about these matters are the twins themselves. When we ask Lori and Reba how they feel about their situation, they tell us that they wouldn’t have it any other way. In an exhaustive search of the medical literature, the same medical historian found the ‘desire to remain together to be so widespread among communicating conjoined twins as to be practically universal’.4 Something is terribly wrong here. But what?
There seem to be just two possibilities. Someone–either Lori and Reba, or everyone else in the world–is making a dreadful mistake when they talk about happiness. Because we are the everyone else in question, it is only natural that we should be attracted to the former conclusion, dismissing the twins’ claim to happiness with offhand rejoinders such as ‘Oh, they’re just saying that’ or ‘They may think they’re happy, but they’re not’ or the ever popular ‘They don’t know what happiness really is’ (usually spoken as if we do). Fair enough. But like the claims they dismiss, these rejoinders are also claims–scientific claims and philosophical claims–that presume answers to questions that have vexed scientists and philosophers for millennia. What are we all talking about when we make such claims about happiness?
Dancing About Architecture
There are thousands of books on happiness, and most of them start by asking what happiness really is. As readers quickly learn, this is approximately equivalent to beginning a pilgrimage by marching directly into the first available tar pit, because happiness really is nothing more or less than a word that we word makers can use to indicate anything we please. The problem is that people seem pleased to use this one word to indicate a host of different things, which has created a tremendous terminological mess on which several fine scholarly careers have been based. If one slops around in this mess long enough, one comes to see that most disagreements about what happiness really is are semantic disagreements about whether the word ought to be used to indicate this or that, rather than scientific or philosophical disagreements about the nature of this and that. What are the this and the that that happiness most often refers to? The word happiness is used to indicate at least three related things, which we might roughly call emotional happiness, moral happiness, and judgmental happiness.
Feeling Happy
Emotional happiness is the most basic of the trio–so basic, in fact, that we become tongue-tied when we try to define it, as though some bratty child had just challenged us to say what the word the means and in the process made a truly compelling case for corporal punishment. Emotional happiness is a phrase for a feeling, an experience, a subjective state, and thus it has no objective referent in the physical world. If we ambled down to the corner pub and met an alien from another planet who asked us to define that feeling, we would either point to the objects in the world that tend to bring it about, or we would mention other feelings that it is like. In fact, this is the only thing we can do when we are asked to define a subjective experience. Consider, for instance, how we might define a very simple subjective experience, such as yellow. You may think yellow is a colour, but it isn’t. It’s a psychological state. It is what human beings with working visual apparatus experience when their eyes are struck by light with a wavelength of 580 nanometers. If our alien friend at the pub asked us to define what we were experiencing when we claimed to be seeing yellow, we would probably start by pointing to a mustard jar, a lemon, a rubber ducky, and saying, ‘See all those things? The thing that is common to the visual experiences you have when you look at them is called yellow.’ Or we might try to define the experience called yellow in terms of other experiences. ‘Yellow? Well, it is sort of like the experience of orange, with a little less of the experience of red.’ If the alien confided that it could not figure out what the duck, the lemon and the mustard jar had in common, and that it had never had the experience of orange or red, then it would be time to order another pint and change the topic to the universal sport of ice hockey, because there is just no other way to define yellow. Philosophers like to say that subjective states are ‘irreducible’, which is to say that nothing we point to, nothing we can compare them with, and nothing we can say about their neurological underpinnings can fully substitute for the experiences themselves.5 The musician Frank Zappa is reputed to have said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, and so it is with talking about yellow. If our new drinking buddy lacks the machinery for colour vision, then our experience of yellow is one that it will never share–or never know it shares–no matter how well we point and talk.6
Emotional happiness is like that. It is the feeling common to the feelings we have when we see our new granddaughter smile for the first time, receive word of a promotion, help a wayward tourist find the art museum, taste Belgian chocolate toward the back of our tongue, inhale the scent of our lover’s shampoo, hear that song we used to like so much in school but haven’t heard in years, touch our cheek to kitten fur, cure cancer or get a really good snootful of cocaine. These feelings are different, of course, but they also have something in common. A piece of real estate is not the same as a share of stock, which is not the same as an ounce of gold, but all are forms of wealth that occupy different points on a scale of value. Similarly, the cocaine experience is not the kitten-fur experience, which is not the promotion experience, but all are forms of feeling that occupy different points on a scale of happiness. In each of these instances, an encounter with something in the world generates a roughly similar pattern of neural activity,7 and thus it makes sense that there is something common to our experiences of each–some conceptual coherence that has led human beings to group this hodgepodge of occurrences together in the same linguistic category for as long as anyone can remember. Indeed, when researchers analyse how all the words in a language are related to the others, they inevitably find that the positivity of the words–that is, the extent to which they refer to the experience of happiness or unhappiness–is the single most important determinant of their relationships.8 Despite Tolstoy’s fine efforts, most speakers consider war to be more closely related to vomit than it is to peace.
Happiness, then, is the you-know-what-I-mean feeling. If you are a human being who lives in this century and shares some of my cultural conditioning, then my pointing and comparing will have been effective and you will know exactly which feeling I mean. If you are an alien who is still struggling with yellow, then happiness is going to be a real challenge. But take heart: I would be similarly challenged if you told me that on your planet there is a feeling common to the acts of dividing numbers by three, banging one’s head lightly on a doorknob, and releasing rhythmic bursts of nitrogen from any orifice at any time except on Tuesday. I would have no idea what that feeling is, and I could only learn the name and hope to use it politely in conversation. Because emotional happiness is an experience, it can only be approximately defined by its antecedents and by its relation to other experiences.9 The poet Alexander Pope devoted about a quarter of his Essay on Man to the topic of happiness, and concluded with this question: ‘Who thus define it, say they more or less / Than this, that happiness is happiness?’10
Emotional happiness may resist our efforts to tame it by description, but when we feel it, we have no doubt about its reality and its importance. Everyone who has observed human behavior for more than thirty continuous seconds seems to have noticed that people are strongly, perhaps even primarily, perhaps even single-mindedly, motivated to feel happy. If there has ever been a group of human beings who prefer despair to delight, frustration to satisfaction and pain to pleasure, they must be very good at hiding because no one has ever seen them. People want to be happy, and all the other things they want are typically meant to be means to that end.
