PHIL 3160 – Philosophy of Happiness

What is it, how can we best pursue it, why should we? Supporting the study of these and related questions at Middle Tennessee State University and beyond. "Examining the concept of human happiness and its application in everyday living as discussed since antiquity by philosophers, psychologists, writers, spiritual leaders, and contributors to pop culture."

Thursday, September 2, 2021

Questions Sep7

 1. More important than whether you're happy, says Haybron, is what?

2. What makes civilization possible?

3. As a general rule, says Haybron, selfish and shallow people don't look _____.

4. A more demanding notion of the good life must meet what standard?

5. Does Haybron recommend scheduling quality family time?

6. What does Kahneman say about "focusing illusions"?

DQ:

  • It's easy to say that someone else's happiness is not the most important thing, harder to say that of yourself. Do you?
  • Do you share the consensus of "virtually all ethical philosophers" that "acting badly is out of the question, even if that would make us happier"? What compels this view?
  • Comment: "One should not be an asshole in the pursuit of happiness."
  • Will having kids make you happier? Better? 97-8
  • What "model of appreciative engagement" in music or another art do you prefer? 100
  • Have you encountered "touroids"? 104 Did you ignore them, taunt them, take their picture...? Are they despicable, or merely laughable? 
  • Have you known a "Dr. Tom"?
  • What percentage of your friends and acquaintances pass the "eulogy test"? 111
  • No old person lies on his deathbed and regrets not having ended it as a teenager. 113 True?
  • Would you prefer that your children lead extraordinary public lives, or lives that are serene, wise, and anonymous? How do you defend your preference? 115
  • Are you addicted to a device or a social medium? Does this concern you? How will you redress it? 117k
  • Comment: is figure 16 disturbing? Have you been in this scenario? Will you be, in the future? Do you accept this as normal and acceptable in today's world?
  • To what grandmotherly wisdom do you subscribe? Or do you think older people have nothing relevant to teach? 
More discussion questions in comments?
==
The Myth of Quality Time
EVERY summer for many years now, my family has kept to our ritual. All 20 of us — my siblings, my dad, our better halves, my nieces and nephews — find a beach house big enough to fit the whole unruly clan. We journey to it from our different states and time zones. We tensely divvy up the bedrooms, trying to remember who fared poorly or well on the previous trip. And we fling ourselves at one another for seven days and seven nights.

That’s right: a solid week. It’s that part of the ritual that mystifies many of my friends, who endorse family closeness but think that there can be entirely too much of it. Wouldn’t a long weekend suffice? And wouldn’t it ward off a few spats and simplify the planning?
The answer to the second question is yes, but to the first, an emphatic no.

I used to think that shorter would be better, and in the past, I arrived for these beach vacations a day late or fled two days early, telling myself that I had to when in truth I also wanted to — because I crave my space and my quiet, and because I weary of marinating in sunscreen and discovering sand in strange places. But in recent years, I’ve showed up at the start and stayed for the duration, and I’ve noticed a difference.

With a more expansive stretch, there’s a better chance that I’ll be around at the precise, random moment when one of my nephews drops his guard and solicits my advice about something private. Or when one of my nieces will need someone other than her parents to tell her that she’s smart and beautiful. Or when one of my siblings will flash back on an incident from our childhood that makes us laugh uncontrollably, and suddenly the cozy, happy chain of our love is cinched that much tighter.

There’s simply no real substitute for physical presence. We delude ourselves when we say otherwise, when we invoke and venerate “quality time,” a shopworn phrase with a debatable promise: that we can plan instances of extraordinary candor, plot episodes of exquisite tenderness, engineer intimacy in an appointed hour.

We can try. We can cordon off one meal each day or two afternoons each week and weed them of distractions. We can choose a setting that encourages relaxation and uplift. We can fill it with totems and frippery — a balloon for a child, sparkling wine for a spouse — that signal celebration and create a sense of the sacred.

And there’s no doubt that the degree of attentiveness that we bring to an occasion ennobles or demeans it. Better to spend 15 focused, responsive minutes than 30 utterly distracted ones.
But people tend not to operate on cue. At least our moods and emotions don’t. We reach out for help at odd points; we bloom at unpredictable ones. The surest way to see the brightest colors, or the darkest ones, is to be watching and waiting and ready for them.

That’s reflected in a development that Claire Cain Miller and David Streitfeld wrote about in The Times last week. They noted that “a workplace culture that urges new mothers and fathers to hurry back to their cubicles is beginning to shift,” and they cited “more family-friendly policies” at Microsoft and Netflix, which have extended the leave that parents can take.
They’ll be lucky: Many people aren’t privileged enough to exercise such discretion. My family is lucky, too. We have the means to get away.

