Monthly Archives: June 2005

Non-sequiturs in Layard's Happiness

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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.

Sign Up To Testify at Smoking Ban Hearing

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This message comes to you from Ban the Ban:

Sign Up to Testify on June 14

Tomorrow is the last day to sign up to testify at the June 14 public hearing at the John Wilson Building. Be sure to sign up know!

If you don’t want to speak, you can submit written testimony, or just drop in on the hearing during the day to show your support!

Call Carol Schwartz’s office at 202-724-8105 to sign up or for more information. Call right now before it’s too late!

All DC freedom lovers should call!

Plague of Spam

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I’ve been getting drowned in comment spam. So, until I get a better spam solution, I’ve disabled comments for unregistered folk. For the time being, you’ll need to login with TypeKey. (Go here to register, if you haven’t. It’s free). I like to keep my comments as open as possible, so sorry about this. But TypeKey is pretty easy.

Happiness? Equality? What?

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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.

Bentham on the Brain

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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?

You're So Vain-ology

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Glen shows us again why he is an economist and not a poet in this post on “You’re So Vain,” inspired by Tyler’s exhumation of the perennial mystery. (This page is entertainingly un-useful for the “who is it about” question.)

On my intepretation, which is, of course, the natural and correct interpretation, “You’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you” is a self-indictment, expressing frustration and emotional paradox.

Carly, or whoever the implied narrator is, obviously can’t get the guy out of her dome. She wants to hate him because he was just as aware of his allure as she was, which was irresistable, which is why she fell for him and he “had her.” She was thrown when he dumped her. And she tries to console herself by pointing out how vain he is. But, it turns out, his vanity is really just a fair acknowledgement of his overwhelmingly attractive qualities, a form of confidence and self-possession that is itself attractive. And so pointing out his vanity is an implicit acknowledgement of everything she loved, and everything she grieves losing.

(By the way, people who go on and on about how great they are, like Quentin Tarantino and Phil Hellmuth, drive you crazy in a special way that only those who live up to their own ridiculous hype can.)

The fact that she’s still thinking and writing songs about him and how goddamn beautiful/perfect/irresistable/vain he was “several years” after he “had her” substantiates his vanity (like his Lear jet and his horse “naturally” winning at Saratoga), which is maddening, and throws her right back into the cycle of love/resentment. He is in fact the kind of person people write songs about and can’t forget. She wants to hate him for the fact that he knows it. But, no, that’s just why she loved him. He’s right. He’s unforgettably terrific. If she could just forget him, she wouldn’t be singing the song. But she can’t, and the reason she’s singing the song is precisely why fell so hard for him, and can’t possibly get over the fact that he “gave away the things [he] loved and one of them was me.”

Right?

Wealth is Weird

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I’ve got a blog post-length comment on this post by Jonathan Wilde over at Catallarchy. This is what you get today.

I’ve got all sorts of interesting things stored up to report on & ruminate about. Gruter Institute conference on the values of the free enterprise system. AEI conference on neuro-morality. Drinks with Pinker. Hannah & Martin. Perhaps tomorrow, should I have world enough, and time (but if we’re tearing our pleasures with rough strife thorough the iron gates of life, then forget it.)

You're Invited

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I’ve helped to put together a little theatrical field trip tonight for the America’s Future Foundation’s newly recussitated AFF Underground cultural series. There’s a couple spots left for discount tickets, and you should email me if you want to come.

We’ll be going to theater J at the DC Jewish Community Center to see the award-winning new play Hannah and Martin, by Kate Fodor. Hannah and Martin explores the intellectual and intimate relationship between celebrated philosopher and notorious Nazi, Martin Heidegger, and Hannah Arendt, one of the 20th Century’s most incisive theorists and critics of totalitarianism.

After the play, we will convene to Local 16, at the corner of 16th and U Streets for drinks and discussion of what promises to be intellectually provocative play.

Tickets are $25.00, five dollars off the regular price, and a merer $20.00 for AFF Founder’s Club members, ten dollars off the regular price. (Why not become a Founder’s Club member now?) AFF Underground has a block of only 30 seats, so act fast.

If you would like to claim a ticket, email me at willwilkinson AT gmail DOT com.

—-

Hannah and Martin
Thursday, June 2, 7:30 pm
Theater J, DC Jewish Community Center
1529 16th St NW

“Celebrated professor and philosopher Hannah Arendt is forced to confront charges that her lover and mentor, the venerable Martin Heidegger, is a Nazi sympathizer and must choose whether to indict or
forgive him. A sensual and deeply felt play of ideas that mines questions of forgiveness, academic independence, and the limits of loyalty when blinded by romantic desire.”

For more info: Theater J at the DC Jewish Community Center to see the award-winning new play Hannah and Martin, by Kate Fodor. Hannah and Martin explores the intellectual and intimate relationship between celebrated philosopher and notorious Nazi, Martin Heidegger, and Hannah Arendt, one of the 20th Century’s most incisive theorists and critics of totalitarianism.

After the play, we will convene to Local 16, at the corner of 16th and U Streets for drinks and discussion of what promises to be intellectually provocative play.

Tickets are $25.00, five dollars off the regular price, and a merer $20.00 for AFF Founder’s Club members, ten dollars off the regular price. (Why not become a Founder’s Club member now?) AFF Underground has a block of only 30 seats, so act fast. Email Chris Morris at chris@americasfuture.org if you would like to claim a ticket.

Hannah and Martin
Thursday, June 2, 7:30 pm
Theater J, DC Jewish Community Center
1529 16th St NW

“Celebrated professor and philosopher Hannah Arendt is forced to confront charges that her lover and mentor, the venerable Martin Heidegger, is a Nazi sympathizer and must choose whether to indict or
forgive him. A sensual and deeply felt play of ideas that mines questions of forgiveness, academic independence, and the limits of loyalty when blinded by romantic desire.”

For more info, visit the page at Theater J.

[UPDATE: AFF's block of tickets at the discounted rate is now spoken for. However, if you're interested in coming and didn't get a discount ticket, you should still feel free to join us. Call the theater for tickets, meet us before in front of the JCC (7:15-ish), and join us for drinks and discussion afterwards at Local 16.]