Conscious Choice: Is Happiness Overrated?

June 2001

Is Happiness Overrated?

Ethical Decision Making and the Meaning of It All

by H. Peter Steeves, Ph.D.

Admit it: you think that if you had more money, a lot of money, money to do the things you want to do, you would be a happier person. It sounds shallow and materialistic, but it is true. Perhaps you would find pleasure in hedonistic pursuits — a new car, a big screen TV, an NBA franchise. Or perhaps you would prefer to help others — take care of your family and friends, give big to charities, set up a foundation to pass out scholarships to the poor, medicine to the infirm, and food to the hungry. Regardless of your temperament, more money would help you live your dreams. And you would be happier.

Which is not to say that your pleasure would last. It might run out long before the money. Happiness is notoriously fickle — with us one moment, and, without giving a reason, gone the next, moving on to a new conquest, a new infatuation. The warning, though, is there from the start in the way the word announces itself, wearing its nature on its sleeve. "Happiness" and "happenstance" share the same key root: "hap," which indicates chance, fortune, and luck. The very word tells us not to trust it, tells us that we cannot control happiness, cannot rationalize it and domesticate it. Sometimes it will simply pick up and leave, though we always think we make such a lovely couple.

Is this because happiness itself is not real? Or because it’s not meaningful? After all, some ridiculous things seem to make some people happy. Yet even extremely fortunate people find themselves unhappy from time to time. And all kinds of people seek a bit of magic to jumpstart happiness or to try to make it stay. Witness the persistent belief in "better living through chemistry" and the continuing popularity of Disneyland, "the happiest place on earth." Both are purchased; both offer retreat from daily life; both might be accompanied by visions of bright lights and talking animals. It’s just that the drugs tend to be destructive over time, which is supposedly not the case with the incessant repetition of "It’s a Small World After All."

Imagine you had the perfect drug at your disposal: the ultimate soma, an extra-strength prozac sans side effects, a way to be hooked up to The Matrix 2.0 as a happy human programmed into a virtual paradise. If happiness were the end, then the artificiality of the means would be unimportant. If happiness really were the goal of life — the meaning of it all — then you would be foolish to "just say no."

Yet most people reject an artificial paradise, protesting that happiness is about having goals and fulfilling them; about knowing you have accomplished something. Such protest already admits that pleasure is not the ultimate goal of life. It admits that immediate happiness is secondary to accomplishing the goal, a fringe-benefit of doing something else worthwhile, a secondary good after Truth.

Suppose we argue that there is more to happiness than fulfilling meaningless desires of material well-being. What, then, will we claim as the key ingredient in true happiness? More to the point, how will we judge which desires are meaningful (and thus should properly lead to happiness) and which are not? To do so, we will need a greater criterion of meaning, which is to say something more meaningful than happiness. Happiness, in other words, would not be the end, but the by-product, of the Good Life.

This is the real lesson to be learned by the "poor little rich girl," the millionaire who ends up miserable, the addict who finally crashes, the child who tires of the video game and is miserable. What these miserable people are sensing is that happiness is not really the point of it all. What they have caught a glimpse of, even if they cannot articulate it themselves, is not that they failed to achieve true happiness, but that they did achieve at least momentary happiness and still it wasn’t worthwhile — perhaps because they’ve failed to create meaning.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all in favor of decreasing sadness and suffering in the world. That’s part of the reason why I am a vegetarian, why I am a teacher, why I think we all must be sure that "President" Bush serves, at most, one term. There’s nothing wrong with promoting some kinds of happiness. But they should not be promoted because they are manifestations of happiness; rather, they should be promoted because they are worthwhile and good.

Still, despite the fact that happiness seems to follow in the wake of the worthwhile and the good, the worthwhile and the good should not be considered the authors of happiness. There is a long, mistaken history in philosophy and in Western society at large of equating happiness and goodness. Utilitarianism is, perhaps, the culmination of that equation. It is the ethical theory that says the correct moral action is the one that creates the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people. What makes this, supposedly, a universal ethic — one not relative to a person’s sex, age, culture, religion, etcetera — is that although we differ in many ways, one thing we all have in common is that we prefer pleasure to pain and happiness to sadness. Happiness is the thing we all want, according to this philosophy; it is the goal of every worthwhile action. And this fact supposedly transcends all of our differences even if each of us defines happiness differently.

