Hic Habitat Felicitas

Happiness and Well-Being: It's About Time?

Philip Zimbardo, the man behind the Stanford Prison Experiments, has been dabbling in positive psychology. He argues that we can use framing effects, which can distort our recollection of our emotional states and by extension our ability to predict what will make us happy, to our advantage. The method, Time Perspective Therapy (TPT), involves determining our attitudes towards the past, present and future (using the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory) and, in some cases, adjusting these attitudes (you can check out the inventory and identify your 'time profile' here). So far, TPT has helped improve the lives of those with post traumatic stress disorder, but as Zimbardo points out in this quick TED talk, this research might be used to help us all get along better in one way or another. Naturally, part of this project involves identifying the ideal attitudes. I imagine which attitudes are 'ideal' depends, at least in part, on what we want and our environment. In any case, take a look at this compelling video in which he discusses his research as well as the fascinating work of social psychologist Robert Levine on time perception and it's relationship to culture, age and gender. 

 

 

Jussi Suikkanen on Kant on Well-Being!

Hello y'all,

Jussi Suikkanen posted an excellent bit about Kant and well-being on PEA Soup. He suggests that Kant might subcribe to hedonistic and desire satisfaction accounts of well-being which are usually taken to be incompatible. Check it out!

   Excelsior!

   C.L.Sosis

Welfart!

Hello y'all,

Lately, I've been wondering how similar our welfare judgments are to moral judgments according to the social intuitionist model of morality advocated by Jonathan Haidt. According to the social intuitionist model, our moral judgments are driven by our intuitions and emotions and our ethical principles are merely post hoc rationalizations of these intuitions and emotions.

The social intuitionist model has interesting experimental consequences. If the social intuitionist model is correct, bizarre factors, such as whether you think somebody just farted, might play a role in the formation of your moral judgments. This is exactly what the research seems to show: it seems disgusted people tend to form harsher moral judgments than their non-disgusted counterparts.

The tail, it seems, wags the dog.

I wonder to what extent welfare principles are merely post hoc rationalizations of our intuitions and emotions. It's often taken for granted that our judgments about well-being reveal the nature of welfare principles, but these judgments might just reveal how we feel about certain lifestyles.  

If our welfare intuitions are the result of the affective factors that moral judgments seem to be, there are ways to show it. For instance, if the odor of the desk which you are using in order to answer a questionnaire about how well off Wally is influences your welfare judgments of Wally, we might take this as some evidence that your feelings of disgust are informing  your welfare judgments. This is just one potential experiment. We need a body of coverging evidence to show that the social intuitionist model is right. The important point is that it's possible to figure out whether your welfare judgments depend on how you feel empirically.

Still, I imagine you might take it that disgust is a relevant consideration in which case your welfare judgments ought to be mediated by what you think is disgusting. This could present a serious problem: if there isn't a fact of the matter about what's disgusting, as most of us seem to believe, there isn't a fact of the matter about who's well off. Then again, that might just be the way well-being (and morality) rolls!

  Excelsior!

  C.L.Sosis

Martin Versus Seligman!

Hello y'all,

In the recent issue of Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, Mike W. Martin (author of From Morality to Mental Health: Virtue and Vice in a Therapeutic Culture) takes Martin Seligman to task. He argues that Seligman "needs to pay greater attention to several methodological matters: (1) greater care in defining happiness, so as to avoid smuggling in value assumptions of the sort suggested by the title of his book, Authentic Happiness; (2) more attention to the gap between happiness as overall satisfaction and specific gratifications (enjoyments); (3) the danger of sliding to subjectivism by equating self-assessments of virtue with objectively-justified values of the sort Aristotle had in mind; (4) awareness of how "positive" emotions and attitudes presuppose value assumptions." Check out the article here. Enjoy!

Excelsior!

 C.L.Sosis

Bill James and Positive Psychology...

Hello y'all,

I strongly suggest you check out these abstracts (from the SAAP 2009 meeting) all of which are related to William James and positive psychology in one way or another. The first, by Stephen Fishman & Lucille McCarthy claims that one of the most significant discoveries of positive psychologists is the tight connection between morality, virtue and happiness. The second,  by James O. Pawelski, takes a look at positive psychology from a Jamesian point of view. The third claims (author, unknown) that positive psychologists don't talk about virtues, properly understood (that is, understood the way they think James thought it ought to be understood)...shocking!

 Excelsior!

 C.L.Sosis

"I Don't Mind Being the Smartest Man in the World..."

Hello Fellow Hedonists,

Sorry I haven't been updating the blog more often, I've been busy working on my dissertation. I hope the post before this will make up for my absence.

I'll be attending a conference on Ethical and Social Scientific Perspective on Well-being being put on by the CSULB Center for Applied Ethics this weekend. It should be fun!

Excelsior!

C.L.Sosis

P.S. WATCHMEN is also coming out this weekend! The bloody smiley face in the upper left hand of this page is a mirror image of the bloody smile face found in the graphic novel. The graphic novel resonated with me, philosophically. I don't want to ruin the ending (which has been changed, from what I understand), but Ozymandias is my hero.

P.S.S. Check out this post on PEA Soup on the inverted experience machine.

When Should You Abandon Your Method?

