There are (at least) three distinct philosophical projects undertaken by Daniel Haybron in this book. First, he develops a theory of happiness (understood as a non-normative, purely psychological phenomenon). Second, he sketches a theory of well-being. And third, he considers the normative implications of contemporary psychological findings, which suggest that we human beings are extremely poor judges of our own good or at least poor judges of how to pursue it. All three are admirable projects, and Haybron has interesting things to say about all three. However, the most fully developed part of the book is his theory of happiness, and for this reason I will say the most about that.
Chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7 contain the discussion of happiness, with chapters 4 and 5 being largely critical and chapters 6 and 7 containing Haybron's own positive view. Even his arguments against other theories of happiness are instructive (though remember these are arguments against views in philosophical psychology, not against the similarly named theories of well-being). The problem with hedonism about happiness – which identifies happiness with a favorable balance of pleasure over pain – is the superficial nature of the affects the theory is built upon. Pleasures are most naturally understood as simple affective experiences with a distinctive positive feel. But many such experiences, such as the fleeting pleasures associated with eating a good meal, while nice enough, seem to have little or no impact on our more stable background feelings. Yet it seems more plausible to identify happiness (or unhappiness) with the more stable feelings. Second, happiness appears to play a role in our psychology that no mere pleasure could play. If we know a person is happy we know that she is in a state that is not easily disrupted which affects many other aspects of her psychology. Hence we can retrospectively explain some of her behavior as well as predict things about how she will behave or react in the near future.
Life satisfaction theories of happiness (not well-being) are examined and found lacking as well. Despite numerous subtle variations in its definition, life satisfaction is always either an attitude towards one's life or a state partly comprised of such an attitude. It is thus either a purely cognitive or partly cognitive phenomenon, as opposed to a purely affective one. But this is precisely why Haybron thinks life satisfaction should not be equated with happiness. Presented with cases of cognitive-affective divergence, our intuitions about happiness track affect. Moreover, it is doubtful that individuals always have some such attitude, i.e. some belief about how well their life is going. Empirical researchers who question subjects about life satisfaction have found reason to think that the answers subjects give are composed then and there on the spot (Schwarz and Strack ‘Reports of Subjective Well-Being: Judgmental Processes and Their Methodological Implications’, 1999). Rather than reporting an already existing belief about the conditions of their lives, subjects seem to be prompted by the exercise itself to form a general view about the conditions of their lives. Haybron argues that if this is even partially correct – if there are significant periods of time when we have no settled attitude about the satisfactoriness of our lives – then it makes no sense to identify such judgments with happiness. It is plausible to think that happiness exists along a spectrum and that at any given moment a person's psychology is located at some point along that spectrum – that she is either happy or unhappy or at some point between these two extremes. There is never a point in time when there is no fact about how happy you are, even though there may be stretches of time when there is no fact of the matter as to how well you think your life is going.
The most significant contribution of the book is Haybron's development of what he calls an emotional state theory of happiness. On this view happiness is neither an attitude nor a superficial affect like pleasure, but is rather a longer-lasting, more causally productive affective state. It is rather like a mood (moods are, after all, typically longer-lasting than discrete emotional episodes and seem to have effects on many other aspects of our psychology). However, even moods, as commonly conceived, are neither stable nor productive enough for Haybron's purposes. On the simplest form of emotional state theory happiness is identified with the aggregate over time of a person's emotions and moods, or in other words, with having a favorable balance over time of positive emotions and moods as opposed to negative ones. Haybron, however, does not endorse this simple account, but goes on to develop a subtler version of emotional state theory. On his considered view, happiness is defined both in terms of affect and in terms of the underlying dispositions that support such affect. To be happy is to have a relatively stable set of mood propensities, tendencies toward positive moods and emotions. The dispositional aspect of the view will no doubt trouble some theorists, since a disposition itself is not an element of experience, but rather the unconscious foundation for experience. I cannot explore this issue here, but whether or not one accepts the dispositional claims, I think Haybron's emotional state account of happiness constitutes a real move forward in the field.
Just as interesting as the move to an emotional state theory is Haybron's attempt to characterize the affective outlooks characteristic of happiness and unhappiness. This material is highly speculative but nonetheless important and deeply suggestive in the best sense of the latter term. Haybron hypothesizes three distinct affective spectrums, only one of which, he thinks, has typically been discussed in the happiness literature. This familiar axis he labels the joy–depression axis, and the moods along this spectrum have to do with the subject's emotional endorsement (or lack thereof) of her life. These states are the emotional analogs of life satisfaction judgments. But they are nonetheless distinct from such judgments. At any given time a subject feels good or bad to some degree about how things are going in some vague, perhaps not fully cognized, sense. It is this sense of happiness that people most often discuss. At the positive extreme it is the general sense that things are good, much is possible, and the sun is shining just for you. However, these affects are only a small part, and not even the most significant part, of happiness as Haybron conceives it.
