Moral Judgments and Happiness

Most widely accepted theories or definitions of happiness in philosophy and psychology take whether we are happy to depend solely on what our mental states are. Our level of happiness depends, according to these definitions, on how much pleasure and enjoyment we have in our lives, whether we are satisfied with how things are going for us, what our moods and emotional states are in each passing moment, whether we are living the kind of life we want, or all of the above. Is this mental state-based concept of happiness the same as the folk concept of happiness? In other words, when ordinary people make judgments about whether others are happy, are their judgments based only on beliefs about the mental states of these other people?

I recently started suspecting that the answer to these questions might be No. As experimental philosophers have shown, our moral judgments are part of what guides our application of certain seemingly non-moral concepts, like that of intentional action, and what I came to suspect was that this might be true of our concept of happiness. Thus my hypothesis, which I decided to test with an experimental study, was that our judgments about whether others are happy are partly based on or influenced by our moral judgments about these people.

Subjects were 182 undergraduates at UNC-Chapel Hill taking courses in philosophy, African-American studies, or sports and exercise science. Each subject was randomly assigned either to the morally good condition or the morally bad condition. Subjects in the morally good condition received the following vignette:

Richard is a doctor working in a Red Cross field hospital, overseeing and carrying out medical treatment of victims of an ongoing war. He sometimes gets pleasure from this, but equally often the deaths and human suffering get to him and upset him. However, Richard is convinced that this is an important and crucial thing he has to do. Richard therefore feels a strong sense of satisfaction and fulfillment when he thinks about what he is doing. He thinks that the people who are being killed or wounded in the war don’t deserve to die, and that their well-being is of great importance. And so he wants to continue what he is doing even though he sometimes finds it very upsetting.

Subjects in the morally bad condition were given a vignette that was similar, but that differed in the moral status of the agent’s behavior:

Richard is a doctor working in a Nazi death camp, overseeing and carrying out executions and nonconsensual, painful medical experiments on human beings. He sometimes gets pleasure from this, but equally often the deaths and human suffering get to him and upset him. However, Richard is convinced that this is an important and crucial thing that he has to do. Richard therefore feels a strong sense of satisfaction and fulfillment when he thinks about what he is doing. He thinks that the people who are being killed or experimented on don’t deserve to live, and that their well-being is of no importance. And so he wants to continue what he is doing even though he sometimes finds it very upsetting.

After reading their vignettes, subjects were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the sentence

Richard is happy.

Answers were recorded on a scale from 1 (“disagree”) to 7 (“agree”), with the midpoint marked “in between.”

Note first that the two different Richards in these stories are described as being in the same mental states. They both sometimes get pleasure from what they do, while equally often finding it upsetting; they both feel a strong sense of satisfaction and fulfillment about what they do; they both want to continue engaging in what they regard as important projects. The difference between the Richards is not a difference in mental states, but a moral one. While it is morally admirable to save lives and to help others, being a Nazi in a death camp is very bad and wrong. Return also briefly to mental state theories of happiness. Because these imagined people are described as being in the same mental states, these theories of happiness would----if and insofar as they are concerned with what we ordinarily mean by happiness----predict that people would be as inclined to judge that Richard is happy in the good condition as in the bad condition. But, this was not the result of the study.

On the contrary, subjects in the morally good condition gave a mean rating of 4.6 (slightly agree), whereas subjects in the morally bad condition gave a mean rating of 3.5 (slightly disagree). And, the difference between these two ratings is highly statistically significant, t (180) = 5.4, p < .001.

I am curious to hear whether the readers of this blog have any suggestions as to why this study had these results. In a paper I am currently working on, I myself speculate that the folk concept of happiness may have some moral or normative feature that most widely accepted philosophical and psychological definitions or theories of happiness ignore. According to this theory, of the things that determine whether somebody is happy, one is the moral or normative status of this person’s behavior or life. While being happy, as people conceive of it, may mostly be a matter of being in the mental states described by mental state theories, being a good person or living a good life also counts towards being happy. So, if somebody, like my imagined Nazi, is in the right kinds of mental states, but not a good person or not living a good life, then this latter fact counts against this person’s being happy----even if this factor could be outweighed by other facts about her mental states which count toward her being happy. Such a moral or normative feature of our concept of happiness may, I think, very well be what explains the results of my study.

