Part 1: Hedonism wins
The dreaded terms ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ enter into the discussion in Section 2, The Nature of Happiness. Shea says on page 11 that the subjective/objective distinction appears for two separate questions: the metaethical question and the normative question. For the metaethical question Shea asks: “Are there objective truths about happiness that are universally true for all human beings independently of what anyone believes or practices? Or do happiness claims have a subjective truth-value that is determined by individuals or groups in some way?” And for the normative question: “What are the good-making features of a life that explain why someone is happy? Are they subjective sorts of things – mental states or experiences – or are they objective in nature – things other than mental states or experiences?”
So:
Objective truth = truth not depending on mental states or experiences.
Subjective truth = truth depending on mental states or experiences.
Objective good-maker = a good-maker that does not depend on mental states or experiences.
Subjective good-maker = a good-maker that does depend on mental states or experiences.
This confuses me. First, it appears as though the author is using the same sense of ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ for both of these questions: independence of experience versus dependence. So these terms are not ambiguous, but there’s a need to separate the questions of truth and good-making.
Second, all good-makers are going to depend on mental states eventually. Separating out good-making from experience will always lead to the absurd conclusion that a person could be happy and yet feel miserable. I don’t believe there can be any miserable happy people. That is a contradiction. It would be equally strange to have someone who feels happy and yet is not happy.
I’m aware that ‘happy’ has at least 4 meanings:
happy(1) = a specific emotion like elation or excitement;
happy(2) = intrinsic goodness, which can be found in any positive emotion, like relief or gratitude, or any positive feeling of any kind, like the soothing warmth of a hot tub;
happy(3) = contentment, a lack of negative emotions, and perhaps a disposition to agree that one has no serious problems with whatever it is they are happy with (their life, their job, their marriage);
happy(4) = eudaimonia or flourishing. If someone is happy they are flourishing, whatever that means.
So ‘happy’ is ambiguous and worth specifying. When I use ‘happy’ I mean intrinsic goodness, happy(2). ‘Flourishing’, to me, means living in a condition of optimized happiness: you have access to all major forms of happiness that a rational person needs for life to be highly worth living, and you are free from all major pains that would make life not worth living for a rational person. The happiness and pain you experience are virtuous and extrinsically good; there is no evil happiness (e.g. cruelty) or evil pain (e.g. not getting something evil you want).
A person doing drugs, playing video games, or binge eating can be very happy while not flourishing. While it doesn’t make sense for someone to feel happy and yet not be happy, it makes perfect sense for someone to feel happy and yet be suffering, where suffering is the opposite of flourishing. Conversely, great pains are often necessary to obtain and maintain flourishing, and so you can be in pain while flourishing.
Shea says, like every other philosopher, that goodness is normative (12): “Theories of the nature of happiness explain why things are good by identifying the ultimate good-making features of lives, the normative properties that explain the truth of propositions like ‘G is good for S’ . . . .
Goodness/badness is not normative on my view, but I’ve already explained this so I’ll move on.
Shea contrasts two views: Subjectivism (“a good G is good for a subject S solely in virtue of S’s mental states or attitudes towards G”) and Objectivism, which is the denial of Subjectivism. Shea gives five theories of well-being: hedonism, desire satisfaction, objective list theory, perfectionism, and eudaimonism.
Hedonism = only pleasure is intrinsically good. Extrinsic goods are good because they lead to pleasure.
This theory is associated with Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. (And Epicurus, and Plato.)
Desire satisfaction = only satisfying one’s desires is intrinsically good. Extrinsic goods are good because they lead to desire satisfaction.
Two types: Actual desires versus ideal desires. I reject actual desire satisfaction theory because someone can fulfill their desires and still be miserable. Plus, someone could experience something and enjoy it, but it wasn’t one of their desires. Where is the goodness coming from? The desire theorist would have to say that the desire and its satisfaction occurred at the same moment. But why would a desire spontaneously come about in this way? Ah, it’s because of the pleasure of the experience.
Ideal satisfaction fares no better, because there is no way of knowing whether a desire you are pursuing (or that someone else has or suggests to you) is ideal or not, or whether a desire you satisfied lined up with an ideal desire.
And yet clearly someone who never satisfies any of their desires is not living a good life. Hedonism explains this: Everyone who experiences happiness desires it for its own sake, so someone who never has any desires satisfied is someone who is never happy.
Objective list theory = There is a list of intrinsic goods that are all irreducible. Pg 16: “Some widely recognized objective goods include friendship, knowledge, achievement, autonomy, beauty, pleasure, and virtue.” Some folks would add existence to this list, though I would not, because whether your existence is any good depends on the conscious experiences you are having or will be having in the future.
