Sharing good deeds

AJ points to Dogooder.info, a site for sharing the good deeds you have done, or have had done unto you. This site could use more traffic, methinks. I can imagine something like this becoming a great resource for birthday/anniversary/etc. ideas.

Happiness and utilitarianism

A recent cross-blog thread about what happiness means:

1. Will Wilkinson: responding to some erroneous statements in Richard Layard's recent philosophy book Happiness.
2. Brad DeLong replies, defending the notion of happiness-maximization.
3. Will Wilkinson rejoins, dissecting the concept of "happiness" as it is normally understood.
4. Julian Sanchez weighs in, noting that certain abstract philosophical notions of happiness don't map very well onto actual human psychology.
5. Brad DeLong comments, without much explanation, that he finds the objections to happiness-maximization unconvincing.

Of course, longtime readers (all three of you) know that the theory of happiness is a longstanding concern on this blog, and I come down roughly on the side of Wilkinson and Sanchez --- one, two, three, four.

Three thought experiments: Lesser evils and moral obligation

You're on a Caribbean cruise, taking a leisurely walk on the deck, enjoying the sun and sea breeze. You pause for a moment and lean against the railing. Suddenly, the devil, dressed in a rather natty tuxedo, is standing beside you.

"My dear friend," he says, "it's been so long since we spoke last. I was beginning to miss you."

"Oh, not you again," you say.

"That hurts, dear friend. In fact, I think my visits have been rather salutary---"

"And on such a nice day..."

"---and you know what, my name actually means adversary. In the ancient Hebrew tradition, I wasn't the incarnation of evil itself. I was more like a criminal prosecutor. I'm the opposition voice, which is necessary to make the system work."

"Well, I think the system outlined in scripture sounds like a terrible way to run the universe, so what's your point?"

"Simply that you should blame the guy upstairs. I'm just the hired help."

"Whatever. Get on with it."

The devil lights up a cigarette and smiles. "In ten minutes, I am going to sink this boat with a typhoon that will spring up out of nowhere. I'm also going to make all the lifeboats disappear. Everyone on board will die."

He pauses and takes a slow drag. You roll your eyes. Drama queen.

"Or, I could leave one lifeboat. Then you can save a few dozen people."

"What's the catch?" you ask.

"No catch. Choose: one lifeboat, or zero."

"One lifeboat, of course. This is a pretty trivial dilemma."

"Well chosen. Yes, it's a trivial dilemma, which is why I won't bother sinking this boat. Anyway, the tux is rented, and the dry cleaning bill would kill me. Here's the real dilemma." With a flourish, he pulls a small metal box out of his jacket pocket. The box has two buttons, labeled A and B. He hands it to you, of course.

"Now," he explains, "you must press A or B. If you press A, then everyone on this boat will die instantly. If you press B, then everyone on this boat will die instantly, except for a few dozen, who will live. If you press neither, then in ten minutes I'll bring the typhoon, and make all the lifeboats disappear. All hands will be lost."

"How about I just use this box to bash your brains out?"

"If you think you can take me..." He fades from sight, leaving only a disembodied cigarette hanging in the air. "I'm still here; I've just tucked myself into a nearly-inaccessible fold of quantum space-time. If you swing, I give you odds of one in ten billion that you'll hit me. I'm not lying. It's a nonzero probability. You've got a real chance."

You sigh. "Okay, I suppose I'll have to press button B."

The devil snaps back into view, smiling. "Excellent. Not a hard decision, since the choice is, for practical purposes, morally isomorphic to the previous one. Now, I suppose you'd call button B a lesser evil than button A. But you felt morally obligated to press it, rather than take the one-in-ten-billion chance of swinging at me."

"This is leading to some rather tedious, obvious, didactical point, isn't it?"

"Yes, but however obvious it is, there are many thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Americans who do not grasp it, so let's proceed. Give me the box."

"You're not going to sink the ship?"

"Like I said, the tux is rented. Now, here's thought experiment number three. Suppose that we're in the midst of a United States Presidential election. Suppose there are two candidates, and your assessment is that one is somewhat less evil than the other. The evil one is button A, and the less evil one is button B. There's a third party candidate who has a one-in-ten-billion chance of winning and changing the whole system, and that's probably an overestimate of the probability. What hangs in the balance? Not dozens, not hundreds, but (at least) thousands of lives and perhaps the future of the free world. The balance of the Supreme Court for the next generation. Life-saving scientific research. Federal funding for health education programs for millions of Africans. The list goes on. What is your moral obligation? Button A, button B, or take a swing?"

"Duh."

"Exactly." With that, the devil takes a last drag, flicks his cigarette into the ocean, and strolls off towards the bar.

Misery is happiness. Ignorance is bliss.

Spent last week at a research conference in smoky LA with my research group. One night, after SL and I had a few drinks at the hotel bar, we ended up talking once again about the nature of happiness. He was claiming that we make all our choices because we believe those choices will make us happy; i.e., that happiness is the ultimate value. Therefore, when we make sacrifices that make us unhappy in one way, we're really doing it because it makes us happier in some other way. Sounds reasonable enough, but my friends who read this blog already know that I disagree completely.

