why we wish that goodness brought happiness, and why that is not so

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Socrates: Yes, indeed, Polus, that is my doctrine; the men and women who are gentle and good are also happy, as I maintain, and the unjust and evil are miserable.
Polus: Then, according to your doctrine, the said Archelaus is miserable?
Socrates: Yes, my friend, if he is wicked.
— Plato, Gorgias (Jowett trans.)

Now this, monks, is the noble truth of the way that leads to the cessation of pain: this is the Noble Eightfold Way; namely, right views, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration. …

Thus spoke the lord, and the five monks expressed delight and approval at the lord’s utterance. … And while the Wheel of Doctrine was set turning by the lord, the earth-dwelling gods raised a shout: ‘This supreme of Wheel of the Doctrine has been set going by the lord at Benares at Ispatana in the Deer Park …’
— from the Buddha’s Sermon at Benares (Burtt, trans.)

(Indianapolis) It would, indeed, be wonderful news if goodness reliably made us happy–and even better news if goodness were both necessary and sufficient for happiness. In that case:

We would have a reliable path out of suffering, because one can always do what is best among the possible options, and that makes you good. If goodness then brings happiness, one can always be happy.
We can be happy while also satisfying our conscience: that tension is banished.
We have an effective argument for people who threaten us. We can truthfully tell them that they can only get what they want (their own happiness) by doing what we want (being good to us and others).

So I don’t blame the monks and gods for raising a joyous shout when they heard the Buddha’s Fourth Noble Truth. But is it a truth?

Social science says that making a contribution to one’s community is associated with feelings of happiness and satisfaction (see evidence from population studies and our own work at Tufts). That’s important to know. I would go so far as to say that a person who is languishing psychologically should probably try collaborating with others on a goal of public value. It’s wiser, too, to choose a career of public service than to be a rapacious capitalist or a tyrannical bureaucrat, because over time, you will have better odds of being happy.

But an empirical association isn’t enough to win Socrates’s argument in the Gorgias or to get the monks and gods joyously shouting. It won’t suffice for several reasons:

Being good probably doesn’t work for everyone. In the Gorgias, Callicles presents himself as a happy sociopath. Social science tells us those people are rare, but they may exist. And for them, goodness is not the path to happiness. So if you face Callicles, Socrates and the Buddha do not provide you with persuasive arguments.

Being good probably doesn’t work in every circumstance. Sure, it’s wise to choose an altruistic career, but that doesn’t mean that you’ll be happier if you neglect an opportunity to steal a million dollars from a big corporation and get away with it. The statistical correlation between goodness and happiness arises because most people, most of the time, don’t have opportunities to be bad, safe, and happy. Alas, the opposite is also true: in tragic situations, being good is not much of a solace.

Surely one reason that goodness tends to produce happiness is that goodness is frequently rewarded, at least with the respect and gratitude of other people. But it is easy to think of cases in which doing the best thing will gain no respect or when acting badly is the best path to applause and acceptance. The statistical relationship between goodness and happiness breaks down in those–not infrequent–situations where goodness goes unnoticed or is actually disparaged.

The correlation between goodness and happiness is a variable, not a constant. In different subcultures, contexts, and times, goodness can either reliably produce happiness or come largely apart from it. If the relationship is a variable, then we can probably vary it. We can make cultures and situations more communitarian–so that being good generally requires harmonious interpersonal relationships–or we can strive for rugged individualism, so that people learn how to be happy without being good to others. Socrates proposes an extremely communitarian utopia in the Republic, and the Buddha actually built one when he founded the Sangha. But that doesn’t prove that people need community to be happy.

Finally, being good in order to be happy doesn’t sound like truly being good. It’s too transactional and self-interested; goodness becomes a coin that you accumulate to buy happiness.

Riffing off Nozick’s famous example: imagine that you are offered two pills. One will make you completely happy and impervious to all negative emotions for the rest of your life. Among the emotions that you will never feel again are guilt, sympathy, and righteous indignation. So you can live happily without being good. The other pill will make you good for the rest of your life: it will prevent you from wanting to make any unethical choices. I think most people would take neither pill, because we will not renounce our freedom and our sensitivity to the full range of emotions, including guilt and temptation. Happiness without goodness will feel hollow, and goodness without moral weakness will feel automatic and inhuman. But if your only goal is to be happy, you should take the first pill, not the second. And that shows that to want to be happy is not to want to be good.

This is why I think there are three different goods–equanimity or happiness, community or ethics, and truth–and none of the three guarantees any of the others. (By the way, despite my criticism of the Deer Park Sermon, Buddhism is compatible with the idea that there are different good things.)

in Indiana

would we be better off without any horse-race polls?

