Hic Habitat Felicitas

I'm Back!

Hello Fellow Hedonists,

I've been on a happiness hiatus. Ironically, the only thing getting in the way of my well-being has been my dissertation on well-being! Let's review what has happened on the happiness front in the past seven weeks.

1) It has been shown that your serotonin levels effect how you play the ultimatum game. Apparently, low serotonin levels probilify the rejection of unfair offers.  The researchers concluded that "5-HT plays a critical role in regulating emotion during social decision-making."

2) Check out Will Wilkinson's excellent discussion with Josh Knobe about experimental philosophy, the experience machine, the status quo bias and the endowment effect...

3) Often, when we think about egalitarianism or distributive justice, we think about the distribution of goods, rights or opportunities. In a recent paper, "Happiness Inequality in the United States," Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers discuss...happiness inequality. According to Wolfers, "there is less happiness inequality today than in the 1970’s or 1980’s" even though there have been "large increases in income and consumption inequality." 

 

You can read the trilogy of articles on the topic, here. You can also read a brief summary of these findings, here.

4) Check out this tantalizing tidbit about the well known benefits of smiling.

5) Apparently, for one reason or another, the gender of your supervisor has an influence on how happy you are at work.

6) The August issue of Psychological Science contains a fascinating article by Eugene M. Caruso, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Timothy D. Wilson on the phenomenon known as temporal value asymmetry. 

7) Randy Newman has remarked that "short people got no reason to live."

Turns out, they're pretty miserable too...

This article suggests that "the main reason why taller people do better is because they have higher incomes, they are better educated, and they work in higher status occupations."

8) According to this article, "Between 1980 and 1985, only 2,125 articles were published on happiness, compared with 10,553 on depression. From 2000 to 2005, the number of articles on happiness increased sixteenfold to 35,069, while articles on depression numbered 80,161. From 2006 to present, just over 2 1/2 years, a search found 27,335 articles on happiness, more than half the 53,092 found on depression."

9) According to recent research the experience of positive emotions was more strongly related to life satisfaction than the absence of negative emotions across nations. However, "negative emotional experiences were more negatively related to life satisfaction in individualistic than in collectivist nations, and positive emotional experiences had a larger positive relationship with life satisfaction in nations that stress self-expression than in nations that value survival. These findings show how emotional aspects of the good life vary with national culture and how this depends on the values that characterize one's society. Although to some degree, positive and negative emotions might be universally viewed as desirable and undesirable, respectively, there appear to be clear cultural differences in how relevant such emotional experiences are to quality of life."

10) According to a recent study in the journal, BMC Cancer, women who suffered two or more traumatic events in their life, such as losing a loved one, had a 62 per cent greater risk of being diagnosed with breast cancer, but optimistic women were 25 per cent less likely to develop the disease. This study definitely deserves a closer look.

11) According to this article, conventional retributivist and utilitarian conceptions of punishment must accommodate our ability to adapt to changed circumstances (including fines and imprisonment) and, somehow, must ameliorate the devastating (unintended) consequences of incarceration (such as unemployment, divorce and disease). These phenomena are obstacles to implementing proportional punishment and creating a marginal deterrent, thus they threaten the foundations of punishment theory.

Well, that's all for now. I'll be back soon...

                                                                                                  Excelsior!

                                                                                                  C.L.Sosis

Well-Being, Deontology and Utilitarianism...

Hello Fellow Hedonists,

Drawing on a range of empirical evidence, this essay argues that the failure to include, and to give sufficient weight to, fairness preferences undermines legal economists' policy recommendations. The authors argue that given the growing body of research revealing that individuals value fairness over their own rational self-interests, it is incumbent on legal economists to take preferences for fairness into account. This claim is problematic from the get go. After all, what we value (or what we prefer) isn't necessarily good for us. I think the authors are on to something, nonetheless.

