OCT 26 Flanagan ch 2-3 (-p.95). I'll stop explicitly asking for your questions, but do please try to pose at least one or two (pegged to specific page #s if possible) each class. PRESENTATIONS: RUSTY, SNEH...
- What alternative "businesses" might be appropriate to governments? Does this really have to be an exclusive disjunction? 43-4
- What do "philosophers call 'content'"? 50 What does this suggest to you about the relation between evidence and experience?
- It seems obvious that "it is one thing to be happy, another to be good" (51) but in Pragmatism William James asks if we can "keep the notion of what is better for us, and what is true for us, permanently apart?" * COMMENT?
- "True happiness...might not involve feeling happy at all." 57 Which famous happiness author is referenced in connection with this claim? Do you think he'd entirely agree? At all seems excessive, doesn't it?
- Why do you think 40% of American teens suffer "persistent sadness and hopelessness"? What would you advise they do?
- What's special about age forty? 63
- Do we need a Ministry of Happiness? 73 (Or perhaps for the Future?)
- How does English differ from other languages in the relation of happy to happiness? 86
- What sort of happiness "involves no smiling or laughing"? 90 Do serenity and contentment not make you ever smile or laugh?
- About what is Haybron 100% clear? 94
*...truth is ONE SPECIES OF GOOD, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it. THE TRUE IS THE NAME OF WHATEVER PROVES ITSELF TO BE GOOD IN THE WAY OF BELIEF, AND GOOD, TOO, FOR DEFINITE, ASSIGNABLE REASONS. Surely you must admit this, that if there were NO good for life in true ideas, or if the knowledge of them were positively disadvantageous and false ideas the only useful ones, then the current notion that truth is divine and precious, and its pursuit a duty, could never have grown up or become a dogma. In a world like that, our duty would be to SHUN truth, rather. But in this world, just as certain foods are not only agreeable to our taste, but good for our teeth, our stomach and our tissues; so certain ideas are not only agreeable to think about, or agreeable as supporting other ideas that we are fond of, but they are also helpful in life's practical struggles. If there be any life that it is really better we should lead, and if there be any idea which, if believed in, would help us to lead that life, then it would be really BETTER FOR US to believe in that idea, UNLESS, INDEED, BELIEF IN IT INCIDENTALLY CLASHED WITH OTHER GREATER VITAL BENEFITS.
'What would be better for us to believe'! This sounds very like a definition of truth. It comes very near to saying 'what we OUGHT to believe': and in THAT definition none of you would find any oddity. Ought we ever not to believe what it is BETTER FOR US to believe? And can we then keep the notion of what is better for us, and what is true for us, permanently apart?
And this, also from Pragmatism, is relevant to our discussion last time about different levels of discourse that shouldn't be "reduced" or "eliminated":
Common sense is BETTER for one sphere of life, science for another, philosophic criticism for a third; but whether either be TRUER absolutely, Heaven only knows. Just now, if I understand the matter rightly, we are witnessing a curious reversion to the common-sense way of looking at physical nature, in the philosophy of science favored by such men as Mach, Ostwald and Duhem. According to these teachers no hypothesis is truer than any other in the sense of being a more literal copy of reality. They are all but ways of talking on our part, to be compared solely from the point of view of their USE. The only literally true thing is REALITY; and the only reality we know is, for these logicians, sensible reality, the flux of our sensations and emotions as they pass.
These are my questions for my presentation...
ReplyDeleteIs there anyone who disagrees with the authors? Anyone who thinks happiness should be the fundamental goal of public policy?
If not happiness, should there be another value at which public policy is aimed? Do you think any singular value which is promoted as the fundamental goal of policy will face similar problems as the happiness agenda?
Do you agree with the authors that our cultures shape and contextualize what happiness means? What would you say the American ideal of happiness looks like?
Would you prefer to live in a culture with a higher average happiness score, or a culture which promotes values and emotions that are important to yourself?
The authors seem to suggest that justice trumps happiness in terms of importance, at least at the level of public policy, why do you think that is? Do you think the same applies at the level of the individual? Is it more important to value justice in your personal life, or happiness? Is it even possible to separate these spheres as I have here, between public and personal?
What sort of happiness "involves no smiling or laughing"? 90 Do serenity and contentment not make you ever smile or laugh?
ReplyDeletethe serene and contented sort.
I certainly don't see the serenity and laughing and smiling as mutually exclusive, but I also wouldn't say that laughing and smiling are the typical responses to serenity.
Individual results may vary. I think I always smile, and often laugh, when feeling serene and contented. In general I think a sense of humor is indispensable for the happy life. Even a bad joke is better than none. (Nothing personal, Gary and Sneh.)
DeleteMuch of this text and chapter are dedicated to a critique of happiness from the perspective of nation-states and governmental bodies. In the United States, one of our founding texts is the Declaration of Independence, which names some of the inalienable rights as being "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Is the assurance of the pursuit of happiness distinct enough from promoting generalized happiness that it avoids some of the critiques the authors have? Or does it fall into the same problems as, say, Bhutan or positive psychologists, and the happiness agenda?