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A “horse-race” poll is one that asks people whether they plan to vote and, if so, for whom. These surveys are appearing at the rate of half a dozen per day right now. I don’t think the tide can be stemmed, because we have a constitutional right to ask other people about the election and print the results. And I acknowledge that I follow polls obsessively, checking them several times a day and reading all about the minutiae of party weighting, robocalls versus live calls, and “house effects.” CIRCLE will even ask horse-race questions on our own youth poll, soon in the field.

But what if they all just went away?

Although there would be pros and cons, I think we’d be much better off. The theoretical framework that helps explain why is Jürgen Habermas‘ distinction between instrumental and communicative reason.

With instrumental reason, you know what you want and you deploy resources, including speech, to get what you want. For that purpose, horse-race polls are very useful. For instance:

If you are Karl Rove, you are now moving money to House races instead of supporting Mitt Romney, because the presidential race looks lost to the GOP, while the House is more “in play.”
If you are a leftish critic of Barack Obama and you live in a blue state, you are probably contemplating not voting (in response to the Pakistan drone bombings and many other issues). You might feel differently if you thought that Romney was about to take your state and the national election was close.
If you work for the president’s re-election campaign, you’re not paying any attention to uncompetitive states, like California, Texas, and New York (combined population = 83 million), but you’re suddenly very interested in Nevada (pop. 2.7 million).
If you are Barack Obama, you think you’re ahead, and so you’re inclined to run out the clock, rather than, for example, explain what you propose to do about difficult public problems.
It’s possible that if you are a Republican, you are losing interest in voting for president, which would make the polls a self-fulfilling prophesy.

One way to assess instrumental action is in terms of the outcomes. From my perspective, Karl Rove’s targeting his millions is bad because he is supporting the wrong people. But lefties’ boycotting an uncompetitive election is fine, even though I am not personally moved to protest this president. (For the record: I voted for Nader in 1996, when I was certain that Clinton would win. This election is closer, and I much prefer Obama to Clinton.)

But we shouldn’t simply assess instrumental action by its outcomes, because that damages other values. In politics, one of the fundamental values is equality: everyone should count for the same. Another value is some version of integrity: you should say what you believe. And deliberation is a value: we should exchange reasons with our fellow citizens and give everyone a hearing. We should deliberate out of respect for other people and also because we might be wrong: deliberation is an opportunity to learn.

If you are sure what you want to happen and you have a pretty accurate sense of how your fellow citizens are going to vote, reasons become relatively unimportant, and some citizens count more than others. Forget about reasoning with all those New Yorkers and Texans: the electoral college outcomes in their states are utterly predictable. Forget about what should count as the best argument for your core positions, because those may not be tactically valuable things to say. Pick the issues and arguments (no matter how trivial) that seem most likely to win you electoral college votes.

That’s advice for candidates and PACs, but individual citizens may regard the election as a spectator sport and believe that it’s interesting and worth their attention just insofar as the outcome looks close. That is wrong because our job is to decide how to vote and then move on to making other decisions that improve the world. Horse-race polls just distract us.

civic engagement makes Tufts students happier

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Thanks to a grant from the Bringing Theory to Practice project, my colleagues and I have been able to study the relationship between civic engagement and “psychosocial well-being” among Tufts students by means of a large, longitudinal survey and some qualitative research. One conceptual framework that informs our research comes from the psychologist Corey Keyes, who has shown that people fall on a continuum from “flourishing” to “languishing” that is quite separate from the continuum that runs from mental illness to its absence. Flourishing has huge mental and physical health benefits–regardless of whether one has a mental illness. People can say they are flourishing if (among other things) “their own daily activities [are] useful to and valued by society” and they have a “sense of belonging to, and comfort and support from, a community.” We propose, in turn, that programs and projects of civic engagement can boost flourishing.

At Tufts, according to a summary by Michelle J. Boyd, Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, Jonathan Zaff, and me:

Current [civic] engagement … was related to higher flourishing scores (Keyes, 2002). … Students who recently engaged in civic activities, most notably activities perceived to be focused on social change, had significantly better scores on indicators of psychosocial well-being (e.g., connection with others, intrinsic motivation toward learning, strategies for managing stress). Furthermore, students who were engaged only for the first semester did not show a lasting psychosocial benefit, and students who had lower socioeconomic backgrounds were less likely to become highly engaged. Moreover, we found that the students who were civically engaged through courses did not necessarily experience better psychosocial outcomes unless they viewed the activities as aimed at social change.

Sometimes, people ask us whether civic engagement is a solution to specific student pathologies, such as alcohol abuse and depression. I think the evidence for that is much weaker than the evidence for flourishing. At least in our Tufts undergraduate sample, civic engagement is a path to finding meaning, purpose, and satisfaction.

the youth vote on PBS NewsHour and elsewhere in the media

Peter Levine

A Blog for Civic Renewal

why we wish that goodness brought happiness, and why that is not so

in Indiana

would we be better off without any horse-race polls?

civic engagement makes Tufts students happier

the youth vote on PBS NewsHour and elsewhere in the media