But we’re also dedicated to it, and we’ve determined that Thanksgiving Day isn’t ample, that Christmas Eve passes too quickly, and that if each of us really means to be central in the others’ lives, we must make an investment, the biggest components of which are minutes, hours, days. As soon as our beach week this summer was done, we huddled over our calendars and traded scores of emails to figure out which week next summer we could all set aside. It wasn’t easy. But it was essential.

Couples move in together not just because it’s economically prudent. They understand, consciously or instinctively, that sustained proximity is the best route to the soul of someone; that unscripted gestures at unexpected junctures yield sweeter rewards than scripted ones on date night; that the “I love you” that counts most isn’t whispered with great ceremony on a hilltop in Tuscany. No, it slips out casually, spontaneously, in the produce section or over the dishes, amid the drudgery and detritus of their routines. That’s also when the truest confessions are made, when hurt is at its rawest and tenderness at its purest.

I know how my 80-year-old father feels about dying, religion and God not because I scheduled a discrete encounter to discuss all of that with him. I know because I happened to be in the passenger seat of his car when such thoughts were on his mind and when, for whatever unforeseeable reason, he felt comfortable articulating them.

And I know what he appreciates and regrets most about his past because I was not only punctual for this summer’s vacation, but also traveled there with him, to fatten our visit, and he was uncharacteristically ruminative on that flight.
It was over lunch at the beach house one day that my oldest nephew spoke with unusual candor, and at unusual length, about his expectations for college, his experiences in high school — stuff that I’d grilled him about previously, never harvesting the generous answers that he volunteered during that particular meal.

It was on a run the next morning that my oldest niece described, as she’d never done for me before, the joys, frustrations and contours of her relationships with her parents, her two sisters and her brother. Why this information tumbled out of her then, with pelicans overhead and sweat slicking our foreheads, I can’t tell you. But I can tell you that I’m even more tightly bonded with her now, and that’s not because of some orchestrated, contrived effort to plumb her emotions. It’s because I was present. It’s because I was there. Frank Bruni, nyt
==
How to Live Wisely.
Imagine you are Dean for a Day. What is one actionable change you would implement to enhance the college experience on campus?
I have asked students this question for years. The answers can be eye-opening. A few years ago, the responses began to move away from “tweak the history course” or “change the ways labs are structured.” A different commentary, about learning to live wisely, has emerged.
What does it mean to live a good life? What about a productive life? How about a happy life? How might I think about these ideas if the answers conflict with one another? And how do I use my time here at college to build on the answers to these tough questions? (nyt - continues)
==
The Meaning of Life, the secret of happiness
"Well, it's nothing very special. Uh, try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations..."
Monty Python



"A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so." Christopher Hitchens

The literal meaning of life is whatever you're doing that prevents you from killing yourself.” Albert Camus

“A life of short duration...could be so rich in joy and love that it could contain more meaning than a life lasting eighty years... Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'.”  Viktor E. Frankl
==
Old Podcast ch7 ... Happiness & the good life

16 comments:

  1. It's easy to say that someone else's happiness is not the most important thing, harder to say that of yourself. Do you?

    I do not think of other people very often, I am not very concerned with others. I do not, in fact I say nothing in regards to others happiness, unless asked about it. It is impossible to care about "others" in some universal sense, this has been proven in evolutionary psychology, we can only real care about 120 or so people. Yet most of us still spout some universal morality which claims to universal care, which is just silly, beyond your kin group everyone and everything else is just a number, or an abstraction.

    Do you share the consensus of "virtually all ethical philosophers" that "acting badly is out of the question, even if that would make us happier"? In the words of Nietzsche many supposed Philosophers are just Theologians and Priests in disguise. They are not motivated by thought, but by control, which is why they find ethics so useful. What is more powerful at controlling what people think and do than making uinversal claims about their rightness or wrongness. What compels this view? Most philosophers are not particpating in Philosophy, they are motivated by other interests discconnecged from Philosophy. I do not understand this weird civic duty that is attached to all ethical philosophy, they attempt to stray away from plain morality yet they fall over and over again into the moralist trap of duty. If you are not a moralist I do not understand why you would care about the well being others or if your actions affect them. Why you would design this whole worldview of obligation and responsibility , as if we could measure such things. Ethics should theoretically study rightness and wrongness but as far as things in themselves, not how we out to act, that is morality. Yet philosophers sure seem to conflate the two, which is bizarre since many philosophers oppose morality while proposing a ethics which is highly moralistic. It is like arguing for veganism while eating a steak.
    Comment: "One should not be an asshole in the pursuit of happiness."
    Will having kids make you happier? I do not understand the sociality, why must your aims be social? You can be pursuing happiness in total seclusion could you not? Having kids has been an integral part of the life of the majority of humans who ever lived, unless you think you are wiser than your species collective wisdom there's something to having children than just losing out on some fun. I wouldn't know since it takes two to tango, but our species sure takes a lot of value in breeding.

