The concept of happiness that I will use throughout this Element is the classical one that corresponds to what contemporary philosophers often call “well-being,” “welfare,” or “flourishing.” It does not mean being happy in the sense of having a cheerful personality or feeling subjectively content. Instead, it means leading a happy life. It is not an emotion or mood, but a state or way of living.
When I use the term ‘happiness’, I am referring to intrinsic goodness, which is a positive (as in ontologically positive, but also positively valenced), felt experience. So on my view, one cannot be happy while unconscious. But one can be flourishing while unconscious. A good night’s rest, or an opportune nap, is part of flourishing, and yet often entails unconsciousness. Often the word ‘pleasure’ is used where I use ‘happiness’, but I feel like ‘pleasure’ is too tangled up with notions of carnal pleasure. It doesn’t help that the view I hold—that happiness is the sole intrinsic good—is referred to in the literature as ‘hedonism’, a word tangled up with debauchery. Even though happiness is the sole intrinsic good, there are many different kinds of intrinsically good experiences, and so there are many different kinds of happiness.
Note 2: Shea says (pg 3) that his notion of happiness is a normative concept. What makes it normative? Apparently because happiness evaluates a person’s life as good or bad.
I do not view goodness or badness as normative. To me, normativity applies to oughts and shoulds. But whether something ought to be the case always, in my view, depends on a goal. And because different intrinsic goods can further different goals, there is no conceptual connection between goodness/badness and ‘should’, and so goodness and badness are not normative concepts.
For example, if a man is made happy by acting violently, then while it’s true that this happiness is intrinsically good, it doesn’t follow that this happiness ought to be. If someone’s goal is to maximize happiness, then happiness that depends on the suffering of others might fail to further this goal. And if someone’s goal is to maximize virtuous happiness, with the understanding that happiness that depends on the pointless suffering of others is not virtuous, then this sort of evil happiness clearly fails to further this goal.
Note 3: Shea writes (pg 3):
A different and popular sense of happiness takes it to be a state of mind like subjective satisfaction or positive emotions and feelings, a purely descriptive psychological condition that is not value laden. By contrast, happiness in my sense is a good: something that has positive value and is desirable and worthy of pursuit, promotion, and protection.
It appears that there’s a difference here in how I use the term ‘value’. Taking after Nevin Climenhaga, I use ‘value’ and ‘goodness’ interchangeably. I’m not sure what ‘value laden’ means here, but happiness, as I use the term, is a state of consciousness (not necessarily a state of mind if states of mind include non-conscious or subconscious states; happiness is an active conscious state in my view), and a feeling or experience, and is absolutely “value laden” in the sense of, well, being valuable, or good.
The “by contrast” bit seems to imply that the view that happiness is something felt somehow precludes happiness from being a good. Just the opposite: happiness’s being felt is what allows it to be intrinsically good.
So far, there are differences in how I understand the terms happiness, normativity, value, and good.
I remember that ‘eudaimonia’ is sometimes translated as ‘happiness’ in Plato, and so that could be where Shea is getting this usage from, but I think this is confusing. Eudaimonia is better translated as ‘flourishing’, and so what Shea calls ‘happiness’ I would call ‘flourishing’, and even then I’m sure that my preferred conception of flourishing would differ in some ways. To signify this, I will replace ‘happiness’ when Shea uses it with [flourishing] in brackets.
Note 4: Shea writes that [flourishing] is intrinsically good (pg 4). But on my view, flourishing is extrinsically good. To flourish is something like: to live as part of a system that maximizes good happiness and good pain and minimizes evil happiness and evil pain. Only happiness is intrinsically good, and flourishing is a state of optimized happiness.
We can also refer to good happiness as ‘virtuous happiness’, good pain as ‘virtuous pain’, evil happiness as ‘vicious happiness’, and evil pain as ‘vicious pain’. The idea is that the kind of happiness that leads to greater long-term happiness for yourself and those around you is virtuous – it doesn’t compromise your character, and is the kind of happiness of which a virtuous person would approve.
Note 5: Apparently Richard Taylor defines [flourishing] as:
“having achieved fulfillment or having been blessed with the highest personal good . . . the kind of good that normally takes a lifetime to attain.”
But on my view ataraxia, a deep sense of existential peace and contentment, is the highest personal good. Ataraxia is difficult to achieve, but, the idea goes, the longer someone spends in eudaimonia, or something close to eudaimonia, the more likely it is that they will achieve it. And so while eudaimonia is a great good, it is ultimately subservient to the even greater goal of achieving ataraxia for as many people as possible.
