Happiness and the Search for Objective Values

Happiness at the coffee shop

Source: Photo Taken by J. Krueger

Happiness is not in the mere feeling of satisfaction but in the reality of freedom and satisfaction. - H. Marcuse (1955/1974, -. 104)

Since the days of classical Greece, philosophers have puzzled over what happiness is, how to achieve it, and whether it is actually good for you. Along the way, the concept of happiness has rubbed up against other valued concepts such as meaning, morality, and achievement. The question of whether you are happy often morphs into the question of whether you are having a good life (cf. Marcuse, 1955).

Psychology is a comparatively late arrival on the happiness scene. Having co-taught a course on The Psychology and the Philosophy of Happiness for a few years, the differences between the two disciplines and the approaches they take have become clearer to me. Consider two differences. First, compared with psychological theory and research, philosophical inquiry tends to look for normative answers (Krueger, 2015). What is happiness is a normative question, signified by the print emphasis. Using rigorous questioning as a tool, the philosophical search for truth proceeds by ruling out reasonable ideas because of their imperfections as identified by thought-experimental counterexamples. Second, philosophical inquiry is more interested in the good life writ large than in experienced states of happiness. This, in my view, shows a general predilection to go after the larger questions.

There is a certain immodesty in this, as though limited or local questions, e.g., about the waxing and waning of certain mood states, is not worth the exertion of philosophical brainpower. Psychological research takes subjective reports more seriously, and it shies away from reifying latent variables. For instance, psychometricians build and test models of latent variables representing stable personality traits of, say, cheerfulness or sociability, but they would not assume that there is such a thing as cheerfulness that can be objectively identified and be held in the palm of one’s hand. It is understood that measurement models and measurement instruments stand in a reciprocal relationship to theoretical concepts.

I will share three notes I pitched to my students after reflecting (with limited success) on ideas that arose in philosophy lectures.

The happiness paradox

Some philosophers claim that "a meaningful life is other-oriented, but then gives your life meaning." This leads to a paradox: "It’s good for you to pursue the good of others instead of your own good.” A paradox is a self-nullifying statement. This particular one implies that you can only achieve your good by not achieving it. Or conversely, you cannot achieve it by achieving it. One possible conclusion is to stop worrying about the objective good and start living.

Happiness and morality

Aristotle, Mill, and Kant (and these are only 3 among many) had strikingly different views on the relationship between happiness and morality. For Aristotle, the two converge. For Mill, meaning aims at happiness. For Kant, happiness undermines morality. All three philosophers had good reasons for their positions, and none of them has been, as far as I know, refuted. Hence the question: If the happiness-morality relationship is a normative issue, which implies that only one view can be true, how are we to act? Perhaps the unresolved normative question leaves room for folk conceptions to guide us (Phillips et al., 2017). They do so anyway, regardless of what philosophers grant.

Happiness and achievement

"The decision about useful elements of SWB should take reality, as well as the psychometrics of self-reported measures, into account. Good relationships, meaning, and accomplishment are not after all exhaustively measured by self-report. We also want to know how your husband rates your marriage, how your bosses and employees rate your self-reported accomplishment, and how others rate the amount of meaning in your life."

How do we know whether what we have accomplished amounts to an objective achievement? Psychologists do not ask this question. The quote above is from M. Seligman (2018, p. 2), the godfather of positive psychology, who, in 2011, introduced the PERMA model of well-being. PERMA = positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment (= achievement). Seligman validates his model by noting high correlations between PERMA and SWB (Subjective Well-Being), which is sort of but not entirely convincing because PERMA and SWB share some of the same variables. Accomplishment is assessed only through human judgment (by the self and by observers).

What else could one do? Some claim that the ceiling painting in the Sistine Chapel is an objective achievement. Catholics and lovers of Renaissance art agree. Iconoclasts (e.g., the Taliban or the Fuegians) dissent. My question is: When (and how) does intersubjective consensus become objective truth? Or does it ever? Arguably, sometimes a few experts have a better fix on 'true' value than do the masses (I know that this begs the question of how we have access to that truth independent of those very expert judgments).

Take a final example from science and scholarship: Of all the professors at the local university, who has achieved objectively the most? We do not know, and I claim we cannot know. What we have and what we work with the best we can is proxies, such as metrics like prizes, citation counts, or public acclaim. Some achievements have an objective element, such as finding the solution to Fermat's last theorem. Then again, what has this solution contributed to the well-being of the world? Perhaps less than your last donation to the local food bank. I think it is time we learn how to live in the absence of objective values. We might be happier for doing so.

Happiness Essential Reads

What Makes People Satisfied With Their Lives?

Don’t Just Survive, Flourish

As to the happy message on a local coffee shop's chalkboard, I think I will ask them to consider an alternate invitation: 'Do more of what makes your life a good life.' Okay, you figure it out.

The game of philosophy

I have noted that great philosophers can be individually compelling while being collectively incoherent. What are the folk to think? Are they supposed to take sides and how are they to act? Is it ok to be a Spinozan today and a Cartesian tomorrow? Aristotle would forbid it as there can be only one truth. If you switch among philosophical views, you ensure that there will be error. Alternatively, you might be sagely managing your risk of being wrong. If you endorse each of 3 famous philosophers for 2 days a week and rest on the 7th, you know that you will be right on 2 days (if 1 of the 3 is right), you just don’t know on which 2. Either way, if each of the 3 philosophes is right with a probability of 1/3, and if you have no knowledge beyond what they knew, your probability of being right is also 1/3 regardless of whether you make a life-long commitment to one of them or if you ride the carousel of rotating allegiances.

A recent paper by David Chalmers illustrates how far even one of the most influential philosophers today is from picking sides. In Idealism and the mind-body problem, Chalmers (2019) discusses varieties of idealism, from the macro sort (the universe has or is a set of mental states) to the micro variant (photons and such are mental), where each one further breaks down into sub-varieties, each with its own defenders and detractors. Hence, Chalmers’s conclusion is anti-climactic.

“I do not claim that idealism is plausible. No position on the mind–body problem is plausible. Materialism is implausible. Dualism is implausible. Idealism is implausible. Neutral monism is implausible. None-of-the-above is implausible. But the probabilities of all of these views get a boost from the fact that one of them must be true. Idealism is not greatly less plausible than its main competitors. So even though idealism is implausible, there is a non-negligible probability that it is true.”

If the best choice is the least improbable option, how far have we gone beyond complete ignorance?