Category Archives: philosophy

three truths and a question about happiness

I am a cheerful guy, happy with my work and family life, able to enjoy mundane events and relish extraordinary experiences. But for me, as for virtually everyone, an undercurrent of sorrow and fear is never completely absent. The sorrow is for pain and loss; the fear is anticipation of more. The individuals who are suffering or who will inevitably suffer include the billions of strangers whose pain is superficially noted in the newspaper; the hundreds of strangers whose tragedies are vividly described every day; one’s close friends and family (including the ones who happen to be healthy, safe, young, and happy today); and oneself. The Buddha was right that the First Noble Truth is suffering.

I respect, and perhaps envy, people who believe that suffering is limited or illusory because a reward follows death. I may envy, but I do not respect, people who simply don’t care, who live for themselves or in the moment and push suffering out of their minds. Even if not caring were possible, it seems dishonorable.

I can imagine a state that requires neither supernatural intervention nor moral oblivion. This state would be difficult to attain, and in fact I do not expect to see it. But it violates no laws of nature. I take some consolation merely in envisioning it.

In the state that I imagine, I would live a life partly devoted to improving or repairing the world. Here is why: Complex and intricate systems are more likely to survive and reproduce if they have an inner drive. That is true of trees, cities, and anthills: they strive to grow, which is why they are prevalent. But they don’t know that they are striving, hence they do not suffer. Sentience is a particular kind of will that is useful for promoting survival. We happen to have it and it explains why we have grown to number seven billion. Because every sentient system is vulnerable and ultimately dies, sentience introduces fear and suffering into the universe. That is a version of the Buddha’s Second Noble Truth.

At the same time—and on this point I think the Buddha might disagree—the existence of animals and other complex, fragile, sentient systems creates opportunities to reduce suffering and to promote at least a transient security and happiness. If one envisions, helps to create, enhances, or preserves a garden, a city, an institution, or a life, it does not become immortal, but one’s work reduces the suffering and enhances the flourishing of sentient beings, including oneself.

Note that “service” will not quite capture what it takes to improve the world. It is not about acting for others, but participating in the development and maintenance of complex systems that include oneself. Much evidence suggests that people who work in that way are happier: not liberated from the fundamental reality of suffering, but absorbed pleasurably in their activity while it lasts.

To devote oneself with perfect efficiency and relentless focus to public work would be excessive. If everyone did that, there would be no point to any of it: we would be taking in each other’s laundry. Or (to use another analogy) it would be like envisioning and building a great cathedral which no one ever visited for prayer or pleasure. So, in the state that I imagine, I would place work in balance with two other activities. One is intimacy, time with family and friends, whom I would treat with partiality and loyalty regardless of their needs. The other is pleasurable appreciation of the complex systems around me, especially people and animals, society, nature, and art.

Co-construction, intimacy, and appreciation are already components of my life, and of most other lives. But I don’t manage them with what could be called equanimity. Here is a little fable about how life could be lived better.

One day, I would go to my doctor’s office for a checkup. I would chose to do that because my life, although fragile and limited, has value, and it is my duty to preserve it if the means are reasonable. On the way to the doctor’s office, I would not be able to work or to spend time with the people I love, so I would appreciate the world. Instead of fruitlessly fretting about the tasks ahead, or even about more important causes and issues, I would be absorbed appreciatively in physical things. They could be evidently beautiful objects: the changing leaves glimpsed through a bus window. Or they could be objects whose beauty is easily overlooked: the impasto of scraps on the wet floor of the bus. One can always turn inside– to the reality of one’s own breath, the feel of one’s weight–or to language and imagination.

On this occasion, the doctor would have news for me: a brain tumor, giving me at most three months to live. As I left her office, I would have different thoughts from when I had entered. I would have to change priorities, giving more attention to planning an orderly succession and documenting my work than to launching new projects. I might be in a bit of a hurry after the appointment, because there would be a lot to do. Yet I wouldn’t feel fundamentally different. I knew my life was limited that morning; it is still limited now. It always promised suffering, but it also offered opportunities for absorption and construction. I would still have those opportunities.

On my way to the next activity–since once more I could neither accomplish work nor spend time with beloved people–I would again become thoroughly absorbed in the contemplation of physical objects, present or imagined. My immanent death would not be on my mind. I would heed the Buddha’s Third Noble Truth: suffering ceases with the abandonment of excessive attachment. Another way to put this point is that we are constantly being reborn, so the moments of biological birth and death are less important than we presume.