I reject this theory for three reasons:
1) It suffers an arbitrariness problem. Who knows whether you have added one item too many, or one too few?
2) It seems to assume that we cannot analyze these goods into a fundamental good, but it’s a matter of fact that I can analyze all these things into a unifying goodness.
3) It fails to provide a unified account of goods. A unified account is simpler.
This theory is associated with W. D. Ross, Derek Parfit, Christopher Rice, and Brad Hooker.
Perfectionism = What is good is the perfection or fulfillment of one’s nature, in our case our human nature.
“Human flourishing consists in the development and exercise of these capacities, such as the physical, intellectual, volitional, social, and emotional powers; and the realization of their corresponding ends, such as life and health, knowledge, free agency, friendship, and beauty. Our level of happiness is determined by the degree to which we fulfill these capacities and participate in these goods.” (16-17)
This theory runs into the immediate problem of evil human nature. I see evil as inseparable from human nature, and surely we don’t want to fulfill these aspects.
But even setting that aside, it’s not clear at all to me why this would be good. Apparently it’s the good consequences we see, the happiness (positive feelings) we obtain by participating in these goods, that makes fulfilling one’s nature good. Or it’s because these are good in an irreducible way. So this either just looks like hedonism or objective list theory.
This theory is associated with Aristotle and Aquinas.
The last of the five theories of well-being that the author considers in this book is eudaimonism. This theory says that the fundamental good-maker of a life is virtue, with virtues including justice, courage, temperance, practical wisdom, curiosity, and intellectual virtue (pg 17).
This theory is also associated with Aristotle, which must mean either that Aristotle was confused or that perfectionism and eudaimonism go together. Shea emphasizes that theism is compatible with any of these views or any combination of these views, and notes that pluralism (combining one or more theory) is an option (pg 19).
I don’t go for pluralism because a unified account is simpler, because hedonism easily explains all that seems good within the other theories, and the theories other than hedonism provide an incorrect analysis of what ‘intrinsic’ means. “Why is happiness (positive feelings) good?”The answer is “Because of the essence of happiness.” And ‘why’ questions stop there. But this is not the case with anything else. Why is friendship good? Because it leads to happiness, a kind of happiness that can’t be found elsewhere and the lacking of which produces misery, bad feelings, in us, and these bad feelings are worth avoiding because of their essence, because of what they are. We can repeat this for every alleged intrinsic good that isn’t happiness.
Part 2: Confusions over subjective/objective
I imagine a universe with nothing in it at all. Does it contain goodness of any kind? Of course not. I imagine another universe with stars and planets, trillions of galaxies, like ours, but there is not a single conscious creature, and from the birth of this universe to its heat death, not a single conscious creature ever comes about. Does this universe contain goodness of any kind? I say it clearly doesn’t.
Someone might think existence itself is good, but they won’t have any explanation as to why it is. Or they might think that the beauty of the stars and planets and awesome size of this universe, its orderliness, its mathematical structure, are all objectively beautiful features of this universe, and so this universe contains goodness despite never containing a single conscious creature. Again, I see no explanation for the goodness of any of this. You might suggest a modal goodness: If the right creature were to pop into this universe, then this creature would benefit from the order of the universe, such as by experiencing awe and wonder and beauty. This could explain the intuition that this universe is more beautiful or better than the universe with nothing in it at all, because there is no possible creature that could pop into an empty universe and proceed to experience happiness.
This thought experiment tells me that goodness is, fundamentally, something experienced. We see this clearly when we consider the so-called “objective” theories of well-being, and see how they all involve mind-dependence:
Objective list theory: Consider friendship, knowledge, achievement, autonomy, beauty, pleasure, and virtue: Which of these depend on mindedness / first-person properties / consciousness / experience / personhood? They all do!
Perfectionism: “Human flourishing consists in the development and exercise of these capacities, such as the physical, intellectual, volitional, social, and emotional powers . . .” (pg 16)
All of these capacities are clearly dependent on minds! Even our physical capacities stop when our minds are destroyed, and are only activated, usually, by our minds.
Eudaimonism: Virtue can be defined in terms of emotions, where the virtuous person feels the right amount of emotion, not too much or too little. Or virtue can be defined in terms of action, where the virtuous person performs the balanced action that is not too extreme on one side or the other. Shea defines virtue in the following way (pg 33-34): “Being virtuous involves having a good will: a will that wills, desires, chooses, and acts in accordance with what is truly good. Willing the good, having the other aspects of one’s character integrated around a good will, and acting in accordance with it, are necessary conditions of virtue. . . . the essence of virtue is having a good will that is rightly ordered and wills the good.”
