The philosophy and science of overall life happiness

[DuB]

"There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination." --Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, 1995 Over the past couple decades, there has been vastly increasing interest across the social & behavioral sciences in studying happiness: What are its causes and correlates? How does it vary across societies, over time, and within the individual lifespan? How should we best pursue it? Are people able to accurately predict what will make them happy or unhappy? The purpose of this thread is not to answer the questions above. Rather, the purpose of this thread is to analyze a general philosophical issue underlying much of this research. Dennett wrote that all science is ultimately built on philosophical claims and that, unfortunately, these claims are typically smuggled in as implicit assumptions rather than being explicitly examined and questioned. The topic I want to focus on here is a great example of how philosophy guides science and what is potentially at stake when we fail to examine the philosophical assumptions guiding our science. The topic pertains to studies of overall life happiness: How do we define it philosophically and procedurally? The answer to this question bears importantly on how we proceed in the scientific study of "the good life." There are two general approaches to measuring overall life happiness, and they are guided by different philosophical views on what constitutes overall life happiness. One approach is straight-forward: we simply ask people a very small set of questions--or even a single question--about how happy they are with their life in general. If we make the reasonable assumptions that they have some personal notion of their level of happiness and they have no reasons to deceive us, then we can take their answers at face value. The philosophy guiding this approach is that what is important when it comes to life happiness is how satisfied we feel when we step back, take stock, and reflect on our life. If doing so makes us happy, then we have a high level of overall life happiness. Call this the "self-report" approach. Another approach is more involved. We give people some kind of recording device--a small hand-held PDA, a paper diary, periodic text messages to their phone, etc.--and using this device, we ask them at numerous random times through their days to report, not how happy they are with their life in general, but how happy they feel in that exact moment. We continue this for some extended period of time (perhaps a few weeks), and at the end of the period we take the average of all of these moment-by-moment happiness ratings. We then define this aggregate measure as their level of overall life happiness. The philosophy guiding this approach is that what is important when it comes to life happiness is not how happy one feels when they reflect on their life, but the sum of the happiness they feel in the totality of individual experiences which constitute their life. Call this the "experience-sampling" approach. These approaches differ not only in terms of how we consequently think about and measure happiness, they also differ in that they can lead to very different estimates of how happy a person is with their life. Consider a successful but over-worked medical school student. This student has met every challenge they have faced with flying colors and is well on their way to fulfilling their life dream of becoming a doctor. However, on a day-to-day level, they are extremely stressed, fatigued, and in less than perfect health. According to the self-report approach, this student is likely to have a high level of overall life happiness. But according to the experience-sampling approach, the student is likely to have low overall life happiness. Now consider another young man or woman, a high school drop-out who spends their days partying, drinking, and taking drugs, but who has failed in every long-term goal they have attempted and whose lack of direction in life implies bleak prospects for their future. According to the self-report approach, it is likely that this person will report low levels of overall life happiness. However, according to the experience-sampling approach, this person is likely to register a high level of overall life happiness. So now we arrive at the question: From a philosophical perspective, which of these approaches is a more valid conceptualization of overall life happiness? Is life happiness the satisfaction we feel when we reflect on our lives, or is it the happiness we feel in the sum of individual moments which comprise our lives?

[Philosopher8659]

"The philosophy and science of overall life happiness " I think, of all the people in the world, that so called Philosophers are the only one's who professionally engage in the ultimate stupidity. Question: Is the cup in the coffee or is the coffee in the cup? I.e. Which is the boundary and which is in the boundary? This is one of the first principles a real philospher is suppose to master, yet you get The History of Philosophy and The Philosophy of History. Which simply means, we have a history of people calling themselves philosopher's but not one of them know how to take their coffee. Now, if what I just wrote leaves you wondering what it means, you have a good chance of being a self-proclaimed philosopher. If you can, with all clear unconsciousness, say "The Philosophy of such and such. . . " then you are truly an educated person. . . . . in god knows what.

[DuB]

Thank you for your characteristically relevant and insightful post.

[Philosopher8659]

Thank you for your characteristically relevant and insightful post. You have no idea how many errors your post contains. However, it is peer worthy.

[DuB]

That's nice. Please accept this long-overdue invitation to my ignore list. You have the distinct honor of being its first guest in the 5+ years I've been frequenting these forums.

[Philosopher8659]

That's nice. Please accept this long-overdue invitation to my ignore list. You have the distinct honor of being its first guest in the 5+ years I've been frequenting these forums. You are most welcome. Ignorance is bliss.

[Zhaylin]

I went with the self-report method. I feel miserable most of the time, lol, but I think I'm overall happy with my life and the possibilities that lie ahead. I guess it depends on how a person views his world- in the past, present or future. I'm future looking. Things HAVE to get better eventually

[DrunkenArse]

I chose other. It seems to me that neither of the two tools explicitly mentioned are suitable for studying happiness but rather the perception of happiness1. However in both of your examples, I would say that the experience sampling gets it right. The student probably is overstressed and miserable. One would surmise that it's only their expectations of future well being and pride in their accomplishments that would lead them to report happiness. The first is in no way related to their immediate happiness and the latter is only related in the portion of their day when they happen to be thinking about it. In this case, if their expectations are fulfilled, then experience sampling will start to reveal happiness. If their expectations are not fulfilled and they continue to be overworked, over-stressed and in poor health, then experience sampling will continue to indicate that they are not happy. In the case of the student, It seems that they are happy. Drinking, drugs and partying are fun. If they continue to make decisions that only consider short-term fun, then they will most likely eventually end up working a bad job to pay rent in a bad neighborhood, homeless alcoholics, in prison or in some other bad state. Again, the experience sampling would capture their change from happy to not-happy. And if they get lucky and end up enjoying their life on a day-to-day basis, then experience sampling would reflect that as well. On the whole, it seems that experience sampling is the better of the two. I can imagine some battered wife that really should leave her abusive husband but convinces herself that she is happy. The self-report approach would most likely fail miserably here. On the whole though, I think that it would be better to just define happiness as some aggregate of objective, measurable, biologicals states that an organism can be in and just directly measure that. It's probably the case that the mechanisms that you've listed have a role in defining such a state but it's important to bear in mind that people lie to themselves about their happiness in both directions fairly routinely2. It's just one more way to make it through the day on the one hand and something else to bitch about on the other. 1 Note how I am not so subtly smuggling in the philosophical position that happiness is something that actually exists independently of perceptions of it. 2 I can't actually substantiate this but it seems to be very true in my experience.

[DuB]

Cool, I think there are some interesting points for discussion here, but I'm going to be too busy over the next several days to begin to pursue those (can't let myself get sucked in!). When I get the time again I think I may also like to take a second shot at those examples. In hindsight I think the ones I provided were actually quite bad, since both of them seem to imply that the focus is on the future state someone will be in, which is not supposed to be the point at all.