what's so good about happiness?

for a start, it's quite unusual

Happiness is a state of mind, a disposition, and a common goal. Happiness is many things, but today I’m going to talk about it as a good. Referring to something as ‘a good’ is standard in philosophy, if not in everyday conversation. Sometimes philosophers even refer to things as ‘bads’! Generally, ‘a good’ is used to refer to something that is ‘good for’ some living creature, rather than something that’s ‘deemed good by’ them. But these two senses often overlap, and I’m going to talk about happiness in relation to both.

In particular, I’m interested in working out whether happiness counts as a basic human good. Again, there are different understandings of what it is to count as a basic human good. But I’m going to use the term here — as I’ve used it before — to refer to things that are irreducibly and objectively good for human beings. Fulfilment, achievement, and friendship are classic examples of goods that meet these conditions, alongside knowledge and love — and I’m satisfied to count all five as such, at least for now. But what about happiness? Is happiness a basic human good?

A state, a disposition, or a goal?

First, we have to pick a sense of happiness to evaluate in this way. “Oh no,” I hear you sigh, “Didn’t we already get past this stage!?” But what I mean is that all three of the options I referred to in my opening sentence — happiness as a state of mind, happiness as a disposition, and happiness as a goal — are contenders to be evaluated as basic human goods.

If we think of these three as “hey I’m happy!”, “I’m generally happy”, and “I’m trying to be happy”, however, then we can draw some early conclusions. For a start, we can conclude that while, superficially, these three options seem to be three different understandings of ‘happiness’, the second and third options clearly depend on the first.

I mean, you wouldn’t have to be happy every minute of every day to count as “I’m generally happy”, but surely you’d need to be experiencing ‘hey I’m happy!” at least some of the time. And similarly, if you were in the situation of “I’m trying to be happy”, then surely experiencing at least some instances of ‘hey I’m happy!’ would have to be part of what you were aiming at, regardless of whether happiness was a long-term goal or a more fleeting one. That there is this centrality to ‘happiness as a state of mind’ seems like useful information when picking a starting point for evaluating the goodness of happiness, perhaps especially when reducibility is a concern.

Looking at all this the other way round, however, it seems that if we think of the third option as “I’m trying to be happy”, then this option doesn’t necessarily involve happiness at all. I mean, I’m not denying that there are some goals of the ‘I want to maintain this thing that I already have’ type, but someone could surely try to be happy without ever achieving it.

To maintain focus, therefore, I’m going to prioritise ‘happiness as a state of mind’ within my discussion of whether happiness counts as a basic human good. Of course, one or both of the other options could also count as basic human goods, whether or not ‘happiness as a goal’ involves happiness. And perhaps all three count, or none of them, or something else, does!

But what is good?

I determined above that if ‘happiness as a state of mind’ is to count as a basic human good, then it must meet the two conditions of irreducibility and objectivity. I’ll begin by accepting that ‘happiness as a state of mind’ meets the irreducibility condition. That is, while other good things, like satisfaction and wonder and comfort, often overlap with and contribute to happiness in this sense, I’m happy to accept straight-up that it doesn’t require any other good as a ground, either for it to cohere as a concept or for it to have goodness of some kind.¹

I’ll now move on to the harder job of considering happiness in relation to the objectivity condition. This is harder, but also more interesting, because one of the most distinctive things about happiness is its unusually deep relation with its subject: that is, the person experiencing it.

First, let’s go back to the distinction I drew above between things that are goods in the sense of being ‘good for’ some living creature, and things that are goods in the sense of being ‘deemed good by’ them. Of course, many things can fit both categories: including abstract things like fulfilment and knowledge, which I mentioned above as classic examples of basic human goods, but also more tangible things like American football and bananas and Tylenol.

Now, think about the way in which some things that are clearly ‘good for’ humans are, nonetheless, not ‘deemed to be good by’ some, or even many, of them. Think, for instance, of someone who hates eating healthy food. Or someone who’s so frustrated by trying to learn maths that they decide it’s worthless. Then, think about the way in which some other things are clearly ‘bad for’ human beings, yet are ‘deemed to be good by’ some, or even many, of them. Think of someone who enjoys teasing other people, or bullying them. Or someone who derives great value from something empty, like counting blades of grass, or from something horrible, like torturing insects.

Hopefully, this makes it clear that ‘good for’ and ‘deemed good by’ can diverge. But you’ve probably noticed that I haven’t explained what I mean by ‘good’. Indeed, you might have noticed that I shifted around quite a lot on this in the previous paragraph. I started by implying it was about wellbeing, but I also brought in desire, worth, enjoyment, and deriving value.

Now, some people try to make things simpler by substituting in happiness at all points. What is good for you? Things that make you happy! What do you deem to be good? Things that make you happy! And on more sophisticated versions of this approach, happiness is swapped for more seemingly quantifiable or nuanced related concepts: concepts like pleasure, utility, and preference satisfaction.

