DISQUS

I know when operating in the realm of individual human behavior, and so probably in collective issues that affect each individual (as "Defeat AGW" policies will), we are obligated in all serious matters to ask ourselves, When do we need to know? As well as, How much do we need to know? -- at each point along the continuum, to evaluate and exploit predictable resiliency and alternative models. Taking into consideration formulae of certainty, risk of harm, and causality, that are far past my pay grade.

Any sign of willingness to lay out these metrics and fight over them one by one?

I submit the approach is distinguishable both from stonewalling, and from the conclusory Chicken Little Al Gore Rhythm(TM).

Means you lost the opportunity to photograph a new web logo.

What Singer misses is that the universe of property rights & markets that matches the goods of sellers with eager buyers (and the vague attentions of buyers with sellers' perishable inventory), itself has a product: Hope & Creativity. Without either of which the human spirit (or whatever term materialists like to use talk about that reality) sickens and collapses, as the Marxists say, "alienated" to the max.

Schmidtz' redefinition is a sort of micro-advancement of the argument. But it is an advancement over "society," a term that makes me nervously finger a small, self-defense-oriented handbag revolver.

Very interesting ethics and epistemology.

"Psychocentrism" may be almost inevitable, reflected in and semi-necessary to our temperaments and bio-psychological profile (measured by the MBTI, but the point doesn't depend on agreeing with MBTI). Thus different "truths" from equally plausible sources are more and less incorporable. The underlying "narrative" creates or responds to a kind of force-field matrix?

Rorschach's comment at the truth&authenticity seeking blog One Cosmos is a good example of some of the dilemmas you mention.

Just some odds and ends of response.

I remember years ago in the NYTimes a report that many people experience a rush of endorphins when they experience themselves as powerful or of high status in a group. That's a major motivator. Doesn't mean however than in non-competing categories high status couldn't belong to different members of the group, gaining successive attention and regaining the spotlight before the endorphins wear off.

Status might have another neurological component, the opposite of the pariah. The pariah fears isolation and death, lack of access to the tribe's resources. Status allows us to tell ourselves stories that, in the crunch, we'll be toward the front of the line at the food trough, or t the flight out of the hurricane path.

In both cases, it seems that the subject's perception of his status is the important thing. It would be interesting to devise a self-report of perceived status of self and others, and cross-refer that to an emotional index of anxiety and contentment. The relationship of status to anxiety or happpiness may not be linear, BTW.

Why do I have the feeling that my proposal being equated to Aristotle is not something to be congratulated on?

Well, presumably people call what they want, when they have it and it satisfies them (whether internal or external), "happiness." Or some cognate term. My approach is perhaps more rough-and-ready than strictly conceptual, but since the topic here is human experience, the keystone is accepting people's own evaluations and criteria for their own experience, then respectfully probing those reports for some kind of uniformity, systemic clues, classes of experience, and whatever else may present itself to the alert observer. Self-reporting problems notwithstanding, the person is the authority on his own experience.

I'm quite interested in someone's comments about what makes him happy. Less so in his absolutes about what makes everyone happy, without breaking a sweat to bridge the subject-object gulf for anyone else. So then, could we apply curiosity to each subject, rather than the researcher imposing his Not-Even-Defined theory of happiness on the material?

For one thing, if we discovered what constitutes happiness for another, and honored it, utopian tyranny would be impossible. To some that is a bug, to some a feature.

I agree, very odd this search for paradoxes everywhere. I suppose there would be fewer books to write about life being kind of happy and kind of unhappy in varying degrees and patterns. My greater interest in this thread goes a different direction, one hopes not too OT.

Not being a professional economist, may I assume that a Big Grad Student Opportunity exists to define what study subjects mean by "happiness" and to put the tools in order? Bill Korner's comment wondering whether ' "not happy" or "very happy" refers to preference satisfaction, desire satisfaction, an experiential state independent of either, eudaimonia, etc.' would seem to suggest a standard is needed in studies of this kind, to spell out the assumptions of researchers and subjects. Its absence should get a study marked down for vagueness.

Different kinds of people are made "happy" by different narratives and undertakings, as brig observes. Hitler need not be referenced; there is the advertisement attributed to Shakleton:

"MEN WANTED FOR HAZARDOUS JOURNEY. SMALL WAGES, BITTER COLD, LONG MONTHS OF COMPLETE DARKNESS, CONSTANT DANGER, SAFE RETURN DOUBTFUL. HONOR AND RECOGNITION IN CASE OF SUCCESS."

One basic task in defining happiness is distinguishing between

<ul><li>"What does the subject believe makes him/her happy?"</li>
<li>"How does the subject know when s/he is happy."</li></ul>

The matter can be further unpacked by eliciting and analyzing a report of multiple circumstances in which the subject now remembers being happy. As a coach and blogger especially interested in maximizing happiness (with special attention from time to time about how it relates to the virtues), I suggest at least these 3 stages of inquiry.