Читать книгу In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government - Charles Murray - Страница 10

[print edition page 11]

2

Coming to Terms with Happiness

My objective is to provide a new backdrop against which to measure the wisdom or utility of specific government policies. I propose to use the concept of the pursuit of happiness for that purpose, considering the constituent conditions that enable us to pursue happiness and then asking how these conditions may be met.

This is easily said and not even very controversial as long as “happiness” has not yet been defined except as the good-that-one-seeks-as-an-end-in-itself-and-for-no-other-reason. The task in this chapter is to fill in the concept of happiness with enough content to permit us to talk about the pursuit of happiness more specifically.

Happiness from Aristotle to the Self-Anchoring Cantril Scale

There is a curiously common assumption that everyone has his own idiosyncratic notion of what constitutes happiness. One contemporary scholar writing a book on the causes of human misery begins with a casual aside that “On the score of happiness, it is difficult to say anything more than that its sources seem infinitely various, and that disputes about tastes are notoriously hard to resolve.”¹ To illustrate his point, he mentions “the happiness to be had by making other people miserable,” apparently assuming that distinctions between sadism and other forms of human pleasure are arbitrary inventions.² Or there is the friend who, when told that I was writing a book dealing with the pursuit of happiness, assumed that I must necessarily get bogged down in what he viewed as the California school of happiness, sitting on the beach waiting for the perfect wave.

[print edition page 12]

The assumption that definitions of happiness are idiosyncratic is curious because the oddball definitions are always the other fellow’s. It is as if everyone recognizes the degraded concept of “happiness-as-feeling-good” that dominates popular usage, and assumes that that’s how everyone else looks at it, while at the same time harboring (perhaps even a little guiltily) a private inner understanding of happiness that is close to the classical understanding.

In practice, the level of agreement about what constitutes happiness is remarkably broad—an assertion you may put to the test by turning to the end of this chapter and seeing whether you can tolerate the working definition I employ. If you can, you may skip this chapter without loss except the pleasure of knowing what good company you are in. The purpose of this chapter is not to persuade you of a particular understanding of happiness but to indicate, briefly and nontechnically, how recent has been the retreat from a common intellectual understanding of human happiness. For centuries, there was a mainstream tradition in the West about the meaning of happiness which I will call Aristotelian. In the eighteenth century, an alternative (which I will call Lockean) began to develop that nonetheless maintained an undercurrent of agreement about how men achieve happiness. It was not until the twentieth century that social science dispensed with the intellectual content of both traditions and began to define happiness by the responses to questionnaire items.^*

THE ARISTOTELIAN MAINSTREAM

“We adopt Aristotelianism as our framework,” writes a historian of the idea of happiness, “because it is the most complete and elaborate theory, because it asks the most questions, considers the most alternatives, and combines this amplitude with serious attention to consistency and proof.” And, he adds, it also is unquestionably the most influential of the understandings of happiness, dominating the Western tradition until the eighteenth century and continuing to stand as the point of reference against which any alternative must be assessed.³

[print edition page 13]

Aristotle’s disquisition on happiness is found in the Nicomachean Ethics. He begins by developing the concept of happiness as the ultimate good-in-itself that proved to be such a unifying bedrock for subsequent writers. Every activity, he writes, has a good that is its own particular end. In medicine, the good to be achieved is health; in strategy, the good is victory; in architecture, the good is a building, and so on.⁴ In modern idiom, everything we do can be said to be “good for” something.

