Is happiness just about feeling good?

[Music] Hi, I’m Dr. Tamar Gendler, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and professor of philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science at Yale University. In this video I’ll be examining the intuitive idea that being happy is just a matter of feeling good. Maya has been learning about the happiness research. She’s taken some of the surveys used to measure happiness. The results align with her experience: her happiness level is relatively low. But what exactly is happiness? This question reminds Maya of her friend Sophie, who studied philosophy in college. So she decides to meet Sophie for coffee. Philosophers have been trying to define happiness for centuries. One of the oldest of these definitions is known as hedonism. Hedonists think happiness is a matter of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. This reminds Maya of one of the surveys she took. It asked her to report on her positive and negative emotions over the past week. Nowadays, the term "hedonist" suggests someone who lives a self-indulgent lifestyle. But when philosophical hedonists talk about pleasure, they don't just mean the immediate pleasures of the body. They mean good feelings, which come in many varieties, including delight, affection, and pride. Think of the good feelings you get from a great novel, a deep friendship, or a job well done. Epicurus, the best-known hedonist from ancient Greece, called pleasure "the starting point and goal" of a happy life. He thought the key to living a happy life wasn’t chasing every pleasure you can, but avoiding unnecessary pain. For Epicurus, the happiest life was one of tranquility. He wrote: "It is not continuous drinking and partying, nor the satisfaction of lusts … which produce a pleasant life, but sober reasoning." Reasoning, he thought, helps us to decide which pleasures to pursue, and which to avoid. We get pleasure whenever we meet our basic human needs for food, shelter, and the company of others. These simple pleasures form the basis of a happy life. But these needs also lead us to crave more intense, refined, and luxurious pleasures. There’s nothing wrong with these pleasures in themselves, they usually lead to more pain down the line. Sober hedonistic reasoning teaches us that to attain the happiest life, we should forgo such indulgent pleasures. Maya is intrigued. She’s not convinced she should limit herself to Epicurus’s simple pleasures, but she finds the larger hedonist idea attractive: To be happy, she should wisely pursue pleasure and avoid pain. Is this simple formula the right way to think of happiness? Let’s find out! The challenge, it seems, in following hedonism is figuring out what will produce the most pleasure and the least pain. For example, will it bring Maya greater pleasure tonight if she and Sophie order dinner from her favorite restaurant, Ambrosia, or if they cook dinner together? Maya loves cooking with Sophie, but she’s also feeling lazy and craving Ambrosia’s delicious food. The joy of cooking with Sophie seems outweighed by the combination of Ambrosia’s tastier food and the chance to relax while waiting for the delivery. So Maya orders in. Sophie points out that Maya’s thinking echoes ideas from Jeremy Bentham, a famous English philosophical hedonist. Bentham thought that to determine how happy someone’s life has been, you just add up the total quantity of their pleasure and subtract the total quantity of their pain. But maybe the kind of pleasure makes a difference, too. John Stuart Mill, another philosophical hedonist, argued that some pleasures count for more than others. He wrote: "The pleasures of the intellect, or the feelings and imagination, and of the moral sentiments" do more for our happiness, even in smaller quantities than the pleasures "of mere sensation." And despite her own laziness, Sophie thinks that the kind of pleasure the two friends get from cooking a meal together is higher quality than the pleasure they get from eating a tasty meal that would be delivered to their door. Maya sees what Sophie is getting at: cooking with friends seems like a deeper, more valuable pleasure than getting take-out. But is it? Mill suggested that you figure out which pleasure has more value by asking people who have experienced both which of the two they prefer. Sophie has tasted plenty of delicious food. She has also cooked many dinners with Maya. And, though she enjoys Ambrosia, Sophie prefers the fun and connection they have when they cook together. Following Mill, Sophie says that’s why she thinks cooking together will give them higher quality pleasure It turns out, then, that figuring out how to be happy takes more than reason alone. You also have to look for people who really are happy, and find out what they enjoyed most. So far, hedonism sounds like a really useful idea! But, Sophie points out, it’s not perfect. Consider one of the ways in which Maya has been pursuing happiness: through dating. Imagine Maya meets the love of her life. She feels great! But what if her partner is secretly cheating on her? As long as she doesn't find out, Maya will still feel great. But her feelings will be based on a lie. According to hedonism, Maya has all she could ask for. Her positive emotions are off the charts! She's living an extremely happy life! But is she really happy? She sure feels happy. But that's only because she doesn't know the truth. And yet Maya would prefer to know the truth, despite the pain it would cause. She’d rather stay single and unhappy than have a partner who deceives her -- even if she never finds out. According to hedonism, this means Maya would prefer unhappiness to happiness. But that seems an odd way to describe the situation. Instead, you might say, Maya's happiness would be an illusion -- she would feel happy, but she wouldn’t really be happy. If feeling happy isn't the same as being happy, then hedonism can't be the whole story about what happiness is. What do you think? Is there more to happiness than feeling good? [Music]