We arrived at this subject while talking about ambition and why we're bothering to finish our Ph.D.'s. Suppose you're an ambitious person who believes that a person's career reflects strongly on his or her value as a human being. You've got a "successful" job, which brings you prestige and intellectual satisfaction; but that job takes a lot of your time, and getting that job entailed sacrifices --- like going to grad school for six years instead of getting a job in industry, making lots of money, and finding a serious girlfriend. Suppose you also know that you might get more pleasure out of life with a much less demanding career: you could take longer vacations; you could spend a lot more time with your future kids; etc. In this scenario, SL would say that, if you choose a more prestigious career over a more hedonic life, you're making that decision because it makes you more truly happy.

That's fine, as far as it goes, and in particular cases it might be true. But SL made the further (and in my opinion erroneous) claim that this example demonstrates a larger principle: Everything we do, we do for happiness. So, for example, if our principles lead us to make great sacrifices that ultimately make us miserable, we're still taking those actions because on some deeper level, it's really making us happy.

I think this claim imples a rather odd definition of happiness. I define happiness as a sensation of joy and contentment --- a definition that clearly distinguishes happiness from non-happiness, and also matches most people's casual intuition. SL's definition has neither of these virtues: it's both tautological (happiness is whatever you choose, because you choose that which (you hope) makes you happy) and counterintuitive. For example, if some dim and dusty corner of your conscience knows that you're doing "the right thing" with your life, but you're nevertheless miserable in your day-to-day experience --- if you're so emotionally tormented that you wake each morning with a palpable lancing pain shooting through your heart, and that pain doesn't go away until you fall asleep at night --- then I would not say that you are "happy" by any usual definition of the word. Yet people knowingly make choices that lead them into this position.

So, to convince SL that he was wrong, I presented him with a dilemma, in the spirit of my three thought experiments: Suppose I could offer you foolproof brain surgery that would make you perfectly content to sit in a corner drooling for the rest of your life. Would you accept this surgery?

"No," he said, "but only because you could never convince me that it would work. What if you make a mistake?"

I said: "Okay, a million people have received this surgery, and every single one of them has reported absolute bliss. Once a month they wake up from their drooling stupor and say, 'Man, I feel so fucking happy! Having the surgery was the greatest decision I ever made.' And then they start drooling again."

He smiled and thought for a moment, then said: "Well, then I'd say yes."

"Most people would not make that choice," I said. "And anyway, you're lying. I don't believe you'd make that choice, if I really offered it to you."

Ultimately, he agreed that he wouldn't accept if I really made the offer. He claimed this didn't contradict his framework, because accepting would make him extremely unhappy in the present. Hence, even though the unhappiness would be short-lived, the intensity of that unhappiness would be so great that it would outweigh the lifetime of happiness that awaited him.

At this point we finally reached our hotel room, so the conversation ended. (We were walking from the elevator --- and if you think this is a long conversation to have whilst walking from the elevator to the hotel room, you haven't been to the Anaheim Hilton.) However, if we'd had more time, I would have said that I wasn't satisfied by his answer. I think his explanation --- that present unhappiness counterbalances future happiness --- does not suffice to explain his rejection. Suppose I could arbitrarily increase both your longevity and the intensity of your happiness --- suppose it would be a continuous, eternal orgasm of bliss. There's only so much unhappiness that the human form is capable of experiencing in a finite time period. If you're really being honest with yourself, there's no way your momentary unhappiness prior to the operation would exceed a million-year orgasm.

So, the notion that happiness is the ultimate value requires convoluted reasoning, and it leads to some suspicious conclusions. Isn't it simpler and more elegant to say that happiness is one among many values, and that we choose among those values based on the form of our characters?

In my opinion, the happiness-maximization doctrine reeks of the fallacy of the Rational Human Being (a close cousin of Economic Man): by making happiness the ultimate value, we can pretend that all our actions stem from rational maximization of the Happiness Utility Function. This gives us the comforting illusion that we're sensible people in control of our destinies.

I don't believe we're rational actors at all. In fact, I don't believe we're even really decision-making entities in the form that people usually assume. I think that our brains long ago evolved to provide so much surplus capacity that mind viruses have hijacked the extra space, in much the same way that a rainforest provides so much surplus biomass and energy that it's home to billions of competing species besides the trees themselves. These mind viruses take many names --- aesthetics, religiosity, curiosity, etc. --- and when you make a decision, it's usually only because one of these viruses has momentarily prevailed over the others.

Your brain is not an organism; it's an ecosystem. Does a rainforest rationally act to optimize its proportion of red ants versus black ants? No; it's just a battlefield where sometimes the red ants win, and sometimes the black ants win. Searching for a motivation behind the victories is meaningless. Ask, instead, for the reason.

Your character has a shape. Your life is the trajectory that this shape carves through the ether of the world, just as a leaf and a rock will carve different trajectories through the air depending on their shapes. Conscience or ambition or any number of things may lead your path away from happiness. Is this a tragedy? Not necessarily. It depends on what you value.