This fable illustrates a state that violates no laws of nature or of reason. In fact, perfectly rational people would never regret facts they cannot control. The obstacles to attaining equanimity are not external: rules, forces, or demands from outside. They are my own emotions. The Fourth (and final) Noble Truth is something like this: freedom of suffering is possible if one exercises the correct discipline, which is not merely a matter of managing emotions and thoughts but also of living right with other people. (It is what Owen Flanagan helpfully calls “equanimity-in-community.”) If that Truth is true, it offers me just as much consolation as I would derive from news of an afterlife. It represents a perfect solution: suffering would have no sting. Death would be like a wall bordering a field: visible, significant, but in no sense spoiling the space it surrounds.

This Fourth Truth could, however, be false if our physical constitutions simply preclude our attaining equanimity. But one thing is clear: we can envision that state. The question is whether dwelling with that thought and pursuing its actual attainment can take us on the right path.

must you be good to be happy?

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He who would live rightly should let his desires be as strong as possible and not chasten them, and should be able to minister to them when they are at their height by reason of his manliness and intelligence, and satisfy each appetite in turn with what it desires. … No, in good truth, Socrates—which you claim to be seeking—the fact is this: luxury and licentiousness and liberty, if they have the support of force, are virtue and happiness, and the rest of these embellishments—the unnatural covenants of mankind—are all mere stuff and nonsense.

— Callicles, in Plato’s Gorgias 492, trans. W.R. Lamb, via Project Perseus

Socrates responds that to be happy, you must be virtuous. That would be a good news, because then we would have self-interested reasons to be altruistic and just; everything would hang together nicely. At roughly the same time, far to the east, the Buddha was saying much the same thing.

But pure philosophical arguments probably don’t support their view. Unless one defines happiness as virtue in a way that stretches ordinary language, it is possible to be bad and happy. There are people like Callicles among us. They do not have selfish reasons to be good, because being bad works fine for them. For them, happiness is pleasure, the satisfaction of preferences, or the sheer wielding of will, and they are lucky enough to succeed.

But it is true–and important–that for most people, being good is the best path to being happy. Several different streams of empirical research flow in this direction, but I am thinking of the work of Corey Keyes. Keyes is challenging the assumption that our most serious mental-health problem is mental illness, and we can cure it. Actually, we only treat symptoms of mental illness, and not very successfully. More to the point, mental illness is not our only problem.

Keyes analyzes large national surveys that ask numerous questions about mental and emotional states. He treats each question as a “symptom” of underlying conditions that cannot be directly measured with single survey items. The standard way to find underlying conditions is factor analysis. If our major problem were mental disorders, then factor analysis would detect one underlying issue: mental illness, whose absence would be mental health. Everyone could be placed on a single continuum from mentally ill to free of illness.

But factor analysis actually finds two independent continua. One runs from mental illness to its absence. The other runs from “flourishing” to its opposite, “languishing.”

From the Mental Health Foundation of New Zealand

“Flourishing,” in turn, turns out to encompass three major elements: 1) positive emotions; 2) positive psychological functioning (such as believing that your life has purpose, or having warm and trusting relations); and 3) positive social functioning (which includes positive beliefs about other people, confidence that one’s own daily activities are useful for others, and belonging to a community). “Languishing” is basically the absence of flourishing.

As someone trained in moral philosophy, I immediately want to ask whether the elements of “flourishing” are the true virtues, the elements of a good life. But for our purposes here, that is not the primary question. The question is whether you have self-interested reasons to want to flourish (as Keyes defines that state) .

Keyes has assembled powerful evidence that you should want to flourish even if you are only concerned about yourself. Flourishing predicts physical health later on, to a powerful degree. For example, not flourishing boosts the risk of cardiovascular disease to roughly the same degree as smoking does. Although languishing is different from mental illness, the two correlate. In fact, your odds of having a diagnosed mental illness later on are just as bad if you are languishing now as if you have a mental illness now. If you would like to be free of mental illness in a few years, it’s just as important to start doing purposeful good work for others as it is to treat your depression or anxiety.

Several very significant conclusions follow:

For most people, virtue is a condition of happiness. There may be some modern-day Callicles who are happy and bad. Keyes’ research is statistical; statistics have variance. There are outliers. But by far the best bet is that you will be better off mentally and physically if you feel that you regularly help other people, see valuable potential in other people, hold positive attitudes toward diversity, and belong to a caring community.
Languishing is a big problem. Only 17% of American adults are both flourishing and free of mental illness. Many people do not feel they are helping others or belong to caring communities, and they are tangibly worse off as a result.
Languishing remains a prevalent problem for highly advantaged people, such as average White North American male adults. (In fact, African Americans are less likely to languish.) That reinforces the point I made recently that social justice is not sufficient. Even if we doubled our prosperity and distributed the wealth equitably, we might all languish.
If we do want to make people happy, we must make them socially virtuous. Classical liberalism and all of its philosophical offshoots rightly argue that governments should not make people good. That would violate their freedom; it wouldn’t work; it would degenerate into tyranny; and it implies a contradiction, because virtue that is coerced does not have the inner significance of virtue freely chosen. I agree with all of that. But if governments cannot make people virtuous, perhaps culture and civil society can. Or perhaps governments can remove barriers and disincentives to virtue, such as public schools that teach children to compete instead of cooperate. In any case, merely ignoring the problem will leave us with only 17% of adults fully mentally healthy.