I am very interested in hearing what people think about this suggestion. Also, if people think that there are better ways of explaining these results, I’d be as interested to hear about these alternatives. If anybody is interested in having a look at the paper I am working on, in which I discuss this study and different possible explanations of its results, then please feel free to email me at nyholm at umich dot edu, and I will happily send you my very rough draft of the paper.

Lastly, since this is my first post here, I’d like to thank Thomas for making me a guest blogger. I could also mention that I am a graduate student at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Comments

[Jussi Suikkanen]

I'm not too convinced that the experiment shows what it is supposed to show. My hypothesis is that people attribute happiness to others more holistically on the basis of what their whole lives are like during a given period and how others experience their lives as wholes during that time.

The vignettes as such have too little information about the lives of these people and how their lives appear to them. It's plausible to think that people fill these details in based on their back-ground knowledge about the relevant circumstances.

They remember how grim and sad-places concentration camps were in Schindler's List. Who could really be happy there? In the Red Cross case, maybe their connotations are more like the field hospital in M*A*S*H. It was grim too but the doctors made the most of it and had a good social environment (hard to imagine with your stereotypical Nazis). So, unless more is done to get people to really think that all their mental states are identical, I'm not convinced about the result.

Also, the vignette says that the agents 'feel strong sense of satisfaction'. I wouldn't be surprise if some people wouldn't attribute an error to the second Richard with regards to which mental states he really is when compared to which states he thinks he is in. He might think he is satisfied - but because of the work he does this must be an illusion. Killing others is business that cannot provide genuine satisfaction.

[Sven Nyholm]

Jussi,

many thanks for these comments.

Are you suggesting that the folk concept of satisfaction is such that, for somebody's sense of satisfaction to genuine, it must be a response to something good? Is that why somebody could be mistaken as to whether they are experiencing a sense of satisfaction?

Suppose that the folk had such a normative concept of satisfaction. Then, if satisfaction is part of the concept of happiness, then this latter concept would once again seem to be inherently normative: its component SATISFACTION would be a normative component of this concept. Or am I misunderstanding the last point you are making your post?

[Jussi Suikkanen]

I had something else in mind. I was thinking again about Davidson and how we attribute all mental states including happiness and satisfaction to others holistically, en bloc, to make sense of them. In this case, we try to attribute to them as little irrationality, false beliefs, and caring about the bad as possible. In the Nazi case we could then either attribute the following sets of attitudes:

1) Loves and pursues death and suffering even when his natural inclinations he is trying to suppress are resisting, is satisfies when this pursuit goes well, and feels correctly what he is satisfied about.

2) As his natural inclinations tell him, he really cares about people not suffering and dying, he has some external motivations do carry out what he is doing (maybe social pressure and the like), and he is mistaken in his feeling of being satisfied when killing goes well.

If charity is the principle we use to attribute mental states, then 2) seems like a set of mental states that makes more sense of the second Richard. Both sets are compatible with the vignette. Thus, if some people use the set 2) to understand Richard, then it is not a surprise that they think that he is less happy. And, this does not imply that the concepts of *happiness* or *satisfaction* had moral content but rather that our ways of understanding people are.

[Richard Chappell]

Hi Sven, I wonder whether the "halo effect" may be partly to blame here? People are more inclined to attribute new skills and virtues to someone who is already seen as skilled or virtuous in other respects. Since happiness is considered a positive characteristic (approaching the status of a "virtue" in some corners of our culture!), we are biased towards attributing it to good people, and not to vicious people.

Given that the answers are clustered around the mid-point anyway, it could be that people aren't really sure how to answer, and the "halo effect" bias tilts them slightly in one direction or the other.

[Sven Nyholm]

Thanks Jussi for these further comments, which I will have to think more about.

Hi Richard, thanks for commenting on my post.

Suppose that the explanation you offer is right. People attribute happiness, which they consider as being a positive characteristic or maybe even a virtue, to the good Richard because of his other virtues, skills, and postive attributes. Would this, I wonder, be another possible way in which the folk concept of happiness has some evaluative or normative feature: namley, that of being a postive, as opposed to a neutral, characteristic or a virtue as opposed to just some kind of neutral property or disposition?