At this point, regular readers might assume I’m about to start arguing against hedonistic consequentialist moral theories, but I’m not. Rather, I’ll just state that ‘happiness as goodness’ seems, to me, an incomprehensibly thin conception of goodness, and I’ll emphasise that I’ve already made space in my conception of goodness for five basic goods, ranging from friendship and knowledge. Beyond this, however, if happiness is goodness, then we’re not going to get far thinking about what kind of good it is!

If you don’t feel happy, then you aren’t happy

I’m now going to try to persuade you over to my view that happiness is subject-centric in quite an unusual way.

The first point I want to make is that if you don’t feel happy, then you are not happy. Somebody can tell you as many times as they like that ‘doing x should make you happy’, or that ‘when y happens people are happy’, but if you do not feel happy in such situations, then none of that matters. Whereas some of the classic basic human goods, such as achievement, do not depend on subjective experience in this way.

I mean, imagine that a precocious child solves an extremely difficult problem. Surely you’d want to consider this an achievement, even if, for instance, the child had found solving the problem extremely easy, and hadn’t known that the problem had been stumping adults for decades. So it seems pretty clear that you can access achievement, without being aware that you’ve done so.

Perhaps you think about knowledge in a similar way: that I know how to ride a bicycle without being able to explain the physics involved, for instance. Or that you know that your neighbour goes to sleep every night, even though you’ve never thought about such a thing. Now, there are some obvious objections that arise in relation to these two examples, which show that it’s harder to conclude that knowledge doesn’t depend on subjective experience than it is to conclude such a thing about achievement. But the point I want to make here is that happiness is surely off the scale! It seems impossible to get your head round the idea of someone accessing happiness without being aware of it.

Happiness requires neither reciprocity nor directionality

I’m now going to compare happiness with another two classic basic goods — friendship and love — to show how happiness is subject-centric in some further ways. First, it’s important to note that both friendship and love do share happiness’s dependence on subjective experience. I mean, surely you can’t be in a ‘state of friendship’ with someone without being aware of it. And while sometimes people talk of ‘not realising I loved him’ or ‘coming to realise I was in love with her’, these seem to me like moves towards states of love, rather than examples of them. That is, I’m happy to bite the bullet and accept that you can’t love someone or something without being aware of doing so.

Unlike friendship and love, however, happiness isn’t necessarily reciprocal or directional. I mean, it would surely be possible to experience happiness even if you were the only living thing left on Earth. Whereas, in such a situation, you couldn’t experience friendship, because friendship is reciprocal. And while, in such a situation, you could continue loving the people and other living things you had previously engaged with, your ongoing love would be muted by their loss, even though reciprocity isn’t necessary in all loving relations. Parents typically love their children, for instance, long before their children are capable of love — at least if my claim about the necessity of awareness is true, but likely even if it isn’t!

However, even if the ongoing love for the lost objects of love wasn’t muted in such a situation, or even if this mutedness didn’t affect the goodness involved, the point would remain that love is directional. In other words, love is directional whether the objects of this directionality are there or not. Whereas, if happiness is directed at anyone, it’s directed at yourself, although I wouldn’t put it like that.²

That is, even though, typically, it is indeed things — people, places, events, thoughts, and so on — that ‘make us happy’, our happiness is not then directed at those things.³ Whereas, the things that give rise to our experiences of friendship and love are also its objects. You are friends with her. I love him. But you are happy. Or I am happy. This is a further sense, therefore, in which happiness is subject-centric.

If you feel happy, then you are happy

I’ll now turn to a final classic basic good, fulfilment. Fulfilment is useful because it shares happiness’s subject-centricity both in the sense of: 1) requiring subjective experiential awareness (if you don’t feel fulfilled, then you aren’t fulfilled); and 2) being non-reciprocal and non-directional (while things can give rise to your fulfilment, fulfilment is not directed at these things). Nonetheless, fulfilment has a deep objective element, which is not shared by happiness.

What I mean by this is that, as discussed above, it’s surely possible for boring and bad things to make someone happy, whereas such things don’t seem to count as giving rise to fulfilment. I mean, imagine someone who claims to be fulfilled by counting the blades of grass or torturing the insects. It seems to me that this person would be getting something wrong about fulfilment, in a way in which we wouldn’t want to push back against in relation to similar claims about happiness. Fulfilment seems thicker than happiness, in this sense.

The formal way to describe such a thing is to say that fulfilment, while requiring subjective experience, is nonetheless dependent on meeting some objective standards. In other words, all instances of fulfilment do involve a subject feeling fulfilled, but not all instances of a subject feeling fulfilled represent instances of fulfilment. Whereas happiness is not like this. You can’t mistakenly feel happy!

We can now put together some conclusions derived from comparing happiness with five classic basic goods. First, happiness is unlike achievement (and possibly knowledge), in that you can’t be happy if you don’t feel happy. Second, happiness is unlike friendship in that happiness lacks the need for reciprocity. Third, happiness is unlike love in that happiness lacks the need for direction at another thing. And finally, happiness is unlike fulfilment in that if you feel happy then you are happy. Happiness, therefore, seems to be a particularly self-centric good — at least in comparison to these five classic basic goods — not in a selfish sense, but a self-contained one.