Aristotle uses this commonsensical beginning to ask, Why seek any particular good? Why build the building, cure the disease, or win the victory? Any particular activity permits two answers: One engages in the activity for the sake of the thing-itself, yes, for there is something intrinsically satisfying in any good thing, but one pursues it as well for the sake of something else. Happiness is the word for that state of affairs which is the final object of these other goods. It is unique because it is the only good that we always choose as an end in itself and never for the sake of something else. “Honor, pleasure, intelligence, and all virtue we choose partly for themselves,” Aristotle writes, “for we would choose each of them even if no further advantage would accrue from them—but we also choose them partly for the sake of happiness, because we assume that it is through them that we will be happy. On the other hand, no one chooses happiness for the sake of honor, pleasure, and the like, nor as a means to anything at all.”⁵

To call the highest good “happiness” is “perhaps a little trite,” Aristotle acknowledges, and he proceeds to specify its content more exactly. To do so, he invokes a characteristic of man that today is sure to provoke an argument. He asserts that man is distinctively rational. The unique proper function of man, Aristotle argues, the one that sets him apart from all other creatures, is delineated by human intelligence. Happiness cannot be understood, nor can it exist, without reference to behavior ordered by intelligence—that is, without reference to rationality—any more than the proper function of a harpist can be understood without reference to the playing of a harp. “The proper function of man, then, consists in an activity of the soul in conformity with a rational principle or, at least, not without it.”⁶

For Aristotle, “conformity with a rational principle” means something far more complex (and realistic) than an icy, mathematical

[print edition page 14]

calculation of odds. There are instead two forms of wisdom, “theoretical wisdom” and “practical wisdom.”^* Scientific knowledge advances by means of theoretical wisdom, but the achievement of happiness is bound up much more closely with practical wisdom, or, as Aristotle defined it, “the capacity of deliberating well about what is good and advantageous for oneself.”⁷ Such deliberation is not a scientific process. Indeed, it could not be, for every actor and every situation is different from every other, and every action is interpreted differently and redounds differently depending upon the peculiarities of persons and circumstances. General laws of behavior thus must always be interpreted according to the particular situation. The quality that permits these interpretations to be made rightly and then acted upon appropriately is practical wisdom. When a statesman makes a decision—Pericles is for Aristotle the embodiment of the ideal—he must call upon his store of practical wisdom. So also must businessmen in making investments for the future, a parent in dealing with his children, a young woman in choosing a husband. None of these judgments can be made adequately through scientific reasoning alone; all must be informed as well by the broader, more diffuse wisdom that is equally, but differently, part of man’s unique gift of rationality.

The more highly developed one’s practical wisdom, the better the effects of one’s actions for oneself and for mankind—a thought that leads to another key aspect of Aristotle’s presentation, the link between thought and action. Aristotle’s point does not demand that a man necessarily act on every conclusion or intention that forms in his mind. (He may know that rain is predicted and wish not to get wet, and yet still not carry his umbrella to the office.) But a man who typically divorces intention from action has in some profound sense shut himself off from human society, for a society cannot function at all if its members systematically fail to base their actions on their judgment. As philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre observes, “Were anyone systematically inconsistent in this way, he or she would soon become unintelligible to those around them. We should not know how to respond to

[print edition page 15]

them, for we could no longer hope to identify either what they were doing or what they meant by what they said or both.”⁸

To repeat: The more highly developed one’s practical wisdom, the “better” the effects of one’s actions for oneself and for mankind. To be “better” in this way is also to be more virtuous—practical wisdom, Aristotle concludes, is both a virtue in itself and also the progenitor of virtuous behavior. And, to return to our original theme, practical wisdom facilitates happiness. It allows one to “deliberate well about what is good and advantageous for oneself,” as well as to fulfill that most human of functions, the exercise of intelligence. For Aristotle, intelligence (or rationality), virtue, and happiness are all interlocked. In this passage from the chapter in which he initially defines happiness, he puts the relationship this way:

In other words, the function of the harpist is to play the harp; the function of the harpist who has high standards is to play it well. On these assumptions, if we take the proper function of man to be a certain kind of life, and if this land of life is an activity of the soul and consists in actions performed in conjunction with the rational element, and if a man of high standards is he who performs these actions well and properly, and if a function is well performed when it is performed in accordance with the excellence appropriate to it; we reach the conclusion that the good of man is an activity of the soul in conformity with excellence or virtue, and if there are several virtues, in conformity with the best and most complete.⁹