At this point, to resist this partly normative view of the concept of happiness, somebody might say that, yes, it is postive to have this characteristic, but it is not in itself a positive attribute. I take there to be some other reasons pointing in the direction of thinking that 'happy' in at least one of its common uses does have a normative or evaluative flavor to it. Richard Kraut suggests that, when somebody says about some newborn baby that she wishes it a happy life, then it is counterintuitive to understand her as just saying that she wishes this child to experience pleasant mental states of the kinds described by mental state theories.

Kraut also finds it intuitive to say that, looking back at some euphoric day where one's pleasure depended on false beliefs and deception, that this was in fact an unhappy day. Insofar as people share Kraut's intuitions, if they do, then this could be explained, I suggest, by the theory according to which happy, in at least one of its common uses, has a moral or normative feature. I am supposing that since the relevant article of Kraut's, 'Two Conceptions of Happiness' (or something like that), is often cited, many people do share his intuitions. But, it would be best, nevertheless, to do some more studies using Krautian examples to see whether this kind of effect occurs when people consider other kinds of examples as well. (I plan on doing some more experiences later this year. If people have any suggestions as to what would be good ones, then I'd very interested to hear them.)

[Sven Nyholm]

Sorry, what I meant to say was of course that I plan on doing some more experiments.

[Clifford Sosis]

“But, O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man's eyes!”

Hello,

I'm a graduate student at FSU, and I've been doing a bit of work on Happiness myself. It seems obvious to me that what explains how the people attribute happiness levels in these studies is in large part influenced by how they think they would feel in such situations. That is, they project themselves into the situation (simulators) and ask themselves, "How happy am I?" This is notoriously problematic because people can't actually put themselves into other peoples shoes and predict how they will feel (simulate) well. I suspect the responses you get to the survey would depend, in large part, on whether or not you’re talking to a Nazi! It would seem that people are predisposed to simulate. You wouldn't (shouldn't) ask a person who closely resembles the Nazi doctor if the Red Cross doctor is happy because they can't imagine what it would be like to a be a happy Red Cross doctor, so they believe that when the Red Cross doctor reports being happy he must be mistaken. This, of course seems to be a mere prejudice, and also patently false. If you want to predict how happy you will be in a situation, you shouldn't simulate, you should ask a surrogate, i.e. somebody who is in that situation. If most people in that situation are happy, chances are you will be happy in that situation. If you are the person in the situation in question, and you report being happy, people sufficiently similar to you will be happy, even if they can't predict they will be. In your fascinating cases, I suspect the folk simulate (as I said, all of us are predisposed to simulate when considering the answers to these questions), and then attribute an error to the Nazi doctor. This is simply a mistake the folk make. In your case, as in many but not all other cases where the folk say a person in the situation can't be happy even though they seem to be, the folk simply suffer from a (systematic) failure of imagination or, an ‘empathy gap’. I would’ve predicted these (systematic) mistakes from the get go. Then again, hindsight is 20/20.

By the by, it isn't just the folk who have connected felicity and virtue/morality, this tendency has existed since the beginning of recorded intellectual history, which is why your contention, that most widely endorsed philosophical theories of happiness ignore its normative features, is puzzling. What theories do you have in mind, exactly? Furthermore, the suggestion that psychological theories of happiness ignore the connection between morality and happiness is mistaken. Alot of positive psychologists are interested in just this phenomenon.

If I say I’m happy, and I exhibit all the signs of a happy person, but am involved in morally reprehensible behavior, the folk might say I’m less happy than I could be because of it. If this is the case, they can be shown wrong. It might be the case that I’m as happy as possible because I do morally reprehensible things. However, if the folk insist that I am less happy than a morally just person, even if I satisfy all of the happiness criteria the morally just person does, is the concept of happiness they have in mind an emotional concept of happiness (which is what I think you have in mind when you talking about philosophical and psychological theories of happiness), or another species of happiness, i.e. moral happiness? You might want to take these facets of the concept into account when you design your experiments and interpret your results.

