happiness is the pursuit of good adjustment—the therapeutic ethic, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan has termed it in a related context.31 Twentieth-century social scientists have accordingly been reluctant to treat happiness as a construct which may be predefined. Instead, they have worked from the notion of “avowed happiness.” If people say they’re happy, the moderns have said, let us assume they are reporting accurately and then try to ascertain what “avowedly happy people” have in common.
The technique can be as uncomplicated as the one used by Norman Bradburn in his pioneering survey for the National Opinion Research Center in 1961. His interviewers asked simply, “Taking all things together, how would you say things are these days—would you say you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy these days?”32 Another important study asked “How do you feel about your life as a whole?” and gave the respondent an opportunity to circle one of seven points on a scale ranging from “delighted” to “terrible.”33 An other technique has been to let the respondent define the extremes, then place himself at a point on that continuum. The best-known of these is called the “self-anchoring striving scale” developed by sociologist Hadley Cantril in a cross-national study.34 Or the investigator may obtain more specific ratings on a variety of scales (“boring” to
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“interesting,” “lonely” to “friendly,” and so forth) and sum them to obtain a composite measure as Angus Campbell and his colleagues did in the “Semantic Differential Happiness Scale” used in the landmark assessment of American quality of life sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation.35
I will not attempt a systematic survey of the outcomes of these studies, which in any case has been done quite well elsewhere.*36 Still, two general points about the modern social science literature regarding happiness are pertinent to my use of the concept of happiness.
The first point is that social scientists have not found happiness to be a particularly variegated phenomenon. In all cases, the concept of “satisfaction” plays a central role in describing happiness. In some studies (Cantril, Campbell et al.), satisfaction is treated as the chief operational component of “happiness.” An argument still rages about the elements of satisfaction (for example: Is satisfaction a function of the gap between aspiration and achievement? Or of the gap between aspiration and expectation?), but satisfaction itself, understood much the same way you probably think of the word, is indispensable.37
The second point is that momentary pleasures don’t seem to be very relevant to happiness. Social scientists have avoided making value judgments about worthy and unworthy types of happiness so that they could measure what people really thought as opposed to what they were supposed to think. But this open-mindedness has yet to reveal a widely held (or even narrowly held) notion of happiness grounded in hedonism.
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Listening either to evangelists or to the evening news, one gets the impression that living for the moment is a prevalent idea of the good life, but the surveys have found hardly anyone who says he adopts it for himself. Very few people actually seem to attach much importance to the fleeting pleasures of the flesh in deciding whether or not they are happy.
A Working Definition of Happiness
Thus some of the reasons that a highly specific definition of happiness is not necessary to a discussion of the pursuit of happiness. Whatever their starting points, and regardless of theoretical differences, people who think about what makes a life a happy one end up with much in common. If you apply your own definition, it is almost certain that it will share enough of the core characteristics I have just discussed to permit common understanding.
For the record, the working definition I will employ is lasting and justified satisfaction with one’s life as a whole. The definition is not original; indeed, minor variants of it have been used by so many that scholarly credit for it is difficult to assign.38 The definition in effect says that when you decide how happy you are, you are thinking of aspects of your life that tend to define your life (not just bits and pieces of it) and you base your assessment of your own happiness on long-range satisfactions with the way things have gone. The pursuit of happiness will refer to an individual’s everyday efforts to plan and conduct his life so that it yields lasting and justified satisfaction.
This is a prosaic definition with one barb, however: the word “justified.” “Justified” is un-Lockean, implying that not all kinds of satisfactions are equal. “Justified” suggests that such things as objective right and objective wrong exist, that such a thing as virtue exists.
One must distinguish at this point between the specifics that you, the reader, or I, the author, attach to the meaning of “justified” and the level of agreement necessary to continue the discussion. Perhaps you are a religious person and interpret the concepts of right, wrong, and virtue according to a specific code that you believe to be universally applicable. Or perhaps you are willing to accept the notion that such a thing as virtuous behavior exists, but insist that it must be
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defined differently for different cultures and different times. In either case, we may put such specifics aside. In the context of this book, “justified” with regard to happiness says that it is not enough to feel good; you must have a plausible reason for feeling good. As philosopher Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz writes, “The man who is satisfied is not only emotionally gratified but also regards his satisfaction as justified.”39 Happiness is more than a feeling.
To this extent, I am insisting that if reason is surrendered, happiness cannot be justified. Remember Mill’s comment: Better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied, regardless of the pig’s view. Put in another context: If someone who is a drug addict says that by remaining in a permanent drugged state he can achieve a life of perpetual ecstasy, and that this is a valid way of being happy, the “justified” requirement says he is wrong. He is not happy, whatever he may think. He has surrendered reason. He has surrendered an indispensable element that makes him human.
Seen from one perspective, this assertion does not entail a great intellectual leap. Who wants to live the life of a drug addict? But it does require a dogmatic statement: It is true not just of me (that I could not be happy as a drug addict), it is true of all people, even those who insist they are happy being drug addicts. And as soon as we make such a statement, all sorts of thoughts intervene. What if one were poor? What if one lived in a ghetto? What if one had no education and no opportunity? Is it really appropriate for a person in the comfortable middle class to say that no one who lives in a euphoric stupor can be happy? I will be assuming that yes, it is appropriate and even essential to be dogmatic that life must be lived with self-awareness and self-judgment.
The Experience Machine Test
I am not sure it is necessary to dwell on the foregoing point—perhaps it is self-evident—but it is so important to the rest of my argument that I refer you to philosopher Robert Nozick’s device, the “experience machine,” adapted here for my own purposes.40
Imagine a machine with electrodes that can be attached to your brain in such a way that it will make you feel exactly as if you were
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having whatever experience you wish. You want to write a great novel? The machine can give you exactly the sensations of writing a great novel. You want to make friends? Have an ideal marriage? The experience machine can do it for you, for a day or a lifetime.
You are not to worry about missing out on anything—you will have a huge library of possible experiences to choose