Four attempts to save the day

The deeply subject-centric nature of happiness causes serious problems when trying to count happiness as a basic human good, however — in relation to the objectivity condition. The biggest problem here is a conclusion reached by comparing happiness with fulfilment: the conclusion that if you feel happy about bad things, then you are indeed happy.

One dead-end route we could pursue, to try to get around this problem, would be to emphasise the way in which instances of happiness nonetheless can be separated from instances of non-happiness. The way in which, that is, there are objective truths about what it is to be happy and when it’s happening: that it’s either true or false that happiness depends on subjective experience, for instance.

But if all something needs to count as an objective good is for there to be objective truths about what the thing is and when it obtains, then everything that exists could meet the objectivity condition for counting as a basic human good! And the same holds even if you focus only on the set of things that count as ‘goods’.

A second way to try to get beyond happiness’s dependence on subjectivity, in order to give it a further chance to meet the objectivity condition, is to return to my conclusion above that some of the classic basic human goods, including friendship, also depend on subjective awareness. Perhaps, therefore, it matters less than we think that bad things can make you happy! After all, you can be friends with bad people, can’t you?

Well, it’s compatible to believe both that: 1) friendship depends on subjective awareness; and that 2) if a ‘friendship’ isn’t sufficiently good for you, then it doesn’t count as friendship. Whereas, it’s hard to conclude that if happiness isn’t sufficiently good for you, then it doesn’t count as an instance of happiness. Indeed, at this stage, I’m happy to accept that feeling happy is both necessary and sufficient to being in a state of happiness. Whereas such a claim seems clearly too strong for friendship.

Third, we could have gone down a different yet overlapping route here, and emphasised instead that knowing things that are bad for you surely still counts as knowledge. But there is something much more morally problematic about being made happy by something horrible, than being made knowledgeable by something horrible. And this isn’t just because there are many ways in which knowing about horrible things can be good for you. It’s also because having knowledge of something bad is morally neutral, per se, even if it has a bad effect on you. Whereas, it’s hard to conclude that being made happy by something bad is morally neutral!

All this said, I think there’s another kind of ‘state of happiness’ that has a much weaker dependence on other things, and therefore is at less risk of interpolating the moral status of other things. This is the state of mind that consists in feeling ‘generally happy’ — or perhaps that involves, but isn’t entirely constituted by, such a feeling. This state of mind seems different from the state of mind that’s broadly constituted by ‘being happy about something’ or ‘being made happy by something’. This ‘generally happy’ state of mind is an amalgam of the first and second options I discussed at the start of this piece, therefore.

Of course, there are various obvious objections to the ‘generally happy’ state being able to meet the objectivity condition, however. I mean, perhaps there is no such thing as feeling ‘generally happy’ beyond ‘being happy about a whole load of particular things’ — and again some of those things could be bad things. We could, at that point, argue that perhaps awareness of all of the things in question isn’t necessary for the state to obtain. But we’re still going to face the problem that if any of the things were bad things, then they would be contributing to the state of ‘general happiness’, whether the person experiencing the state was aware of their contribution or not.

Nonetheless, if it’s true that sometimes we simply feel ‘generally happy’, then such a state of mind is, I think, the best contender for 'happiness as a basic human good’, at least in terms of meeting the objectivity condition.

Beyond basic human goods

I want to conclude by emphasising, however, that happiness can, of course, be a necessary part of a good human life without being a basic human good. And that this is the case regardless of whether happiness falls foul of the objectivity condition or the irreducibility one. In other words, just because some instances of happiness involve feeling happy about bad things doesn’t mean that instances of happiness that involve feeling happy about non-bad things aren’t a crucial part of a good life.

It seems clear that happiness cannot be the only good thing. If you spend your life only seeking and attaining happiness, then your life will not be a good one. But your life will also not be good without experiencing happiness, often. I can’t think of another good quite like it.

1. If you’re not sure what I mean by irreducible here, then think, for instance, of food. It seems clear that the goodness of food is reducible — generally, minimally, to the meeting of need, but sometimes instead or additionally to the meeting of valuable preferences, or perhaps to the value of certain aesthetic experiences. I mean, banana-eating doesn’t suddenly become irreducibly valuable just because you’re not hungry!

2. I’m happy to accept that talk of ‘loving yourself’ is analogical. Beyond that, I can see that someone might say “but isn’t being happy about x directed at x?”, and that this might be relevant to my concerns, which I focus on later in the piece, about bad things making people happy. It seems clear to me that ‘being happy about x’ isn’t directional in the way that ‘loving her’ is. ‘Loving her’ isn’t just something that she, in some sense, gives rise to, or that wouldn’t happen without her — she is the object of the love. Whereas I’m happy (!) to conclude that x isn’t the object of ‘being happy about x’ in this directional sense, or minimally that if it is, then it’s in a much more loose kind of way. Think here of the difference between ‘being happy about x’ and the incoherent notions of ‘being happy at x’ or ‘happying x’. Nonetheless, there is much more to be said about the overlaps between love and happiness.

3. It’s interesting to note at this point that it’s hard to intend to be happy. Generally, the relevant intending we do is intending to bring about things that make us happy.