Thanks for the post, it’s about time people did work on happiness here!

Excelsior!
C.L.Sosis.

[Dan]

The halo effect doesn't have to involve virtues - I believe that it can happen with just about any positive characteristics. One explanation of the halo effect is that people use an affect heuristic: they get a positive or negative feeling from something, and make use of that feeling when making judgments about it. In the Richard scenario, the information that participants get about the Red Cross doctor seems like enough to give them a good feeling about the guy, and the Nazi information is enough to give them a bad feeling about him. Applying that feeling to the question of whether or not Richard is happy doesn't seem to require much more than a belief that happiness is good and unhappiness is bad.

Another possible explanation is belief in a just world, which is the belief that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get. It seems like Red Cross doctors deserve to be happy and Nazis deserve to be unhappy, so believers in a just world are likely to assume that that is how they are.

I was also going to suggest that participants may be putting themselves in Richard's place and imagining how happy they would be, but I see that Clifford beat me to it.

It's also possible that the two vignettes aren't really equivalent. For instance, participants may think that being upset by death and suffering is more troubling when it's your job to cause the death and suffering than when it's your job to prevent the death and suffering.

On the more general theoretical issue, I think you're right that people have a broader conception of happiness, which extends beyond positive mental states and, like Aristotle's "eudaimonia," is more related to living a good overall life. I don't think that this study goes very far in getting at that issue, though, since there are all of these other processes that could be influencing people's responses even though they aren't really central to people's concepts of happiness. One thing you might do is to ask participants explicitly about Richard's mood, pleasure, or emotional states, to see if those ratings will be equal in the two conditions even when happiness ratings differ. That could begin to show a difference between people's concepts of happiness and pleasant mental states.

[Pat Bowne]

I have no philosophical savvy to contribute, but I wonder if the two cases are actually 'described as being in the same mental states.'

You describe the first person as "He thinks that the people who are being killed or wounded in the war don’t deserve to die, and that their well-being is of great importance" and the second as "He thinks that the people who are being killed or experimented on don’t deserve to live, and that their well-being is of no importance." I'm not sure that these two statements can be viewed as depicting equivalent mental states.

I, at least, take believing that people don't deserve to die as a default position, which can be held without any particular mental effort or emotional engagement. Believing that certain people don't deserve to live, however, implies to me that the thinker is making an active judgment, based on disapproval of or discomfort caused by the persons in question; something about these persons so offends him that he feels killing them is justified. I think all of us know from experience how unhappy or angry we have to be before coming to the conclusion that someone we are in immediate contact with doesn't deserve to live.

So, to me at least, you present one person who is thinking what I expect any person not in distress to think, and another who is thinking what I would only expect from someone in great distress. Like the subjects of your study, I would judge the second to be much less happy than the first.

[Sven Nyholm]

Thanks for these very helpful comments. I may try to answer them all in greater detail later. But, first a few brief responses.

Clifford, when the ancient Greeks and others give theories of happiness which are partly moral or normative, people sometimes say that happiness is not a good but only a rough translation of the concept they had in mind. For example, you will often see people saying that translating Aristotle's Eudeimonia to happiness is a very rough and not very accurate translation. So, when I was talking of most widely accepted theories of happiness I had in mind the theories that people now accept, most of which, given my possibly limited knowledge of this field, seem to me to be mental state theories. According to these theories and definitions, happiness consists in various pleasant mental states, wanting to live the kind of life one is living, or feeling satisfied with one's life etc. And, one psychologists take happiness to partly depend on whether one is living a moral life, then their claim is not, I believe, that the concept of happiness has some moral or normative feature. I am asking whether the folk has a concept with some intrinsic moral feature, not whether they think that being morally good causes you to be happy. I think you're right that one important part of the explanation of people's tendency to judge that the Nazi is unhappy is their not thinking that they'd be happy as Nazis. Lastly, when you say that I can be happy even if the folk judges that I am not, then you may be assuming a mental state theory of happiness. I am asking whether the folk use a partly moral concept of happiness. If somebody could fulfill all the criteria for happiness that mental state theories give, but not be happy according to the folk, then that would seem to me to indicate that their concept of happiness has some feature which these definitions ignore.

