Abstract
I argue that happiness is an exclusively categorical mental state. Daniel Haybron’s inclusion of dispositions into his emotional state theory rests of a confusion of constituents of happiness in the narrow psychological sense with objects of prudential concern, to which obviously belong “mood propensities” and other dispositional states. I further argue that while it is probably correct to require of a constituent of happiness that it must in some sense be “deep” and belong to, or directly impact on, a persons’ self, the importance of depth may be overrated by the emotional state theory, which also ignores the possibility that mental states other than moods and emotions can be deep in the relevant sense.
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Notes
There are, however, quite a few conceptions of happiness that are non-psychological or at least not purely psychological. Some philosophers, notably in the Aristotelian tradition, have insisted on viewing happiness as an evaluative, most often moral, notion. Still more have, as a matter of fact, treated it as something that comprises both psychological and normative aspects. I shall only be concerned with happiness in a purely psychological sense (see also Sect. 3).
For a defence of the existence of nonphenomenal conscious states (see Nelkin 1989; Lormand 1996; Peacocke 2003; Georgalis 2005). Especially conscious propositional attitudes (e.g. acts of thinking) have been having no distinctive phenomenal character in themselves, but merely being—very often—accompanied by other states that have such a character (e.g. conscious imagining, thinking “in words” etc.). However, a majority of philosophers of mind seem to think that conscious states are necessarily phenomenal (Strawson 1994; Siewert 1998; Levine 2001; Dainton 2008; Farkas 2008; Kriegel 2009). For a defence of the view that propositional attitudes have a distinctive phenomenal character (see Klausen 2008).
Although, as Haybron himself notes (Haybron 2008, p. 285, n. 6), affect-based empirical research on happiness, notably the work of Kahneman, has also recognized the relevance of moods and emotions.
If moods and emotions are themselves conceived as (partly) dispositional, it seems that a mood propensity must be second-order disposition, viz. a disposition to (inter alia) acquire other, more specific dispositions. This might seem somewhat strange, but need not be considered unreasonable; arguably, quite a few significant psychological or moral traits take the form of second-order dispositions. Moreover, Haybron seems to restrict the relevant manifestations of mood propensities to the phenomenal (and thus categorical) aspects of moods, when he speaks of a disposition to experience moods.
In one place, Haybron even says that happiness “primarily concerns a person’s psychic dispositions” (2008, p. 69). This does not sit quite well with his suggestion that occurrent states should have priority over dispositional one’s when assessing a person’s happiness.
This seems to contradict Haybron’s claim that happiness cannot be purely dispositional. But I understand him as allowing for the possibility that happiness may be temporarily (“locally”) made up by purely dispositional states. His admission that happiness must involve some occurrent states appears to be nothing more than a kind of (“global”) system requirement: a happy person must sometimes have some characteristic experiences. This is consistent with the possibility that her happiness is purely dispositional some, or even most, of the time.
I would be more cautious with judging Martha to be happy, not merely because of the alleged difference between the concepts of temperament and happiness, but also because the link between behavioral dispositions and the affective states required for happiness can be rather weak.
Haybron briefly notes this possibility, but seems to think that is at best an unusual practice (Haybron 2008, p. 34).
The notion of a propensity has proved extremely difficult to define precisely (see Belnap 2007 for an overview). For present purposes it should suffice to notice that while not identical to probabilities of outcomes, propensities are closely similar to such probabilities, and are regularly used to explain probabilities and ground predictions about the frequency of events. Moreover, it is generally assumed that a propensity to yield an outcome E obtains if and only if it is the case that outcome E would be produced in a sufficiently large and varied number of cases (paraphrasing Alston 2005, p. 110).
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for helping me to clarify this point.
The case thus complies with Haybron’s—somewhat ad hoc—constraint that mood propensities not be tied to specific objects.
Hill (2009, 220f.) makes a similar point about some of Haybron’s other examples.
Contrary to what Feldman (2010, 29ff.) appears to assume.
It can be questioned whether this suggestion conforms with Haybron’s requirement that happiness-constitutive mood propensities must be emotionally based. But perhaps it could be argued that Jane’s mood propensities are grounded in her emotional condition (which, in turn, is maintained by the intervention of her friends and relatives).
But ask Proust about eating a Madeleine. While it can be argued that the pleasure of his narrator—famously described at the beginning of In Search of Lost Time—only causally triggered an array of other, allegedly more central mental states, it did seem to have a rather deep significance in itself.
Correspondingly, there is empirical evidence that even fleeting, superficial mood states can have a highly significant and predictable influence on people’s behavior and self-understanding (Forgas and Williams 2002, p. 74). This may be due to their being correlated with more central states, but still indicates that they are themselves more significant than might otherwise be expected.
I shall ignore the possibility that there can be states that are non-phenomenally conscious (but see footnote 2).
I have assumed that dispositional states are essentially unconscious (though the may be constituted by their tendency to produce conscious experiences). But it is possible that some dispositional states do have a distinctive phenomenology (though this may better be seen as an accompanying categorical state). Being irritable or cheerful may have a certain feel of to it (Klausen 2008; cf. also Feldman 2010, p. 142). This phenomenal side of dispositions could of course be directly relevant to happiness. But again, this is because it is a conscious experience and has nothing do with dispositionality as such.
It may be objected on Haybron’s behalf that he is does not intend to simply analyze the folk concept of happiness (Haybron 2008, p. 47), and that it is therefore less important if our intuitions do not favor the inclusion of unconscious states into that concept. But Haybron obviously does think that this inclusion is in agreement with, and perhaps even motivated by, ordinary usage. A more revisionary approach would be more open to the inclusion of e.g. character traits or brain processes.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this issue.
Work on this paper was supported by the EU Interreg 4A Program, in the context of the NexusPro2017 project. I am also grateful to Lina Lind Christensen and other graduate students who attended my seminar on Welfare, Happiness and the Good Life at the University of Southern Denmark in the spring of 2014 for valuable suggestions, and to two anonymous reviewers for their insight and perceptive criticisms.
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Klausen, S.H. Happiness, Dispositions and the Self. J Happiness Stud 17, 995–1013 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-015-9628-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-015-9628-6