Note 6: Shea makes a distinction between something being intrinsically good for someone versus something being intrinsically good period. Something can make “the world a better place even if it has no relation to any individual.” This is impossible on my view. The concept of ‘better’ is ultimately phenomenal, just like the concept of goodness more generally. So it’s impossible for something to be better without being better for someone. Nothing is magically good; all good things are good for a reason. To say that something can be good in a vacuum sounds to me like saying that it’s good for no reason. The phrase “good for nothing” applies here. If something is good for nothing then it’s not good.
Note 7: Because there are four types of goodness on my view (intrinsic, extrinsic, saving, and success), a person’s life can be good in different ways. But I imagine the child in the story of Omelas, the one being tortured so that the city’s inhabitants can flourish. This child does not live a good life. No sane person wants to live this child’s life. And yet the child’s life does, in the magical context of the story, produce a great deal of goodness for others. The child’s life is not good for the child, but it is good for others. So the child has a useful life, though not a good life. This tells me that, for me, a good life and a useful life are not the same thing. The basic notion of ‘good life’ thus requires that the life be good for the person who lives it. If your life is painful enough, it’s perfectly rational to reject your own life even if your life is highly useful for others.
Note 8: Moral goodness, on my view, refers to the goodness of someone’s character and moral reasoning. Moral goodness does not occupy some additional category of goodness, but is a particular type of extrinsic good, good because good character and good reasoning leads to greater and better happiness and less suffering.
Note 9: Shea shares this quote from Julia Annas:
“As we bring up our children, what we aim for is not that they have episodes of smiley-face feeling, but that their lives go well as wholes: we come to think happiness as the way a life as a whole goes well, and see that episodes of happiness are not what we build our lives around.”
I observe that we build our lives around running away from pain, especially unbearable pain: pain so great that it makes us wish we weren’t alive. Pains we run away from include the pain of boredom, the pain of disappointing a parent or mentor, the pain of the judgment of others, the pain of poverty, the pain of low self-esteem, and so on.
But I want to turn to this notion of “life as a whole going well.” I’m not sure what to make of this. Very simply, a life with more happiness than pain can be said to be at least technically a happy life, a life that has gone well, even if only barely. But some kinds of happiness are more prized than others. A life filled with more happiness than pain might be worse off on the whole compared to a life with more pain than happiness, if the latter contains more of these prized forms of happiness. A boring-but-decent life is arguably less desirable than a troubled-but-magnificent life. Put another way, higher-order happiness is so great that a life filled with only lower pains and pleasures where the pleasures slightly outweigh the pains is not as worth living as a life with higher-order pains and pleasures where the pains slightly outweigh the pleasures.
So when comparing the magnitude of pains versus pleasures, we take into account the context of the pain or pleasure. We don't want to play with children's toys forever, even if that meant freedom from the greater pains of life; we want to take part in greater narratives, in projects that go beyond ourselves and have a broader and deeper impact on the world, and we are willing to sacrifice much comfort for that opportunity.
This idea of “smiley-face feeling” – like the pleasures of entertainment and food and traveling and so on – seems to speak to a kind of shallow happiness. We don’t want that for our children. We want our children to experience deep, profound happiness. That’s where ataraxia comes in. I don’t want to go to a soulless job, go home, eat dinner, listen to a podcast or watch some mildly entertaining show, go to bed, and repeat until I die. That sounds bland, shallow, pointless, stupid, disgusting – a waste of life. What I want is to do the kind of work I find most urgent – work so urgent, and so important, that it’s worth suffering for, even dying for – work so meaningful that if I managed to complete it, at least to a decent enough degree, the self-satisfaction I would feel would be so great that I would no longer find myself raging against death and suffering, but accepting it, because I’m grateful to have had the chance to do the work even if it meant being forced to live in a world that’s in many ways deeply bad.
Note 10: Because flourishing is an extrinsic good, and a saving good, I understand what makes it good. So I can explain why flourishing is good. Shea on the other hand has not yet explained why flourishing is good, or what it means for something to be good in the first place, or what flourishing looks like. On his view, flourishing is intrinsically good, which is a departure from my view. On my view the only thing that can be intrinsically good is something of which one cannot seriously ask why someone would want it without failing to grasp its essence. The only thing that fits the bill is conscious, positive, felt experience, and I call this sort of experience happiness. (As GE Moore pointed out, you can always ask, “But why is that thing good?” This is why I believe that the reason why something is good must terminate in an essence fact: intrinsic goodness is good by its essence. No one who grasps the essence of happiness can seriously ask why it's good.) Plus, I see that nothing would be good in a universe that forever was empty of conscious subjects, and this tells me that whatever goodness is, it must cash out in conscious experience.
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