Means and ends in the pursuit of happiness

A state of happiness or a happy life is subjective and difficult to define in a precise manner. Yet, most people will agree that a fundamental purpose of life is the pursuit of our and other people’s happiness. But, what is happiness?

Definitions have been attempted since ancient times by philosophers and more recently by psychologist and neuroscientists. For instance, Aristotle (384–322 BC) ethics defined happiness as made up of pleasure (hedonia) and a life well lived (eudaimonia), a definition close to that still used today by most psychologists – pleasure, meaningful and engaged. While neuroscience has focused on the neuroanatomy of pleasure (changes in brain activity associated with changes in reported happiness), it has also began researching the study of prospective consciousness a feature unique to human beings (the sole capable of anticipating the outcome of current choices).

Whatever definition one chooses, it is clear that we need to distinguish current states of mind (which can be manipulated with drugs or group activities) from feelings of long-term achievement, ranging in degree from content to intense, which are felt by individuals with different innate predispositions.

For instance, consider the state of mind of two elders in the presence of a beautiful young person. One elder may find it a source of happiness by remembering fondly his own youth while the other may feel miserable by thinking that, because of his age, he will never be able to date such a beauty again. Likewise, consider the fact that many people consider as their happiest days those lived under conditions of serious displeasure (e.g. war or disaster) simply because they remember more vividly the friendship lived during that ordeal.

So, a personal state of feeling happy depends on one’s personality and his happy memories in relation to specific circumstances, namely: health, friends, family, money, sex, love, freedom, safety, etc. Are these factors to be considered as means to happiness or as constituents of happiness itself? Possibly both!

When our brain produces a given state of happiness, it is being impacted by various factors that are conducive to happiness or unhappiness feelings. However, in the current state of knowledge it is not yet possible to understand why it reads and weights differently such signals. Likewise, we do not know how different individuals weight their own happiness in relation to that of others in their community. Nevertheless, we can influence his ideas and personality through education.

This led me to suggest that we distinguish the means or ends that can be confused with happiness itself from those primary means required to achieve the ends usually associated with happiness. For instance, in my blog on the six pillars of human happiness I selected capitalism as fundamental to create wealth and liberalism to achieve freedom. That is, I considered money and freedom as intermediary ends which are part of happiness.

This is important, if one is to design integrated policies aimed at improving human happiness. For instance, to achieve the material conditions needed for happiness, we selected a trinity made up of market capitalism, representative democracy and constitutional liberalism. While, for spiritual conditions, we selected a trinity of productive work, scientific methods and enlightened virtues. These are the ones necessary to produce the ingredients of happiness, be they education, health, freedom, peace, religion or love.

Sex and family relationships as pillars of human happiness

This month SlutWalk marches, sparked by a Toronto’s cop remark about the role of provocative dressing in rape, brought sex again to the forefront of public debate. Given the importance that sex (or the lack of it) has in our daily lives, and the fact that family relationship always come top in any surveys about human happiness, we need to explain why we did not include them among the six pillars of human happiness.

The reasons for exclusion are different from those we used to exclude religion. They derive mostly from the fact that all controversial issues surrounding sex and family relationships depend on historical context and involve moral values that are better debated within the principles of liberalism, enlightenment and science.

For instance, the right to indecent exposure or promiscuous relations that is invoked by some of the feminists among the SlutWalk promoters is better discussed in the context of the limits to freedom in a society ruled by liberal principles.

Namely, such limits must be defined bearing in mind the historical experiments with free love in the 1920s and the 1960s and the attempts to eliminate the family institution in communist regimes. Both experiments ended up degrading the role of women. The first by turning into sects whose leaders abused women into coercive sex while the second degraded women turned into second class citizens or forced to prostitution.

Likewise, old debates about the use of sex for pleasure or procreation, the health consequences of masturbation, incestuous relations and other non-conventional forms of sex can now be studied scientifically. Other issues such as the age of consent, monogamy vs. polygamy, cohabitation vs. marriage, divorce, etc. should be discussed under enlightened principles and bearing in mind their impact on society cohesiveness and productive capacity.

For all these reasons, and despite the vital importance of family relationships for happiness, we did not separate them as one of the six pillars of human happiness.