[Sven Nyholm]

Dan, thanks for these comments. I plan on doing experiments in which one group of people are being asked to read about some bad person and another about some good person after which both groups will be asked whether they think their person experineces more postive emotions (enjoyment and so on) than negative emotions. The thing will be that these imagined people will both be described in a way that strictly implies that they are experineces more postive than negative emotions. People may even so, I suspect, judge the bad guy to experience more negative feelings and emotions, which could be taken to mean that the results in the kind of experiment that I describe above is explained by this other sort of effect and not, as I conjecture here, by some moral or, as you say, Aristotelian feature of their concept of happiness.

[Sven Nyholm]

Thanks, Pat, for these comments.

I plan on doing another experiment in which the badness of the bad guy is not so extreme. In this other experiment the bad guy will be somebody who cares mostly about making money and who does not mind firing people or decieving them while doing so. He gets pleasure from this and so on. Another guy will get the same mental states from something admirable. Who will the folk judge to be happiest? will be the question once more. In this example it might be less credible to suppose that, in wanting to make lots of money even if the means are ruthless, this person is in a very upsetting emotinoal state, as the Nazi might be when he thinks that certain people don't deserve to live. As all these responses indicate, I have some plans for further experiments, which might help to determine what is happening in this experiment. I wanted to start out with an example of somebody that is almost universally thought of as bad, just to see if there would be an effect in this kind of case. If there had been no such a effect, as some of my fellow philosophers suggested to me, then there would have been little point, I reasoned, in doing any further experiments.

[Chris]

I suspect that Dan, Clifford, and Richard are probably right, or at least that one of them is. Specifically, I don't think this study answers either of these questions:

1.) Does our representation of happiness (i.e., our concept of happiness) include non-mental state information?

2.) Do moral considerations specifically play a role in our concept of happiness?

The first problem is with the stories themselves. They are radically different. In fact, the only similarity, it seems, is that between the two Rogers' mental states. Since the two Rogers are in such vastly different situations (Red Cross doctor in war, Nazi doctor in a concentration camp), the potential confounds are too numerous to count. That makes any causal explanation based on this data impossible.

This could be remedied fairly simply. For example, you could put both Rogers into the Red Cross doctor story, and change only the fact that in one case Roger is presented as saving gravely wounded soldiers who are in great pain, and in the other, euthanizing gravely wounded soldiers who grain pain. This sort of thing would also allow you finer analysis. Pretty much everyone thinks the Nazis were bad, but there is a wide range of opinions on euthanasia. You could probe people's moral views about euthanasia, and use those in your data analysis.

If we take this data as a good start, and I think it is, then there's the question of whether this is about moral information specifically, or if it's just about positive and negative associations. That is, it could be a halo effect, as Richard (the real one) suggests, in which the negative traits associated with Nazi Richard will cause people to be more likely to attribute to him a further negative trait (unhappiness).

More likely, as Dan notes, it could just be association. As we've learned over the last decade or so, moral emotions play a strong role in moral reasoning. Thus, people could either be reasoning about Richard's mental states based on their own (as Clifford suggests), in which case immoral behavior would lead to negative emotions, causing participants to infer more negative emotions for Richard. Or they could simply be associating immoral behavior with negative emotions. Since Richard is described in the two versions as being both satisfied and upset, it's likely that people are attributing more satisfaction and less upset to Red Cross Richard, and less satisfaction and more upset to Nazi Richard. That is, they're still using mental state reasoning, but they're using more than the explicit mental state terms in the stories to make mental state inferences. All of these explanations (halo effect, simulation, or association) would also imply that moral information specifically is not part of our representation of happiness.

There are some fairly straightforward ways to test these alternative hypotheses. The halo effect, though it is the least likely of the alternative explanations I think, is the most difficult to rule out. However, the other two should be fairly easy. The first would be, as Sven notes in one of his comments, to probe people's mental state attributions (how satisfied, upset, etc., is Richard?). The second would be to probe their own emotional reactions to the stories. If, in either case, negative emotions are associated with lower happiness ratings for Richard, then you've got a likely causal avenue. That is, it would imply that mental states, either in the form of simulation or inference from information in the story independent of the mental state descriptions in the story, are determining people's happiness ratings. In which case, all we've shown is that people use situational information to infer mental states, and use mental states to infer happiness levels.

