… and the Pursuit of Happiness - Institute of Economic Affairs

foreword
Foreword
‘I am not sure whether what you’ve just argued for is trivial or
wrong, but I am certain it’s one or the other’: so said my tutor at
my first moral philosophy tutorial as an undergraduate.
I had just finished reading out my essay – an impassioned
defence of the theory of utilitarianism.
Utilitarianism seemed to me, at first glance, to be incontrovertible.
The right course of action to take was the one that maximised
the greatest happiness of the greatest number. All other considerations
needed to be subordinate to this ‘greatest felicity principle’,
as Jeremy Bentham, the most influential contributor to utilitarian
theory, termed it.
Even to a (not very well-read) freshman, there were some
obvious problems with utilitarian ethics – contestability about
how to measure happiness being just one of the more minor
irritations. Should we be concerned with the aggregate total of
human happiness or should distributional factors be considered?
Might the average, rather than aggregate, happiness of human
beings be a more desirable aim? How should inter-generational
concerns be accounted for – would it be legitimate to alter the
happiness of today’s population at the expense, or to the benefit,
of the unborn? Do only humans count – or do all sentient beings
need to be factored in to our overarching happiness-maximising
equation?
For a few days at least, however, these seemed to be mere
nuances of possible disagreement within a highly attractive
universal ethical theory. If human happiness was not to be the key
guide to our decision-making, what would?
Fortunately, not many weeks passed before I was introduced
to the work of John Rawls and Robert Nozick, who both contributed
to clarifying the morally counter-intuitive nature of utilitarianism
and establishing a more liberal, individualistic framework
for political theory.
Nozick’s discussion of an experience machine is perhaps the
most keenly analysed and contested section of his work. In short,
he asks us to consider the hypothetical opportunity of plugging
ourselves into some form of device which would generate the
sensations of a life happier than the one we would otherwise lead.
We would experience greater levels of ecstasy and fewer feelings of
pain if we would just strap ourselves into this ‘orgasmatron’ and
flick on the switch.
Not only would we recoil at actually forcing our fellow citizens
into such machines, we would also choose not to take up the
entirely voluntary option ourselves. We would, without hesitation,
plump for the less happy but more individualistic path. We
would most likely consider anyone deciding to enter the machine
themselves as committing some form of suicide. Happiness is not
something we simply want to experience; it’s something we want
to achieve.
But if utilitarianism has been tackled successfully in the sphere
of moral philosophy, it threatens to make a re-emergence in the
field of economics.
‘Wellbeing’ or ‘happiness’ economics purports to show
that traditional measures of economic ‘success’ – such as gross
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