Richard Schoch continues our special series on the top 50 ideas of the century

One of the most curious intellectual developments of the past decade has been that quantitative social scientists – economists and psychologists, most especially – have become philosophers of happiness. Not philosophers of justice, game theory or ethics, any of which would be expected. Rather, these researchers are now focusing intently upon questions of the good life.

This has not happened overnight. It was the last century’s most influential economist, John Maynard Keynes, who insisted that material prosperity alone could never confer upon individuals the “purposiveness”, as he called it, that is a necessary part of happiness. Back in 1928 he predicted that when humanity was at last freed from the bondage of poverty and deprivation, it would face the more profound challenge of using its material freedom “to live wisely and agreeably and well.”

Working from Keynes’ expansive definition of wellbeing, today’s happiness economists, most particularly Richard Layard and Andrew Oswald, have argued (just as philosophers have long argued) that once wealth reaches a certain level above subsistence, its power to generate higher levels of happiness diminishes. Accordingly, the ultimate goal of happiness economics has been to alter how governments levy tax and distribute resources, shifting focus away from material abundance and toward personal wellbeing.

Happiness economists need to collect data. For such purpose they have turned to positive psychology – that branch of the discipline interested not in what makes people neurotic or dysfunctional but what makes them satisfied and able to flourish. The positive psychology movement, as founded in the United States by Martin Seligman, is premised upon the belief that happiness can be categorically defined, measured, and compared across subject groups. Hence the tools of the trade are such activities as life satisfaction surveys and brain scans. In its most elaborate form, positive psychology looks at wellbeing from three overlapping perspectives: the pleasant life (how much pleasure?), the good life (how much engagement and challenge?) and the meaningful life (how much purpose and meaning?). Yet for all its seeming explanatory potential, a serious criticism of the “science of happiness” is that to rise above reductively hedonistic definitions it must become less scientific. It is one thing to calibrate pain and pleasure but quite another to measure the value and purpose of a human life.

Enter philosophy. When debating questions of the good life, economists and psychologists find themselves relying upon philosophical traditions of happiness that began in ancient Athens and have continued into the modern era. Benthamite utilitarianism has been an obvious starting point, as it dovetails nicely with the scientific impulse to equate happiness with pleasure and good feeling. Mill’s important qualifications, however, regarding qualitative distinctions among pleasures and the paradoxical nature of happiness (we find it by concentrating on something else) have been important correctives. In turn, Mill’s refinement of Bentham recalls Aristotle’s view that happiness is excellence in the art of living well. The Stoic principle that happiness lies within – as one’s attitude toward uncontrollable external events – also resonates with contemporary awareness that good fortune and material abundance do not in themselves provide lasting satisfaction. The limitations of hard-nosed scientific research on happiness have, ironically, created the space for a renewed appreciation of how philosophy can today address that perennially important question: how can I live well?

Recent philosophical approaches to happiness have been varied and creative. Most obviously, there has been a spate of popular books on happiness, the most successful of which has been Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy. Far more interesting, however, are two related developments: the relationship between philosophy and other disciplines, and the expanding audience for philosophical ideas. A sustained dialogue between philosophy and science has been a significant consequence of recent developments in the field: significant because the belief that science can “solve” the problem of happiness is itself vulnerable to philosophical critique.

Moreover, philosophical traditions of happiness are also in dialogue with the world’s great religious traditions. At a time when debates about religion in contemporary society seem ever more acrimonious, the topic of happiness reminds us of commonalities in secular and sacred approaches to the good life.

Finally, recent widespread interest in happiness has meant that philosophy has gained a much wider institutional audience. Government agencies, healthcare professionals, and private sector employers, in a shared quest to improve the wellbeing of their (dreaded term) “stakeholders”, have discovered to their surprise just how relevant philosophy can be to pressing social concerns. In a way that few predicted a decade ago, happiness has become one of the main routes by which philosophy has found its way back to the heart of the public sphere. And that’s something to be happy about.

Further reading
The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science, Jonathan Haidt (US: Basic Books; UK: Randon House, 2006)

Richard Schoch is professor of the history of culture at Queen Mary, University of London, and author of The Secrets of Happiness: three thousand years of searching for the good life (Profile)

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