According to its proponents (such as the English philosophers John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham), since I don’t experience happiness any more intensely than you — and since your pain is in essence no different from my pain, it’s just that mine is mine and yours is yours — then it wouldn’t be right simply to pursue my own happiness and avoid my own pain. Rather, happiness itself is a good thing and therefore should be increased in the world. Consequently, any action that creates the greatest amount of happiness in the world — that is, the greatest level of happiness for the greatest number of people — is good.

Critics of Utilitarianism typically attack the relativity of happiness and the sense in which it is nearly impossible to assure achieving it. Deontological ethics (duty-based ethics or, more specifically, Kantian ethics — so named as it is the ethical system founded by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant) suggests that happiness should play no major role in ethical decision making. Utilitarians are always making guesses about what might lead to happiness. Often they do something that most of us already know is wrong — such as telling a lie — in hopes that it will lead to greater happiness for all involved down the road. ("Of course that dress looks lovely on you!") But as Kant knew, consequences are not really predictable; and a well-intentioned Utilitarian can lead us all down the road to Hell, smiling happily, to be sure, the whole trip.

Kant argues, instead, that we should always act rationally — this is the one true thing that all human beings have in common, the one trait that transcends all of our differences. To be human is to be a rational creature. It is irrational to act in such a way that were our actions to be universalized — that is, were everyone to start acting the way we act and our act were to become like a natural law — there would be a logical contradiction. For example, stealing is wrong for Kant under any circumstance, even if you are Robin Hood and hope to make a majority of people happy by spreading the wealth. Why? Because stealing is illogical.

Kant’s thinking is clear if you follow the steps. What is stealing? It is taking someone else’s private property without permission. Now, what if everyone were to steal — what if stealing became the universal accepted norm? Then it would be okay to take any private property belonging to anyone whenever you wanted to do so. You would have a right to everything at all times. But private property by definition is something that one person owns and alone has a right to. So there really wouldn’t be any private property at all in a society where stealing were the norm (because everyone would have a right to everything). And since there would not be any private property, there wouldn’t be any "stealing" (since stealing is taking someone else’s private property without permission). Consequently, universalizing stealing makes stealing impossible. It is contradictory and illogical; therefore it is immoral. (Try going through similar arguments for why defaulting on a loan is immoral and why lying is immoral; both actions lead to logical contradictions once they become the universal norms of behavior.) What is important to notice, though, is that Kant has defined morality in a way that has nothing to do with happiness whatsoever.

Kantian ethics are hard to swallow. It’s difficult to imagine having to live one’s life as a strict Kantian. But the difficulty of following an ethic has nothing to do with whether it is right or wrong. Kant is wrong for other reasons. He is wrong, for instance, in thinking that our rationality is the only important thing we share, or that rationality is fully defined by living a life free of logical contradiction. He is wrong for thinking both that animals lack rationality and that a creature’s lack of rationality indicates that that creature is not owed any ethical duties.

And Mill and Bentham are wrong on non-Kantian grounds as well. Utilitarianism, in its attempt to equate happiness and goodness, can endorse such evils as slavery (if 51 percent of the population is happy enslaving 49 percent of the population then you have maximized happiness), torture (what is the suffering of one person in the face of an ongoing war?), and N’Sync (if enough happy young girls buy CDs and tickets).

Living the Good Life and doing the right thing are not the same as striving for happiness, whether that happiness is one’s own or the masses.’ And ethical decision making can’t be done with a simple mathematical calculation of smiles, nor with an abstract appeal to contextless logic that ignores the deeper meanings of affect and existence. In all the billions upon billions of worlds, with the likely billions upon billions of beings on them, how strange it would be to find that the meaning of it all was whether or not you feel happy. I hope that you do. I wouldn’t mind a little of it myself. But we are capable of so much more. At least, it makes me happy to think so.

H. Peter Steeves, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University.

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