Paper of the Day
Julia Annas, “Happiness as Achievement,” Daedelus, Spring 2004
Philosophers (and some psychologists, too) will finnd it unsurprising that if you rush to look for empirical measures of an unanalyzed ‘subjective’ phenomenon, the result will be confusion and banality. After all, what is it that the social scientists on the World Database of Happiness are actually measuring? Here is the heart of the problem. Is happiness really something subjective? Is it simply a matter of pleasure, a positive feeling? We can at least hope that it is not, and that we can come to conclusions better than the claim that what anyone needs to be happy is food and possibly meaning.
Annas, one of the world’s experts on the classical conception of human well-being, simply brutalizes the scientific pretensions of the happiness survey approach. The disdainful asides are great. Take footnote 1.
For an amusing example, see
, where “scientists” claim to have solved “one of the greatest mysteries plaguing mankind” by actually giving us a mathematical formula: P + (5 x E) + (3 x H) = happiness, where P = personal characteristics, E = existence, and H = higherorder needs. You compute your formula by answering four questions.
Or this:
I have seen a survey that asks people to measure the happiness of their lives by assigning it a facefrom a spectrum with a very smiley face at one end and a very frowny face at the other. Suppose that you have just won the Nobel Prize; this surely merits the smiliest face. But suppose also that you have just lost your family in a car crash; this surely warrants the frowniest face. So, how happy are you? There is no coherent answer–unless you are supposed to combine these points by picking the indifferent face in the middle!
Annas’s point is that happiness is a global condition that applies to an entire life–an achievement in living–not a transitory feeling, nor even a feeling about how things are going. It is a way that things are going. Our own happiness is something we can be wrong about, and so unlikely to be something captured by a self-report.
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I can’t escape the feeling while reading this that Annas is attempting to elevate what is essentially a dispute about the means of attaining happiness to a conceptual dispute about what happiness ‘is’. Except when she strays into bald assertion, little of what she says seems inconsistent with a subjective notion of happiness that merely happens often to be best realised by “achievement”.
Conchis, I think the dispute about what happiness is is pretty clear. She is saying that it is not feeling good, and it is not getting what you want, whatever it is that you want. She is saying that happiness is a life where action is properly integrated into a proper, coherent, global lifeplan.
Happiness is isn’t the FEELING one gets from a life that makes sense on the whole, and is correctly oriented toward achieving integrated and nested goals. Happiness, in the classical sense Annas is articulating, just IS having a life that fits this description. The feeling usually supervenes on the a life that is structured this way, like a indicator light reporting that things are going well. But if the light is on, and you feel good, but things aren’t actually going well, then you aren’t really happy.
This is a real, substantive dispute about the nature of happiness. Annas is right to point out that there is nothing especially scientific about pretending that the hedonistic or desire satisfaction conception of happiness are the only ones. Additionally, she is right to point out that these conceptions of happiness fail to justice to the way people do in fact conceive of, and talk about, happiness.
I don’t think there is any special barrier to studying happiness in the global achievement sense scientifically. But one is going to have to give up on the primary role of surveys.
I guess there is a long history of scientific, philosophical (and cult) movements who’s first action is to sieze and redefine a common word for their purposes.
I think rejecting surveys is a firm step down that road …
(on a purely practical note though, look at the wasted man hours economists spend each year explaining “demand.”)
This is the first paper I’ve read about on this site that is skeptical of the worth of studies of avowed happiness. I’m very happy to hear that Will would engage in critical reflection about what conclusions can really be drawn from this research.
I would only disagree with the characterization of avowed happiness reports as describing subjective happiness. I think that the standard in surveys is objective, although not necessarily in a good way:
When people apply the term “very happy” or “somewhat unhappy” to themselves, they have to be applying some sort of standard criteria. They might think they are really happier or less happy than others think that they are. They might want to ask the speaker what he means by “happy”. They might not even want to answer (I would be reluctant) for fear of misleading. But if you answer that question you’re still using a word that you know will be taken a certain way based on common understandings. I think its obvious (but underrecognized) that the most striking characteristic of happiness reports is their OBJECTIVITY. Not that they tell us what happiness IS.