Utilitarianism, Bentham and happiness

To clarify the point regarding happiness. Bentham argues for the minimising of pain and the maximising of pleasure as the source of the calculus of utility. J.S. Mill changed the formulation to refer directly to happiness. Bentham has achieved a fair measure of his aims as his lobbying of parliament laid many of the foundations for the more measured system of criminal punishment that we have today. The excessive punishments that were commonplace in his time now only exist in Islamic countries and are correctly seen as barbaric in their offence against utility - why should the punishment cause more suffering than the crime?

Suicide

This was an interesting result I saw in the BMJ this week: "People who commit suicide have heavier brains at necropsy than controls who died suddenly but of natural causes, a study has found (British Journal of Psychiatry 2000;177:257-61). The authors, all psychiatrists, can't say why victims of suicide have heavy brains, but they think the matter should be investigated further. "

I seem to recall that the volume of the brain, as measured by a PET scan, it proportional to 'g'. Could it be that stupid as suicide appears to be, suicides are cleverer?

I suppose that it could be an artefact of the violent death of an
otherwise healthy person.

--
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. - GBS

Happiness

'Count no man happy until he is dead'

Considering this, I have read many biographies and find it almost universally true that very few people are happy - though they do have interludes of happiness on occasion.

I have wondered if it really is the case that you can only know if you are happy in retrospect. It may be true, but a sensible person could remember a past period of happiness, see the same, or similar, circumstances and, along with the feeling of good will, decide that he is happy now.

It is seen, probably correctly, as smug and insufferable to protest your happiness whilst we travel through this vale of tears. However it is right, I think, to be honest and, if it is true that you are lucky in some particular way, honest to mention it. Just as it is honest to confess your misery if that is how you feel.

I have looked for happy people in many places. I thought I met a happy man in David Raven, the professor of classics in Pietermaritzburg. Later,when he killed himself, I realised that he was not the happy man I thought he was. I mourned, and still mourn, his passing as he was a man of exquisite aesthetic taste, a keen (sometimes too keen) sense of humour and father to a lovely daughter. His homosexuality was, I fear, the seat of his ultimate misery.

I have, of course, been unhappy as a result of the usual things, grief, anxiety, failure in love, physical discomfort and so forth. Without that it would be impossible to claim to be happy - it is, after all, the antithesis of unhappiness, knowing one enables one to know the other. A life lived on an even keel with no misfortune could not be a happy one
for that reason.

I wonder how genuine my belief that I am the happiest person I have ever known really is. My brother (a jovial, delightful and interesting man and a man I loved more than anybody I have known) was not happy. He was irritated, understandably, by what he saw as my complaisant happiness. He felt that I was only under the delusion of being happy because of my capacity to forget unpleasantness and live only for the day.

He may well have been right. After all, if I am truly happy then why should I wish ( or risk ) discussion about it? I know that I do actively forget unpleasantness.

However, if I am so deluded and it doesn't impinge on my effectiveness in life, then why should I seek to open my eyes and remove my delusion to join the ranks of the unhappy? Is there a better delusion, if that is
what it is, than the delusion that you are happy?

I have been interested to join discussions on the Epicurean mail list, I hoped to learn of how to reach increased hights of delight through attachment to an even simpler life. I have been a little saddened to
find that it is a group more of people seeking than of people who have found - but I should have expected that, shouldn't I!

Can anybody point me to happy people, dead or alive, whose lives I can read and learn from?

Is happiness, as I believe, not a goal or a destination, but a way of seeing the journey?

How, by the way, does hubris come into it? Was it just an old Greek way of of cutting down tall poppies or is it a recognition of a real aspect of human nature (environment/culture/upbringing/imprinting/wtf)?

Is this, I wonder, a difficult or threatening subject? Is there a feeling that a person has somehow failed if he is not happy?

Is it, as I believe, not possible to seek happiness, but only to find it, en passant?

--
We are all of us failures - at least, the best of us are. - J.M. Barrie

Jeremy Bentham, Epicurus, Rawls and torture

Investigating the question of Epicurus and his view of torture has led me to look at Jeremy Bentham again.

Sadly his works are not all indexed and on line - apparently work is in
progress to collate, index and publish them, but it will be a 70 volume
monster!

It seems to me that, where Epicurus identified the maximising of happiness as a useful goal in life, Bentham took the matter a stage further with his utilitarian calculus. His work on jurisprudence and punishment is
interesting. He saw that punishment was necessary to encourage better behaviour in people, but that the total punishment meted out could never be allowed to exceed the total misery that the crimes had caused. Furthermore corporal, and of course capital, punishment were too extreme in their negative effect on the total happiness of humanity to be countenanced.

I haven't been able to find any direct references to torture in Bentham's writing, though I am sure that there must be - has anybody else come across any?

Epicurus appears not to be pro-torture, he hardly could see it as a means to happiness for anybody, but he does suggest that the wise man would suffer torture calmly. In this he has the imaginative edge over those currently
urging torture as he doesn't see it only as something to be applied to 'the other' [since Epicurus is a humanist and not a xenophobe], but as something that even a happy, wise and honourable person might suffer in the course of
life.

Though Epicurus suggested avoiding politics was wise for a happy life, a sound view, Bentham, of course, considers the wider implications, for happiness for all, which does require a political accommodation. Actually Epicurus' urging that to be happy you must understand and make peace with your neighbour does really cover the same point if 'neighbour' is taken in
the widest sense - your enemy is, after all, only a neighbour with whom you have failed to make accommodation.