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    Replies
    1. With regard to your answer to the second question, "Do you share the consensus of "virtually all eithical philosophers" that acting badly is out of the question, even if that would make us happier", I have to agree. I quite picked up on that very theme in Chapter 7, where the author is describing meaning. It may not be virtuous, but even demented monarchs live a life of meaning. Meaning for me is neither good or bad, positive or negative. A ruler's decisions that cause pain and even death to his constituents has meaning. Ask the families whose loss was felt in those ruler's decisions. Hitler's life had meaning. If we ask the Jewish people is Hitler's life had meaning, they may reply "yes, it did, it meant my life was forfeit!"

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  2. Unknown is Kathleen Baldwin. I am not sure what happened and why I cannot post as that person.

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  3. "One should not be an asshole in the pursuit of happiness." I listened to a production of Bill Maher a couple of weeks ago. He mentioned that phones make people assholes. Figure 16 shows a table of them. My boyfriend is one. It sounds like a moral directive, yet our society is full of people on their phones all the time. It seems we are losing much from this tendency of our culture. It seems more important what an unknown person has to say about our lives than those that mean something to us and even ourselves. I have a phone and I use it. But, when someone walks in the room I'm in on the phone, I put it down out of respect and courtesy. I find that is not a common act. Maybe being old school, I find when you don't put your phone down when others enter your space, it seems rude.

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  4. "Will having kids make you happier?" It does not seem to be a direct line to happiness nor do I think it is a given. There may be a lot of factors in determining if children bring parents happiness. The motivation and whether that brings results may play a part. There are some who think having children will fix a bad relationship (which I have never heard of a baby fixing one), or that the baby will give them someone to love and who will love them back (which doesn't happen for years and frustrates many moms before that time). Even when motivated to raise a wonderful human being, there are very trying times. But, as that child grows up and takes on life armed with your teachings and guidance, it seems better than happiness, it swells the heart. "So it is with children who learn to read fluently and well: They begin to take flight into whole new worlds as effortlessly as young birds take to the sky" William James.

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  5. I have a question: What did you think of Daniel M. Haybron leaving nature out of the SOARS model? Does your first childhood experience involve nature? Did nature play a role in your childhood? Would you include nature in the SOARS model? I remember moving out to the wooded country and thinking and feeling nature was out to get me; that there was an adversary of some sort behind every tree. When I left it after living in it for 26 years, I felt I was leaving an old friend. Something changed and I learned to trust nature.

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  6. Will having kids make you happier? Better? 97-8: I must say that my four children continue to be largely a source of happiness for me. I have a unique relationship with each of them as adults. Most important to me is that we truly love each other and express that love often. As to the times when they were growing up, sure that was sometimes very stressful. However, I was younger then, and dealing with the demands of child rearing seemed more like a challenge I could handle than it would seem if it were happening to me now. I particularly enjoyed my children when they we infants and pre-school age. I will always remember the overwhelming feeling of love I had for them when they were newborns and we were first bonding.

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  7. I think the question of whether or not having kids will make you happier is such a difficult one to answer. Coming from someone that doesn’t have kids, it’s hard to know if I could even really answer this question, but I think that having kids would make me happier. I know that the thought of having children someday makes me smile, so that does have to kind of count for something, I think. More than just the thought of having kids, the thought of getting to raise children in a healthy loving household. The thought of getting to give my child/children not only the life I wish I would’ve had, but more importantly the parents that I wish I would’ve had. I think maybe the reason the results show the opposite affect is because it would more so be surveying their current life satisfaction rather than their legitimate “happiness”. And in a situation when you’re barely getting any sleep, just pushed a live human out of your body, dealing with the postpartum emotions, etc., I can only imagine where my face would rank on the smiley chart.

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  8. Figure 16 has a disturbing quality to it that some may overlook. It is a real indication of a lack of familial, or at least social, ties. I have been in this situation numerous occasions, and it is the personification of the oxymoron "Alone together." Fortunately for myself, my family has never been one keen on allowing such distractions at the table. Dinner was always seen as a given allotment of time for family interaction. Instead, it has been in the company of friends that this mostly occurs, and I suppose that is linked to younger generations keeping more electronics on their person.

    Now, on the topic of whether I see this in my future or not, I sure hope not. Maybe a few habits of my old folks did stick, but there is a strong need for communication within the family. Between all the personal responsibilities that each member in my family will have, its imperative that we have a time that is locked down.

    Now is this normal? Yes, if we define normality as merely a descriptor for attributes readily found within nature or society. Is it acceptable? Not at all, for the reasons previously discussed. Call me old fashioned.