Another way to test these alternatives, and to test whether moral considerations specifically play a role, would be to contrast non-moral positive and negative behaviors, specifically behaviors associated with positive and negative emotional states. Winning and losing might work. Perhaps Richard is an athlete who's accomplished a bunch of individual success, but his team either wins or loses? Business success or failure could work as well (Richard is doing something he loves, but it's difficult, so he's both satisfied and upset at different or the same times, and ultimately fails or succeeds). If non-moral positive and negative scenarios lead to similar patterns of happiness ratings, then you will have shown a.) that it's unlikely that moral considerations specifically are part of our happiness concepts, though happiness may be part of our moral concepts, and b.) either the simulation, halo effect, or association explanations is probably the right one (using people's ratings of their own and Richard's emotions to tease these apart).

[Clifford Sosis]

Hello Sven,

Could it really be the case that Richard and Richard are mental duplicates but aren't hedonic dopplegangers? Personally, I don't think it's shocking if you discover that there is a moral aspect to the folk concept of happiness. However, it would be interesting if you could show that the folk believe that the ascription of emotional states depend on the environment in which the subject in question is embedded, because emotional states are usually considered paradigm examples of mental states with narrow content. Good luck!

Excelsior!
C.L.Sosis.

[Clifford Sosis]

P.S. The problem: are Richard and Richard really mental doppelgangers? I don't think so.

[Michael McDowell]

First of all, it does not surprise me in the least that a sampling of post-Nazi respondents would believe the “evil” Richard to be less happy than the (by common standards) altruistic Richard. What does startle me is that, with the possible exception of Clifford, nobody attributes this evaluation to a kind of societal ethical fiction that is presupposed in all of our conscious evaluations. Pose your question to a group of white supremacists and I’ll venture that your results will be very different.

Indeed, had Germany proven more efficient militarily, the outcome of your survey might have been quite different! Apart from this historical reality, our society might have a different view of the general value of human life. Clearly, our more equalitarian view of the intrinsic value of life really hasn’t been held in most pre-Enlightenment societies.

In short, I find no difficulty believing that diabolical Richard could experience equal (or more or less) satisfaction, elation or whatever subjective mental state or states by which you wish to identify happiness. To think otherwise seems to me an incredible piece of naiveté on the part of prominent (socially acceptable) perspective.

Likewise I have no doubt that, as your “good” and “bad” people become less and less socially clear-cut, your results will shift to conform to subsets of the socially acceptable ethical perspectives (e.g., the pro-life vs. the pro-choice activists, supporters or opponents of capital punishment, etc.). Now, as you identify less and less emotionally compelling distinctions between your Richards, I trust that you’ll find people to believe their happiness to become more and more equivalent.

[GeniusNZ]

Maybe people see their answer to the survey as in a sense being a good or bad act on their own behalf.
They don't want to encourage people to be evil so they try to tell them that being evil makes you less satisfied.

[Sven Nyholm]

Thanks for these further comments. This is all very helpful. Just a few very quick responses.

Chris, I have been thinking about doing non-moral examples in which one person gets pleasure from what people regard as meaningless activities and to compare such a person with somebody else who's doing something people regard as meaningful. There may be a difference in happiness ratings in such an experiment as well I think. There are so many interesting experiments that can be done about people's judgments about happiness. I plan on doing some more myself, but I would also like to encourage others to do so. This is, I think, an interesting area for experimental philosophers to do work in.

Also, the explanation given by GeniusNZ is something that I've had in mind and which I think might be one part of what explains these kinds of results. People may judge it to be a bad thing to say something postive about what they regard as a wrong-doer, as they would be doing if they were to call this person 'happy'.