It seems to me that, if they had the chance, both Bentham and Epicurus would be consider Rawl's test of a just society as being a sound one from a utilitarian and Epicurean point of view. Since nobody but a masochist would
invite torture on themselves, I can't see that anybody applying Rawl's test could justify torture.

I wonder too that, since torture has been known to be ineffective in producing reliable information for several centuries those that argue for it must either be ignorant of this fact, or wilfully ignoring it - or must
rather have a different reason for urging torture than the 'ticking bomb' excuse. I think that they are really motivated by feelings of revenge, hatred and the smug assumption that they, themselves, will never face it,
being ubermenschen in their opinion.

--
Yesterday's chip wrapper is enjoys eternal youth - something denied the nectar of the gods; tomorrow's free beer.

Tone, self-satisfaction and being smug

I was consequently interested to see a film that I enjoyed very much this weekend, a Yank film, for the record, called 'Thirteen conversations about one thing'. This film makes the hatred for the congenital (or maybe learned) smug optimist quite palpable. I myself, didn't see the optimist as smug, but smug is mainly a word that is applied to those with whom one disagrees (like 'I am steadfast, you are stubborn, but he is pig headed'). I must admit (I don't think it a confession as I am sure it is common and doesn't do anybody any harm) to have felt what I can only describe as smug on certain occasions - mainly as a result of being proved right after much opposition - but I think that this feeling has none of the unpleasantness of the possibly associated schadenfreuder.

Interestingly also, in last week's New Scientist, being optimistic about oneself and the future is shown to have a huge statistically significant value in health and longevity. I was interested that it was suggested that it was a more significant positive effect than a smoker giving up smoking!

So, maybe the objection to those with a panglossean view (at least of themselves and their own life and situation, if not of humanity as a whole) is envy for both their current 'luck', their past 'luck' and their complaisant expectation of future 'luck'. Calling somebody else 'smug' is more a reflection, under this view, of ones own insecurity.

Interestingly as well, Voltaire's Dr Pangloss didn't suffer himself from any reversals or reasons to doubt his view - it was only his disciples, after his death, who ran into philosophical problems with it. This may also be a problem, ideal as a smug, panglossean, optimistic, content, and maybe even happy, view might be, it is not something that is easy to cultivate artificially.

I'd recommend the film to make up for any bile, angst, irritation or other unfortunate feeling that this post, smug by name and smug by nature might have occasioned.

--
"May you get what you want, and want what you get" - Double Gipsy curse from "Thirteen conversations about one thing"

Is it worth re-living one's life?

If one was aware that one was re-living it then the continual sense of deja vu might be irritating. If, the question were simply if one would like exactly the same experience again then I'd have no objection, but, what would be the point? After all, I'd simply end up in exactly the same state I am in now. If the question is just the old one of 'would I wish to change anything' if I re-lived it, then, yes, as a Groundhog Day style experiment it might be fun to try out a few alternative universes, but, just for fun, I wouldn't wish to change the path that got me to here at all.
--
The happiest people on earth are those few fortunates who seem to be in a state of mild, stable hypomania. - David Horrobin 'The Madness of Adam and Eve' (How schizophrenia shaped humanity)

On the eve of Nelson Mandela's birthday.

Whose birthday is on the mind of the world? The answer is obvious Nelson Mandela's birthday is tomorrow.

Some of the greatest of people have had a Nobel Prize as the acme of their career. Few have had it as a mere marker of their progress to immortality. Though there is far to go in uniting the new South Africa, most South Africans are united in their pride at having Mandela a fellow South African.

What is it about Mandela that has made him such a great man? It is not his intellect, though that is undeniably great. It is not his suffering, though that also has been long, apparently without end and, to a lesser man, soul
destroying. It is not even his humility which, great as it is, has not prevented him from expressing his objection to the mighty. It is not his royal birth, enough for some to claim some position in the world. It is not his fame, though few have been more universally famous and few are likely to be famous well after their death. So, what is it?

Clearly it is all of the above. It is also, much more importantly, his humanity. He stands before all of us as a man who, as with all of us, has had, and, no doubt, has, his flaws. He has never denied them. They are almost his strength. We admire and trust him because he has been one of us, still is one of us, and respects all of us. His example urges us to examine
ourselves for our integrity. Usually this is a cause for resentment. We can't, however, resent somebody who has earned all our respect in such fundamental ways.

We find it difficult to forgive our enemies, even in their pettiness, their insubstantial nature. Mandela sees beyond the enemy to the person and understands, and shows us how to understand the person, who, like us, is human and flawed.

I cannot, when thinking of Mandela, avoid thinking of other great men who have changed the world. Buddha, Ecclesiastes, Socrates, Diogenes and Epicurus seem to be men who have understood the vanity of the world and the
striving of people as empty and have, like Mandela, urged us to move beyond that to our common humanity. Petty men who have only temporal power creep under the huge legs of such men and peep about to find themselves
dishonourable graves - as Shakespeare had it so perfectly.

Mandela is a man with no statutory, economic or hereditary power, at least not in the world. However, when he speaks nobody remains untouched by his remarks. He seems to epitomise the powerless power that Ghandi showed was
real power. He has shown himself, like all of us, to be unwise in youth, but unlike most of us, wise beyond even his years as he learned from his bitter experience, not the bitterness, but the essence of life.

It seems trivial to wish him a happy birthday, but I, and millions who respect him can offer the wish that a man who has given so much should, at least, enjoy happiness for as long as he lives.

Happy Birthday, Madiba!