much table pounding, and it is false. I am, in fact, willing to sacrifice some measure of happiness to ensure my autonomy, or to accomplish something of great value. I would, in fact, be willing to face suffering and death if that was required to preserve my freedom. And it’s pretty easy to point out that happiness is instrumental to other values. I want happiness because I will be motivated to accomplish great things if I am happy. I am more likely to be benevolent and kind if I am happy. I am more likely to have a meaningful, successful intimate relationship. I will live longer if I am happy, and it is good to live. Etc. If we are going to admit that it makes sense to talk about things being self-evidently good, then happiness surely is one of those things. And so are all the other goods Layard mentions. He gets nowhere.

Layard is right that a plurality of values requires balancing. But there is no way around this on a personal level, and especially not on a public level.

Individual moral intelligence involves weighing competing values and making judgments about their ordering according to standards that vary with context, relationship, social role, and more. It is hard to be a good person because it is hard to make out all the morally relevant characteristics of one’s situation, and it is hard to know how to trade values against each other, and to be modest but resolute in the face of complexity–not because it is hard to be motivated to maximize something ridiculous like net aggregate utility.

Layard’s larger problem is that he totally fails to grasp that the central problem of liberalism is how to accomodate and balance the pluralitiy of value conceptions of citizens in a cosmopolitan society. That Layard thinks he is in possession of the one true philosophy of value that allows him to rank other values is quite nice for Layard. But the very fact that I am spending my time writing a blog post disagreeing with Layard about utilitarianism demonstrates that not everyone agrees that his is the correct conception of value, or the correct standard for determining public policy. And the simple fact that we are having this disagreement, whether or not Layard is right about utilitarianism, is a reason not to accept utilitarianism as the sole arbiter of our public rules. Even if utilitarianism, or any comprehensive conception of value, is true, it cannot therefore be asserted as the legitimate basis of a just society as long as people reasonably reject it. None among us has the special authority to declare that ours is the public philosophy, and others will just have to live with it, like it or not.

Ironically, Layard accuses anyone who is not a utilitarian of paternalism, because he apparently thinks that if some value is a value, then the state ought to promote it, but that if a value doesn’t register as hedons, then you’re forcing people to act in the interest of alleged values that they don’t benefit from experientially.

However, Layard is a transparent paternalist. If you think that things other than happiness are good, then Layard will just say that you are wrong, have no moral right to act for values other than happiness, and that the state may force you to do what “science” reveals to be conducive to happiness, whether you most want happiness or not.

If one has aspirations for the totalizing rule of one’s comprehensive moral conception, it seems that one should accept a fair burden of persuasion. But Layard treats classic objections to utilitarianism as annoyances, or bad manners, and brushes them off with incompetent “argumentation.” Here’s what he says about Nozick’s famous experience machine:

If offered the chance, asks Nozick, would you plug in? Of course, many people would not, for all sorts of reasons. They would not trust the machine to deliver what it promised, so they would prefer to keep their real autonomy. Or they might have obligations to others that they could not perform if they were inert. And so on. Thus this is a weak test case, especially because it describes a situation so far from our reality that we have almost become a different animal.

That the machine perfectly delivers as promised is stipulated. Inability to entertain the counterfactual–to actually conduct the thought esperiment–is not an argument against it. And “obligations to others they could not perform”? Well, yes. This is precisely the sort of thing people might worry about because people generally think they ought to meet their obligations, regardless of the hedonic payoff. That’s part of Nozick’s point, dipshit. If Layard was honest, he would bite the bullet and say, yes, plug in. And if there was an experience machine for each of us that would maximize the hedonic quality of our experience, then we would be obligated individually and collectively to forgo a real life of actual action and actual engagement, and instead climb into our pods on the Matrix pod farm, and dream sweet virtual dreams until we die. If Layard will not deign to explain to us why, despite our deep sense of revulsion, we ought to see this scenario as the happiest of all possible circumstance, he cannot expect us to acquiesce to his Benthamite Philosopher Technocrat fantasy.

This book is just a philosophical/methodological disaster.

Layard cites a study by Carol Ryff that purports to show that “purpose in life, autonomy, positive relationships, personal growth and self-acceptance” are highly correlated with self-reported SWB. OK. No suprise. What does Layard think this shows? That Mill was wrong about the existence of qualitatively “higher” pleasures.

Thus Mill was right in his intuition about the true sources of happiness, but he was wrong to argue that some times of pleasure are intrinsically better than others

Of course, it doesn’t even begin to establish this. It might simply establish that people who have more intrinsically valuable experiences tend to report that they are happier on the whole. That’s what Mill thinks, after all.

Layard goes on to say that Mill’s high/low distinction is “inherently paternalistic.” But the only reason to say that is if you, like Layard, are an irremediable paternalist, and take the existence of higher pleasures as a reason to coerce people into having more of them and less of the lower. That is, Mills distinction is paternalistic only if you think the fact that something has special value on one conception of value immediately implies that the state should do something about it. Absurd.

More:

[S]ome unhealthy enjoyments, like that of the sadist, should be avoided because they decrease the happiness of others. But no good feeling is bad in itself–it can only be bad because of its consequences.

