Daily Archives: March 19, 2016

Happiness Is

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Reader Marty, who downloaded the Happiness report, replied to the post, Theodicy and Secularism –

“I thought it was interesting that the Dalai Lama said that we cannot count on religion as the basis for our ethics, since the people of the world cannot agree on one religion–and many don’t believe in any religion at all. (This was in the UN World Happiness Report.) The Dalai Lama said that we need a secular ethics. The World Happiness Report suggested a secular ethics based on the Greatest Happiness Principle. I think the UN has made a great start in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We have the plan already in place, if only we would follow it. Ha! Isn’t that always the problem!”

In concert with Marty’s response and in acknowledgement of how important, how critical this concept is, the mariner has reproduced verbatim that portion of the Happiness Report that explains the happiness principle. Further, two other recent posts have focused on this subject. See: Where is our Light? and Sailing One’s Own Ship in a Tumultuous World.

The Greatest Happiness Principle

So, first, what ethical idea based on human need can best fill the moral vacuum left by the decline of religious belief? The answer must surely be the great central idea of the 18th century Anglo-Saxon Enlightenment on which much of modern Western civilisation is based. This can be expressed in three propositions.

 We should assess human progress by the extent to which people are enjoying their lives—by the prevalence of happiness and, conversely, the absence of misery.

 Therefore, the objective of governments should be to create conditions for the greatest possible happiness and the least possible misery. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “The care of human life and happiness … is the only legitimate object of good government”.

 Likewise the obligation of each of us is to create the greatest amount of human happiness that we can in the world and the least misery. (Overall happiness of course includes our own.) And in all of this it is more important to reduce unhappiness (or misery) than to increase the happiness of those who are already higher up the scale.

These three propositions are what may be called the “greatest happiness principle”. It was Proposition 1 which inspired many organisations, like the OECD, the EU and many governments, to reassess their answer to the question: what is progress? And it was Propositions 1 and 2 which have mainly inspired the production of successive World Happiness Reports – our hope has been to display enough of the new science of happiness to enable policy-makers to make happiness a practical goal of policy.

But it is Proposition 3 that we wish to promote in this chapter, because we believe it should be the central principle which inspires those billions worldwide for whom religion no longer provides the answer to how we should live.

The principle is frequently misunderstood. For example, it does not assume that people are only concerned about their own happiness. On the contrary, if people only pursued their own happiness, this would not produce a very happy society. Instead the greatest happiness principle exhorts us to care passionately about the happiness of others. It is only if we do so that true progress (as we have defined it) can occur.

But what is so special about happiness? Why not judge our progress by our wealth or our freedom or our health or education, and not just our happiness? Clearly many things are good. But different goods are often in competition. My spending more on health may mean spending less on education. Or wealth-creation may require some limitations on freedom. So we have to ask why different things are good? And in most cases we can give sensible answers. For example, ‘Wealth makes people feel good’ or ‘Ill health makes people feel bad.’ But if we ask why it matters how people feel—why happiness is good—we can give no answer. It is just self-evident. So happiness is revealed as the overarching good, and other goods obtain their goodness from the fact that they contribute to happiness. And that is why an “impartial spectator” would judge a state of human affairs by the happiness of the people.

The greatest happiness principle has a universal appeal. It has the capacity to inspire, by mobilizing the benevolent part of every human being. In the language of Jews, Christians and Muslims, it embodies the commandment to Do as you would be done by, and to Love your neighbor as yourself. In the language of Hinduism and Buddhism, it embodies the principle of compassion—that we should in all our dealings truly wish for the happiness of all of those we can affect, and we should cultivate in ourselves an attitude of unconditional benevolence….

….In this context, an ethical system that favours not only others’ happiness but also our own has a much better chance of being implemented than one that is pure hair-shirt. It is therefore a huge advantage of the greatest happiness principle that it requires self-compassion as well as compassion towards others.

Reprinted from Chapter 3: Promoting Secular Ethics, Fourth World Happiness Report 2016 in behalf of the United Nations.

REFERENCE SECTION

It behooves the reader to read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights mentioned in Marty’s reply, see: http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/index.html

To see the World Happiness report, http://worldhappiness.report/ for a free download or purchase a printed copy at: https://shop.un.org/search/Universal%20Happiness%20report  $17+shipping.

Ancient Mariner

Theodicy and Secularism

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Theodicy is a philosophy organized and documented by Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430CE). Theodicy addresses specifically the question: “If God is good, loves all things and created all things, why is there evil in the world? Either God also created evil and therefore is not good and loving, or God does not exist.” Theodicy is a defense of God’s perfection in light of the existence of evil.

The question itself was asked as early as Plato and was posited as a reason for nominalism[1] by William of Occam, famous for Occam’s Razor. Bertram Russell, a famous British agnostic, mathematical theorist and inquisitor at large, presented the following thought experiment in an article titled, “Is there a God?”

“If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes.

But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense.

If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.”

“The existence of this teapot cannot be disproved. We can look and scan the skies almost for eternity, and it may always just be the case that it wasn’t in the place we looked – there may be another spot we’ve overlooked, or it may have moved while we were looking. However, given the absurd nature of the specific example, the teapot, we would rightly infer that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Russell’s audacity in the thought experiment was to question why people don’t like to apply the same, sound, logic … to the existence of any particular deity; there is no difference in the evidence base provided, therefore there is no reason to assume a God and not a celestial teapot.[2]

Theodicy addresses these logical challenges to deism – the belief in a supreme god. Saint Augustine, simply, said that God is perfectly good. It was God who created the world and the universe out of nothing and that evil is a byproduct of humanity’s sin. Evil is the punishment for original sin[3]. Augustine states that continued sin is created by human free will, an attribute made possible by eating fruit from the tree of knowledge. God remains whole and not responsible for sin and suffering.

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During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, secularism[4] emerged as a broadly accepted philosophy. Secularism is different than agnostic or atheistic philosophies which require, more or less, theistic presumptions. Secularism has ethics derived from humanism, pragmatism, and anthropological reasoning. Secularism is a self-contained life experience where the existence or non-existence of God does not matter.

Augustine (and many other theologians) would consider secularism sin. In religious context, God is the source of goodness and love – elements that are not necessary in secularism. Secularism is founded in vanity and self aggrandizement. The original question about the existence of God is replaced by the question, “What is good?” Humans tend to answer this question in terms of convenience and privilege for the self, the community or the nation – whatever works best – especially for the individual.

It is obvious already that great questions confront humanity in the twenty-first century. Human culture is yanked back and forth by new technologies, new scientific frontiers, abuse of the planet, power shifts in national supremacy, and even the existence of humanity itself. Some will argue that only secularism will allow the best decisions to be made in the future; others will argue that, despite the vagaries of the future, the belief in a superior force – one that predefines what is good – is our only rudder.

We shall see.

Ancient Mariner

  1. [1] Oxford Dictionary: “the doctrine that universals or general ideas are mere names without any corresponding reality, and that only particular objects exist; properties, numbers, and sets are thought of as merely features of the way of considering the things that exist. Important in medieval scholastic thought, nominalism is associated particularly with William of Occam. Often contrasted with realism.

[2]See: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Russell’s_Teapot

[3] Old Testament, Genesis 3.

[4] Merriam –Webster Secularism: indifference to or rejection of religion and religious considerations.