Happiness & Public Policy

Matthew Pianalto has written a useful review of John F. Schumaker’s In Search of Happiness. It looks to me like Shumaker is one of those guys who insists on making happiness coextensive with their conception of a good life, and then argues that we’re can’t be happy, even though we think we are, since our lives don’t measure up to his substantive theory of the good.

Schumaker argues that those who conceive of happiness as “subjective well-being” — comprised of the satisfaction of individual desires and the presence of high levels of positive affect (and minimal negative affect) — have failed to recognize that genuine happiness likely consists of more than satisfaction and pleasure. At the very minimum, we must recognize that the quality of a person’s happiness necessarily depends upon the kinds of values which inform a person’s understanding of happiness and thus set the parameters for how one pursues the happy life. On Schumaker’s view, the values of individualist, materialist cultures are far too shallow, amoral, and non-sustainable for their realization to lead to a genuinely happy life. Because of this, Schumaker declares that, “in reality I believe that a heart-felt happiness is beyond the reach of most people who regard consumer culture to be their psychological home” (287).

This strikes me as just stupid. Why not simply say that if individidualist, materialist cultures lead to happiness in the “subjective well-being” sense, which they do (much more so than poor, collectivist cultures), then some forms of happiness are shallow, amoral, and unsustainable. The book might be more honestly titled Against What Brainwashed People Like You Think Happiness Is. I really can’t see the intellectual virtue of such a tendentiously moralized conception of happiness. From Pianalto’s review, it seems pretty clear Shumaker believes that material and cultural progress is immoral, and wants us to live more like hunter-gatherers. This bit is interesting:

In Schumaker’s reconstruction of the development of modern civilization, happiness emerges as a powerful ideal as people settle down into permanent communities which, surprisingly, leads to distancing of happiness from everyday life. Schumaker suggests that the development of agriculture, which allowed cities of specialized laborers to emerge (leaving farmers in the countryside to provide food), gave rise to the concept of work, as something that one must begrudgingly labor at during the day so that one can be happy (or just eat) at night. Work, for most people most of the time, is not fun, and so the concept of work distances those who must work from the happiness that they are working toward.

Ruut Veenhoven has toyed with similar ideas. But, funnily enough, he has argued this is one of the reasons that individualistic, materialistic cultures have greater measured happiness because they are more like hunter-gatherer societies in important respects than are the very hierarchical, immobile, agricultural societies of yore. That is, the environment-psychology mismatch between traditional agricultural societies and nomadic hunter-gatherer societies, is larger than the mismatch between contemporary consumer cultures and nomadic hunter-gatherer societies. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s provocative. In any case, as I argued against Veenhoven in our Cato Unbound exchange, I don’t think happiness is exactly a “natural” state, and the environmental mismatch views don’t take human cultural malleability seriously enough. Anyway, I think Shumaker might be right about work. Which is why it is imperative that we maximize rates of economic growth: the wealthier people are, the more discretion they have in how they use their time. The division of labor is the solution to the problems it creates.

[Follwup: Speaking of nomads, by packing their entire moral philosophy into their conception of happiness, thinkers like Shumaker are left having to deal with findings like this as embarassments:

The effect of modernization on the well-being of Bedouin women (n = 150) was investigated. Results show that the more modern the objective circumstances of the women’s lives, and/or the more modern the husbands’ attitudes (as perceived by their wives), the greater their subjective well-being(SWB). The women’s own attitudes affected their SWB only via interaction with their husbands’ attitudes and/or life circumstances. If the husbands’ attitudes were modern, their wives’ attitudes were not significantly related to SWB. However, if the husbands’ attitudes were traditional, then the more modern the wives’ attitudes, the lower their SWB. These findings repeated themselves, to a lesser degree, with life circumstances. The results fit the latest theoretical developments on SWB, and reflect the changes taking place within Bedouin society.

Are Bedouin women suffering from false consciousness? Is this merely subjective form of happiness too superficial to care about? Do they really know what’s good for them? Do they know that modern practices are “unsustainable”?]      