It would be unfair to leave Aristotle’s view of happiness at such an abstract level, however. Happiness as he envisions it is not at all austere or abstract. On the contrary, it is consistent with what “is commonly said about it” by ordinary people, Aristotle writes. It is pleasurable, for example, in that “the sensation of pleasure belongs to the soul, and each man derives pleasure from what he is said to love.”¹⁰ Elsewhere (see especially bk. 10), Aristotle clarifies the nature of pleasure and, as might be expected, he emphatically rejects an identity of pleasure and happiness: That happiness is pleasurable does not mean that pleasures constitute happiness. But the happy man enjoys himself, and the happier he is, the more he enjoys himself.

[print edition page 16]

Aristotle adds that at least some resources (money, for example) are also necessary for happiness, and such things as personal attractiveness and good birth are helpful. But happiness as Aristotle develops the concept is not something to be reserved only to the rich or the brilliant. Even if the highest happiness is reserved to the wise, “it can attach, through some form of study or application, to anyone who is not handicapped by some incapacity for goodness.”¹¹ In this context, Aristotle makes another point that is especially relevant: Just because you are not enjoying the most ideal happiness you can imagine for yourself does not mean you cannot be happy. Misfortunes may occur in the life of any person, no matter how wise and virtuous, but “if, as we said, the activities determine a man’s life, no supremely happy man can ever become miserable, for he will never do what is hateful and base.” He will act in the ways that bring happiness, “just as a good shoemaker makes the best shoe he can from the leather available.”¹²

The prescriptions that flow from Aristotle’s analysis sound familiar to modern ears. If your parents taught you that lasting satisfaction comes from developing your talents to their fullest, doing your job as well as you can, raising a family, and contributing to your community, your parents were teaching you an Aristotelian course. By the same token, Aristotle has been viewed by modern critics as a defender of bourgeois values. Thus Bertrand Russell writes with unconcealed disdain that

Those who neither fall below nor rise above the level of decent, well-behaved citizens will find in the Ethics a systematic account of the principles by which they hold that their conduct should be regulated. The book appeals to the respectable middle-aged, and has been used by them, especially since the seventeenth century, to repress the ardours and enthusiasms of the young. But to a man with any depth of feeling it cannot but be repulsive. . . .¹³

Readers of Aristotle might well respond that in his evocation of courage as well as wisdom, justice as well as honor, he is calling forth not just “decency” or “respectability” but the very best that humans have in them. For that matter, it is not such a bad thing (or perhaps, such a common one) to be a decent, well-behaved citizen. It is easy to understand the resilience of the Aristotelian vision of happiness if only because it so closely corresponds to the evolving views of so many

[print edition page 17]

people who grow older, into “respectable middle age,” and try to figure out what is making them happy or unhappy. Aristotle’s view has, as a social scientist might say, a good deal of face validity.

This underlying correspondence between Aristotle’s philosophy and everyday experience may account for why the Aristotelian framework was without serious competition for nearly two millennia. The advent of Christianity provided a religious branch of thinking about human happiness over which this book—after all a book about social policy and not a history of theories of happiness—must skip. It may be noted in passing, however, that in this area as in many others, Christian and especially Catholic theology owe much to Aristotle. For Aquinas, writing his Treatise on Happiness, Aristotle did not even need a name. He was simply and without peer The Philosopher.

THE LOCKEAN REVISION

An indispensable underpinning of the Aristotelian view of happiness was that all pleasures are not created equal; some are inherently superior to others. It is impossible for a person to make himself truly happy by stringing together episodes of sex, feasting, circuses, and idle good times. Beginning with the eighteenth century, an influential line of British philosophers discarded the underlying premise that pleasures can be ranked.^*

The individual took center stage. An individual human being has inviolate rights, makes private decisions, and whether those decisions are “right” or “wrong” is a question that can be answered only by the individual who makes them. And so with happiness. It is not necessary, they argued, to assign a hierarchy of virtue or goodness to human activities. It is sufficient to say that human beings pursue their self-interest as they perceive it, including their understanding of such things as pleasure and happiness. How they perceive these things is not subject to validation by an outside party.

