This is a good point that I keep hitting but somehow hasn’t percolated to everyone I know yet. You can report being happy despite enduring things that most people consider calamities: serious illness or injury, dire poverty, lack of personal freedom, and so on.
I don’t know whether someone has done this at the neurological level—do poor Mexicans who report happiness have similar brain activity to affluent Americans who report happiness? Are poor or sick people really feeling happy, or just reluctant to complain? But let’s take the least convenient possible world, and assume that reported happiness pretty much coincides with a neurological state of happy feelings. Even so, “happiness” is a pretty bizarre measure of well-being.
Optimizing for “happiness,” according to the results of happiness research, would be a very odd way to live. You would certainly lower your own chances of survival (since you wouldn’t be trying hard to avoid injury, sickness, or poverty.) Evolution wouldn’t select for it (since having children makes you less happy.)
This is why I think that the “happiness” of happiness research is probably not useful for inspiring public policy or changes in one’s private life. It’s hard to define what humans do, or should, value. But because we are living things, any human values worthy of the name should almost certainly include “increase the probability of staying alive.” If a value system doesn’t assign negative points to losing limbs or going hungry, it’s probably a bad idea to make major decisions on that basis.
Maximizing (non-steeply-discounted) total life happiness does imply trying to survive.
Basing public policy on happiness research sounds terrible to me, but I would expect that most individuals could become significantly happier without compromising other values if they knew how.
This is a good point that I keep hitting but somehow hasn’t percolated to everyone I know yet. You can report being happy despite enduring things that most people consider calamities: serious illness or injury, dire poverty, lack of personal freedom, and so on.
I don’t know whether someone has done this at the neurological level—do poor Mexicans who report happiness have similar brain activity to affluent Americans who report happiness? Are poor or sick people really feeling happy, or just reluctant to complain? But let’s take the least convenient possible world, and assume that reported happiness pretty much coincides with a neurological state of happy feelings. Even so, “happiness” is a pretty bizarre measure of well-being.
Optimizing for “happiness,” according to the results of happiness research, would be a very odd way to live. You would certainly lower your own chances of survival (since you wouldn’t be trying hard to avoid injury, sickness, or poverty.) Evolution wouldn’t select for it (since having children makes you less happy.)
This is why I think that the “happiness” of happiness research is probably not useful for inspiring public policy or changes in one’s private life. It’s hard to define what humans do, or should, value. But because we are living things, any human values worthy of the name should almost certainly include “increase the probability of staying alive.” If a value system doesn’t assign negative points to losing limbs or going hungry, it’s probably a bad idea to make major decisions on that basis.
Maximizing (non-steeply-discounted) total life happiness does imply trying to survive.
Basing public policy on happiness research sounds terrible to me, but I would expect that most individuals could become significantly happier without compromising other values if they knew how.