Happiness

2. The notion in philosophy

‘Happiness’ is not the important notion in ethics; ‘wellbeing’ is – that is, a notion of good fortune, of what makes a life go well. ‘Happiness’ is important only if one thinks, as many philosophers of course have thought, that happiness is the only thing that contributes to wellbeing (a substantive claim), or if one uses ‘happiness’, as some philosophers have used it, to mean the same thing as ‘wellbeing’. What we want, and what philosophers have generally been in search of, is an account of what it is for a life to go well.

Aristotle spoke of ‘eudaimonia’ (literally, ‘good divine power’ or ‘good fortune’), normally translated in English as ‘happiness’ (see Eudaimonia). For him, it is the central term in ethics. ‘What is the supreme good attainable in our actions? Well, so far as the name goes, there is pretty general agreement. “It is happiness,” say both intellectuals and the unsophisticated, meaning by “happiness” living well and faring well’ (Nicomachean Ethics 1095a). Aristotle’s notion therefore is what I have called ‘wellbeing’ – what actually makes a life go well – and it is often thought that the prominent psychological element in the English word ‘happiness’ makes it an inappropriate translation for ‘eudaimonia’. But even if ‘eudaimonia’ and ‘happiness’ do not mean quite the same, it does not follow that Aristotle, on the one hand, and anglophone philosophers who have used the term ‘happiness’ on the other, are talking about different things. For the reason given earlier, they are often both talking about wellbeing and, if they say different things about it, they may well be making contrary claims (see Aristotle §§21–2).

It is a plausible thought that faring well in some way involves acting well. How are virtue and happiness related? Some, such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle on some interpretations, have held that virtuous action is necessary and sufficient for happiness (see Plato §14; Socrates §4). On this view, all that matters for happiness is internal to one’s will: happiness is being virtuous and nothing else. Others, including Aristotle on other interpretations, have held that, important though virtue is to happiness, it is not all there is to it; external conditions such as health, wealth and avoidance of disasters matter too. Still others have thought that virtue is generally inimical to happiness (Thrasymachus as depicted by Plato in the Republic and Thomas Hobbes on some interpretations). It is somewhat easier to argue that virtue is sufficient for happiness than that it is necessary. Some elements of a good life (say, accomplishing things such as creating great art or making major scientific discoveries) do not seem to lose their value just because the agent concerned is not virtuous. If we could resolve these issues in favour of the first option, we should have a powerful answer to the vexed question, ‘Why be moral?’ Because, we could then say, it is a (or the only) way to be happy.

The most prominent use of the term ‘happiness’ in modern philosophy is to be found in the work of utilitarians (see Utilitarianism). They hold that acts are right in virtue of the value of their consequences, and what makes consequences valuable, according to classical utilitarians, such as Jeremy Bentham, J.S. Mill and Henry Sidgwick, is the presence of pleasure or happiness (see Consequentialism). This appeal to pleasure or happiness, although historically important in utilitarianism, is not essential to it. A utilitarian may say, and many modern utilitarians have said, that several irreducibly different things, perhaps including happiness, are valuable. The classical utilitarians put the term ‘happiness’ to various theoretical uses. Some of them used it in an empirical theory of action (psychological hedonism), which claims that pleasure or happiness is the only end which in fact we desire or at which we aim. They also used it in a normative theory of the ends of life (ethical hedonism), which claims that pleasure or happiness is the only thing worth acting for (see Hedonism §2). Once ‘happiness’ is given these theoretical roles, it comes under pressure to grow to fill them. If happiness is what in fact we aim at, then the term ‘happiness’ must encompass all that in fact we aim at (for example, saving one’s children at the cost of one’s own life). If it is the only thing worth aiming at, then whatever is worth aiming at (such as saving one’s children at the cost of one’s own life) must be fitted under the term ‘happiness’. It is not that the term cannot be stretched to include them; it is rather that once it includes them it may have become a technical term, and we should then need to know its technical sense. The natural elasticity of the word ‘happiness’ can easily lead to confusion. It is easy to be deceived by shifts of sense such as this: ‘happiness is what makes a life good’ (a substantive claim: happiness is the one and only end in life); ‘happiness is what makes life good’ (a tautology: ‘happiness’ means ‘what makes a life good’).

The classical utilitarians paid insufficient attention to the meaning of their central term. Jeremy Bentham seems to have thought of ‘pleasure’ or ‘happiness’ primarily as a positive feeling tone. But when he defined ‘utility’, he described it as ‘that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness (all this in the present case comes to the same thing)’ (1789: 12), thus running together what improves one’s situation and what produces certain mental states. J.S. Mill’s approach was more complex. What links valuable states for him is that they are pleasurable, but this is not a case of there being any common positive feeling tone running through them all. In Utilitarianism (1861), he famously claims that pleasures differ in quality as well as quantity: states of higher quality are those that we prefer when sufficiently informed. Then, returning to differences in quantity, he observes that pleasures are not homogeneous, and that pleasure is always heterogeneous with pain. Informed preferences, he says, enter too in determining which is the greater of two pleasures or the worse of two pains. He may mean merely that the preference of the informed judge is a way for us to learn which pleasure is greater, but he sometimes seems to suggest that being the object of an informed preference is all that we can mean by a pleasure’s being greater. Henry Sidgwick also adopted a preference account. He thought that the only things that we wanted for their own sakes were mental states, but that there was no single feeling tone running through all of them that gave them their unity. What unified them was that they were desired. The ultimate good, he concluded, was ‘desirable consciousness’ (1874: 397).