Often, when simple utilitarians calculate the happiness/welfare/well-being of an individual or group, they pretend that people don't care about things such as fairness. When utilitarians, such as Peter Singer, recommend a counterintuitive social policy, they pretend that ignoring our intuitions (of the deontic variety) doesn't have a negative influence on our subjective well-being, but it wouldn't be entirely surprising if people were upset by non-utilitarian considerations even if they shouldn't be. If utilitarians were to take the influence our ineliminable (moral) judgments of right and wrong have on our subjective well-being into account, they might be forced to concede that non-utilitarian concerns (such as justice and fairness) must be respected.

Shouldn't utilitarians simply attempt to accommodate deontic considerations? I don't think so. My deontic judgments are the evolutionary by-product of morally irrelevant processes that were conducive to my fitness. Fitness, from my point of view, is morally irrelevant. Thus, it seems to me that I should ignore my deontic judgments when I try to figure out what I ought to do. However, whether or not I should ignore these judgments depends on whether or not I can. On one hand, it might turn out that I can simply dismiss my own judgments and values as systematic biases that undermine my well-being and be done with it.

On the other hand, it might turn out I can't ignore these judgments, even if I am able to recognize they are biases upon reflection. Ignoring these biases could make me miserable, even if I don't identify with them. If this turns out to be the case, it might be a good idea to chemically or surgically alter my brain to relieve myself of these harmful biases. It might also be a good (and less difficult) idea to trick myself by creating situations in which acting in accordance with these illusions doesn't undermine my well-being (intentionally damaging my brain might not work). Either way, reasoning away my conscience might not be a viable option.

                                                                                                   Excelsior!

                                                                                                   C.L.Sosis

It Is Better To Give...

Hello Fellow Hedonists,

According to a new study in the journal Science, spending money on others promotes your happiness.  People who spent money on others reported greater happiness, while those who spent more on themselves did not, regardless of income level. Professor Stephen Joseph, of the University of Nottingham, said: "Most of the research in the past has said money isn't that important in terms of happiness. The things that are important are things to do with relationships, with other people, and things that help to promote meaning, the purpose in life. I think that's what this study speaks to."

Professor Joseph goes on to say "being prescriptive about how people spend their money, even if it is for seemingly worthwhile causes, is a very dangerous path to go down. Research like this describes society - it doesn't tell us what society ought to be." This claim is obviously false. The study, of course, doesn't show us that we should be happy. However, this claim is prescriptive, in a sense, for those of us who want to be happy but don't know how, isn't it?

Professor Ruut Veenhoven, of Erasmus University, said "this may come as a surprise for economists who have learned that humans are essentially egoists." He might be right, but this study doesn't show that psychological egoism is false. After all, even he acknowledges that "people don't know what really makes them happy." So, it might be the case that people are, as a matter of fact, psychological egoists, or hedonists for that matter, they just don't realize what will make them happy. This study might show that ruthless egoists and misanthropic hedonists are simply ignorant!

                                                                              Excelsior!

                                                                              C.L.Sosis

Don't Judge Me: Moral Reasoning and Well-Being...

Hello Fellow Hedonists,

Templeton Prize winner, Jonathan Haidt, delivered an excellent lecture at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies on the place of harm/care and justice/fairness (as well as other non-western moral sentiments) within the context of evolutionary/moral/folk psychology. It includes an interesting discussion of the moral intuitions of liberals and conservatives.

Haidt catalogs our moral intuitions, and he seems to believe we should use this catalog as a guide to good moral reasoning. This seems to be the wrong way to formulate a good guide to moral reasoning. If we were carefully catalog our epistemic intuitions, for instance, it would be idiotic to use that catalog as a guide to good reasoning. If we did, in epistemology, what Haidt does here, in ethics, we would reason as our forefathers did: poorly. There is a better way! Our epistemic intuitions aren't reliable guides to good reasoning. It would be a miraculous coincidence if our moral intuitions were perfectly reliable guides to human well-being. 

In the end, Haidt is content to kowtow to conservatives and leave everything as he found it. If we were to follow his lead, we would encourage bad moral reasoning, moral reasoning that conforms to our moral intuitions but ultimately undermines our well-being.

                                                                                       Excelsior!

                                                                                       C.L.Sosis