Thoughts on Happiness

Happiness, per se, is not one of my research interests, though who would deny a personal interest in its pursuit? Discussions of the scientific (social scientific? pseudo-scientific?) investigations of happiness researchers seem to come up in all manner of places: my ethics classrooms, my philosophy of science classroom, with my colleagues in psychology and international relations, and in the magazines I read. Most recently, in a Science article on "Measuring Subjective Well-Being."

Subjective Well-Being: that's the technical term for happiness.

You might think that philosophers, and particularly ethicists, would be heavily invested in the project of evaluating what is emerging out of this research field at the intersection of psychology, cognitive science, and economics. After all, ethics is the study of the good life, yes? And if happiness or "subjective well-being" is not one of the central components of the good life, then the good life must be a pretty lousy life to lead.

Environmental ethicists, as I've pointed out, should be following what's going on in the world of happiness research since the environmental challenge of global warming and the technological challenge of decreasing (clean) oil reserves will increasingly force economically developed countries to decide whether happiness can be found without cheap energy.

A quick search of Philosopher's Index found oodles of results for the search term "happiness" ("oodles" being the technical term for more than you'd ever want to search through manually). But only 11 results for the scientific (?) term "subjective well-being" and most of those were not recent (within the last 10 years). The recent ones had been published in journals of business ethics, nursing ethics, and political theory. About the same number of hits came up with the search term "positive psychology," and a notable percentage of those by pragmatists.

Could it be that Philosopher's Index or my search terms are not capturing all that philosophers have said about subjective well-being? It certainly is a subject of interest on the blogs from time to time. (Here's one. And here's one on happiness and raising children. Here's one on using happiness/social capital measurements to supplement measures of GDP.)

One of the central questions in happiness research is whether and how subjective well-being can be measured. (Are we philosophers really leaving this up to the economists to decide?) In order to decide that, it's necessary to identify whether happiness is a unified phenomenon or whether there are various elements that make up an overall assessment of happiness-and whether happiness is culturally defined or a universal attribute of human psychology.

For instance, economists tend to find that money can buy happiness. But psychologists have found that individuals tend to have a personal "set point" which they return to, even after major trauma (limb amputations) or good fortune (winning the lottery).

There is some evidence that various measures of happiness do correlate with one another, which may (but should not) lead to the conclusion that any of these measures can be substituted for another. The simplest measure is, of course, asking people: "Taking all things together, how happy are you on a scale of 0 to 10?" This apparently correlates with:

• asking a person's friends whether that person is happy
• plausible causes of well-being (have they had good fortune?, etc.)
• plausible effects of well-being (have they quit their job, left their spouse? etc.)
• physical functioning, including immune-system responses and stress hormone levels
• measures of brain activity.

One of the underlying assumptions of the subjective test ("How happy are you?") is that the answer that is most true is the one that is based on affect, not judgment.

I still have some skepticism about whether there is one thing which all of these reports capture rather than several things which tend to correlate with each other. For instance, enjoying oneself from moment to moment (as measured by time diaries) correlates with an overall subjective judgment ("How happy would you say you have been in the last year?") as does the converse. But I can imagine many exceptions. Undertaking a difficult and tedious but highly meaningful project, in my own experience, can make me feel lousy and unhappy at times. Academic writing and raising children are plausible examples. But achieving eventual success at those very same projects can be the source of meaning that brings one form of happiness to a well-lived life.

My political inclinations applaud the efforts of policy analysts to contrast measures of GDP with measures of happiness levels because doing so seems to expand the definition of "the good life" to include what money can't buy. But my philosopher's instincts warn that this science is too new to be a basis for public policy.

CFP: Evidence, Science and Public Policy

It is high time that philosophers of science became more involved in bridging theory and policy problems. Science and technology policy now extend to many issues, most of which, other than medical policy, have received less attention than they deserve. I hope a conference like this one emerges soon stateside. I know that I can't justify the time, expense, and carbon expenditures to make it to Australia in the middle of spring quarter.

