IH-10.html

4. Calculating happiness

In brief

Here we turn to an idea that goes back to the philosopher Jeremy Bentham: the idea that happiness can be measured. In this chapter we’ll look at Bentham’s attempts to measure happiness, and at the idea of ‘subjective well-being’ in positive psychology. We’ll also explore some of the philosophical questions around the idea of measuring happiness.

Two sovereign masters

One of the central ideas of positive psychology is that happiness is a quantity that may be measured. To look at this, it will help to go back to the philosopher Jeremy Bentham. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Bentham was one of the first thinkers to try to put happiness on a scientific, which is to say a measurable, footing.

Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) was an English lawyer and philosopher, and the founder of the philosophical movement known as ‘Utilitarianism’. Though trained in the law, he became disillusioned with the irrational, chaotic and arbitrary state of legislation. Law seemed the antithesis of a rigorous science, without any clear principles, a huge mass of exceptions and precedents and faulty reasoning. Bentham dreamed of putting law on a firm and unambiguous footing, not only so that we might be able to distinguish the good from the bad, but also so that we might be able to say precisely how good or bad something was. Thanks to the rather peculiar terms of his will, Bentham bequeathed his body to University College London, where it still sits in embalmed form.

Bentham started from two very fundamental aspects of our experience, what he called the ‘two sovereign masters’: pain and pleasure. They are ‘masters’ because they guide our actions: we act to maximize pleasure and to diminish pain. Bentham realized that, if this was the case, then if we want to know how we should act, and how we should pass judgement on the actions of others, we simply need to work out which actions lead to the greatest maximizing of pleasure and the greatest reduction of pain.

For Bentham, this isn’t just about my own pleasure and pain, but about a broader social vision: in calculating which actions best maximize pleasure and minimize pain, I have to factor in the broadest possible range of outcomes of my action. Perhaps I get some pleasure from hitting you over the head with a rock, but if we factor in the discomfort that you feel, then it becomes clear that I should probably refrain. And if I get pleasure from hitting you over the head with a cat, then we have to consider the cat in the calculations as well.

For Bentham, there are several factors we need to consider in calculating the consequences of an action in terms of pleasure and pain.

We need to think about the intensity of pleasure or pain, the question of how much.
We also need to think about the duration, the question of how long. After all, we might prefer a brief second of serious pain to a year of nagging suffering.
Then there’s certainty, or how likely it is that this action will lead to pleasure or pain.
There’s also propinquity, how near-at-hand the pain or pleasure is going to be – for example, we might think something is worth doing for a small increase in pleasure tomorrow, but if this small increase in pleasure is in ten years’ time, it might be less worthwhile.
Then there’s the question of fecundity, or how likely this pleasure or pain is to give rise to more of the same.
And finally, there’s purity, or whether the pain or the pleasure is likely to turn into or to entail the opposite, just as the pleasure of drinking a bottle of wine can entail the discomfort of a hangover the following day.

In this exercise, we’ll try out Bentham’s ‘Hedonic Calculus’. Think of a decision that you need to make, but that you’re not sure about. Now fill in the following two charts by ticking the relevant boxes, first for the likely outcomes in terms of pleasure, and then for the likely outcomes in terms of pain.

Pleasure

	High	Medium	Low
Intensity
Duration
Certainty
Propinquity
Fecundity
Purity

Pain

	High	Medium	Low
Intensity
Duration
Certainty
Propinquity
Fecundity
Purity

You’ll also need to think about the number of people (or other sentient creatures) implicated in your decision. So if there are 100 people for whom it might lead to undesirable outcomes, this might outweigh the ten people for whom this might lead to desirable outcomes.

After filling in the charts as best you can, ask yourself whether you can make your decision based on these likely outcomes of pleasure and pain.

The problem here is immediately clear: how do we actually perform the necessary calculations? What units do we use to measure pleasure? And pain? And how do we know that we have sufficient data? After all, we need to consider all possible implications of any action, and if we’re going to perform actual calculations, we have to do this with a degree of rigour. This approach to deciding the right thing to do might work as a rule of thumb, but when it comes to putting it on firmer foundations, it becomes much more difficult to see how we should make these decisions.

But the idea of happiness as a measurable quantity hasn’t gone away. More recently with positive psychology, it has returned in the form of the idea of ‘subjective well-being’.

Subjective well-being

In all but the most limited approaches to happiness, it seems clear that we’re not just talking about mapping our fleeting experiences of pleasure. Any substantial notion of happiness needs to include some idea of how well our life is going. If you’ve ever been involved in a psychological survey about your life, you may have been asked questions like: ‘How happy are you with the way your life is going?’; or ‘Are you satisfied with your life?’ These are clearly not only questions about the amount of pleasure that you experience, but also take into account broader considerations relating to how well you’re faring. It’s perfectly possible to experience a great many pleasures, and at the same time to think that life isn’t really going well for us. And it’s perfectly possible to have the sense that life is going well for us, but to experience little in the way of subjective pleasure.

