I have said before that the implicit yet common understanding of happiness today is preference satisfaction.1 It is the view that sees the standards of happiness to be internal to the agent, existing solely within the purview of the individual. “To each, his own.” This is closely associated with what I have described as cultural existentialism.2 The increasing pluralism of Western society has birthed a state of affairs in which there is no longer a common understanding of the good.3 What remains is the individual’s assessment, protected by law–insofar as he or she does not impinge on the rights of others. But if this view of happiness is pushed to its limits, as it were, the ramifications are unsettling, to say the least.4
Jean-Paul Sartre, while taking a critical stance toward the French intelligentsia, once said that the word existentialism “is used so often and to such an extent that it no longer has meaning.”5 Similar things may be said about the word happiness today. In fact, some writers even admit the futility of attempting to define it. Dennis Prager has said as much. Despite writing a book about happiness, he admits early on that there is no good definition of it.6 Quoting a U.S. Supreme Court decision on obscenity, Prager likens it to the concept of happiness, “I don’t know how to define it, but I know it when I see it”, continuing that–while describing his engagement with audiences on the subject–“the audience and I knew what we were discussing, however any of us might define it.”7 This highlights the contemporary phenomenon that “happiness has become an empty container, stripped of content and structure, allowing each individual to add whatever their preferences dictate.”8 Consider three examples below, which help reveal some of the tensions underlying this contemporary conception of happiness.
First, consider the drug addict who has the means to spend his days in a more or less continuous state of intoxication. As a person with a given set of preferences, who is in fact able to satisfy them continuously, we have no choice but to conclude he is happy. Suppose that such a person lives nearly the entire span of his life in this state, and further suppose he dies while blissfully intoxicated. From the viewpoint of modern happiness, we are bound to conclude that, not only did he die happy, but that he led a happy life. Yet, I think most people would at the very least hesitate to call such a life a happy one.9
Second, I offer the example of what I will call a “rights violator”. Consider a severely disordered individual, such as a serial killer or rapist, who possesses the means and ability to regularly satisfy his preferences for such terrible actions. Suppose he has sufficient intelligence and skill that enables him to elude detection or capture, and has the monetary means to move about and travel the globe at ease. Again, to the extent he is able to satisfy his preferences–which, suppose it is regular and often–he can be described as happy. Notice that, from the perspective of happiness, it makes no difference that this person is in fact severely violating the rights of other human beings. That such things are held to be evil, illegal, warranting imprisonment, or even death–is, again from the perspective of happiness–simply irrelevant. If someone is able to satisfy their preferences–regardless of what those preferences actually are–they can be said to be happy. Period. But, here as before, few people would describe the life of such a person as happy.
For my third and final example, I want to invoke Robert Nozick’s experience machine.10 Imagine a machine that can provide you with a simulated reality, in which whatever you desire is yours. By “plugging in”, you experience life exactly as you want it to be. Once plugged in, you cannot distinguish your simulated life from your (previous) actual life. In other words, the machine would offer you the chance to satisfy every preference you could possibly have, thus placing happiness within your reach.11 But would such a life be happy? This too is suggestive, since it seems that what we really want is to actually do certain things, or to actually be a certain kind of person, rather than the mere “experience” of such things.
If happiness is preference satisfaction, then each of these examples entails a happy life. But, I think (and hope) few among us would endorse them as so.12 Indeed, what these examples suggest is that the “to each, his own” model of preference satisfaction, in which the criterion of happiness is internal to the agent, is highly problematic. To be clear, although preference satisfaction is implicit in the everyday words and actions of people today, when its necessary entailments–its extremes–are brought to light, few of us would endorse them. Yet even so, happiness as preference satisfaction is largely unchallenged today, especially in popular culture. “How often is a challenge heard […] to spell out just what someone means by being happy? Our current assumptions governing moral disputes discourage inquiry about this foundational issue–anyone’s claim to personal happiness is beyond reproach.”13 “Conflicts arise, therefore, the moment one begins to raise questions about the content or cause of another person’s happiness. Immediately, the interlocutor, or even the merely curious, may well be assailed with claims about the right to seek happiness, to define it, and to enjoy it in his or her own way.”14 “Each person is a law of happiness unto himself or herself.”15
This view of happiness presupposes a certain underlying structure of practical rationality, which has been discussed and criticized by Alasdair MacIntyre.16 In Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, he writes, “individuals understand each other and themselves as each possessing his or her own ordered schedule of preferences. […] What are my wants? And how are they ordered? The answers to this question provide the initial premise for the practical reasoning of such individuals, a premise expressed by an utterance of the form: ‘I want it to be the case that such and such’ or of some closely cognate form.”16 MacIntyre goes on to argue that the expression “I want” has come to function as an independent good reason for action. What I take him to be getting at is that (implicit) initial premises like “I want such-and-such because it is good” have largely been replaced by “I want such-and-such–therefore it is good”.17 The criterion in the former is external, independent, impersonal; in the latter–as with modern happiness–internal to the agent. But this leads to all sorts of absurdities and self-deceptions, such as those illustrated by the examples above. It seems that if concepts of happiness are to avoid such problems, they must be based on, or derived from, standards independent of the agent.
Notes:
1. For example, see my essay, Happiness: A Brief Contrast.
2. See my essays, Introduction to Cultural Existentialism, Cultural Existentialism: The Absurdity of American Individualism, and Cultural Existentialism: Instances and Instrumentality.
3. It may be more accurate to say that the West has come to be characterized by a situation in which no shared conception of the good exists. Pluralism is a good word for it. For the record, I see such pluralism as more or less deterministic. That is, I cannot at this point see how it could have been otherwise, given the societal changes that have taken place, e.g., economic, technological, cultural, political, et al. Thus, I think this state of affairs to be unavoidable, and not necessarily the result of any one person or thing. I have discussed this before. See my essay, The Good, Liberalism, and the Role of Preferences.
4. “Unsettling to who?” Here, as sometimes before, I simply want to emphasize the strong current of subjectivity in modern thought. This is perhaps linked to the increasing use of the ad hominem in debate. Suffice for now that, as a point of contrast, it is unsettling from a pre-modern viewpoint. By “pushed to its limits”, I mean followed to its logical terminus.
5. Quoted from Sartre’s speech at the Club Maintenant in Paris on Monday, October 29th, 1945. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is A Humanism.
6. See Dennis Prager, Happiness Is A Serious Problem.
7. Ibid. At best, this shows a kind of overlap between pre-modern and modern views of happiness, which the latter has not been able to fully integrate or reconcile. At worst, it shows that happiness has been reduced to an absurdity.
8. Quoted from my essay, The Good, Liberalism, and the Role of Preferences.
9. That we would hesitate to do so is suggestive, and this may be one area that pre-modern views of happiness still persist in our common understanding today.
10. See Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia.
11. Note that here the “rights violator” could satisfy his disordered preferences–without actually violating any actual person’s rights. Likewise, the drug addict could experience endless intoxication without any adverse effects, such as risking one’s health.
12. Again, if this is true it would seem to suggest a sense in which pre-modern views about happiness still inform our implicit understanding of it.
13. See Deal W. Hudson, Happiness and the Limits of Satisfaction.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. MacIntyre is critical of this form of practical rationality in many of his books. See especially Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, and Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity.
17. A sort of Euthyphro dilemma. (See Plato, Euthyphro.) MacIntyre continues, “Desires of course had always been recognized as motives for action, and someone could always explain his or her action by expressing the desire which had motivated by means of some such expression as ‘I want’. […] What was new was the transformation of first-person expressions of desire themselves, without further qualification, into statements of a reason for action, into premises for practical reasoning.” See Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?