Michele

Michele

I don’t understand why this statement is meaningful. Its like saying there is nothing one can do to alter one’s natural disposition to be a certain height, or have a certain skin tone, or any of the other things which genes have an effect on. But one can choose to get more or less sun, one can be malnourished and short or take HGH and be taller.

Of course we can’t change our dispositions. That’s what a disposition is. But we can change all the other things that go into the formula, along with disposition, to determine the end result.

With this view, happiness is almost more like an undercurrent that runs through a person’s life than a surface feeling of joy. Looking at it this way, someone whose life consists solely of entertainment might seem happier on the surface, but since they don’t take the actions of happiness, they might not really be as happy as the person who works competently, loves well, etc., even if that person seems uptight or serious on the surface.

I agree that the impact of this research, if it’s true, is huge. The good thing about happiness is that it seems like happiness-facts can ultimately ground claims about what is right, wrong, virtuous, vicious, etc. But if we have reasons to do things that do not get grounded in facts about happiness – especially if we say we have reasons to be more free, more healthy, etc. – the most unifying explanation of these reasons will probably be some kind of group-subjectivism, e.g., “That’s just the way WE feel, after thinking about it. We LIKE freedom, we reflectively endorse it.” Isn’t this gross? Doesn’t it turn all of ethics into a gooey war of rhetoric, just like Dick Rorty says? How else could we account for our attempts to convince outback bushmen and government-worshipping Germans to try out our ways?

See Jerome Kagan, Three Seductive Ideas (Harvard University Press, 1998), particularly the discussion of fear and anxiety, pp. 15-38.

Something or other in Kagan’s book will rile just about anybody, but he asks good questions.

Robert

See Jerome Kagan, Three Seductive Ideas (Harvard University Press, 1998), particularly the discussion of fear and anxiety, pp. 15-38.

Something or other in Kagan’s book will rile just about anybody, but he asks good questions.

Robert

I’m pretty skeptical of self-reports, but what I was reading made it seem not as bad as I thought. But I am perfeclty willing to believe that it is as bad as I thought. Can you point me to the Kagan discussion?

You refer to Objectivism as having a “subjective-happiness-as-barometer-of-objective-life-success-view.” (Hey, isn’t it a lot easier to say that kind of thing in German?)

But Rand’s point of view wasn’t strictly consequentialist. Note those qualifiers like “happiness is the purpose, not the standard” and “man’s life qua man.”

These days, the people with the big investment in who is an Objectivist and who isn’t seem to be tilting toward a duty ethic, albeit with context-dependent rules. I think they are also tilting toward an a priori mode of argument that pushes to the side empirical evidence about happiness, or any other outcomes in life.

In any form of eudaimonism, you’re going to encounter arguments of the form “So-and-so claims to be happy, but here is evidence that maybe he isn’t.” It gets dangerous when the eudaimonist starts resorting to “So-and-so claims to be happy, but he is obviously isn’t living by Rand’s ethic, or Aristotle’s, or the Stoics’, or whoever’s, *so he can’t be happy.* What more do you need to know?”

Of course we need to know more. And good social science–the kind that will enable us to know more, social science that manages a balance between theory development and empirical work–is really hard to do.

Robert Campbell

I tend to agree with Tim about self-report measures of happiness or subjective well-being. The corroboration checks you mention have been applied in only a tiny percentage of the studies that used the self-report measures; the degree of convergence with physiological measures has been challenged by some knowledgeable people (e.g., Jerome Kagan); and so on.

Doesn’t self-reported happiness fall prey to a lot of the same distortions as self-reported self-esteem? In many societies, including our own, high self-esteem is considered better than low self-esteem, and apart from cultural norms, some people may be “defending against” feelings of low self-esteem–or just plain kidding themselves. If you give the Rosenberg Self-Esteem scale to a bunch of Clemson students, the average score will be around 70 out 90–which looks like very high self-esteem. Yet some of these students don’t act as though they think all that highly of either their competence or their worth.

The measurement problems are really tough. Self-esteem researchers are starting to introduce procedures that get around social desirability and various defenses; I suspect that those who study happiness or subjective well-being need to be doing similar things.

I also rather doubt that happiness is a single dimenson, just as I doubt that utility is a single dimension, but that’s fodder for another discussion.

Robert

I want Frank’s claim to be true. My hunch is that we’d be better off economically, as well as in terms of happiness if people worked less and played more. But from what I’m reading, I can’t tell whether it is true.

The lesson, I think, is not that hedonic consequentialism is wrong, but merely that we need to focus our effots more intensely on the things that really cause suffering.

Along those lines, I’ve been teachin “Luxury Fever” by the economist Robert Frank. His basic claim is that conspicuous consumption does nothing to increase the overall happiness of a group of people, but various forms of inconspicuous consuption (like more time off work) do.

Also, people can seem a lot happier than they actually are. Somebody I knew committed suicide last year, but she always gave the impression of being a very positive, happy-go-lucky person, even to her closest friends and family. When she died, nobody had any idea why she did it. But something tells me that she wasn’t quite as happy as she seemed. After this I can’t be but very skeptical about judging people’s happiness by their outward behaviour.

Of course, these are just single cases but I would imagine that they’re far from unique until I’m given strong evidence to the contrary.

Looked at the point of view of the genes: it is not necessary for us to have “permanent” happiness changes to motivate us; a simply happy moment (or a happy hour or two, or day) is plenty motivational. You’re unhappy because you have no friends; well, you go out and make one. You’re happy for a little while over your new buddy, but then you drop back to your baseline. The point is, the friend remains; thus the evolutionary function of friend-making (whatever it is, if it is still operative) is served.

More mathematically, consider a graph of happiness level over time. It’s not the area under the curve we are optimizing (that’s basically constant according to what you’re saying). Rather we are trying to create upspikes and desperately trying to avoid the downspikes.

I don’t agree that this changes much of our reasons for acting. Sure, if it were possible to do something that would make me permanently more happy, I might do that (people marry, have kids…). [Would you do it if it were a "false" happiness, a wire installed in the pleasure center of your brain?] But mostly I do things for short term happiness, knowing it is so, and this is the vast majority of my action. I buy lunch and eat it – this makes me temporarily happy, but I know I won’t even remember it a week from now.