All of these aspects of virtue are likewise mind-dependent. There is no virtue without experience.
So these so-called objective theories of well-being are actually quite mind-dependent or experience dependent. Just like hedonism and desire satisfaction? Well, not so fast.
One way of cashing out the objective/subjective distinction is in terms of properties and epistemic access. If something is subjective, then its truth or existence depends on first-person properties. But if something is objective, then its truth or existence depends on third-person properties. The moon is an object, it’s objective; the moon is made up of third-person properties. This means the moon is public: any person, or cameras, can see the moon. My memories are part of me, a subject, they are subjective; my memories are made up of first-person properties. This means my memories are private: no person, no technology, can access my memories except me.
If someone reports a subjective experience, they are giving a data report. As long as that data report contains no interpretation, and is just a pure data report, then that report cannot be false. Data can’t be mistaken; only interpretations of data can be mistaken. It is in this sense that introspection—a self-report of experience—is infallible, and any pure data report communicated to anyone else is likewise infallible.
So consider the truth of: “I love breakfast burritos”. Is this statement true? Yes. And no. It depends on who you ask. But now consider: “The moon is smaller than the earth.” Is this statement true? Yes, and it does not depend on who you ask. Subjective statements have this yes-no property, while objective statements have a yes-only or no-only property.
It is from this that we get this idea that subjective claims are infallible, but objective claims are fallible. But for every subjective claim, there is an objective claim about the truth of that claim.
To illustrate, let’s say I go to a party and I enjoy myself. But I black out and forget everything about the party. I also have a twin who, unbeknownst to be, was at that party, but they had a terrible time. A friend of mine sees my twin being miserable and, thinking it was me, tells me the next day how miserable I was. I take my friend’s word for it. My attitude and my belief with respect to my enjoyment of the party is that I did not enjoy it, even though I really did.
This illuminates two points. The first is that my attitude or belief does not determine whether an instance of happiness took place. I was in fact happy, but because of this scenario, I took on the belief / attitude that I was not happy at the party. If a co-worker asks me how the party went, I might say: “I did not enjoy it”, even though I in fact did. If I were being more sensitive to the truth, I would have said, “I don’t remember whether I enjoyed it, but according to my friend I did not.”
The second point is that while people can be wrong about their own instances of happiness, other people can also be wrong about what happiness has taken place. My co-worker might, because of what I say, fashion the false belief that I did not enjoy myself at the party when I in fact did.
People, even myself, can be incorrect about what happiness has taken place. In this sense, hedonism is objective. “Ben enjoyed himself at the party.” Is this statement true? Yes, and it does not depend on who you ask. It depends on the actual experience that actually took place.
This is why the mind reading fallacy is so frustrating:
“I saw that movie; I liked it!”
“No you didn’t.”
“What? Yes... I did. Why are you saying I didn’t?”
“No one liked that movie. You’re just saying that to be different.”
“...No, I liked the movie because of its writing. The setups and payoffs
were—”
“Yeah, sure thing buddy.”
What to do when faced with this kind of gaslighting? People can be, and will be, profoundly wrong about your own experiences, and because your experiences are private, there’s not much you can do. The objective fact remains that you had the experiences you did, and anyone who says otherwise is not only incorrect, but, from your vantage point, certainly incorrect.
Part 3: Highest good
Shea says that for Christians, the highest good is union with God. But whether someone has union with God, or is even capable of ever having union with God, depends on whether that person has a mind! Again, we find mind-dependence.
This matters because Shea tries to argue that while theism fits with any theory of well-being, theism fits better with so-called objectivist theories. All of this falls apart if it turns out that hedonism is, in some sense, objective, and if, in some sense, all of the so-called objective theories of well-being are subjective. This falls apart even further because hedonism is so plausible that if it really were true that God is evidentially incompatible with hedonism, then all the worse for theism.
One way to recover the intuitions surrounding this topic, is that what is extrinsically good or bad is objective. Drinking a vial of acid is extrinsically bad regardless of anyone’s opinion, because the pain that would result from drinking a vial of acid is intrinsically bad. People can be wrong, and often are wrong, about the good or bad consequences of things. So people can be wrong, and often are wrong, about what it takes to flourish, to exist in an idealized condition that maximizes extrinsically good happiness and minimizes pain that fails to be extrinsically good.