[print edition page 18]

John Locke, writing at the end of the seventeenth century, was the first to voice this radically different approach to happiness. Happiness, he wrote, is sensible pleasure. Its lowest form is “so much ease from all pain, and so much present pleasure, as without which anyone cannot be content.” Its highest form is not any particular type of activity nor is it even categorizable by its virtue or lack of it. Rather, the highest form of happiness is simply “the utmost pleasure we are capable of.”¹⁵ Happiness is as happiness does; therefore no outside agent—such as a king, for example—has the right to interfere with the individual’s pursuit of those pleasures and satisfactions that have the most utility for his particular notions of what makes him happy as long as he harms no one else in that pursuit.

The theoretical gap between the Aristotelian and the Lockean view of happiness yawns wide. But if one asks whether the Lockean view of happiness really did represent a major change in the way men viewed the question that concerns us—How are men to pursue happiness?—the differences between the British philosophers and the Aristotelians are far less clear. The same writers who propounded a radically new view of man’s natural rights, who overturned prevailing ideas about the rights of kings and aristocrats over common men, tended to give descriptions of private virtue and its connection with happiness that correspond quite closely to the Aristotelian one.^*

To understand how these theoretical differences were bridged, it first must be remembered that Locke’s value-stripped statement that happiness consisted of sensible pleasure was modified by his successors. The Scottish moral philosophers who followed—most prominently David Hume, Francis Hutcheson, and Adam Smith—saw more

[print edition page 19]

in the human animal than Locke had admitted; they saw as well “benevolence,” which constituted for them the basis of the social order. For Hutcheson in particular, the “moral sense” enabled and indeed compelled thoughtful men to take pleasure—to find happiness—in acts that Aristotle would have found entirely suitable. Hutcheson, writing of the meaning of obligation and self-interest, argues that men are so powerfully driven by their nature “to be pleased and happy when we reflect upon our having done virtuous actions and to be uneasy when we are conscious of having acted otherwise” that self-interest inherently will tend to coincide with virtuous behavior.¹⁷ Similarly, David Hume writes that “whatever contradictions may vulgarly be supposed between the selfish and social sentiments” are no greater than those between selfish and any other sentiments. “Selfish” has any attraction only because the things that are selfishly sought are attractive. What is most attractive to men? What gives the most relish to the objects of their selfish pursuits? Hume sees “benevolence or humanity” as the ones that perceptive men will naturally choose.¹⁸

We need not exclude even Locke from this line of thought. Locke was, after all, a Calvinist, and Calvinists were not notably permissive in their attitude toward what constitutes right behavior and suitable pleasure. Locke’s writings include clear statements that only the shortsighted are content with pleasures of the senses. When he wrote that “the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness,” Locke meant happiness in Christianity and in just society.¹⁹ Locke’s epistemology permitted men to call themselves happy if they felt pleasure, whatever its sources. But the sources of pleasure that actually worked were limited.

Much the same points may be made about the utilitarians, identified primarily with Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, who followed in the nineteenth century.^* The utilitarians, building on the Lockean tradition, saw happiness as a favorable balance of pleasure over pain in which Aristotelian considerations of higher pleasures versus lower pleasures need play no part. “Nature has placed mankind

[print edition page 20]

under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure,” Bentham wrote in a famous passage. “They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think.”²⁰ It is an uncompromising rejection of Aristotelian distinctions and moral precepts.

