SEPT 9

3: SEP 9

Assigned

• Haybron, C2, “What is Happiness?” (16 short)
• Haybron, C3, “Life Satisfaction” (10)
• McMahon, Chapter 2. Part Two (40-50; 10)

Haybron, Chapter 2: What is Happiness?

• Brief Small Group discussion: Think about a unique or typical experience you have that you would identify with endorsement, engagement, or attunement. Are there experiences that relate to more than one of these? To all three?

• Recall the distinction between H(s) and H(l).

• Haybron takes us into a rich phenomenal account of emotional state happiness (Share our examples.)

• Endorsement -- Being "at home" in your life. An "emotional evaluation". Satisfying criteria you accept as counting toward the claim, "my life is positively good" Haybron associates this most closely with joys and sadness, gains and loss.

• Examples -- Feeling from actual endorsements (give examples), but also from savoring accomplishment or appreciating need fulfillment (parents seeing contented children, a full pantry...)

• Engagement - vitality and flow. But note, this aspect of H(s) is compatible with "negative affect".
• Attunement -- peace of mind, tranquility, confidence, expansiveness

• Is Haybron making a recommendation or describing objective, transcultural features of emotional happiness? How do we know this isn't just "a few of his favorite things"? How do we ground these?

• Problem of "false happiness" -- discrepancies such as Robert's (also Happy Frank) -- adaptive unconscious might be part of the explanation -- interesting that we can go wrong in this way. mood propensity or dispositional happiness. These cases seem to show that a deeper analysis of H(s) is needed.

• Can you also be happy and not know it?

• The Haybron discussion also gets at the idea of superficial vs. deep happiness. Ricard, or the sage, presumably has it.

Haybron, Chapter 3, "Life Satisfaction"

• More cases of lives that require narratives (interesting connection to our wisdom discussion of mythos) to understand: Moresse "Pop" Bickham. Note what Bickham says. It's possible that Bickham has deployed a powerful version of the "internal strategy".
• Haybron considers whether we should infer from his life satisfaction that he was happy

• Claim: You can judge your life favorably no matter how you feel. (Probe this. Even if H(s=0)?
• Claim: (33) There may be a diff between being satisfied with your life and judging that it is going well.

• Comment: Bickham is the extreme case in which its hard to get our intuitions around the idea that Hs and Hl could go together. But let's do our own investigation of this.

• Was Wittgenstein's "wonderful" life plausibly happy or satisfying?

• LS defined at p. 35: "To be satisfied with your life is to regard it as going well enough by your standards."

• That's a puzzling definition since early he convinced us that you "satisfied" and "going well" can be judged separately.

• Claim: It's a mistake to call life satisfaction a hedonic good because it is "not just a question of pleasure"

• Comment: This doesn't tell us that it doesn't also involve a kind of feeling. The fact that it involves judgement doesn't mean emotion isn't involved.

• Small Group Problem: How do you make life satisfaction judgements? How will you decide if your life is "going well" in the coming 2-3 years? Can you be satisfied with your life even if some aspects are not going well? When you think of what is good in your life, do you experience a kind of affect? (Mention the tenure study.)

• Problems with LS judgements:

• they are global judgments of complex sets of events over time. too reductive a judgement to make 1 - 10.
• it sounds like a simple judgement of the relationship between expectation and outcome (like ordering a steak), but it isn't, really, now is it?

• Good point: more like assessing a "goal-achievement gap" -- example of tenure happiness study

• determining "well enough" is pretty subjective (variable). -- maybe, but that could be explained within the "goal-achievement gap" model since we're always "resetting" in one direction or another ("Things won are done." or "I guess that's not working") recall point about hedonic structure of this.
• most people seem to be able to assert satisfaction with their lives independently of whether they were "choiceworthy"

• For Haybron, this implies that Hl judgements are basically much less relevant to assessing happiness than emotional states. He even suggests with the Calcutta workers reports that they are not grounded judgements.

*kidney patients, colostomy patients.

McMahon, Chapter 1. Part Two: Plato v Aristotle - McMahon (40-50)

• Repasting McMahon notes from p. 40-50

• big contrast between Plato and Aristotle -- School of Athens fresco.

• end, function, craft, techne. Hierarchy of arts.
• end vs. final end -- the universal good is the final end, not relative. sec. 6-7.
• happiness as activity of the soul in accordance with virtue (def., but also consequence of reasoning from nature of human life). Gloss on eudaimonia.
• Section 13: nature of the soul. two irrational elements: veg/appetitive and one rational. Note separation/relationship.
• As M notes, Aristotle's focus on the rational part of the soul leaves him with a similar problem as Plato -- a model of happiness that few (not the Alcibiades in the world) will attain. In spite of the huge contrast between them, they are both classical Greek philosophers who see Reason as central. Perhaps "hyper-rationalists".

• Note how Aristotle's analysis of happiness entails a view of wisdom.