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  9. Something I'd like to bring up in class discussion today is the humorous analogy I couldn't help but make while reading about the happiness of immoral people and "Authentic Happiness." It goes as follows:

    Our "gut values" are very aptly named, as they are quite similar to our "gut bacteria," or "gut culture."

    Gut Bacteria:
    We get the majority of our gut bacteria at birth (from our mother), though our gut culture does change over the course of our lives, just not rapidly. We need these bacteria, which are outside entities (unlike our cells, which are a part of our entity) to survive, even though we had no part in choosing them, and it takes a great deal of effort to change our gut culture later in life- a complete removal and replacement considered practically impossible.

    Gut Values:
    We get the majority of our values in early childhood (from family, friends, and the media) though our values can evolve as we continue to interact in society. We need to connect with our values to be "authentically happy" even though we must discover, as opposed to choosing, our true feelings. While it is possible with much effort to change over time, it usually does not occur, and a trace of our formative values are usually always present.

    See some similarity?

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  10. It is true that no old person lies on his deathbed wishing he ended his life as a teenager. Or so it has not been heard of. However, it seems that with time all things heal, correct? So you would think that one would be happy with his decision that he did not make that harsh decision when he was younger. Though, there could always be a possibility that one was dealt a bad hand his whole life, but I would think that is rare.

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  11. The grandmotherly wisdom I subscribed to strongest would probably be the importance of family. I think at least in modern western cultures we place far less of an emphasis on family than it deserves there is something about the bonds made by common experiences of life like births deaths and everything in between in combination with evolutionary imperatives that make family unlike any other relationship and life and due to that it has a singular effect on our happiness that no other relationship can compare to.

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  12. Will having children improve one’s happiness? I must admit that I’m not exactly one to speak on such a topic, as I have no children of my own. There is, however, many people that I have spoken with that would say that children imperative to happiness. Whether the childless can truly be happy or not is up for debate for many people, but I merely want to know if child rearing increases one’s aggregate happiness.

    There’s something to be said about the innate desire to hand down your legacy and wisdom. In many ways, I believe that plays a huge role in many people’s decision to have children. Moreover, as discussed in the book, simply having meaningful tasks will give a person happiness and purpose. And what is more meaningful than being responsible for the character development of another human?

    Now, do I believe that you must have a child in the biological sense, or even the legal sense? Not at all. I believe that adoption and mentor ship are at least suitable replacements for having children. It’s not the blood that courses through the child’s veins that makes you love them necessarily, but the bond you form with them over the years.

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  13. ”To what grandmotherly wisdom do you subscribe? Or do you think older people have nothing relevant to teach?” I would honestly say I don’t subscribe to much wisdom from the elders. I find myself agreeing with the older generations in their views with cell phones and social media, and its extensive negative effects on our younger generations, but other than that I don’t frequently find our views or opinions aligning, which makes it extremely difficult for me to soak up any of their elderly wisdom. I think for the most part, times are changing very quickly (and that pace is only increasing, and at a lot faster rate these days) and, in most cases, their views and “wisdom’ don’t necessarily keep up with that evolution. Now by no means am I saying take everything the older generations say with a grain of salt, but I am a firm believer that we should take their wisdom and do our best to educate them on the changes of the new generations.

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  14. Figure 16 rings all too familiar in my house growing up. We honestly weren’t much of an “eat at the dinner table” kind of family, not to say we didn’t try a few times. The only time I ever remember a “no phones at the table” being enforced would be if we were eating out together as a family, and to be transparent, I think it was only because my mom wanted our family to look like we enjoyed eating together and spending time together. With that being said, now as an adult it is absolutely infuriating to me when I am eating dinner with someone, or multiple people, and they can’t even participate in conversation because they are on their phone. Growing up we were on our phones during dinner because we were bored or because we didn’t want to be there, so when someone is out with me and they are on their phone, that is automatically the thought I get. To call back to the question of elderly wisdom, I think this is a big one that really stuck with me. I can confidently say that I don’t see this in my future. I want to create an environment that my family is wanting to interact with each other and talk about their days rather than find a distraction.

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  15. 6. What does Kahneman say about "focusing illusions"?

    I believe that Kahneman is talking about how much of an impact our perception of things, internal and external, can make on how a situation, obstacle, or condition can manifest without actually changing at all. Accidentally stepping on someone's shoe when walking on a busy street may not only require the energy for a quick "sorry about that", "no worries", and then both parties to be on their ways. However, for a sneakerhead who's been collecting for his whole life, you might as well have ran his foot over with your car.

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You don’t need a pill: Neo

It is not how much we have, but how much we enjoy, that makes happiness True happiness is... to enjoy the present, without anxious dependen...