Happiness

3. ‘Wellbeing’, ‘welfare’, ‘utility’ and ‘quality of life’

It is because ‘wellbeing’ (or ‘welfare’, ‘utility’, ‘quality of life’) is the important notion in ethics, not ‘happiness’, that most attention now goes to it (see Welfare). What, then, makes a life go well? How one answers that question will depend on how many of the following arguments one finds persuasive.

Wellbeing is not simply a positive feeling tone. There is no one tone running through all the things that make a life go well. Wellbeing, one might instead say, taking a lead from Sidgwick, is the fulfilment of desires. However, despite what some economists say, it certainly could not be the fulfilment of one’s actual desires; they can be fulfilled and one be worse off. It would have to be, as Sidgwick himself says, the fulfilment of informed desires. But ‘informed’ in what sense? Suppose we say that a desire is informed if it exists when I am aware of all relevant facts and I commit no logical error (Brandt 1979: 10). But an irrational desire might well survive criticism by facts and logic, and its mere survival is less than it takes to make one better off. For instance, a man might have a crazy aim in life – say, counting the blades of grass in various lawns (Rawls 1971: 432–3). He accepts, let us say, that no one is interested, that the information is of no use, and he makes no logical error. Still, it is unlikely that we would regard the fulfilment of this obsessive desire as, in itself, enhancing his life – apart, that is, from preventing anxieties or tensions that might be set up by frustrating the desire, which are not the point. Cases like this suggest that our standard of ‘informed’ is not stiff enough yet. To make it stiffer, though, we should have to make desires ‘informed’ in some such strong sense as ‘formed in proper appreciation of the nature of their object’. But this makes the mere occurrence of desire much less important and the nature of the object of desire much more important.

We might say therefore, as many philosophers do, that there are many different things that enhance life: happiness, seen as a state of mind, might be one, but perhaps also accomplishing something in the course of one’s life, knowledge of certain basic metaphysical and moral matters, deep personal relations, and so on. Wellbeing, we could say, consists in having good things (a list of which we could provide).

The list-account of wellbeing has the potential of being much broader than the happiness-account of classical utilitarianism. Philosophers now debate just how broad it can be. Sidgwick thought that nothing enhanced a life unless it entered consciousness or experience. One might call this the ‘experience requirement’. But some think that the requirement is too restrictive. They say that we sometimes want things other than states of consciousness, and these things seem to make our lives better. For instance we may desire a good reputation among people we shall never know about, or posthumous fame, or to accomplish something with our lives. One way to clarify one’s thoughts on this issue is to ask: supposing there were a foolproof machine that would give one any experience one wanted, would one plug in? What could matter except how life feels from the inside? Many would answer that what they want is to accomplish something with their lives (such as write a good novel, or discover a cure for AIDS), not to have the impression that they are. Many would say that they also want simply to be in touch with reality, even at a cost in desirable consciousness.

Some philosophers think that if, for these reasons, we drop the experience requirement, the list of things that make a life better will grow counter-intuitively large. Without the requirement, we seem to have to fall back on the view that wellbeing is the fulfilment of desires formed in proper appreciation of the nature of their object. I want our twenty-fifth century successors to flourish (any moderately decent person would), but surely the fulfilment of that desire centuries from now will not retroactively make my life better. The fulfilment of such desires has to be excluded, but the experience requirement is not the only way of doing it. The list-account of wellbeing will do it too. The list is composed by identifying what enhances life. Nothing enhances life but instances of items on that list: happiness, knowledge, accomplishment, personal relations, and so on. The fulfilment of my desire for our twenty-fifth century successors to flourish may be excluded simply because it does not fit under any of the headings on the list that we should eventually compile.