Science of Good and Evil by Michael Shermer

Author:Michael Shermer [Shermer, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Times Books
Published: 2005-01-02T06:00:00+00:00

The Happiness Principle: Personal Right and Wrong

In addition to asking the moral receiver, what other criteria might we use to judge the rightness or wrongness of an action? For millennia, philosophers and observers of human behavior have noted that we have a tendency to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Pleasure and pain encompass many things, from pure physical to pure ethereal states. We may find pleasure in a kiss or an idea. We may experience pain in a slap or an insult. Happiness is a good synonym for pleasure, and unhappiness is a good synonym for pain, and thus we may state that one of the fundamental drives of human nature is that we all strive for greater levels of happiness and avoid greater levels of unhappiness, however these may be personally defined. Happiness and unhappiness, then, are emotions that evolved as part of the suite of emotions that make up the human psyche.

As we have seen, humans have a host of moral and immoral passions, including being selfish and selfless, competitive and cooperative, nasty and nice. It is natural and normal to try to increase our own happiness by whatever means available, even if that means being selfish, competitive, and nasty. Fortunately, evolution created both sets of passions, so that we also seek to increase our own happiness by being selfless, cooperative, and nice. The happiness principle states that it is a higher moral principle to always seek happiness with someone else’s happiness in mind, and never seek happiness when it leads to someone else’s unhappiness. My colleague, social scientist and moral philosopher Jay Stuart Snelson, expressed this sentiment well in his “win-win principle”: “Always seek gain through the gain of others, and never seek gain through the forced or fraudulent loss of others.”2

This is not always easy to do. There is a tension in the human condition between these competing motives, and as often as not the darker side of our humanity emerges. The moral animal struggles with the immoral animal within. Whether the moral or immoral animal wins in any given situation depends on a host of circumstances and conditions. Since we have within us both moral and immoral sentiments, and we have the capacity to think rationally and override our baser instincts, and we have the freedom to choose to do so, the core of morality is choosing to do the right thing by acting morally and applying the happiness principle.

So, for any given moral question, one may begin by asking the moral receiver how he or she would respond, then ask yourself if the action in question will likely lead to greater or lesser levels of happiness for yourself and the moral receiver. These two moral principles dovetail, because the moral receiver is, presumably, seeking greater levels of happiness; thus, by asking first what you should do, you will also receive feedback on how the moral receiver’s happiness will be affected by your actions.

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