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CFP

Sydney-Tilburg conference on
EVIDENCE, SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY

Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science
26-28 March 2009

Conference website: http://sydcfs.org.au/

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KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: Mark Burgman (University of Melbourne), John Quiggin (University of Queensland) and John Worrall (London School of Economics)

ORGANISERS: Mark Colyvan (Sydney), Stephan Hartmann (Tilburg), James Justus (Sydney) and Jan Sprenger (Tilburg)

The relationship between science and public policy is complex. Good public policy on matters such as the environment, climate change, health, the economy, and justice must be informed by good science. But this science needs to be conducted in ways amenable to the needs of the policy makers and the results communicated in ways accessible to both the policy makers and the public at large. Public policy issues might even impinge on the science itself. For example, acceptable levels of error might be thought to be determined by the consequences of the decisions to be made using the scientific findings. This raises many interesting philosophical questions about the relationship between science, evidence and public policy. Should science remain independent of policy decisions and concern itself only with evidence? Is this possible? What is evidence-based medicine and does it live up to its advertising? What is evidence-based public policy and what does it offer above standard policy making? Our goal in this conference is to bring together philosophers of science, political philosophers, policy makers, and other researchers interested in the science-policy interface. We welcome papers on any of the above questions as well as papers on broader issues concerning evidence, especially in applied contexts (e.g. legal, medical, and environmental).

We invite submissions of extended abstracts of up to 1000 words by 1 December 2008. Decisions will be made by 15 January 2009.

Climate change: Ethics, politics, economics

Next year I'm teaching an "Introduction to Ethics" course with an emphasis on sustainability issues.

One inevitable pitfall will be the temptation to be distracted from the discourse of ethics by the details of policy. My students, most of whom prefer technical problems to theoretical questions, will be tempted by this distraction. And since I'm usually so concerned to show that theory matters to practice, I will be too. But it's a lower-level course, not a place for settling what policy should be for specific cases.

Another pitfall will be overcoming both apathy and skepticism. In just about every class or lecture where the question of global warming comes up, there is one (and usually only one) skeptic. I hope that I can pull the ever-present skeptic into a debate on the ethics of the issue instead of the facts. I personally believe the facts are settled, but there is no time in a philosophy course to teach all the science--both basic and complex--that is needed to place trust in the consensus of climate scientists. (For example, one student this year insisted that since Mars is warmer than the earth, and Mars has no humans on it, climate change on earth can't possibly be caused by humans.)

Freeman Dyson has a piece in the New York Review of Books discussing an economic evaluation of climate change policies in the book A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies. The author, William Nordhaus, holds that the more ambitious plans, such as Al Gore's call for a drastic reduction in emissions, will not be cost-effective in the long run. That is, they will cost more to implement than the economy will benefit from climate stabilization. (This evaluation seems to ignore the ethical question of whether the costs of failure to act are disproportionately paid by the vulnerable.) On the other hand, doing nothing could be disastrous. Nordhaus says that any policy proposal which tries to avoid raising the price of carbon (and doesn't that translate into allowing gas prices to rise?) is simply not serious.

Dyson also takes on the question of the global warming skeptics, as I'm sure I'll have to do. The main argument in their favor is the problem of induction that attacks any scientific generalization, plus the philosopher of science's skeptical metainduction: any scientific inference could be wrong, and in the history of science many have been wrong. So maybe the climate scientists, with all their evidence for anthropogenic causes of global warming and the even greater consensus that, human-caused or not, the current warming trend will be fueled by positive feedback mechanisms, are just wrong. Maybe. But the idea of inductive risk does hold that skepticism in check: if we're wrong, we'll be in really bad shape.

Dyson's concern is that the global warming issue distracts from other environmental issues. He writes:

Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment. The skeptics now have the difficult task of convincing the public that the opposite is true. Many of the skeptics are passionate environmentalists. They are horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including problems of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice.

Trees

When I'm not teaching philosophy, one of the things I do is study presettlement-era forests in western New York. During the coming quarter I expect to be doing more of that, so in anticipation I've collected a few items on trees:

For one, I keep up with the policy debate over the Bush Administrations "Healthy Forests Initiative" which pays lip service to selective logging. If done right selective logging could decrease the frequency, intensity, and extent of wildfires. But the initiative has been used as an excuse to log (lucrative) areas which would otherwise be off-limits. For instance, since it gives priority to logging in national forests at the "wildland/urban interface," huge remote areas have received that designation. (Read more here.) In December, though, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals suspended the policy that has allowed logging in national forests without environmental review on the basis that the policy violated the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act. (NEPA is the legislation that requires that management of public land include public input.)

There is a blog carnival, Festival of the Trees, and the March edition celebrates orchards.

My favorite tree blogs are:
Tree Species: Exploring the world of trees
Arboreality: About trees, forests, and wood
The Forest Protection Blog

And here are some more general plant and ecology blogs:
Talking Plants, on NPR
Invasive Species