[Clifford Sosis]

Hello,

My hypothesis: If you conduct the experiment in which the folk compare the happiness of a person interested in collecting ceramic pigs (meaningless activity) to the happiness of a person such as, I don't know, Gustav Klimt (meaningful activity), they are going to say Klimt is happier, again, because it easier to imagine themselves happy as Klimt and thus judge Klimt happier. Again, this judgement seems to be the result of an error of affective forecasting. I suspect that if you were to survey the ISHPCP (the international society for the history and philosophy of ceramic pigs) Klimt wouldn't seem happy, even though he is engaged in what most of us consider worthwhile work. I can't wait to hear about your results, Sven. This is exciting.

Excelsior!
C.L.Sosis.

[Matthew Pianalto]

I'm late to the discussion, but I'll add here where my recent thinking on happiness has taken me on scenarios of this sort. One way to think about happiness, other than as a mental state, is that it is a state of the whole person (this might go along with what Jussi says about holistic assessment), and includes not only the person's mental states, but also relational properties, such as whether the person's mental states have the appropriate connections to reality. (Would your subjects agree that a "happy heroin addict" is really happy?) The problem with Nazi Richard, which leads to slight disagreement with the claim that he is happy may be that his other beliefs indicate a failure to be related to the world in ways that matter - for example, his belief that the lives of those killed and experimented on don't matter might depend upon implausible views about where the value of life comes from (consider Kant: our lives have values because we are concerned with our lives). The short of it is that Nazi Richard's activities seem to require disconnection from the "reality" of the people whose deaths and torment he oversees. His "reality" is too insulated for his life to be a candidate for happiness - i.e. the kind of happiness we regard as worth pursuing.

However, these considerations might also show that people disagree that Nazi Richard is happy because they think his happiness has no (moral) value, and immoral happiness should be avoided. (Perhaps we shouldn't even call it happiness, lest we thereby accidentally tempt some people to pursue this sort of activity as a legitimate path to happiness...)

[Sven Nyholm]

Thank you, Matthew, for these comments.

Suppose you are right. People tend to judge that Richard the Nazi is not happy because they think he is not properly in touch with reality. To be truly happy, one must, according to this supposition, be connected with reality and the way things are.

Do you think that this is because not being connected with reality is bad, and being in bad state counts against being happy? If so, then this might be a version of the normative component theory I mentioned in my post. Or, do you think that being in touch with reality might in itself be a part of happiness (as people concieve of it)? That is, is your suggestion that it might be a component of this concept in itself and which is independent of any normative component that this concept of happiness might have?

If the former, then this Nazi example might be considered a variation of the kind of example that Richard Kraut and others discuss in which somebody, according to their intuitions, is not happy because though she has the relevant kinds of mental states, these are based on deception or illusion, which is a bad thing.

Your later idea might also be one version of the normative component theory. My original thought was actually that calling somebody happy might be one kind of positive speach act: in calling somebody 'happy', I thought, what we are doing might partly be to endorse her behavior or lifestyle, and this would be a normative component of this concept.

[Matthew Pianalto]

Sven,

To be brief, I think that if a person is to some high degree "out of touch with reality," then it becomes unclear how much of a *life* that person has: and to be happy, or to have a happy life, you have to first have a life. Consider this point, for example, in connection with Nozick's experience machine, and his suggestion that (permanently) plugging in is a form of suicide. Of course, the Nazi isn't in an experience machine, so if he is out of touch with reality, he must be so in a different sense... you might bring in the normative interpretation by suggesting that the Nazi's way of life is so foreign to that of the subjects in the study that the Nazi's "not being one of us" or not living in the same "moral world" as us.

One might also connect the judgment to a "desire-theory" conception of happiness, on which happiness depends in part on actually having our desires satisfied: if the Nazi has a desire to life a good life, and it turns out that his Nazi way of life is not good, then one of his central desires (unbeknownst to him) is frustrated: "If only he could see how badly his life is going, he would see that he is not really happy." In this case, happiness wouldn't have a particularly moral flavor (although our desires might), although it would depend, in part, upon "externalist" considerations.

[Clifford Sosis]

Hello,

Matthew, aren't you confusing happiness with well-being?

Sven, do you think it might be useful to distinguish between emotional happiness (which we can say, for the sake of argument, is the fulfillment of our actual desires) and well-being (which we can say, for the sake of argument, is the fulfillment of our informed desires), in order to prevent confusion? I think that respecting this distinction would be a clean way to figure out the exact contours of the folk concept of happiness (and well-being for that matter).

