could claim that he was prevented by external conditions from pursuing happiness.
I have adapted them for purposes of this discussion under the chapter headings of material resources (corresponding to physiological needs), safety (safety needs), and self-respect (esteem needs). The discussion of self-actualization has been folded into a somewhat broader topic that embraces as well the concept of intrinsic rewards—taken together and dispensing with jargon, the label “enjoyment” is as good as any.
Omissions
I have omitted a separate discussion of the need for “belongingness” and intimacy in this part of the book not because social policy is irrelevant (quite the contrary), but for two other reasons. First, some of the most important ways in which social policy enables people to form intimate relationships with others are through the other enabling conditions, especially self-respect (self-respect being
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an enabling condition not only for happiness in general but also for the development of relationships with others in particular). Second, I will be arguing much later in the book that the formation of “little platoons” (chap. 12) is the nexus within which the pursuit of happiness is worked out. What Maslow calls the need for belongingness is not just one of the needs, it is the key for meeting the others as well.
Before leaving the list of enabling conditions, a few comments about two obvious missing ones. What about human needs for freedom? Justice? Maslow argues that they are not separate categories, but rather “preconditions for basic need satisfactions.”4 It is perhaps an indication of the underlying coherence of Maslow’s system that, despite my own predisposition to treat freedom as an enabling condition and the disposition of many other commentators on social policy to treat justice as an independent enabling condition, it turns out to be awkward to do so. Few of us wake up in the morning looking forward to the day because we are free or live in a just society. We are much more likely to wake up looking forward to the day (if we are so fortunate) because of other things that freedom and justice have made possible—they are the enabling conditions of the enabling conditions, if you will. In a book about the felt satisfactions of life, freedom and justice seem to be examples of things that from day to day are good for a wide variety of other things and are better discussed in that context.
The Strategy for the Discussion
For the next four chapters of this book about public policy, I ask that you temporarily forget about specific policies. In fact, the key to this enterprise is precisely not thinking about policies (which we will begin to do instead in part 3) and instead concentrating on what it is we want to accomplish regarding each of the enabling conditions, ignoring for the time being how to do so through government programs and largely ignoring even whether it is possible to accomplish such things through government programs. We have identified (I am asking you to agree) four extremely important enabling conditions for the pursuit of happiness: material resources, safety, self-respect, and “enjoyment.” Perhaps public policy can contribute a great deal to the
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achievement of these conditions, perhaps not. We don’t know yet, because we haven’t yet thought about what the conditions consist of. When a person is living in a situation where the enabling conditions have been met—where he has “enough” material resources, safety, self-respect, and access to enjoyment to pursue happiness—what will be the characteristics of each of those states of affairs?
THRESHOLDS
My general strategy will be to superimpose upon the concept of “enabling condition” the concept of “threshold.” To illustrate, consider the role of food as an element in the enabling condition “material resources.” Has anyone been happy while starving? Only, one may assume, under the most extraordinary circumstances. Has anyone been happy while having only a Spartan diet, with little variety but adequate nutrition? Of course; it happens all the time. There is a threshold before which it is nearly impossible to pursue happiness, after which the pursuit of happiness becomes readily possible. The first question to ask of enabling conditions will be, Is there a threshold state and, if so, where does it lie? Is there such a thing as “enough” material resources to enable one to pursue happiness? “Enough” safety? “Enough” self-respect? “Enough” enjoyment?
An intuitive first response is that surely there is not such a thing as “enough” of these goods that can be defined concretely or generalized across all people. But that really amounts to saying that “threshold” can be a complex concept, not that thresholds do not exist. For example, continuing the food example, don’t people who have a wide variety of foods tend to enjoy life more than people who must live on beans, other things being equal? The answer is probably “yes,” if “enjoyment” is understood to mean “pleasure,” and given the multitude of exceptions that are wiped away by that catchall, “other things being equal.” But it is just as obvious that there are limits. At some point along the diet continuum from “beans and rice” to “every food in the world,” the correlation between “access to amount and variety of food” to “ability to pursue happiness” drops to zero. Such a thing as a threshold exists, though we defer the question of where it is to be found.
Or consider the case of a person for whom good food provides the rewards that Bach provides for a music lover. Is his threshold the same
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as for the person who hardly notices what he is eating? In one sense the gourmet’s threshold is different: The appreciation of food is for him a significant source of aesthetic enjoyment, whereas it is not for the indifferent eater. But in another sense his threshold is the same: If tomorrow the gourmet is told by his doctor to subsist on a few bland foods for his health, he can nonetheless continue to pursue happiness (even though he has been deprived of an important source of enjoyment), just as the indifferent eater can.
An examination of the threshold state and whether one exists will lead us to other kinds of analyses. For example, suppose there is a clear-cut threshold condition (a point below which happiness cannot be pursued and above which it can) but it differs widely among people. In this case, it becomes critically important that social policy maximize the ability of each person to put himself in a situation satisfactory to his own needs. Now, in contrast, imagine that there is no threshold condition for anyone, but instead everyone agrees that more is better: If you have two units of X, you are better able to pursue happiness than with one unit of X, and this holds true for all values of X. In such a case, social policy should be more concerned about pumping out an endless supply of this magic good and seeing that it is equitably distributed than with allowing people to seek their own level.
WHY NO MORE THAN ENABLE?
It may seem a minimalist approach to policy—just to “enable” people to do something (why not go further, and help them do it?), to worry just about reaching a “threshold” (why not go beyond, and supply a plenitude?). But the minimalism is intrinsic, not arbitrary. To understand the perspective of the chapters that follow, it is essential to understand first of all that when the topic is the pursuit of happiness, “enable” is as far as the government can go.
In the world of public policy that the television networks describe every evening on the news, governments face choices of how much to do, because the policies that get talked about the most are policies based on problems. A problem is shown—a flood in Pennsylvania, homelessness in Manhattan, traffic congestion in the skies, a scientific finding that a certain level of radon is dangerous—and always there is the question, What is the government going to do about it? Is it going
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to stand idly
