In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government. Charles Murray
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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