But then Bentham constrains his notion of the pursuit of happiness in practice to the point that one wonders whether it might not be easier to be a Calvinist than a Utilitarian. Bentham asserts that happiness (an excess of pleasure over pain) must be maximized for the community, not for any one member of it.²¹ That his own happiness is his first concern does not free him from a moral obligation to act in ways that promote the greatest happiness for the greatest number. How is he to fulfill this moral obligation? Bentham proposes his “hedonistic calculus,” which considers seven factors of pleasure and pain. One must choose the moral act by considering all seven and deciding whether a given action is a net plus or a net minus—an excruciatingly rigorous demand on an individual’s moral sense. Disregarding the practicalities of actually implementing Bentham’s dictum, it is an understanding of “happiness as pleasure” that, if adhered to, seems likely to evoke the same middle-class morality that so offended Russell about Aristotle’s Ethics.

John Stuart Mill went much further, identifying himself with man’s capacity for rational action as a fundamental source of true enjoyment and happiness. “It is quite compatible with the principle of utility to recognize the fact that some kinds of pleasures are more desirable and more valuable than others,” he wrote. “No intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base,” no matter how convinced they might be that doing so would yield them a greater amount of pleasure.²² Shortly thereafter, he adds:

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they know only their side of the question.²³

Thus, briefly, some reasons for arguing that in the evolution of the concept of happiness an array of philosophers espoused quite different conceptual views of happiness that nonetheless had very similar

[print edition page 21]

behavioral implications. To borrow from V. J. McGill’s formulation in The Idea of Happiness: in Aristotle, virtue is the substance of happiness; in the post-Lockean revision, it is instrumental.²⁴

The concept of happiness as employed by the Founding Fathers in general and Thomas Jefferson in particular reveals this easy coexistence of intellectually alien traditions. Jefferson was a good Lockean in his view of happiness as the constant pursuit of men. Indeed, he went beyond Locke, viewing the pursuit of happiness not just as something that men naturally did as a consequence of their human essence, but as an end of man ordained by natural law (or by God). A desire for happiness was itself part of man’s essence.²⁵ But he also was drawn to the “moral sense” philosophy of Francis Hutcheson, and argued that “the essence of virtue is doing good to others.”²⁶ Finally, bringing himself full circle back to a Lockean perspective, Jefferson rejected the public arena as a suitable place for virtue to manifest itself, putting it instead in the private sphere of effort and reward.²⁷ As historian John Diggins summarized it, Jefferson “made happiness the end of life, virtue the basis of happiness, and utility the criterion of virtue.”²⁸ In less elaborated ways, the other Founders shared this rough compromise between theoretical options and real ones in the pursuit of happiness: Men may do what they will to pursue their vision of happiness, as long as they do not harm others, but thoughtful men will behave as virtuous gentlemen.

THE SOCIOLOGISTS’ ALTERNATIVE, “AVOWED HAPPINESS”

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, people stopped talking about “happiness” as a philosophical construct. Howard Mumford Jones associated the demise of happiness with William James. No matter what tradition you endorsed, he argued, James left you adrift. With Pragmatism, James had dismantled the notion of happiness as a life lived in correspondence to immutable reason. With Varieties of Religious Experience, he had cast doubt on happiness grounded in theology. “And if happiness means the acceptance of things on the basis of right reason,” Mumford Jones wrote, “the place of rationality in consciousness is so considerably shrunken by a study of James’s The Principles of Psychology . . . that Locke seems for a time to be a mere museum piece.”²⁹ Modern man was upon us.

[print edition page 22]

William James is not the only suspect in the case, but whether it was he or Freud or the quantum physicists who did in the classical concept of happiness is not the issue. Happiness as defined by Aristotle or the Enlightenment or the utilitarians depended on man’s being a recognizably rational, purposive creature. In the late nineteenth century, that assumption became intellectually untenable. By the time that the twentieth century dawned, the pursuit of happiness had become for the intellectuals a matter of healthy psychological adaptation. The man in the street might still be under the impression he was pursuing an Aristotelian ideal (not identified as such) of the virtuous life. But the scientific view had changed. For the twentieth century, Howard Mumford Jones gloomily concludes, “the problem of happiness is the problem of adjustment between the primitive subliminal urges of our hidden selves and the drab and practical necessities of every day.”³⁰

