Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

192 R. Smith
identify, and twice in the first three paragraphs Layard invokes the philosophers of
the Enlightenment in support of his claim that the supreme good is happiness. The
ghosts of Bentham and John Stuart Mill loom behind the shoulders of the distinguished
commission. The ‘noble philosophy of the Enlightenment’ is cited for the
third time, in support of the view that ‘every human being wants to be happy’. A
sentence that falls neatly into two iambic pentameters suggests that the writer, or
speaker, might come from Shakespeare.
So it is time to reassert the noble
Philosophy of the Enlightenment.
Themetre–adifferentkindofmetricthis,ofcourse – requires us to pronounce
‘noble’ as one word (this is common in Shakespeare, e.g. ‘Your wife, your son, these
senators, the nobles’, Coriolanus III. ii). After the slightly blurred effect of this line
ending, the second pentameter, ‘Philosophy of the Enlightenment’, which is perfect
in the coincidence of ictus and accent, strikes the reader with redoubled force. The
Philosophy of the Enlightenment is indeed reasserted, as if it were indubitable.
It follows from our acceptance of this philosophy, apparently, that,
progress is measured by the overall scale of human happiness and misery. And the right
action is the one that produces the greatest happiness in the world and (especially) the least
misery.
Of this Layard states, ‘I can think of no nobler ideal’. There is a curious
sequence of thought here running from President Sarkozy through the distinguished
commission – surely by now they must be a Distinguished Commission – to the
Enlightenment and its noble philosophers, and thus to their, and Layard’s own, noble
ideal. From President and Distinguished Commission, with their glimpses of ermine
and the nobility which we have been rather heavily directed to notice, we are invited
somehow to arrive at the democracy of the greatest happiness principle, in which,
as Layard notes, ‘everybody counts equally’.
Layard proposes a ‘campaign for the Principle of the Greatest Happiness’. The
last sentences of this paragraph, and the whole of the following one, repay careful
reading:
We desperately need a social norm in which the good of others figures more prominently
in our personal goals. Today’s excessive individualism removes so much of the joy from
family life, work and even friendship.
There have been objections to this principle, which can be answered. But even some sympathisers
prefer the term ‘flourishing’ to ‘happiness’. Why is this? I fear it reflects a streak
of puritanism – that happiness ought to come from some sources rather than others. But
in the world’s great literature, people discuss whether they are happy, not whether they are
flourishing. When we discuss the quality of life, we should use the words that people use to
describe themselves.
The first oddity is that the ‘excessive individualism’ of our time is taken as a reason
why we should sign up for a campaign (or principle, or philosophy) that treats the
happiness of communities as an aggregate of the happiness of individuals. The second
oddity consists in Layard’s repudiation of the idea of ‘flourishing’. This is said
to reflect a ‘streak of puritanism’: the thought being that a particular sort of person,