It is absurd to think someone could enjoy the highest good, union with God, and thus be maximally happy, while feeling miserable. So again, non-hedonism leads to absurdity. Again, this is the problem with any theory that denies happiness as the final good: if there is some other good that is more fundamental, then we could imagine someone being so miserable that they would prefer death to life, and yet because they have this other good, they are “objectively” happy.
I can imagine an evil God giving me this deal: When you die, either you will be tortured every day for eternity in hell, or everyone else will. You can choose to peacefully cease to exist forever at the infinite expense of everyone else, or you can sacrifice yourself to save all of humanity.
On a virtue-first view, you should sacrifice yourself and enjoy your infinite virtue. But what does this “enjoyment” entail? It entails finding yourself stuck in a worst possible evil, the kind of evil that cannot possibly be justified: a state where every moment you wish for death but cannot die, and this goes on forever. On the other hand, if you pick the selfish action and cease to exist, your selfishness is of no concern to you.
This demonstrates what the real moral concerns are to conscious creatures. The deepest moral concern for a conscious creature is to avoid a worst possible evil at all costs. We can be grateful that there is no evil God to force such a choice on anyone!
Plus in order to be unified with God you would need to love God and be in a relationship with God, but this relationship would be impossible if you are in terrible pain and you see God not caring about your pain. Why might God not care about your pain? Because not only can you be happy without intrinsically good experiences, you can be maximally happy without intrinsically good experiences. This shows the incoherence of separating out maximal goods from intrinsically good experience.
But if happiness must come first before relationship with God is possible, or if happiness is necessitated by a relationship with God, then this points to happiness as being the fundamental good.
On pg 22 Shea says that maximal pleasure, apart from the union with God, will not make someone perfectly happy. Maybe this is true if the pleasures being maximized are lower-order pleasures. But think of what a relationship with God entails. These things absolutely would produce unique and extreme positive feelings. That’s why we can imagine someone being happier, even happiest, by being in union with a perfect being.
Blaise Pascal: “The Stoics say: ‘Withdraw into yourself, that is where you will find peace. And that is not true. Others say: Go outside: look for happiness in some diversion.’ And that is not true . . . Happiness is neither outside nor inside us: it is in God, both outside and inside us.”
Hedonism can make sense of the idea of happiness being both inside and outside us. First, intrinsic goodness is inside us in the sense that it is a first-person property and something experienced directly. Second, happiness is inside us in the sense that introspection, self-honesty, integration of the shadow (a Jungian idea), letting go of negative feelings, and so on, are meditative practices that occur within us. Third: Happiness lies outside of us in that some of the best feelings we can feel are tied to senses of home, community, belonging, usefulness to others, being loved by others, viewed as valuable by others, and feeling well-integrated into a social system.
I imagine the stoics would have some choice words with Pascal’s lazy remarks against stoicism. Even a cursory reading of the stoics reveals the stoic ideals of being kind towards others even when they are unkind to you, upholding your duties to others without complaint, and behaving and speaking blamelessly around others so that there is nothing they can say against you. It’s patently false to characterize stoicism as isolating oneself from society and finding peace only within. Don’t let the foolishness of others get to you, and don’t rely on the judgments of others for your happiness, the stoic would say, which is perfectly sound advice. But happiness for the stoic absolutely is placed in following Nature’s path for you, which probably will involve working with others to some extent.
Next, I have no idea what it means to say that our happiness is inside God. Does that mean God doesn’t make us feel happy? That can’t be right. Okay, but our feelings are in a sense inside us. So admitting that God makes us feel happy is to admit that our happiness is inside us. Maybe it’s saying that the source of our feelings of happiness lie in God. But that’s not true either. I have already explained how belief in God produces misery for some of us. And I mentioned the ways union with God would make us extremely happy, but no one on earth has that kind of union with God, so that happiness is irrelevant to us earthlings.
What is the highest good? What is the priority of goods?
This hierarchy can be objective in hedonism because some things just do produce more happiness than other things. I imagine someone struggling to decide whether to go to the party or stay home. Staying home is the low risk low reward strategy, but going to the party is higher risk higher reward. This person decides that the party will involve drinking and drinking games with strangers, and knowing that they don’t like this, they stay home. But the next day a friend sends a video of the party, and they had Guitar Hero and Super Smash Bros set ups and people were playing games, and Bob realizes that he would have had a blast had he gone to the party. Going to the party was the better choice and Bob’s choice of staying home was incorrect.
