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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,
and in this Wi-Phi video I’ll examine the idea that
being happy is just about getting what you want.
Maya and Sophie have been discussing what philosophers think about happiness.
Philosophical hedonists say happiness is about having
lots of positive feelings and few negative ones.
But Maya is not convinced that feelings are all that matter.
Having a partner makes her feel great.
But if he were secretly cheating on her, she wouldn't describe herself as happy
-- even if she never found out.
Her happiness about having a partner requires more than the
feeling of having a faithful and loving partner
-- it also requires actually having a faithful and loving partner!
Maya recalls a survey she took to measure her happiness level,
which defined happiness as life satisfaction.
If you’re satisfied with your life, you don’t feel like you’re missing anything.
You have everything -- or nearly everything -- you desire.
This reminds Sophie of another philosophical concept of happiness,
called the desire theory.
It says happiness is all about getting what you want out of life.
According to this theory, the more your desires are satisfied, the happier you are.
Maya isn’t so sure.
She thinks back to the summer after college,
when she finally got to take that trip to
Paris she’d dreamed about since she was little.
It turned out to be boring, unpleasant, and disappointing.
It didn’t make her happy at all.
So how can getting what you want be the key to happiness?
Sophie agrees. You can get something you want, and still be unhappy.
But we need to be careful about describing our desires.
Yes, Maya got to go to Paris.
But that’s just part of what she wanted.
She wanted a trip to Paris she would enjoy. She wanted to have fun in Paris.
So she didn’t get what she wanted after all.
This starts to make more sense to Maya.
Real happiness is getting what I truly want in life.
And one thing I truly want is to enjoy life.
And doesn’t everyone want to enjoy life?
That’s why pleasure is such an important part of happiness
-- but only because we want to feel good.
And because we want other things too, pleasure isn’t all there is to happiness.
Since people’s desires vary,
happiness looks very different from one person to another.
And even though it may be a little hard for Maya to imagine,
there may be some people who are not attached to the pursuit of pleasure at all.
Hedonism says people like that must be terribly unhappy.
But, Maya thinks, who is she to judge?
Maybe for someone like that, happiness is just really different than it is for her.
Sophie points out that while this flexibility
is appealing, it leads to a difficult question.
What happens when someone’s desires are twisted, harmful, or self-destructive?
What if they even desire their own death?
Would they really be happier if they got what they wanted?
Maya thinks of her family friend John,
who struggled for years with a serious drinking problem.
That was an awful time in John’s life.
All he wanted to do was drink -- the desire was overpowering.
But if all John wanted to do was drink, and that’s all he did,
then according to the desire theory, John must have been happy!
That seems wrong. John always talks about how unhappy he was back then!
And his friends and family emphatically agree.
For someone gripped by addiction or other self-destructive desires,
getting what they want looks like the opposite of happiness.
Sitting at home drinking all day for months on end is not a happy way to live
-- even if booze is all you crave.
So, Maya says, the desire theory can’t be the whole story, either.
Sophie reminds her to be careful about describing people’s desires.
It might seem like all John wanted to do was drink all day.
And maybe that was his most powerful desire.
But didn’t he desire other things out of life as well?
For example, surely he wanted to feel alert and energetic in the morning,
instead of sick, tired, and hungover.
Perhaps he wanted to make progress in his career,
but his drinking kept getting in the way.
Surely he wanted to feel closer to his family and friends,
and to have them be less upset with him about his drinking.
If John had significant desires he couldn’t satisfy because of his drinking,
then the desire theory is clear: he was unhappy.
John’s desires were in conflict.
That seems like a surefire recipe for unhappiness.
If you want one thing,
but you also want something else that makes it impossible to get the first,
you can’t satisfy both your desires.
As long as satisfying one desire makes it impossible to satisfy another,
you’ll be perpetually dissatisfied.
Maya’s head is starting to spin.
She agrees that conflicting desires are sources of unhappiness.
But was John’s unhappiness just about having conflicting desires?
Through hard work, therapy, and a lot of help from his friends,
John’s desire to drink is no longer overpowering.
He can pursue his other, healthier desires.
But if his unhappiness was just about being conflicted,
couldn’t he have found happiness by extinguishing his other desires instead?
If he’d extinguished his desires for health, success,
and good relationships and focused wholly on his drinking,
John would have eliminated the conflict among his desires, as well.
But that wouldn’t have made him any happier, would it?
Instead, it would have been a sign that he was
giving up any hope for happiness altogether.
Living the life you want to live is a crucial ingredient in happiness,
even more so than pleasure and the avoidance of pain.
But Maya still feels like something’s missing from this account of happiness.
What do you think is the missing piece?
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