Sources: Corey L.M. Keyes, “Promoting and Protecting Mental health as Flourishing,” American Psychologist, vol. 62, no. 2 (2007), pp. 95-108; Keyes, “The Mental Health Continuum: From Languishing to Flourishing in Life,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior, vol. 43, no. 2, (2002), pp. 207-222; conversations with Keyes.

the importance of the inner life to moral philosophy

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It can be seen that there a huge gap, at present unfillable as far as we are concerned, which needs to be filled by an account of human nature, human action, the type of characteristic a virtue is, and above all of human ‘flourishing.’

— Elizabeth Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” 1958

The dominant question in modern moral philosophy is “How should we get along?” I am increasingly interested in a different question: “What is a good (enough) life?”

I wrote, “How should we get along?” a little flippantly, but it is actually a very serious question that provokes huge follow-up questions, such as “What kind of government should we have?” “Who deserves what?” and “May I, under any circumstances, lie/break a promise/harm another?” These examples merely hint at a long agenda.

But the agenda isn’t long enough unless it also addresses the question of how we should live our own lives, including our inner lives of thought and emotion. One can see this by observing the limits of the main philosophical schools:

Utilitarianism teaches that we must maximize the happiness, welfare, or satisfaction of all people (including ourselves; but each of us is outnumbered about 7 billion-to-one by the rest of the species and therefore hardly counts). Anscombe said, “it is a bit much to swallow that that a man in pain and hunger and poor and friendless is ‘flourishing.'” True, and plenty of people are needlessly in such condition because of my sins of omission and commission. So I ought to do or give much more. But the links that connect my potential acts of welfare, other people’s material conditions, and other people’s flourishing are hardly certain or straightforward. Some people who know no physical pain and have plenty of money and friends are nevertheless miserable to the point of suicide; others are stupidly happy but not are living worthy lives. Material welfare may be a necessary condition of a good life, but it is not a sufficient condition. If the question is whether we are living well, then how we get along (our duties and rights vis-a-vis others) is only part of the story. We could make the distribution of rights and goods perfectly just and yet all fail miserably as human beings.

Kantianism teaches that we must develop our own rational autonomy and that of others. Everyone must live his or her own life, but we have a duty to enhance other people’s ability to do so. The emphasis now is more on freedom than on welfare, but I can’t just stand by while 3.5 billion people live on less than $2/day, because destitution and illiteracy interfere with living autonomous lives governed by choice and reflection. I mention the problem of global poverty for a second time not only because it is hugely important, but also because I want to explore the same problem in relation to both Kantianism and to utilitarianism. The practical conclusions of the two theories are not necessarily different even though the premises are. In any event, the limits of the two theories are similar. It’s all very well to say that I must honor and defend other people’s rights to live autonomously and support them in doing so. But what is the point of an autonomous life–for them or for me? Or (if we take autonomy to be self-evidently good), then what makes a life autonomous? Unless we can say something about the content of an autonomous life–what the autonomous person thinks, feels, and does–the theory is radically incomplete.

Virtue ethics, which Anscombe helped to revive in the essay quoted above, might offer a much richer account of the good life. A good life could be one in which certain desirable traits are habitual, becoming virtues. However, despite Anscombe’s hopes, my sense is that actual virtue ethics is mostly concerned with “How should we get along?” The virtues of greatest interest involve our relations with other people and are understood in terms of effects on them. Besides, even though virtue ethics may have value for illuminating the good life, it doesn’t seem obvious that a good life just is a virtuous one.

“Perfectionism” is a word for any ethical theory that is primarily concerned with what make a life good. It seems to me a somewhat unfortunate title, evoking competitive striving, super-human standards, “achievement of human excellence in art, science and culture” (Rawls), or even disdain for other people. Perhaps a good inner life is primarily oriented to promoting the welfare and/or autonomy or others. Perhaps a good inner life requires modesty: acceptance or even embrace of limits. Conceivably, not being a “perfectionist” (in the ordinary sense of that word) is a necessary condition of being a fully good person. Leaving aside the unfortunate terminology, I think we need to ask “How should a person live?” and “What duties to we have to ourselves?” if we want to know how people should get along.

Owen Flanagan, The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized

morality as a network (revisited)

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(Syracuse, NY for a conference on Self among Selves: Emotion and the Common Life) Each of us holds many moral propositions. Some are abstract and general, like “Every person has equal moral worth.” Some look like rules or commands: “Do not kill human beings.” Some are more like positive or negative emotions about particular things or people, but we could translate them into propositions.

