Abstract
In this paper I analyze philosophically the dominant conception of happiness operative in the increasingly popular global movement to empirically define, measure, and promote human happiness: the idea of “subjective psychological wellbeing” (SWB). SWB is presented as an ethically and metaphysically neutral “scientific” view of the human good or wellbeing, grounded purely in empirical psychology, survey data, and neuroscientific findings about the brain mechanisms involved in happiness. I argue that this conception of happiness actually rests upon highly controversial philosophical (non-empirical) presuppositions about the nature of human agency, pleasure, emotion, and the experience of value. I then draw upon phenomenology, the philosophy of emotion, and ethics to argue that this particular conception of happiness, while perhaps suitable for certain limited purposes, is highly problematic when given the leading normative role by the happiness science movement, particularly as a guiding aim of individual decision-making and public policy interventions.
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Notes
Sometimes the concepts of “happiness” and “wellbeing” are distinguished by researchers. For example, while both are held to be, in some sense, ultimate ends or goals of human action and desire, “happiness” may be thought of as the subjective component of the broader idea of “wellbeing,” with the latter including everything (subjective or not) that is non-instrumentally good for human beings, for instance, bodily health and autonomy, regardless of their impact on our subjective enjoyments. This distinction is stipulative and not widely respected. In this paper I use the terms “happiness” and “wellbeing” interchangeably.
The most popular course currently offered at Yale University is Laurie Santos’ “Science of Wellbeing.” The most popular course in Harvard University’s history was Tal Ben-Shahar’s course “Positive Psychology,” which is the foundation of this best-selling book, Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment (Ben-Shahar 2008).
Portugal, for instance, where I live, ranks a mediocre 59 out of 156 countries on the United Nations 2020 “World Happiness Report” (pre-pandemic). A Cambridge University report finds that only 8% of the Portuguese population are “flourishing” (Seligman 2011:28). This is despite the exceptionally low violent crime rate, good weather, natural beauty, cultural richness, public health care, and relatively stable liberal democratic institutions.
And there is the traditional use of happiness as manifestation of good fortune or luck, reflected in the etymological root, the Icelandic “happ,” and still present in the phrase a “happy accident.” We find the same traditional, etymological links between the words for happiness and fortune/luck in German and the romance languages.
See McMahon (2005), who traces the history and complexity of the concept of happiness.
The seven formal variables of Bentham’s (1907) felicific calculus are: intensity (how strong?), duration (how long?), certainty (how likely?), propinquity (how far off in time?), fecundity (how likely to lead to more pleasure?), purity (how much is mixed with pain?), and extent (how many people affected?).
Kahneman famously contrasts “experiential utility” with “remembered utility,” or how we reflectively judge (or misjudge) our experience to have been in retrospect (Kahneman 2011:391–397).
In more recent work, Seligman departs from a sole focus on SWB and attempts to incorporate more objective, “eudaimonic” elements into his theory of wellbeing. He offers us an acronym, PERMA, to describe this: positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. He still maintains that all of these elements can be rigorously measured (Seligman 2011).
Aristotle’s most extended discussion of pleasure is in books X and XII of the Nicomachean Ethics, where he argues that qualitatively different pleasures supervene on different activities and that the value of a particular enjoyment is conditioned by the (independent) value of the activity in which its taken.
Compare with Bentham’s notorious claim: “Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin [a simple child’s game] is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry. If the game of push-pin furnish more pleasure, it is more valuable than either…If poetry and music deserve to be preferred before a game of push-pin, it must be because they are calculated to gratify those individuals who are most difficult to be pleased” (Bentham 1830:206–207).
This stance is clear in the psychometric scale used by many positive psychologists to measure the overall positivity or negativity of an individual’s emotional experience, the 5 point Likert “Positive Affect Negative Affect Schedule” (PANAS).
So-called “objectless” moods like anxiety or dread may seem to be a counterexample to this claim. But see Solomon (2006) for a response.
An unsettling instance of the imperative to psychologically manage human suffering involves the attempt to provide a prefixed, quantitative framework for how much grieving is healthy and appropriate after the death of a beloved before the bereaved can be expected to return fully to work and productive life. Two weeks? Three? Four? The impulse here may be benevolent, but many find the method disturbing or even grotesque.
Gilbert 2006:71. It is not clear what work the qualifier “by and large” is doing in Gilbert’s statement. Given the assumptions of the theory, what else could matter, intrinsically or non-instrumentally?
Similarly, Layard claims that, in modern liberal states, subjective happiness is “the only good which would be generally accepted [i.e., by most people] as an end in itself” (2011:240).
I discuss how tacit, experiential knowledge and skill provides a basic background framework of intelligibility for the interpretation of human action in Hasselberger 2014.
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Acknowledgements
For helpful discussions and commentary on this paper I would like to thank Andre Alves, Talbot Brewer, Joseph Davis, James Mumford, Paul Nedelisky, and two anonymous reviewers for this journal.
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Hasselberger, W. Laboratory Happiness or Human Flourishing: The Empirical Science of Wellbeing in Phenomenological Perspective. Cult Med Psychiatry 46, 115–138 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-021-09716-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-021-09716-7