I just rediscovered this 2002 Slate Dialogue about happiness between Steven Pinker and Martin Seligman, moderated by Robert Wright. That’s a group I’d like to have dinner with! Nice bit from Pinker:

Certainly the difference between happiness on the one hand and a good and meaningful life on the other can’t be overemphasized. Last year when I lectured to my introductory psychology class about happiness I made this point using a set of thought experiments from the late philosopher Robert Nozick. If a genie offered you the possibility of living the rest of your life in a state of sublime happiness, but you had to be asleep the whole time and dreaming, never to taste reality again, would you take it? How much extra happiness would you agree to if you had to lose a unique talent, like athletic or musical giftedness, or if you had to give up 30 IQ points? To take an extreme case, would you agree to a lifelong increment in happiness on the condition that you would be transformed into a pig? Would you agree to become happier if it meant that one of your siblings had never been born or one of your children? All these examples, I said, show that happiness is not our only goal, perhaps not even our main goal, in life.

Exactly.

From the NYT Arts section:

On Monday, people wept, at least one person fainted and the E.M.S. made a brief visit as Ms. Abramovic repeated her own “Lips of Thomas” from 1975, intermittently the series’ most incendiary work. The artist calmly carved a five-point star in her abdomen with a razor blade, one line every 45 minutes or so (which, over seven hours, meant repeat cuts). There were bouts of intense self-flagellation with a whip and shivering repose on a cross made of large blocks of ice. The piece was cluttered with unnecessary new additions, including a military cap from her father, who was a partisan general in Yugoslavia, and a flag fashioned from the white cloth she used to blot her cuts. Nonetheless, at midnight the audience refused to leave until it had delivered a 10-minute ovation.

Say what you will about your response to this kind of performance, the fact that this sort of thing goes on makes it clear that the value of pleasure and the disvalue of pain are quite contextual. The obvious interpretation is that Abramovic’s pain has value in the context of her artwork, and of her life as an artist. The people who gave her a 10-minute ovation likely see it that way, too. I know of no general theory of value so well-supported that it should give us a compelling reason to resist the obvious interpretation. This is the sort of data you build a general theory on. If your theory says the value of pleasure or pain is invariant, then your theory is false. If it says that the value of pain cannot be positive (or that the value of pleasure cannot be negative), your theory is false. In general we prefer pleasure over pain, and in general pleasure is more valuable than pain, of course. But I think it’s important to see that the value of pleasure and pain, and the value of the various emotions, varies with their role in a situation, and their function in the overall structure of a life.

[Thanks to Joanna for the link.]

Is there a problem in comparing one person’s utility to another’s?

Well, it depends on what you mean by utility, of course. If, as on the formal theory, utility is just a way of representating an ordinal ordering of preferences, and preferences are propositional attitudes only contingently related to qualitiative states of consciousness, then there’s a problem, sort of, in the sense that quantitative comparison doesn’t make any sense. It’s just ruled out by definition. (How it is that you do welfare economics anyway has been one of the main preoccupations of the modern economics profession.)

Now, if utility is a certain kind of feeling of pleasure, then interpersonal utility comparisons are no more problematic than intrapersonal utility comparisons. I feel better now that I did when I woke up. It’s a fact! And I can feel better than someone else does, obviously. If Bob is enjoying a massage, and Al is taking his CPA exam, then Bob is likely racking up more utility, in the substantive psychological sense of utility.

The tricky question has to do with the value of utility, in this sense of utility. If you’re a Benthamite, then utility just is value. But unless one’s moral sense has been corrupted, it is easy to see that Benthamism is false. The value of lots and lots things obviously swings quite free of utility-as-pleasure. So if we ask, “Whose mental state realizes more value, Bob’s or Al’s?,” it is not easy to say. It may not be possible to say. The fact that Bob is experiencing more utility is informative only if we know how valuable utility is. Perhaps Al, while he finds the CPA exam arduous and boring, also finds that he is well-prepared, and the test, although not at all pleasurable, is the occasion for the experience of competence and self-efficacy. Arguably, the experience of competence and self-efficacy is more valuable than the warm, transient pleasure of a good massage.

(Some of you will be tempted to confuse the fact Al is feeling something that is good [self-efficacy] with the idea that he feels good. Don’t do that. Imagine a different example where the performance of competence is physically and mentally excruciating. Maybe a great warrior in a struggle to the death with a fierce opponent. Titus Pullo in the arena against the gladiators in the latest episode of Rome, say. Gravely wounded, and at the brink of exhaustion, Pullo simply doesn’t “feel good,” if you’re speaking English [or Latin]. Nevertheless, there may be value in his experience of competence as a fighter.)

