Happiness, Ethics and Economics by Hirata Johannes;

Author:Hirata, Johannes;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2011-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Happiness as a self-transcendent phenomenon

When happiness is considered a person’s dominant end and ultimate motivation of all behavior, then this means that the person is concerned only about her inner state of mind that results from her experience. All other considerations will become purely instrumental, turning the person entirely indifferent with respect to both (1) the reasons that bring about these inner mental states, and (2) anything that does not become part of her experience (and hence does not influence her inner mental state). Other people’s well-being and the respect for their rights enter her “felicific calculus” (attributed to Bentham) only if and to the extent that they have an impact on her own happiness. Such a view shall be called a solipsistic conception of happiness. It is the view of economics (homo oeconomicus) in particular and psychological hedonism in general.

This conception is squarely opposed to the real concerns most people care about. This becomes clear as soon as one spells out some of the implications of the solipsistic conception of happiness. To begin with the second type of indifference (2), a person would not care about what people do behind her back as long as it does not have any consequences on her affective experience. A wife would not care about her husband’s faithfulness as long as she does not learn about it. A person would not care about the health of a friend as long as it does not affect his affective state. People would not care whether a friend was just being nice in order to reap a personal benefit rather than out of sincere friendship. In fact, in a world of solipsistic pleasure maximizers, every so-called friend would only be nice out of a cold calculus of advantage. Real friendship would be inexistent.

Robert Nozick (1989: 104) suggested the following thought experiment to test the concept of solipsistic happiness. Imagine a machine that can give you pure and unlimited pleasure for an arbitrarily long period. What is more, this machine generates not just blind pleasure but the perfect illusion of happiness. The person connected to this machine will experience a perfect illusion of friendship, love, good music, delicious food, etc., being entirely unaware of being locked into the machine. There would be no negative side-effects of using this machine and its use would not imply any costs. If you choose, you can remain in that machine until the end of your life. Would we want to get plugged to such a machine, and would we call that experience happiness?, Nozick asks us.

Nozick was probably not aware that his thought experiment was not even that far removed from reality after all. Already in the 1950s, neuroscientists had identified a pleasure center in the brain of rats which allowed them to motivate the animals by administering targeted electric pulses directly into the brain to do whatever the researchers wished them to do (Olds and Milner 1954). Similar experiments involving human patients with severe neural conditions showed that electric stimulation

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