The second axis concerns engagement. These are the affects that color our experience of acting in the world and so shape our inclinations to engage further or not. Under this rubric are feelings of energy, vitality, buoyancy, and also what psychologists have called a sense of flow (Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimum Experience, 1990) and these positive feelings exist at the opposite end of a spectrum from feelings of inertia, a sense of lethargy, and a sense of the pointlessness or worthlessness of action.
Most important of all is the third axis, which concerns a subject's most basic level of comfort with her world. Haybron calls this ‘attunement’. The positive end of this spectrum is characterized by comfort, confidence, a sense of safety or security, and it is contrasted with the other extreme of feeling anxious, uncomfortable, out of synch with one's environment. The affects at the positive end of this spectrum are, Haybron thinks, the most significant for happiness, but they are also some of the more elusive affects we experience. Because they typically form the background to ordinary life they are most easily identified and isolated when something causes them to vanish. In the words of the old song: ‘You don't miss your water, ‘til the well runs dry’ (William Bell, 1961, Stax Records).
After discussing happiness at length, Haybron turns to the theory of well-being. Chapter 8 is an interesting exploration of contemporary forms of eudaimonism, in particular of attempts to revive Aristotelian accounts of well-being. The discussion centers on the perfectionist aspect of such views, arguing that ultimately perfection is a non-prudential value, one we would be mistaken to include in a theory of well-being. Nonetheless, Haybron remains interested in the nature-fulfillment aspect of such projects, and he wishes to ground his own approach to well-being on this idea. The big difference (which emerges in chapter 9) is that, for Haybron, it is our emotional natures that ought to be developed, and happiness as he discusses it is a necessary part of nature-fulfillment so conceived. This is a radical departure from the traditional approach to defining our nature, and it will ultimately require much more defense than Haybron offers here. Moreover, many will remain skeptical of the appeal to objective value that Haybron makes. According to Haybron, happiness is valuable both in itself and as a fulfillment of our emotional natures, but neither the value of happiness nor the value of nature fulfillment is to be traced in any way to the fact that people care about these things or value them.
The third part of the book is addressed to questions about the normative significance of a broad body of work in empirical psychology. This material – much of it from the positive psychology movement – has claimed to reveal, among other things, that we are generally quite bad at pursuing happiness. Haybron presents this material in an interesting and engaging way, but his own claims are ultimately quite conservative (with one notable exception mentioned below). It is true that for those philosophers who have ignored the empirical realm for a long time – those who are still caught up in the vision of man as rational maximizer of his own utility – it may come as a surprise to read that, as Haybron puts it, people are not good at figuring out what is good for them (well-being is not transparent), nor are they psychologically well equipped to pursue happiness in the option-rich environments characteristic of modern, developed, liberal democracies (we lack aptitude for pursuing happiness under these conditions). But for those familiar with the literature, this is (or is fast becoming) widely accepted as true.
The interesting questions are about the normative implications of these findings, and no simple answers are on the horizon. If, for example, one thinks that the best justification of the badness of paternalism appeals to our own better knowledge of our own good, then these findings might undermine a full-fledged commitment to the badness of paternalism. On the other hand, if one thinks there are strong deontological reasons to respect individuals’ choices regardless of whether such choices are wise, then the findings will seem far less relevant (if they seem relevant at all). Both of these points are mentioned in Haybron's book, but no real conclusions are reached. In some sense this is not surprising, since these are difficult matters. Nor would I want Haybron to leap to inadequately supported normative conclusions (as is too often typical of philosophers excited by the findings of psychologists). But one is left wondering whether this material was really the beginning material for a different book.
There is one notable exception to my claim that Haybron does not move much beyond existing claims about our prudentially flawed thinking. This is Haybron's discussion in chapter 10 of affective ignorance, i.e. ignorance of one's own past and current affect. Here, Haybron partly relies on mental distinctions he himself has made in earlier chapters. Speculating that the affective realm may be much richer and more complex than some psychology researchers have recognized (drawing, for example, on his own previous discussion of the three affective axes relevant to happiness), he wonders whether our ignorance about our own affective states might actually be much greater than empirical psychologists have so far revealed. This chapter raises fascinating questions about the nature of consciousness and about what it would take to establish empirically the truth of such strong claims about affective ignorance. And it is certainly true that, if Haybron is right, this would be a significant result. His discussion should certainly convince us to take such possibilities seriously, even if it is not, by itself, enough to convince us of their truth.
Overall, this is a wonderfully stimulating, highly original book. It should be read by anyone working on happiness or well-being, but its audience should be wider than that, and I can only hope that the title doesn't limit the audience unduly. Philosophers of mind will find much of interest here, particularly in Haybron's discussions of judgmental and affective ignorance. And anyone interested in emotion and affect (many people these days) should definitely read Haybron as well.