If the pursuit of happiness is in reality the pursuit of adjustment, then happiness is a matter of whatever feels good, and the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of good adjustment—the therapeutic ethic, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan has termed it in a related context.³¹ Twentieth-century social scientists have accordingly been reluctant to treat happiness as a construct which may be predefined. Instead, they have worked from the notion of “avowed happiness.” If people say they’re happy, the moderns have said, let us assume they are reporting accurately and then try to ascertain what “avowedly happy people” have in common.

The technique can be as uncomplicated as the one used by Norman Bradburn in his pioneering survey for the National Opinion Research Center in 1961. His interviewers asked simply, “Taking all things together, how would you say things are these days—would you say you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy these days?”³² Another important study asked “How do you feel about your life as a whole?” and gave the respondent an opportunity to circle one of seven points on a scale ranging from “delighted” to “terrible.”³³ An other technique has been to let the respondent define the extremes, then place himself at a point on that continuum. The best-known of these is called the “self-anchoring striving scale” developed by sociologist Hadley Cantril in a cross-national study.³⁴ Or the investigator may obtain more specific ratings on a variety of scales (“boring” to

[print edition page 23]

“interesting,” “lonely” to “friendly,” and so forth) and sum them to obtain a composite measure as Angus Campbell and his colleagues did in the “Semantic Differential Happiness Scale” used in the landmark assessment of American quality of life sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation.³⁵

I will not attempt a systematic survey of the outcomes of these studies, which in any case has been done quite well elsewhere.^*36 Still, two general points about the modern social science literature regarding happiness are pertinent to my use of the concept of happiness.

The first point is that social scientists have not found happiness to be a particularly variegated phenomenon. In all cases, the concept of “satisfaction” plays a central role in describing happiness. In some studies (Cantril, Campbell et al.), satisfaction is treated as the chief operational component of “happiness.” An argument still rages about the elements of satisfaction (for example: Is satisfaction a function of the gap between aspiration and achievement? Or of the gap between aspiration and expectation?), but satisfaction itself, understood much the same way you probably think of the word, is indispensable.³⁷

The second point is that momentary pleasures don’t seem to be very relevant to happiness. Social scientists have avoided making value judgments about worthy and unworthy types of happiness so that they could measure what people really thought as opposed to what they were supposed to think. But this open-mindedness has yet to reveal a widely held (or even narrowly held) notion of happiness grounded in hedonism.

[print edition page 24]

Listening either to evangelists or to the evening news, one gets the impression that living for the moment is a prevalent idea of the good life, but the surveys have found hardly anyone who says he adopts it for himself. Very few people actually seem to attach much importance to the fleeting pleasures of the flesh in deciding whether or not they are happy.

A Working Definition of Happiness

Thus some of the reasons that a highly specific definition of happiness is not necessary to a discussion of the pursuit of happiness. Whatever their starting points, and regardless of theoretical differences, people who think about what makes a life a happy one end up with much in common. If you apply your own definition, it is almost certain that it will share enough of the core characteristics I have just discussed to permit common understanding.

For the record, the working definition I will employ is lasting and justified satisfaction with one’s life as a whole. The definition is not original; indeed, minor variants of it have been used by so many that scholarly credit for it is difficult to assign.³⁸ The definition in effect says that when you decide how happy you are, you are thinking of aspects of your life that tend to define your life (not just bits and pieces of it) and you base your assessment of your own happiness on long-range satisfactions with the way things have gone. The pursuit of happiness will refer to an individual’s everyday efforts to plan and conduct his life so that it yields lasting and justified satisfaction.

This is a prosaic definition with one barb, however: the word “justified.” “Justified” is un-Lockean, implying that not all kinds of satisfactions are equal. “Justified” suggests that such things as objective right and objective wrong exist, that such a thing as virtue exists.