Of course, we should avoid talk of the plain old valuable and ask, “valuable to whom, for what?” Different people have different life plans, and different life plans have different requirements. As Aristotle noted, food is good for everyone, but how much food is good depends on what you’re up to. Milo the wrestler needs more food than the rest of us, owing to his vocation. Likewise, the value of utility-as-pleasure depends on our projects and goals.

For example, take this bit of a USA Today story about performance artist Criss Angel:

In the premiere, he lit himself on fire. This week, Angel flies suspended from a helicopter, hanging with four 8-gauge fish hooks stuck into his back. “You have to put them in the flesh just right. Too shallow and they will rip right out, too deep can be permanent muscle damage. It was excruciatingly painful, yet one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever done.”

And I take it that Angel sees some of the beauty of it–some of the value of it–in the fact that it was excruciatingly painful. Same with David Blaine starving himself, or freezing himself in a block of ice. The pain is essential to the art. It could even be that Criss Angel dies with more dolors than hedons in the bank, due to the exquisite pain involved in his macabre calling, yet passes into the afterlife considering his life a brilliant, beautiful success.

So how does the value of Criss Angel’s excruciating pain compare with the value of somebody else’s pain? That’s the question that doesn’t make any sense. A lifeplan-relative theory of value makes the interpersonal comparison of the value of utility-as-pleasure impossible, since pleasure and pain doesn’t play the same role in everyone’s life plan, even if it is possible to compare who is having more or less pleasure or pain. We have not found the science, and we won’t.

Asians reliably report lower “happiness” on surveys than do Westerners, even after controlling for wealth and institutions. Are their lives worse? Is there something the matter with them? No. The value they place on whatever it is that happiness surveys track may just be different. The may be doing just as well relative to their lifeplans as we are, and maybe even better.

Dennis Prager writes:

The notion that happiness (or at least acting happy) is a debt we owe to all those in our lives and even to society at large is foreign to the vast majority of people. Yet, the more time I have devoted to writing and lecturing on this issue, the more I have come to realize that this is indeed the case. Ask anyone who was raised by an unhappy parent; ask anyone married to a chronically unhappy person; ask any worker whose co-worker is moody what their life is like and you will readily understand the moral obligation to be as happy as one can be.

I think this is a kind of funny way of talking. But it’s true that happy people are nicer to be around.

What do you make of this, Prager’s next and concluding paragraph?

Polls consistently show Republicans and religiously active Jews and Christians to be happier than Democrats and secular Americans. In light of the above, what does the preceding tell us about the good each group is likely to achieve?

Do you suppose Dennis Prager thinks secular Democrats have a moral obligation to become religious Republicans?

From Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s excellent Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “consequentialism“:

Some critics argue that not all pleasures are valuable, since, for example, there is no value in the pleasures of a sadist while whipping a victim. Other opponents object that not only pleasures are intrinsically valuable, because other things are valuable independently of whether they lead to pleasure or avoid pain. For example, my love for my wife does not seem to become less valuable when I get less pleasure from her because she gets some horrible disease. Similarly, freedom seems valuable even when it creates anxiety, and even when it is freedom to do something (such as leave one’s country) that one does not want to do. Again, many people value knowledge of other galaxies regardless of whether this knowledge will create pleasure or avoid pain.

I find all of these objections totally persuasive. Is there any reason for resisting them other than a prior commitment to hedonism?

Brad DeLong writes, rather mysteriously, that Julian’s parentalism piece “confirms his utilitarianism. convinces me that I would be insane were I to prioritize liberty over utility: that I am right to be a utilitarian.” He quotes Julian at length and then says:

My mind explodes when I read Julian’s command to “take as least as much satisfaction in the feeling of responsibility for our choices, in knowing that we have shaped a life that is ours even when we have chosen badly.” It is the libertarian version of the old communist story:

Speaker: After the revolution we will all eat strawberries and cream.

Worker: But I don’t like strawberries and cream!

Speaker: After the revolution you will eat strawberries and cream–and like it!

Is DeLong hearing Julian say something like “we should take satisfaction in our dissatisfaction”? Is that why his mind explodes? But that’s not what Julian is saying.

What’s going on!?