Happiness Considered Merely Instrumental

In comments for my earlier post, Inky asks:

Then what is the ultimate aim? Surely you're not postulating that the ultimate aim of *most* people is to lead meaningful, productive lives of personal integrity beyond mere happiness?

Since Haloscan appears to trash old comments after a while, I'll reply here, because I want to record this indefinitely.

As I state in that comments thread, I don't believe that the things people value besides happiness are necessarily noble. They can equally well be craven, or egotistical, or founded on irrational hate. But the point is that people do have attachments to values that would not be called "happiness" by any usual definition of the term "happiness". People want happiness, but they find happiness valuable only insofar as it is obtained in a manner consistent with their ultimate values.

For example, all human beings could become "happy" by giving themselves a lobotomy. Most humans would not, however, choose to become happy in this fashion, because the thought of being a happy drooling idiot is somehow unattractive --- even though that drooling idiot would have no conception of the inadequacy of his/her happiness. This observation doesn't paint humanity as particularly noble, or possessed of very much integrity, but it does illustrate that the experience of happiness alone is not the ultimate aim.

So what is the ultimate aim? Perhaps it is to be happy for the right reason. But in this case we can simply drop the happiness as an end-in-itself, and understand happiness as a motivating force that drives us to bring about those right reasons. In Aristotle's classic categorization, happiness is therefore an instrumental good, not an intrinsic good.

Interestingly, this conclusion has some vague, poetic resemblance to recent findings in neuroscience (via Brain Waves):

George Loewenstein then explains: ''Happiness is a signal that our brains use to motivate us to do certain things. And in the same way that our eye adapts to different levels of illumination, we're designed to kind of go back to the happiness set point. Our brains are not trying to be happy. Our brains are trying to regulate us.''

As usual, there's a couple of related Wikipedia articles: Goodness, Happiness.

Three thought experiments: Is happiness the ultimate good?

Thought Experiment Number One: The devil comes to you one day and says, "OK, I don't like you, so I'm going to give you the following choice. Either: (A) I will make you miserable for the rest of your natural life, which will be a long and dolorous half century; or: (B) I will make you effortlessly happy for that same duration, plus I will immediately kill five million children whom you don't know in a variety of excruciatingly painful ways. Oh, and since I'm Evil and all, I'm going to do it in front of their parents. Whichever way you choose, you'll forget instantly and completely that I made this offer and that you made this choice. So which do you choose?"

The point of this thought experiment is to point out that personal happiness is not the lone ultimate value, even for a humanist. Besides their need for happiness, people have an equally deep need to live their lives in a manner that they can admire. Notice that this is not merely "higher hedonism" --- i.e., in this thought experiment you do not choose to be good because the thought of being good will make you happier, in a deeper sense, than being selfish. The experiment stipulates that you will immediately forget that you were ever offered this choice. Therefore, there is no hedonic value, on any level, in making the altruistic choice. Yet most people would make the altruistic choice --- or, at least, I like to believe so.

Thought Experiment Number Two: The devil comes to you the next day, not quite satiated with your misery, and says: "OK, yesterday was a wuss question, because you could at least make your decision based on a net gain in happiness over all of humanity. Today, I'm going to offer you the following choice. Either: (A) I will make humanity miserable for the rest of its existence, which will be a long and dolorous million years; or: (B) I will make all of humanity happy for equally long, plus I will permanently bring back slavery, in the ugliest and most racist form that humanity has ever known --- black people will be regarded as subhuman, and forced to grow up in complete degradation and servitude to white people --- except, of course, that I've made everybody happy, so the slaves too will be joyful in their subjection, as they weren't in the past. As before, nobody will know that this choice was made. Now choose."

The point of this thought experiment is that even global happiness is not the ultimate value. There are things that we value --- like "justice" --- more than happiness. Or, at least, happiness alone cannot compensate for the loss of all other values.

Thought Experiment Number Three: Thoroughly pleased with itself, the devil comes to your doorstep a third time. "OK, that was fun at first, but now it's getting boring. When everybody's miserable, there's no point in being Evil. I'm going to roll back that whole universal misery till the end of time thing. But since we're such friends, I've got another present for you. I'm going to kill your son. No, you don't get a choice. Here's your choice. Either: (A) you'll immediately forget he ever existed, and therefore feel no grief whatsoever; or: (B) you'll remember him always, and miss him every day of the rest of your life, just like any other parent. Either way, you'll forget this decision. What do you say?"

The point of this experiment is that the result of the previous two experiments are not just artifacts of absurdly extreme situations. Even given the choice, many people would choose misery over happiness in their own personal lives.

All this was prompted by recent musings on why one might choose to be unhappy rather than let go of something precious. I wondered: is it necessarily irrational? No, not necessarily. You have to weigh your happiness against whatever you must give up to attain it.

p.s. Yes, all of the above scenarios are arguably related to the various Matrix dilemmas described by James Pryor, although I think deception plays less central a role in these thought experiments than in Pryor's. If you take this line of thought a little farther, you might conclude that you wouldn't want to live in heaven either.