The notion of subjective well-being (sometimes written simply as SWB) is a way of trying to get at some hard, objective data on what seems most subjective: our own sense of how life is going for us. It does this by relying on the reportability of subjective states, the fact that I can say that yesterday things were going well for me, and that today things are going less well for me. So while how you feel may be subjective, your report about how you’re feeling turns this kind of first-person experience into objective third-person data. Subjective well-being research relies on questionnaires and surveys that require the participants to respond to questions related to their own evaluations of their lives.

This can most easily be made clear by means of an example. The five statements below come from the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS), developed by researchers Ed Diener, Robert Emmons, Randy Larsen and Sharon Griffin. For each statement, give yourself a mark from 1 to 7 where 1 is ‘strongly disagree’, 4 is ‘neither agree nor disagree’ and 7 is ‘strongly agree’. Then add up the figures to give yourself a total.

The Satisfaction With Life Scale

		In most ways my life is close to my ideal.
		The conditions of my life are excellent.
		I am satisfied with my life.
		So far I have got the important things I want in life.
		If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing.
		TOTAL

Your total should be between 5 and 35. The scores break down into broad bands as follows:

31–35	Extremely satisfied
26–30	Satisfied
21–25	Slightly satisfied
20	Neutral
1–19	Slightly dissatisfied
10–14	Dissatisfied
5–9	Extremely dissatisfied

You may want to take this short test every day for a week, to chart the comings and goings of your subjective well-being. It may be that on Monday you’re more or less happy (total of 27), on Tuesday you lose your job (total of 13), then on Wednesday, because you’re not at work, you go to the park and promptly fall in love (your total goes up to 32), but then on Thursday you realize that the person you’ve fallen in love with is leaving for Panama the coming weekend (the score plummets to 5). In this fashion we can track changes in our well-being.

If you’re a philosopher, and therefore awkward, you may find that this approach to happiness raises a few problems. Perhaps you don’t have an ‘ideal’ with which you compare your life. Perhaps you have the sense that getting the important things you want isn’t as important as all that. Perhaps you’re puzzled by which of the things you want are important and which aren’t. Or perhaps you’re mystified by the final question about living your life over. What does this mean? What are you permitted to change in this thought-experiment: just your own decisions, or do you have discretion when it comes to the laws of physics?

So now, looking back over the list of statements from the Satisfaction With Life Scale, have a think about the following questions.

Do the answers you’ve given on the subjective well-being scale really reflect your life satisfaction? And do they really reflect your happiness (which may or may not be the same thing)? What kind of assumptions about the nature of happiness do you think there might be in the Satisfaction With Life Scale?

Questions about subjective well-being

Although at first glance the idea of subjective well-being may seem to be close to a eudaimonistic notion of happiness, there’s an important difference. Subjective well-being is an evaluation of how life is going for me, but philosophers of eudaimonistic happiness often make broader claims about what it is that makes a good life. It would be perfectly possible, within a eudaimonistic theory of happiness, to say that somebody had ‘lived a happy life’, even if they didn’t report any level of subjective well-being.

Flora was a novelist. Her books were unpublished during her lifetime but were discovered posthumously and are now considered to be classics of literature.

Throughout her life, Flora was troubled by self-doubt. In fact, one day a psychologist knocked on her door and asked: ‘Are you satisfied with your life?’ Flora howled: ‘No! How can I be satisfied? Nobody reads the words that I labour over day and night!’ The psychologist apologized and moved on down the street.

Flora, in other words, experienced almost no subjective well-being. But once her books were published, a literary critic wrote in the newspaper that her books were ‘a testament to a rich and flourishing inner life’.

Was Flora happy or not? Was the critic wrong? Is it possible that the critic was right, even if Flora experienced no subjective well-being?

For all of its problems, subjective well-being is a useful measure precisely because it’s something measurable. Through studies of subjective well-being we know, for example, that while being poor correlates with lack of well-being, as you become richer, in terms of subjective well-being you become subject to the law of diminishing returns: doubling your income if you’re on the breadline will make a big difference to your life; doubling your income if you’re super-rich will have a negligible effect. These kinds of measure can be used to explore the gains and losses in well-being of everything from marriage to death of a spouse, to losing one’s job, to child-rearing (incidentally, and perhaps contrary to expectations, it seems to be fairly well established that having children correlates with a somewhat lower level of overall life satisfaction).

In other words, if we want our theory of happiness to provide us with more or less objective measures, then subjective well-being may be the way to go; but there are other kinds of questions we can ask about happiness, questions that go beyond ideas of pleasure and of subjective well-being. We will explore some of these questions in the next chapter.