Abstract
Recent social surveys of happiness (subjective well-being) have given a new stimulus to utilitarian political theory by providing a statistically reliable measure of the ‘happiness’ of individuals that can then be correlated with other variables. One general finding is that greater happiness does not correlate strongly with increased wealth, beyond modest levels, and this has led to calls for governments to shift priorities away from economic growth and towards other social values. This paper notes how the conclusions of this research help to address some of the traditional objections to utilitarianism. The question of how happiness research findings can be used to set happiness-maximization goals for public policy needs careful examination, as the translation from research to policy is not always straightforward. Some empirical and ethical objections to this ‘new utilitarianism’ are raised. The complicating factors of public expectations of, and trust in, governments pose obstacles to any proposal that happiness research may lead to changes in public policy and hence to ‘happier’ populations.
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Notes
The eudaimonic approach to happiness research is given more thorough discussion in a recent issue of the Journal of Happiness Studies (issue 1, 2008).
‘If a starving wreck, ravished by famine, buffeted by disease, is made happy through some mental conditioning (say, via the “opium” of religion), the person will be seen as doing well on this mental-state perspective, but that would be quite scandalous’ (Sen 1985, p. 188).
A typical hypothetical example used here would be that of a surgeon who has five patients whose lives depend on organ transplants. Should he dissect, and hence kill, one person with healthy organs to save five others? To do so would appear to maximize utility, but is also fundamentally wrong. A real-world example comes from the Kingdom of Bhutan, which espouses a policy of Gross National Happiness, but in 1991 rescinded citizenship from, and then expelled, its Nepalese-Hindi minority—about 100,000 people—who continue to languish in refugee camps. At the time of writing, a group of these refugees was resettling in my own community. Can the forced expulsion of an unwanted minority be justified by the happiness of the majority?
This is perhaps being too generous to Diener and Seligman, however, as their review article does contain the assertion that ‘… market democracies have much more well-being than totalitarian dictatorships, so military expenditures that protect and extend democracy will increase global well-being’ (2004, p. 24). Published not long after the invasion of Iraq, this statement seems to be guilty of the kind of moral problem often associated with utilitarianism.
This is a version of one of oldest objections to utilitarianism. It may be put somewhat like this: Suppose playing tic-tac-toe gives me more pleasure than listening to Bach; then we would have to suppose that the former is of higher moral worth, in my case. There is something inherently wrong with this, and Mill struggled to get around the problem by arguing that, in the estimation of anyone with sufficient experience of both forms of pleasure, Bach would be the clear favourite. So, similarly, we might argue that anyone with sufficient experience and knowledge of both will see that saving one’s money for retirement is morally superior, because it will bring greater lasting happiness, to spending one’s money in a casino.
J.S. Mill commits all of the fallacies described above. He argues that, because people desire happiness, happiness is desirable. Since all this says is, ‘happiness is desirable because people desire it’, the so-called ‘proof’ is tautological. Further, the only reason he can give as to why people desire the ‘general happiness’ is that people desire their own happiness. Proceeding thus from a tautology, which he assumes to be a ‘fact’, he surmises that ‘happiness is a good’; and because it is a good to each individual person, it must therefore be ‘a good to the aggregate of all persons’ (Mill, in Warnock 1962, pp. 288–289). He does not stop to ask whether ‘happiness’ has any meaning beyond the subjective experience of one person at a time. However, he then proceeds to argue that ultimately we desire only happiness, because all other desirable things are desired only as a means to greater happiness. But the very premises of his case have to be dismissed. Furthermore, happiness suits his purposes as a super-ordinate goal partly because it is free of content and can thus be linked to any other desirable goals.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Nikil Mukerji for comments on an early draft, and to Professor Ruut Veenhoven for supplying data.
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Duncan, G. Should Happiness-Maximization be the Goal of Government?. J Happiness Stud 11, 163–178 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-008-9129-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-008-9129-y