in every century has recognized that people seek emotional happiness, then how has so much confusion arisen over the meaning of the word? One of the problems is that many people consider the desire for happiness to be a bit like the desire for a bowel movement: something we all have, but not something of which we should be especially proud. The kind of happiness they have in mind is cheap and base–a vacuous state of ‘bovine contentment’13 that cannot possibly be the basis of a meaningful human life. As the philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote, ‘It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.’14
The philosopher Robert Nozick tried to illustrate the ubiquity of this belief by describing a fictitious virtual-reality machine that would allow anyone to have any experience they chose, and that would conveniently cause them to forget that they were hooked up to the machine.15 He concluded that no one would willingly choose to get hooked up for the rest of his life because the happiness he would experience with such a machine would not be happiness at all. ‘Someone whose emotion is based upon egregiously unjustified and false evaluations we will be reluctant to term happy, however he feels.’16 In short, emotional happiness is fine for pigs, but it is a goal unworthy of creatures as sophisticated and capable as we.
Now, let’s take a moment to think about the difficult position that someone who holds this view is in, and let’s guess how they might resolve it. If you considered it perfectly tragic for life to be aimed at nothing more substantive and significant than a feeling, and yet you could not help but notice that people spend their days seeking happiness, then what might you be tempted to conclude? Bingo! You might be tempted to conclude that the word happiness does not indicate a good feeling but rather that it indicates a very special good feeling that can only be produced by very special means–for example, by living one’s life in a proper, moral, meaningful, deep, rich, Socratic and non-piglike way. Now that would be the kind of feeling one wouldn’t be ashamed to strive for. In fact, the Greeks had a word for this kind of happiness–eudaimonia–which translates literally as ‘good spirit’ but which probably means something more like ‘human flourishing’ or ‘life well lived.’ For Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and even Epicurus (a name usually associated with piggish happiness), the only thing that could induce that kind of happiness was the virtuous performance of one’s duties, with the precise meaning of virtuous left for each philosopher to work out for himself. The ancient Athenian legislator Solon suggested that one could not say that a person was happy until the person’s life had ended because happiness is the result of living up to one’s potential–and how can we make such a judgment until we see how the whole thing turns out? A few centuries later, Christian theologians added a nifty twist to this classical conception: happiness was not merely the product of a life of virtue but the reward for a life of virtue, and that reward was not necessarily to be expected in this lifetime.17
For two thousand years philosophers have felt compelled to identify happiness with virtue because that is the sort of happiness they think we ought to want. And maybe they’re right. But if living one’s life virtuously is a cause of happiness, it is not happiness itself, and it does us no good to obfuscate a discussion by calling both the cause and the consequence by the same name. I can produce pain by pricking your finger with a pin or by electrically stimulating a particular spot in your brain, and the two pains will be identical feelings produced by different means. It would do us no good to call the first of these real pain and the other fake pain. Pain is pain, no matter what causes it. By muddling causes and consequences, philosophers have been forced to construct tortured defences of some truly astonishing claims–for example, that a Nazi war criminal who is basking on an Argentinean beach is not really happy, whereas the pious missionary who is being eaten alive by cannibals is. ‘Happiness will not tremble,’ Cicero wrote in the first century BC, ‘however much it is tortured.’18 That statement may be admired for its courage, but it probably doesn’t capture the sentiments of the missionary who was drafted to play the role of the entrée.
Happiness is a word that we generally use to indicate an experience and not the actions that give rise to it. Does it make any sense to say, ‘After a day spent killing his parents, Frank was happy’? Indeed it does. We hope there never was such a person, but the sentence is grammatical, well formed and easily understood. Frank is a sick puppy, but if he says he is happy and he looks happy, is there a principled reason to doubt him? Does it make any sense to say, ‘Sue was happy to be in a coma’? No, of course not. If Sue is unconscious, she cannot be happy no matter how many good deeds she did before calamity struck. Or how about this one: ‘The computer obeyed all Ten Commandments and was happy as a clam’? Again, sorry, but no. There is some remote possibility that clams can be happy because there is some remote possibility that clams have the capacity to feel. There may be something it is like to be a clam, but we can be fairly certain that there is nothing it is like to be a computer, and hence the computer cannot be happy no matter how many of its neighbour’s wives it failed to covet.19 Happiness refers to feelings, virtue refers to actions, and those actions can cause those feelings. But not necessarily and not exclusively.
Feeling Happy About
The you-know-what-I-mean feeling is what people ordinarily mean by happiness, but it is not the only thing they mean. If philosophers have muddled the moral and emotional meanings of the word happiness, then psychologists have muddled the emotional and judgmental meanings equally well and often. For example, when a person says, ‘All in all, I’m happy about the way my life has gone’, psychologists are generally willing to grant that the person is happy. The problem is that people sometimes use the word happy to express their beliefs about the merits of things, such as when they say, ‘I’m happy they caught the little bastard who broke my windshield’, and they say things like this even when they are not feeling anything vaguely resembling pleasure. How do we know when a person is expressing a point of view rather than making a claim about her subjective experience? When the word happy is followed by the words that or about, speakers are usually trying to tell us that we ought to take the word happy as an indication not of their feelings but rather of their stances. For instance, when our spouse excitedly reveals that she has just been asked to spend six months at the company’s new branch in Tahiti while we stay home and mind the kids, we may say, ‘I’m not happy, of course, but I’m happy that you’re happy.’ Sentences such as these make high school English teachers apoplectic, but they are actually quite sensible if we can just resist the temptation to take every instance of the word happy as an instance of emotional happiness. Indeed, the first time we utter the word, we are letting our spouse know that we are most certainly not having the you-know-what-I-mean feeling (emotional happiness), and the second time we utter the word we are indicating that we approve of the fact that our spouse is (judgmental happiness). When we say we are happy about or happy that, we are merely noting that something is a potential source of pleasurable feeling, or a past source of pleasurable feeling, or that we realize it ought to be a source of pleasurable feeling but that it sure doesn’t feel that way at the moment. We are not actually claiming to be experiencing the feeling or anything like it. It would be more appropriate for us to tell our spouse, ‘I am not happy, but I understand you are, and I can even imagine that were I going to Tahiti and were you remaining home with these juvenile delinquents, I’d be experiencing happiness rather than admiring yours.’ Of course, speaking like this requires that we forsake all possibility of human companionship, so we opt for the common shorthand and say we are happy about things even when we are feeling thoroughly distraught. That’s fine, just as long as we keep in mind that we don’t always mean what we say.
New Yeller
If we were to agree to reserve the word happiness to refer to that class of subjective emotional experiences that are vaguely described as enjoyable