Hello Fellow Hedonists,

According to traditional criteria, outlined by L.W Sumner in the book “Welfare, Happiness & Ethics” the best theory about the nature of well-being “is the one which is most faithful to our ordinary concept and our ordinary experience.”  The relevant experience is “given by what we think or feel or know about well-being, both our own and that of others.” This theory must accommodate “the prodigious variety of our preanalytic convictions.” A good theory of well-being should offer truth conditions which “can support and systematize our intuitive assessments.” In a sense, such a theory is an “interpretation of our preanalytic convictions” thus, “the best interpretation is the one which makes the best sense of those convictions” (Sumner, pg 11). A theory of well-being that satisfies these criteria is descriptively adequate.[1]

 There are many accounts of well-being that aim to satisfy these criteria. Despite this profuse variety--hedonism, present desire satisfaction, summative comprehensive desire satisfaction, global comprehensive desire satisfaction, informed desire satisfaction, authentic happiness and perfectionism to name a few--these accounts can be classified as either subjective or objective. Subjective theories of welfare "make our well-being logically dependent on our attitudes of favours and disfavor" whereas objective accounts "deny this dependency." (Sumner pg 38). In other words, subjectivist accounts of well-being claim that your well-being is a function of the structure and content of your subjective experiences. According to objectivist accounts of well-being, your well-being is not entirely the function of your subjective experiences.

Hedonism, for instance, is a subjective account of well-being. According to hedonism your well-being is entirely the function of the intensity and duration of your positive subjective experiences. In particular, hedonists believe that “welfare consists in happiness and that happiness consists in pleasure and the absence of pain” (Sumner, pg 87). In general, a subjective account, such as hedonism, is criticized by pointing out that there are examples of people who we don’t want to say are well off—the deceived, for instance— which seem to satisfy subjective criteria of well-being. Consider the experience machine, for example:

Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life's desires?...Of course, while in the tank you won't know that you're there; you'll think it's all actually happening. Others can also plug in to have the experiences they want, so there's no need to stay unplugged to serve them. (Ignore problems such as who will service the machines if everyone plugs in.) Would you plug in? What else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside? (Nozick, pg 43)

The fact that we wouldn’t choose to plug into the experience machine (because we believe our well-being doesn’t entirely depend on what we experience) is supposed to show that hedonism is descriptively inadequate. Accordingly, we ought to modify or reject hedonism in favor of a theory that doesn’t have any (or as many) counterintuitive consequences. We ought to adopt a theory that acknowledges that it seems, to most of us, that whether we are well-off depends at least in part on what the real world is like.

According to objectivist accounts of well-being—such as perfectionism, authentic happiness and all desire satisfaction accounts—the well-being of an individual is not entirely a function of subjective experience. Informed desire accounts of well-being, for instance, suggest that your well-being depends on whether your informed desires are satisfied. In order for a desire to be satisfied, we can’t just think our desires have been satisfied, the external world must be a certain way. So, if I want to win the Nobel Prize, I’m not better off if my dissertation director convinces me I’ve won the Nobel Prize. My informed desire to win the Nobel Prize is satisfied if and only if I actually win the Nobel Prize.  It is in this sense informed desire accounts of well-being are objectivist.

In this case, as in the last, objectivist accounts—such as informed desire satisfaction accounts—are criticized by pointing out that there are examples of people who we don’t want to say are well off—the idiosyncratic, for instance—even though they satisfy objectivist criteria of well-being. For example, imagine a brilliant Harvard Mathematician who has an informed desire to count all of the blades of grass in his front yard (Rawls, pg 379). Assume that he is fully informed; that he isn’t delusional. Now suppose he satisfies this informed desire. Even though his informed desire is satisfied, intuitively, he doesn’t seem better-off because of it. This example is supposed to reveal that the informed desire satisfaction account of well-being is descriptively inadequate. Thus we ought to modify or reject desire satisfaction in favor of a theory that doesn’t have any (or as many) counterintuitive consequences.

You usually modify or reject a theory of well-being when it has counterintuitive consequences. You might also simply ‘outsmart’ your opponent, that is, you might ignore these intuitions if they conflict with a fairly coherent, intuitively plausible, descriptively adequate (though imperfect) theory.[2]It could also be the case that upon reflection, these intuitions evaporate (Crisp, pp 640-1). Philosophers often don’t see eye to eye with each other about these cases, and it would appear we have hit philosophical bedrock. Subjective and objective theories of well-being seem to be at loggerheads and they have been for awhile now. 

If history is a guide here, the prospects for the traditional approach—a methodology that has been used for at least two millennia— leading to a descriptively adequate theory of well-being any time soon don’t look so good. Approaching this problem from another angle couldn’t hurt, right?

   

      Excelsior!

  C.L.Sosis

 

---

[1]Most philosophers seem to think that this is the correct way to come up with an account of well-being, so many, in fact, I can’t list them all here.

[2]The Philosophical Lexicon: outsmart, v. To embrace the conclusion of one's opponent's reductio ad absurdum argument. "They thought they had me, but I outsmarted them. I agreed that it was sometimes just to hang an innocent man."

Bibliography--

Crisp, Roger. “Hedonism Reconsidered.” The Journal of Phenomenological Research. Volume 73 Issue 3, pp 619 – 645, (2006).

 

Nozick, R. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Blackwell, (1974).

 

Rawls, John.  A Theory of Justice. New York: Belknpap Press, (2001).