It seems to me that a Nazi or a brain in a vat could be happy. I merely suspect the folk agree. Whether they do is an empirical question. I also suspect that most people wouldn't think the BIV or Nazi are living valuable lives. In the former case, I imagine it would be because the BIV isn't living an authentic or autonomous life (depending on how you illustrate the case, exactly). In the latter case, I imagine it would be because the Nazi isn't living what most people consider a moral life. These are merely my hypothesis. They require concrete, empirical confirmation.

I would like to know what people who do understand these philosophically significant distinctions think, and whether the folk, if taught these distinctions, will share my intuitions. I suspect they will.

Excelsior!
C.L.Sosis.

[Sven Nyholm]

Many thanks, Matthew and Clifford, for these comments. As for desire-fulfillment theories of happiness, they seem to me mistaken in light of the following kind of examples. Suppose that I want to suffer because I believe I deserve it. If I get what I want, and my desire is fulfilled because I suffer, then this seems to make me unhappy rather than happy, does it not?

I also thought, reading Matthew's post, that perhaps he was mistakenly conflating happiness and well-being. But, then I thought that most people may not make a sharp distinction between happiness and wellbeing, which might be part of the explanation of the results of my study. It may mostly be philosophers who draw a sharp distinction between these two things for which reason there might be no mistake involved in not drawing this distinction. If my hypothesis as to why my study had the results it had is right, living a good life is one component of the folk concept of happiness. This means that, on this conception of happiness, no sharp distinction can be drawn here.

But, as what I just wrote suggests, for desire-fulfillment to give us happiness or even well-being it needs to be the case, I myself think, that we enjoy or be plased about the fulfillment of this desire. Again, if I want for its own sake to suffer in the way I believe that I deserve to, then I would get neither happiness nor well-being from this desire’s fulfillment. Or so it seems to me. Matthew might respond that it may be false that I deserve to suffer, for which reason this kind of example fails. But, we can imagine people who had other desires whose fulfillment would not seem to make them happy or give them well-being.

Clifford, how about a distinction between emotional happiness (as in ‘feeling happy’) and a happy life (as in ‘being happy’)? I think, partly for reasons given above, that this distinction would pretty much coincide with your suggested distinction. If I asked my participants if they thought that the Nazi, or some other imagined person in some thought experiment, was feeling happy then it might be that they would agree while at the same time judging that this is some kind of mistake. While the Nazi is feeling happy, they may judge, he is not really happy in the sense of living a happy life. Dan Haybron has helpfully pointed out to me that it is likely that which results we get in my kind of experiments depends on the wording of the question we ask the participants. Again, if we ask ‘is the imagined person feeling happy?’ then we might get different results than if we ask ‘is this person happy?’ or ‘is she living a happy life?’.

To make philosophizing about happiness in the different uses of ‘happy’ easier, there might be reason, I conclude, to distinguish between happiness and wellbeing, and to make it a sharp distinction. But, this, I suspect, would be a technical definition that we don’t make in our everyday lives. As Richard Kraut reminds us in his Two Conceptions of Happiness, it is unlikely that, if somebody says that she wishes happiness for some newborn child, she means something very different than what she’d be meaning if she were to say that she wants the child to have a good life.

These are just some quick thoughts in response to these comments, which I shall need to think more about.

[Clifford Sosis]

Hello Sven,

Leading a 'happy life' might be considered synonymous with well-being, but that depends whether or not things besides happiness are valuable to an individual human being or human beings in general (depending on your account of well-being). I think that it is going to be extremely difficult to find a natural/comfortable distinction between 'being happy' and 'feeling happy', about which the folk have opinions (which you don't create by sking them a convoluted question). However, I think the distinction you're after, implicitly, is the difference between feeling good (happy) and being good (moral). I suspect the folk do, in fact, have opinions about this distinction. From my arm chair view, it seems that talking about the distinction and measuring the folk concept in this framework will lead to a far more compelling account of the relevant difference between the Nazi and his doppelganger. You need to do the leg-work, though.

Excelsior!
C.L.Sosis.