must be remembered that Locke’s value-stripped statement that happiness consisted of sensible pleasure was modified by his successors. The Scottish moral philosophers who followed—most prominently David Hume, Francis Hutcheson, and Adam Smith—saw more
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in the human animal than Locke had admitted; they saw as well “benevolence,” which constituted for them the basis of the social order. For Hutcheson in particular, the “moral sense” enabled and indeed compelled thoughtful men to take pleasure—to find happiness—in acts that Aristotle would have found entirely suitable. Hutcheson, writing of the meaning of obligation and self-interest, argues that men are so powerfully driven by their nature “to be pleased and happy when we reflect upon our having done virtuous actions and to be uneasy when we are conscious of having acted otherwise” that self-interest inherently will tend to coincide with virtuous behavior.17 Similarly, David Hume writes that “whatever contradictions may vulgarly be supposed between the selfish and social sentiments” are no greater than those between selfish and any other sentiments. “Selfish” has any attraction only because the things that are selfishly sought are attractive. What is most attractive to men? What gives the most relish to the objects of their selfish pursuits? Hume sees “benevolence or humanity” as the ones that perceptive men will naturally choose.18
We need not exclude even Locke from this line of thought. Locke was, after all, a Calvinist, and Calvinists were not notably permissive in their attitude toward what constitutes right behavior and suitable pleasure. Locke’s writings include clear statements that only the shortsighted are content with pleasures of the senses. When he wrote that “the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness,” Locke meant happiness in Christianity and in just society.19 Locke’s epistemology permitted men to call themselves happy if they felt pleasure, whatever its sources. But the sources of pleasure that actually worked were limited.
Much the same points may be made about the utilitarians, identified primarily with Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, who followed in the nineteenth century.* The utilitarians, building on the Lockean tradition, saw happiness as a favorable balance of pleasure over pain in which Aristotelian considerations of higher pleasures versus lower pleasures need play no part. “Nature has placed mankind
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under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure,” Bentham wrote in a famous passage. “They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think.”20 It is an uncompromising rejection of Aristotelian distinctions and moral precepts.
But then Bentham constrains his notion of the pursuit of happiness in practice to the point that one wonders whether it might not be easier to be a Calvinist than a Utilitarian. Bentham asserts that happiness (an excess of pleasure over pain) must be maximized for the community, not for any one member of it.21 That his own happiness is his first concern does not free him from a moral obligation to act in ways that promote the greatest happiness for the greatest number. How is he to fulfill this moral obligation? Bentham proposes his “hedonistic calculus,” which considers seven factors of pleasure and pain. One must choose the moral act by considering all seven and deciding whether a given action is a net plus or a net minus—an excruciatingly rigorous demand on an individual’s moral sense. Disregarding the practicalities of actually implementing Bentham’s dictum, it is an understanding of “happiness as pleasure” that, if adhered to, seems likely to evoke the same middle-class morality that so offended Russell about Aristotle’s Ethics.
John Stuart Mill went much further, identifying himself with man’s capacity for rational action as a fundamental source of true enjoyment and happiness. “It is quite compatible with the principle of utility to recognize the fact that some kinds of pleasures are more desirable and more valuable than others,” he wrote. “No intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base,” no matter how convinced they might be that doing so would yield them a greater amount of pleasure.22 Shortly thereafter, he adds:
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 know only their side of the question.23
Thus, briefly, some reasons for arguing that in the evolution of the concept of happiness an array of philosophers espoused quite different conceptual views of happiness that nonetheless had very similar
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behavioral implications. To borrow from V. J. McGill’s formulation in The Idea of Happiness: in Aristotle, virtue is the substance of happiness; in the post-Lockean revision, it is instrumental.24
The concept of happiness as employed by the Founding Fathers in general and Thomas Jefferson in particular reveals this easy coexistence of intellectually alien traditions. Jefferson was a good Lockean in his view of happiness as the constant pursuit of men. Indeed, he went beyond Locke, viewing the pursuit of happiness not just as something that men naturally did as a consequence of their human essence, but as an end of man ordained by natural law (or by God). A desire for happiness was itself part of man’s essence.25 But he also was drawn to the “moral sense” philosophy of Francis Hutcheson, and argued that “the essence of virtue is doing good to others.”26 Finally, bringing himself full circle back to a Lockean perspective, Jefferson rejected the public arena as a suitable place for virtue to manifest itself, putting it instead in the private sphere of effort and reward.27 As historian John Diggins summarized it, Jefferson “made happiness the end of life, virtue the basis of happiness, and utility the criterion of virtue.”28 In less elaborated ways, the other Founders shared this rough compromise between theoretical options and real ones in the pursuit of happiness: Men may do what they will to pursue their vision of happiness, as long as they do not harm others, but thoughtful men will behave as virtuous gentlemen.
THE SOCIOLOGISTS’ ALTERNATIVE, “AVOWED HAPPINESS”
As the nineteenth century drew to a close, people stopped talking about “happiness” as a philosophical construct. Howard Mumford Jones associated the demise of happiness with William James. No matter what tradition you endorsed, he argued, James left you adrift. With Pragmatism, James had dismantled the notion of happiness as a life lived in correspondence to immutable reason. With Varieties of Religious Experience, he had cast doubt on happiness grounded in theology. “And if happiness means the acceptance of things on the basis of right reason,” Mumford Jones wrote, “the place of rationality in consciousness is so considerably shrunken by a study of James’s The Principles of Psychology . . . that Locke seems for a time to be a mere museum piece.”29 Modern man was upon us.
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William James is not the only suspect in the case, but whether it was he or Freud or the quantum physicists who did in the classical concept of happiness is not the issue. Happiness as defined by Aristotle or the Enlightenment or the utilitarians depended on man’s being a recognizably rational, purposive creature. In the late nineteenth century, that assumption became intellectually untenable. By the time that the twentieth century dawned, the pursuit of happiness had become for the intellectuals a matter of healthy psychological adaptation. The man in the street might still be under the impression he was pursuing an Aristotelian ideal (not identified as such) of the virtuous life. But the scientific view had changed. For the twentieth century, Howard Mumford Jones gloomily concludes, “the problem of happiness is the problem of adjustment between the primitive subliminal urges of our hidden selves and the drab and practical necessities of every day.”30
If the pursuit of happiness