Some are intuitive. When they are very obvious, it can even seem obtuse to ask why they are valid. (“Why should you not randomly kill people for fun?” is a bad question.) But some of most important moral thoughts are rather particular, idiosyncratic, and in need of justification. For example, I sit here writing with a view of Tufts University, which is my employer. I feel some commitment to and fondness for Tufts, and I believe that my writing supports my work for Tufts (because it will ultimately find its way into an article). Those feelings could be translated into propositions. But each one requires justification and evidently connects to other propositions. To show that I am doing the right thing, I would owe a description of Tufts University and some premises about moral commitment (i.e., Why should one be committed to anything?). In the ensuing conversation, factual information might be relevant: Tufts actually does certain things. Morally evaluative terms would also arise and would need to be justified. The conversation about Tufts might well shift into related topics, such as the role of scholarship in a democracy, the value of democracy, the place of philosophy as scholarship, or the quality of my scholarly work.

We could view all the morally relevant propositions that I hold as nodes in a network. My relationship to each node may be a straightforward endorsement, but it may be more complicated than that. (See the concept of propositional attitude.) For instance, Anne Swidler finds (Talk of Love, 2001) that many middle class Americans have in their heads what they call a “Movie” ideal of love. They do not believe it. They view it with some irony. But they appeal to it in certain situations and they feel its force over them. If we translated that Hollywood ideal into propositions (e.g., Every individual has a perfect romantic match; finding that person guarantees happiness), most Americans would both endorse and strongly deny those statements.

Many of my moral beliefs and ideas are connected to other nodes, but not necessarily in one way. Depending on what two nodes say, it can be the case that:

A logically entails B
A causes B
A makes B more likely
A is a step on a long path toward B
A and B are in fruitful tension: incompatible, yet both worthy of support
A resembles B
A prevents B
B echoes A
I am impressed by people who believe A, and they also tend to believe B
People with a given kind of experience tend to believe both A and B
A and B are examples of C

… and so on.

When we try to assess whether people are good, or whether what they does is right, we often ask about the separate propositions that these individuals hold. For instance, anyone who thinks that Jews are evil is worse for that reason, regardless of what else he may think or do. That is a node in his network, and we have a strong moral intuition about it.

But in many cases, we do not have confident intuitions about the separate nodes, nor should we, because they have no moral valence out of context. So a different question to ask about a network is: How is it structured?

I think that question has been addressed too narrowly (in the philosophical writing that I know). The question always seems to be whether the network is coherent and whether each component is entailed by broader, more abstract, more “foundational” premises. Kant, Mill, Rawls, and many others analyze morality that way. They presume that a moral network map should be organized as a tree, with abstract generalities at the root, and particular applications at the branches. But that is only one type of diagram. I see no reason to assume it’s the best; it is certainly vulnerable to skepticism about the premises that lie at the root. Nor is coherence evidently desirable: I admire more a person who is aware of moral tensions and inconsistencies than one who has simplified his principles to remove all conflict.

A very common goal of moral reflection (not only among professional philosophers) is to weed out the weaker aspects of a person’s network. “Critical thinking” is supposed to be a matter of getting rid of the mere prejudices and unsupported assumptions, conflicts, and fallacious connections. Professional philosophers often impose what Amartya Sen calls “informational restraints” to weed out nodes and links. They certainly disagree about which considerations to ignore: for example, Kantians reject consequences, Rawls erects a veil of ignorance to hide our place in society, and utilitarians screen out motives as primary evidence about what should be done. Most, however, will agree that anecdotes about specific individuals are subject to bias; that simple arguments from authority are fallacious; that strong emotional responses must be translatable into valid propositions; that evidence about consequences only matters to the extent that we can assess outcomes by an independent standard; that the use of precedents and comparisons requires justification; and that rules or principles that can be generalized are more reliable than those that are narrow and ad hoc.

As Bernard Williams writes in a slightly different context, theorists tend to criticize–and seek to delete–intuitive or conventional moral concepts, but “our major problem now is that we have not too many but too few, and we need to cherish as many as we can.”

Instead of seeking to delete nodes or connections that are unreliable, and instead of trying to make the whole network look like a flowchart with the summum bonum at the base, I would ask:

How extensive is the network?
How many connections does the person draw? (How dense is the network?)
Are the nodes that have the most connections intuitively correct?
Are the nodes that have the most connections intuitively weighty?
Have the conflicts been recognized and led to appropriate conclusions, or have they been ignored?
Are there free-standing nodes, and if so, are they justified in any way?

(I have explored related ideas in posts on How to Save the Enlightenment Ideal and Moral Thinking as a Network.

Peter Levine

A Blog for Civic Renewal