One must distinguish at this point between the specifics that you, the reader, or I, the author, attach to the meaning of “justified” and the level of agreement necessary to continue the discussion. Perhaps you are a religious person and interpret the concepts of right, wrong, and virtue according to a specific code that you believe to be universally applicable. Or perhaps you are willing to accept the notion that such a thing as virtuous behavior exists, but insist that it must be

[print edition page 25]

defined differently for different cultures and different times. In either case, we may put such specifics aside. In the context of this book, “justified” with regard to happiness says that it is not enough to feel good; you must have a plausible reason for feeling good. As philosopher Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz writes, “The man who is satisfied is not only emotionally gratified but also regards his satisfaction as justified.”³⁹ Happiness is more than a feeling.

To this extent, I am insisting that if reason is surrendered, happiness cannot be justified. Remember Mill’s comment: Better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied, regardless of the pig’s view. Put in another context: If someone who is a drug addict says that by remaining in a permanent drugged state he can achieve a life of perpetual ecstasy, and that this is a valid way of being happy, the “justified” requirement says he is wrong. He is not happy, whatever he may think. He has surrendered reason. He has surrendered an indispensable element that makes him human.

Seen from one perspective, this assertion does not entail a great intellectual leap. Who wants to live the life of a drug addict? But it does require a dogmatic statement: It is true not just of me (that I could not be happy as a drug addict), it is true of all people, even those who insist they are happy being drug addicts. And as soon as we make such a statement, all sorts of thoughts intervene. What if one were poor? What if one lived in a ghetto? What if one had no education and no opportunity? Is it really appropriate for a person in the comfortable middle class to say that no one who lives in a euphoric stupor can be happy? I will be assuming that yes, it is appropriate and even essential to be dogmatic that life must be lived with self-awareness and self-judgment.

The Experience Machine Test

I am not sure it is necessary to dwell on the foregoing point—perhaps it is self-evident—but it is so important to the rest of my argument that I refer you to philosopher Robert Nozick’s device, the “experience machine,” adapted here for my own purposes.⁴⁰

Imagine a machine with electrodes that can be attached to your brain in such a way that it will make you feel exactly as if you were

[print edition page 26]

having whatever experience you wish. You want to write a great novel? The machine can give you exactly the sensations of writing a great novel. You want to make friends? Have an ideal marriage? The experience machine can do it for you, for a day or a lifetime.

You are not to worry about missing out on anything—you will have a huge library of possible experiences to choose from. If you wish, you may try a little of everything—two years a test pilot, two years a Talmudic scholar, two years the parent of loving children; whatever you wish. The main point is that while you are on the machine, your consciousness of what is happening will be indistinguishable from the real thing. You will think you are a concert pianist, or rock star if you prefer, and the experiences of a Vladimir Horowitz or of a Mick Jagger will not have been any more real than the ones you feel while floating in the tank, attached to the electrodes. All you have to do is ask to be plugged in. The test question: Would you choose the experience machine as a substitute for living the rest of your life in the real world?

Most people say no. Specifying why one would refuse is not easy, however. Every reason you may devise is irrational unless you hold an underlying, bedrock premise that what you do and are is anchored in something other than sensory input to your nerve endings. The stipulation that the satisfaction be “justified,” while it will not involve any particular creed or set of values, does require this fundamental belief that the state of being human has some distinctive core—that a human being has a soul, if you will.

If you have any residual uncertainty about your stance, it may be useful to think of the judgment one would make for one’s own child. Suppose that your child had a serious physical disability—was confined to a wheelchair, for example, and was therefore intrinsically prevented from ever having certain experiences.^* Would you then choose a life on the experience machine for your child? (You could hook him up while he was asleep, so he would not have even the momentary anguish of knowing that his subsequent experiences would be fake.) I am assuming, and assuming that you agree, that the answer must be a horrified no.