Maybe it would be helpful for DeLong if he were not to think like this:

(1) X is valuable iff X is a pleasurable mental state. (Axiom!)
(2) Someone just said A is valuable.
(3) But A isn’t a pleasurable mental state!
Therefore, (4) Head explodes. Aghh!

Not thinking/exploding like this might be helpful because sometimes people are just trying to say, more or less directly, that (1) isn’t true. And this is OK. This is allowed. For it is not the case that (1) is obviously true, self-evidently true, axiomatic, apodeictic, incontrovertble–cannot, like the law contradiction, be denied without affirming what is denied–, etc. It really might not be true. Really.

And so when somebody comes along and says something that implies that it isn’t ture, it’s not that they are therefore trying to say that it is true (because it just obviously, axiomatically is) and, on the other hand, it isn’t. Because that really would be stupid. The principle of charity indicates that we should assume that they are not stupid, but are trying to offer some reason not to believe (1). After all, there are reasons not to believe (1). And so it may not be especially helpful to address an argument that implies the falsity of (1) by forcefully repeating (1), or having one’s head explode (and then living to tell the tale).

Julian, I take it, thinks that something like autonomy or self-governance, or maybe existential self-creation, is valuable for its own sake. At least I think something like that.

Our lives are good lives just in case they are fully ours, constituted by our choices, even if they aren’t fully happy lives. Other things equal, happy lives are better than unhappy ones. But some happy lives are bad ones. And some unhappy ones are good, because they realize other values, like autonomy.

Now, it is rational to take satisfaction in what is valuable, and so we ought to take satisfaction in our autonomy, because our autonomy is valuable. But autonomy is not valuable because we take satisfaction in it. Autonomy is not like strawberries and cream. It may be that you have a taste for it or that you don’t. But if you don’t, you should. Because autonomy is a necessary requirement of a fully good human life, and you ought to take satisfaction in what will make your life go best, even if you don’t.

I trust no one will confuse this for an argument in favor of utilitarianism.

I’ve been dipping into the literature on the measurement of happiness, and the most stunning thing about happiness is that it is so incredibly robust. It seems that there is almost nothing one can do to significantly and permanently alter one’s natural temperamental disposition to happiness. Most people in most places are pretty happy. Income means very little. People who suffer horrifying disfigurements and disabilities usually bounce right back to their happiness “set-point.” The Minnesota twins studies show that hedonic tone is to a large degree genetic. It seems that even people in prison aren’t a whole lot less happy than people not in prison. Freedom and democracy mean something, but not that much. If you’re on good terms with your family, have close friends and meaningful work, you’re probably doing about as well as you’re going to do.

All this implies that any form of happiness-consequentialism is pretty much useless as anything more than a very brute standard of evaluation. I have yet to fully process what this really means. (It does mean that the Objectivist subjective-happiness-as-barometer-of objective-life-success view is plain false.) I do think this pushes me to a more Scanlonian view according to which our reasons for action are not even close to exhausted by considerations of “well-being.” If being more free, more healthy, and so forth do not cash out in terms of happiness, then so much the worse for cashing out value in terms of happiness.

Additionally, I think the methodological implications of the happiness research on measurement problems in economics have yet to be digested. Consider the concluding paragraph of Krugman’s excellent essay “Viagra and the Wealth of Nations“:

In other words, as soon as you try to think seriously about how to measure Viagra’s effect on the nation’s wealth, you realize what a dubious enterprise such comparisons are. I have nothing against calculating real G.D.P. as accurately as possible; we need that number for all kinds of purposes. But the rather vulgar case of Viagra reminds us that, in the end, economics is not about wealth — it’s about the pursuit of happiness.

Krugman seems to be saying that “problem of Viagra” is not simply a problem for calculating the effects new innovations have on material wealth, but a problem for determining the effects of innovation on happiness (which is what wealth really amounts to). But if we take the happiness research seriously, almost nothing has much effect on anyone’s long-term happiness. So if we are to say what makes it better to have Viagra than to not have Viagra (or whatever), then we’re going to have to say something about our reasons to value more possibilities, more choices, and enhanced abilities. But what we have to say is not going to be much about happiness. That is to say, “wealth” isn’t a measure of happiness, either. My intuition about what wealth is: a garden of forking paths leading to multitudes of possible lives.