ReplyDeleteThe authors tackle this issue more later on in the book as, from my understanding, they do make a distinction between these modes.
"Do we need a Ministry of Happiness? 73 (Or perhaps for the Future?)"
ReplyDeleteI actually have read Ministry for the Future, and I have a similar critique of both ministry ideas: I believe they fail to grasp the magnitude of the problem. David Wallace Wells in his book 'The Uninhabitable Earth' argues that climate change may be a sort of 'super object,' so complex and massive of a concept/ phemonema that analysis and understanding of the totality is near impossible. I believe this is the case for a world of suffering too. Happiness and suffering on the world scale is totalizing: it captures political economy, culture, etc. That is to say, a movement to end suffering is so world historic its impossible to capture with a single apparatus, even at the scale of the UN or America. Rather, we must imagine a world comprised of entirely different struggles to create a new world. Struggles that revolutionize social relations and thus political economy.
How do we imagine a world where we live communally, and happily? This is the same question I ask about climate change that I do ending world suffering. Not just carbon taxes and ministries against suffering, but world historic movements as totalizing as the problems themselves. The limits of our imagination begin and end with what modern capitalism allows, (or as Foucault would call our current epoch), and thus we can maybe only predict/ imagine a sort of socialism: a PROCESS of ridding ourselves of many different kinds of social relations that caused climate change and world suffering, and revolutionizing with new ones.
I thought Ministry for the Future had a pretty narrow view of the disorder and suffering climate change can bring. In the past 3 years, it is already outdated and seems like a book from the 2010s. With globalization, events that previously could be isolated (like the collapse of an empire) now have world-historic effects in the truest sense. That is to say, WW2-levels of world historic events are possible everywhere, happening all the time. In order for the world we want to exist, without suffering and thus defeating climate change and exploitation, we can't imagine governments, nor American empire, properly addressing these issues with ministries or new governmental bodies. The solutions to them would involve ALL of us living very differently, as the problems themselves are already causing us to do. This goes for 'world happiness' the same. Especially as us Americans somewhat insulated from the suffering of the third world and former/ current colonies (who will be most affected by climate change). The solution, or conclusion, of climate change and the fight to end needless suffering, would require a super object of struggle. Hopefully there's something interesting in this rambling of mine!
We read it in Environmental Ethics last year. I think KSR is aware of the magnitude of the problem, but perhaps he's more optimistic than you think is warranted? That's a reasonable objection. But we pragmatists think it's a condition of success in dealing with any problem, of any magnitude, that we believe there are attainable solutions. Whether we have the collective will to achieve them is of course another question.
DeleteQuestions for chapters 3 and 4:
ReplyDelete“Living a good life and well-being are more abstract and general concepts than happiness” (pg. 44-45)
Do you agree with this? Whether you do or don’t, why?
Idk man, but all of the books we’ve read so far have been trying to find the meaning of happiness, and not living a good life/ wellbeing. Happiness (to me personally) seems more abstract than the other too, just because there is more (however small) that most people can agree on that leads to “living a good life/ wellbeing” than what we agree on for happiness. But then again, what do I know?
I don't think the Epicureans distinguished sharply between being happy and living well. I know I don't. It's important not to get swamped by semantics in these discussions, so I suppose we should always preface discussion with a disclaimer such as "When I say happiness I mean..."
DeleteThis is just a comment, but I feel like this book is trying to be so picky and precise, it’s low key driving me nuts. This could also be because I stopped reading books in the ninth grade, but whatever.
ReplyDeleteYou haven't literally read a book since the 9th grade?
DeleteWhat you call picky and precise, they call careful analysis. But that's not to insure that their analysis is necessarily correct.
Delete“‘about 30-40% of the differences in happiness between people within a country are accounted for by genetic differences between people.’ It hard to see how anyone could surmise the genetic contribution to happiness without a very precise and univocal conception of happiness, which at the moment doesn’t exist” (pg. 95). What do you think about this? Do you think there is a genetic component to happiness, or do your genetics simply changes how you are viewed socially, which then has the chance to change your general happiness level.
ReplyDeleteI would say that I am the poster child for genetics having an impact on your relative levels of happiness. I was born into every possible advantage, yet I have still struggled with mental illness, which have caused my overall happiness levels in life to be lower than that of the average joe. However, I do think that if I had been genetically predisposed to receive the short end of the stick societally (not being born white, not being able to function in school, etc) my life would have been much worse. I think there is truth in both sides of the coin.
"We argued above that danger is universal, fear - conceived as a self-identical inner emotional response to danger" (90) .
ReplyDeleteCan it be argued that this fear is is similar to the ataraxia that Epicurus discussed?
I would argue that it is and its interesting to see the fear factor trickle down into what Flanagan discusses here. Epicurus expands on this notion, finding that our happiness is hindered by specifically the fear of death. Flanagan places a different spin on it in that he favors the embracement of fear. He rather advocates that fear is a natural human emotion and that certain situations make fear appropriate.