test pilot, two years a Talmudic scholar, two years the parent of loving children; whatever you wish. The main point is that while you are on the machine, your consciousness of what is happening will be indistinguishable from the real thing. You will think you are a concert pianist, or rock star if you prefer, and the experiences of a Vladimir Horowitz or of a Mick Jagger will not have been any more real than the ones you feel while floating in the tank, attached to the electrodes. All you have to do is ask to be plugged in. The test question: Would you choose the experience machine as a substitute for living the rest of your life in the real world?
Most people say no. Specifying why one would refuse is not easy, however. Every reason you may devise is irrational unless you hold an underlying, bedrock premise that what you do and are is anchored in something other than sensory input to your nerve endings. The stipulation that the satisfaction be “justified,” while it will not involve any particular creed or set of values, does require this fundamental belief that the state of being human has some distinctive core—that a human being has a soul, if you will.
If you have any residual uncertainty about your stance, it may be useful to think of the judgment one would make for one’s own child. Suppose that your child had a serious physical disability—was confined to a wheelchair, for example, and was therefore intrinsically prevented from ever having certain experiences.* Would you then choose a life on the experience machine for your child? (You could hook him up while he was asleep, so he would not have even the momentary anguish of knowing that his subsequent experiences would be fake.) I am assuming, and assuming that you agree, that the answer must be a horrified no.
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It is quite true that man lives by bread alone—when there is no bread. But what happens to man’s desires when there is plenty of bread and when his belly is chronically filled?
—Abraham Maslow
Other things equal, human beings enjoy the exercise of their realized capacities (their innate or trained abilities), and this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its complexity.
—The Aristotelian Principle as stated by John Rawls
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Enabling Conditions and Thresholds
To pursue happiness is to pursue the good we seek as an end in itself, that thing which, realized, expresses itself as justified satisfaction with life as a whole. The object of government is to provide a framework within which people—all people, of all temperaments and talents—can pursue happiness. The question remains: What does any of this have to do with practicalities, not social philosophy?
As a way of framing the question, I will use the notion of “enabling conditions.” As the name implies, an enabling condition does not cause something to happen (governments do not make people happy), it permits something to happen (governments behave in ways that leave people able to be happy). And so with specific policies: Government policies affect the conditions that enable people to pursue happiness and thereby may be considered effective or ineffective, good or bad, efficient or inefficient. Why are food stamps good? One reason might be that food stamps are good because they keep people from starving. The very practical, down-to-earth proposition is that you can’t pursue happiness if you’re starving. Hardly anyone will disagree. Stated more formally as an enabling condition,
It is impossible to pursue happiness without a certain amount of material resources.
This seems self-evident—enough so, at any rate, that it makes sense to inquire how social policy interacts with this enabling condition. What does the policy called food stamps have to do with the enabling condition involving “enough” material resources to pursue happiness? And having asked that question, it then makes sense to ask (still sticking to the very practical issues involved) what “enough” might mean.
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With material resources, I began with the most obvious of all enabling conditions. As soon as one pushes further, the room for disagreement increases. One quickly reaches possible “enabling conditions” that some will find marginal, irrelevant, or conceptually redundant with the conditions that have already been defined. I have no interest in pushing the limits. Anyone who wants to develop a definitionally taut, orthogonal set of enabling conditions for happiness is welcome to try to do so; I will not. The objective is not to set up an internally consistent intellectual system but to ask how some obviously important enabling conditions of happiness relate to day-to-day life and day-to-day social policy in the United States of America in the latter part of the twentieth century. For this task, we have an excellent conceptualization already available, and I draw upon it for organizing the succeeding chapters.
Maslow’s Needs Hierarchy
In 1943, psychologist Abraham Maslow published an article entitled “A Theory of Human Motivation,” which argued that human needs fall into a few basic categories arranged in a hierarchy.1 At the most primitive level, man needs to survive. Withhold food from a man, and food will be what he most wants; for him, utopia is a place with enough food. “Freedom, love, community feeling, respect, philosophy, all may be waved aside as fripperies which are useless since they fail to fill the stomach. Such a man may fairly be said to live by bread alone.”2
When enough food is available, utopia stops being a place with enough food. Other needs surface. “A want that is satisfied is no longer a want. The organism is dominated and its behavior organized only by unsatisfied needs.”3 Maslow identified five categories of need and ranked them in this order:
Physiological needs (food, water, shelter, sex).
The need for safety (predictability, order, protection from physical harm).
The need for intimacy (belongingness, friendship, relationships with spouse and children).
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The need for esteem (self-respect, recognition, and respect from others).
The need for self-actualization (expressing one’s capacities, fulfilling one’s potential).
Maslow argued that these needs are met roughly in the order listed. People whose basic physiological needs have not been met are absorbed first in satisfying them, then in ensuring their safety, then in forming intimate relationships of love and friendship, then in attaining self-esteem, and finally in fulfilling their special potentialities. This order is not immutably fixed (and is not important to this discussion in any case). People trade elements of one good for elements of another, people value different goods differently, but such is the general sequence.
Maslow went on to become a major figure in psychology, with a controversial body of work that extends far beyond his original needs hierarchy. My use of Maslow is limited to this: He provides a useful way of organizing an unwieldy discussion. Taken together, his five categories are a capitulation of