Now, I understand that that’s just a restatement of Benthamite egalitarianism among pleasures, but it doesn’t pass the straight face test, does it? Many emotions (or any “judgment sensitive attitudes”, in Scanlon’s terms) are themselves morally evaluable. And it strikes me as exceedingly dubious to assert that the problem with taking pleasure in the rape of children, the torture of kittens, or the betrayal of those who trust you has to do with their consequences for happiness.

The reason Mill distinguishes between higher or lower pleasures is that the distinction is real, he’s a good philosopher, and so sees that it must be accomodated within his theory. The problem with Mill’s move for Mill is that it points beyond utilitarianism toward the independent value of properties, such as beauty, cognitive complexity, and truth in virtue of which higher pleasures are higher.

Looking through the literature on happiness (those in the know say “subjective well-being,” or just SWB), it seems clear that a good number of those involved have egalitarian or welfare liberal politics. A lot of these folks profess to being utilitarians of some sort. And there seems to be a push for more redistribution, less inequality, etc. But I think I’m detecting something amiss, here.

Much of the upshot of the literature is that extra money doesn’t do much for you; that people tend become accustomed to their level of material comfort; that people have happiness set-points to which they recur after positive or negative spikes in affect. The flip side of “a lot of money doesn’t make you happy” is “not so much money doesn’t make you unhappy.” So the problem with large economic inequalities isn’t the happiness gap, because the happiness gap is small.

Now, it turns out that one’s perception of one’s place in the income distribution matters to happiness, such that people lower in the distribution are less happy in virtue of being lower in the distribution (or thinking they are). But, aside from total egalitarianism, which isn’t likely to make anyone happy, there is nothing to be done about this. There is always going to be some distribution. There is always a bottom and a top quintile. The point being, I’m a bit puzzled at this point by the attachment to utilitarianism AND SWB research AND egalitarianism.

My hunch is that these folks aren’t really utilitarians after all. They have a prior intuition about the injustice of inequality, and the justice of progressive redistribution. Then, they attempt to undermine resistance to higher tax rates on the wealthy by pointing to research that they interpret to say that this won’t make the wealthy any less happy, and so, Why worry? The trouble is, it won’t make the poor (in a country like the US where the poor are already rich) much happier either, and won’t do anything to change relative position in the distribution. So what’s the point? The point is more progressive redistribution, to which many folks are committed to prior to and independent of utilitarianism or their interest in happiness.

In a way, it turns out that dogmatic welfare liberals are just like dogmatic libertarians. I’ve run into a lot of libertarians who think that a perfect libertarian regime MUST be most conducive to happiness. Because if it wasn’t, then that would be a strong argument against the perfect libertarian regime, against which there is no strong argument. Unsurprisingly, a lot of welfare liberals think this way too. Start with your political commitments, and then argue that everything good must revolve around your fixed point. This is fun at parties, but it tends not to make for good science.

Right now, I’m looking at Richard Layard’s Happiness. He’s an unreconstructed Benthamite, and his view seems to be that evidence on the neurological reward system provides an account of objective utility. And because there’s a neurological correlate to utility, we should think of utilitarianism as the most scientifically respectable of all moral theories, and use it as a guide to social policy, in just the way Bentham intended.

This got me wondering: is the reward system unitary, with a single architecture, or is the reward system implicated in different ways by different cognitive programs or difference kinds of decision tasks. (One possibility is that pleasure/benefit is determined by different systems than pain/costs, and so it may not be that units of plan and units of pleasure trade off in any simple on-to-one sort of way.)

In this article from Nature Reviews, neuro-ethicist Bill Casebeer argues that a virtue-theoretic approach best captures what’s going on in the brain. Moral judgment and motivation is not in all (most?) cases driven by judgments of utility. For example “hot” judgments in social contexts activating theory-of-mind systems probably don’t implicate systems that would calculate either individual or collective expected utility.

This may be important for a number of reasons. The most interesting to me has to do with possible conflicts social policy that is designed to maximize expected social utility and the affective/motivational systems that actually drive behavior. Rawls’s argument against utilitarianism, in a nutshell, is that it is inconsistent with our “sense of justice” and thus utilitarian principles will not gain our willing compliance, and will therefore fail to establish a stable social order. The utilitarian can retort that motivational dispositions are a constraint that utilitarianism must take into account. But then it seems that the principles of utility basically end up mirroring the principles that underlie actual human motivation, which will be doing all the work. At which point it seems otiose to say that what we’re trying to do with policy is maximize happiness, when it would just be more accurate to say that we’re trying to come up with principles people take themselves to have a reason to endorse, where those reasons are only sometimes reasons of utility. The fact that the dopaminergic system or whatever lights up whenever we do whatever we do has nothing interesting to do with what we take to be valuable, or what we should be shooting for socially.

I guess I’m trying to say something to the effect that nothing about the brain actually helps a utilitarian like Layard justify a Benthamite approach to social policy. The reasons for rejecting utilitarianism were never that we don’t know where utility is in the brain, but that it wreaks havoc with native moral judgment and cuts against the grain of our motivational dispositions. Brain science helps us understand why this is the case. We are natural-born Aristotelians (or maybe Humean sentimentalists) unlikely to be moved by comprehensive schemes of utility maximization. Does anyone who might know think the evidence supports this argument?