In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government. Charles Murray
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is lasting and justified satisfaction with one’s life as a whole. The definition is not original; indeed, minor variants of it have been used by so many that scholarly credit for it is difficult to assign.38 The definition in effect says that when you decide how happy you are, you are thinking of aspects of your life that tend to define your life (not just bits and pieces of it) and you base your assessment of your own happiness on long-range satisfactions with the way things have gone. The pursuit of happiness will refer to an individual’s everyday efforts to plan and conduct his life so that it yields lasting and justified satisfaction.
This is a prosaic definition with one barb, however: the word “justified.” “Justified” is un-Lockean, implying that not all kinds of satisfactions are equal. “Justified” suggests that such things as objective right and objective wrong exist, that such a thing as virtue exists.
One must distinguish at this point between the specifics that you, the reader, or I, the author, attach to the meaning of “justified” and the level of agreement necessary to continue the discussion. Perhaps you are a religious person and interpret the concepts of right, wrong, and virtue according to a specific code that you believe to be universally applicable. Or perhaps you are willing to accept the notion that such a thing as virtuous behavior exists, but insist that it must be
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defined differently for different cultures and different times. In either case, we may put such specifics aside. In the context of this book, “justified” with regard to happiness says that it is not enough to feel good; you must have a plausible reason for feeling good. As philosopher Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz writes, “The man who is satisfied is not only emotionally gratified but also regards his satisfaction as justified.”39 Happiness is more than a feeling.
To this extent, I am insisting that if reason is surrendered, happiness cannot be justified. Remember Mill’s comment: Better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied, regardless of the pig’s view. Put in another context: If someone who is a drug addict says that by remaining in a permanent drugged state he can achieve a life of perpetual ecstasy, and that this is a valid way of being happy, the “justified” requirement says he is wrong. He is not happy, whatever he may think. He has surrendered reason. He has surrendered an indispensable element that makes him human.
Seen from one perspective, this assertion does not entail a great intellectual leap. Who wants to live the life of a drug addict? But it does require a dogmatic statement: It is true not just of me (that I could not be happy as a drug addict), it is true of all people, even those who insist they are happy being drug addicts. And as soon as we make such a statement, all sorts of thoughts intervene. What if one were poor? What if one lived in a ghetto? What if one had no education and no opportunity? Is it really appropriate for a person in the comfortable middle class to say that no one who lives in a euphoric stupor can be happy? I will be assuming that yes, it is appropriate and even essential to be dogmatic that life must be lived with self-awareness and self-judgment.
The Experience Machine Test
I am not sure it is necessary to dwell on the foregoing point—perhaps it is self-evident—but it is so important to the rest of my argument that I refer you to philosopher Robert Nozick’s device, the “experience machine,” adapted here for my own purposes.40
Imagine a machine with electrodes that can be attached to your brain in such a way that it will make you feel exactly as if you were
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having whatever experience you wish. You want to write a great novel? The machine can give you exactly the sensations of writing a great novel. You want to make friends? Have an ideal marriage? The experience machine can do it for you, for a day or a lifetime.
You are not to worry about missing out on anything—you will have a huge library of possible experiences to choose from. If you wish, you may try a little of everything—two years a test pilot, two years a Talmudic scholar, two years the parent of loving children; whatever you wish. The main point is that while you are on the machine, your consciousness of what is happening will be indistinguishable from the real thing. You will think you are a concert pianist, or rock star if you prefer, and the experiences of a Vladimir Horowitz or of a Mick Jagger will not have been any more real than the ones you feel while floating in the tank, attached to the electrodes. All you have to do is ask to be plugged in. The test question: Would you choose the experience machine as a substitute for living the rest of your life in the real world?
Most people say no. Specifying why one would refuse is not easy, however. Every reason you may devise is irrational unless you hold an underlying, bedrock premise that what you do and are is anchored in something other than sensory input to your nerve endings. The stipulation that the satisfaction be “justified,” while it will not involve any particular creed or set of values, does require this fundamental belief that the state of being human has some distinctive core—that a human being has a soul, if you will.
If you have any residual uncertainty about your stance, it may be useful to think of the judgment one would make for one’s own child. Suppose that your child had a serious physical disability—was confined to a wheelchair, for example, and was therefore intrinsically prevented from ever having certain experiences.* Would you then choose a life on the experience machine for your child? (You could hook him up while he was asleep, so he would not have even the momentary anguish of knowing that his subsequent experiences would be fake.) I am assuming, and assuming that you agree, that the answer must be a horrified no.
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It is quite true that man lives by bread alone—when there is no bread. But what happens to man’s desires when there is plenty of bread and when his belly is chronically filled?
—Abraham Maslow
Other things equal, human beings enjoy the exercise of their realized capacities (their innate or trained abilities), and this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its complexity.
—The Aristotelian Principle as stated by John Rawls
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Enabling Conditions and Thresholds
To pursue happiness is to pursue the good we seek as an end in itself, that thing which, realized, expresses itself as justified satisfaction with life as a whole. The object of government is to provide a framework within which people—all people, of all temperaments and talents—can pursue happiness. The question remains: What does any of this have to do with practicalities, not social philosophy?
As a way of framing the question, I will use the notion of “enabling conditions.” As the name implies, an enabling condition does not cause something to happen (governments do not make people happy), it permits something to happen (governments behave in ways that leave people able to be happy). And so with specific policies: Government policies affect the conditions that enable people to pursue happiness and thereby may be considered effective or ineffective, good or bad, efficient or inefficient. Why are food stamps good? One reason might be that food stamps are good because they keep people from starving. The very practical, down-to-earth proposition is that you can’t pursue happiness if you’re starving. Hardly anyone will disagree. Stated more formally as an enabling condition,
It is impossible to pursue happiness without a certain amount of material resources.
This seems self-evident—enough so, at any rate, that it makes sense to inquire