But in another sense, talk of a hierarchy of goods seems silly since it’s obvious that this will differ from person to person. For one person, achievement in ballet is of top priority, for another person it’s achievement in tennis. What matters on utilitarianism is what makes someone in fact happy. We could try to extract from these certain universals of happiness, like that happiness from achieving something great is highly prized and worth pursuing. So hedonism can account for a hierarchy of goods if you want. Certainly, hedonism better accounts for our deepest moral concerns, like the concern of avoiding maximal evils.
For some people death is a special evil because 1) It is inevitable and 2) It destroys all possibility of future happiness. Life can feel absurd and pointless given that one day it will all just end forever. What was the point? People who aren’t bothered by existential questions can focus on other things. But people like me who are more preoccupied with death and what it means for the meaning of life, defeating death in some sense is of a high priority. That’s where ataraxia comes in. So for some of us, ataraxia is the summum bonum or highest good.
When it comes to figuring out what the summum bonum is of your life, often people will have us imagine being on our death bed; what would you regret most if you didn’t get it done? Then pursue the answer to that question. But that answer will differ massively from person to person, in the details if not in the structure.
On pg 27 Aquinas says that God is the final end, but on pg 1 Aquinas says that happiness is the final end. Curious...
Pg 1: “man’s last end is happiness which all men desire” ; “man must, of necessity, desire all, whatsoever he desires, for the last end”.
Pg 27: “God is the last end of man and of all other things . . . [and] man and other rational creatures attain to their last end by knowing and loving God”.
Part 4: Rapid fire
Three orientations of optimism:
Optimism = perfect and imperfect happiness are possible
Mixed = only imperfect happiness is possible
Pessimism = neither is possible
In this life, it appears that mixed is the right attitude for Christians and non-Christians alike. Though pessimism will be true in some cases.
56 Man is made happy by God alone — this is clearly false even from a Christian point: Christians are made happy by basic and social goods… if it turns out God is not real these still made the Christian happy all along. Man is made perfectly happy by God alone – that’s fine.
I agree that Christianity, or any worldview that promises eternity with a personal perfect being, can offer perfect happiness, and other worldviews that offer only impersonal states of bliss will lack the individuality, freedom, and sense of love and acceptance we long for.
Imperfect happiness is precarious on theism as well… many Christians live poor lives despite their faith.
If God wanted to be glorified, for those who believe to stand out, then happiness could be one way to do this.
You might say perseverance despite pain should be more expected but if that’s the case then all Christians should suffer horribly to demonstrate God’s strength… but this doesnt work because many Christians are happy (for naturalistic reasons) plus it would be cruel to torture Christians just so they could prove their virtue (though God does this to Job).
The problem is that humans look toward happiness to see what works, and by extension what is true. If non-Christians see that Christianity doesn’t work then they will assume it’s not true. At least pragmatically it’s not true, and many humans are by necessity pragmatists.
It is very strange that God would create us or allow us to evolve into pragmatists in this way only for Christians to not only not be pragmatically differentiated positively in any supernaturally gifted way, but if anything it is the opposite (but this could be a selection effect: unfortunate people gravitate toward religion).
We can reconcile pragmatism with a property reference theory of truth when we extend value properties to truth: it is true that I would be happy if such and such, and therefore that is the more relevant truth.
59 Theism is not the best to live in because of the agony it causes both from the pain of belief and the pain of love.
59 There is no god’s offer in any undeniable tangible sense. God has not visited me in a dream or through an angel. There are only reports of events in the Bible and all of that is consistent with naturalism.
While I would love to take up God’s offer for salvation and happiness, this offer needs to be made in a real way and not in a way as out there and disconnected as being in a book, especially a book as flawed and problematic as the Bible, full of human errors and compiled by human authors.
Even if I were offered that doesn’t mean there is free choice. How could someone freely choose to be unhappy? That makes no sense. I don’t choose to see how the problem of evil renders belief in God irrational, but I see it all the same. And that sight makes it impossible for me to believe, so there is no choice.
60 Knowing and loving God is the greatest good but it is impossible to know and love God while experiencing a worst possible evil or maximal evil.
While a best possible good is union with a perfect being, because of the unique and ultimate kinds of happiness this would entail, a maximal good would be any state where you flourish forever (or flourish for the maximum psychologically viable amount of time).
61 I agree union with God supports pro-theism.
I agree that if heaven is union with God then there is no such thing as secular heaven. But to be charitable we can imagine heaven defined as an eternal state with all imagined virtuous goods being delivered.
Hope in God can lead to disappointment and crushing loss and complacency in this life – a kind of learned helplessness and over reliance on God sorting everything out.
Hope is primarily an act of imagination: see the future you want and wonder how it might happen. If something seems too good to be true, it’s hard to imagine it happening, and thus hard to hope for.