The Foundations of Morality
5. Satisfaction and Happiness
1. The Role of Desire
I shall argue in this chapter, therefore, in defense of at least one form of the doctrine of “psychological eudaemonism.” Superficially similar doctrines, under the name “psychological hedonism” or “psychological egoism,” are actively opposed by many modern moral philosophers. We shall consider here the criticism offered by an older moral philosopher, Hastings Rashdall.
Rashdall, criticizing “psychological hedonism,” held that it rested on a great “hysteron-proteron”—an inversion of the true order of logical dependence, a reversal of cause and effect:
Bertrand Russell, whose opinions on ethics have undergone many minor changes and at least one major revolution, has finally settled on this view, as revealed in two books published nearly thirty years apart. Let us begin with the earlier statement:
Russell then goes on to ask how the desires of a single individual can be harmonized with each other, and how, if possible, the desires of different individuals can be harmonized with each other.
In Human Society in Ethics and Politics, published in 1955, he returns to the same theme:
I mean by “right” conduct that conduct which will probably produce the greatest balance of satisfaction over dissatisfaction, or the smallest balance of dissatisfaction over satisfaction, and that, in making this estimate, the question as to who enjoys the satisfaction, or suffers the dissatisfaction, is to be considered irrelevant. . . . I say “satisfaction” rather than “pleasure” or “interest.” The term “interest” as commonly employed has too narrow a connotation. . . . The term “satisfaction” is wide enough to embrace everything that comes to a man through the realization of his desires, and these desires do not necessarily have any connection with self, except that one feels them. One may, for instance, desire—I do myself—that a proof should be discovered for Fermat’s last theorem, and one may be glad if a brilliant young mathematician is given a sufficient grant to enable him to seek a proof. The gratification that one would feel in this case comes under the head of satisfaction, but hardly of self-interest as commonly understood.
Satisfaction, as I mean the word, is not quite the same thing as pleasure, although it is intimately connected with it. Some experiences have a satisfying quality which goes beyond their mere pleasurableness; others, on the contrary, although very pleasurable, do not have that peculiar feeling of fulfillment which I am calling satisfaction.
Many philosophers have maintained that men always and invariably seek pleasure, and that even the apparently most altruistic acts have this end in view. This, I think, is a mistake. It is true, of course, that, whatever you may desire, you will get a certain pleasure when your object is achieved, but often the pleasure is due to the desire, not the desire to the expected pleasure. This applies especially to the simplest desires, such as hunger and thirst. Satisfying hunger or thirst is a pleasure, but the desire for food or drink is direct, and is not, except in a gourmet, a desire for the pleasure which they afford.
2. “Happiness” or “Well-Being”?
Thus codes of morals have their starting point in human desires, choices, preferences, valuations. But the recognition of this, important as it is, carries us only a little way towards the construction of an ethical system or even a basis for evaluating existing ethical rules and judgments.
We shall take up the next steps in succeeding chapters. But before we come to these chapters, which will be mainly concerned with the problem of means, let us ask whether we can frame any satisfactory answer to the question of ends.
It will not do to say, as some modern moral philosophers have been content to say, that ends are “pluralistic” and wholly incommensurable. This evades entirely one of the most important problems of ethics. The ethical problem as it presents itself in practice in daily life is precisely which course of action we “ought” to take, precisely which “end,” among conflicting “ends,” we ought to pursue.
It is frequently asserted by moral philosophers, for example, that though “Happiness” may be an element in the ultimate end, “Virtue” is also an ultimate end which cannot be subsumed under or resolved into “Happiness.” But suppose a man is confronted with a decision in which one course of action, in his opinion, would most tend to promote happiness (and not necessarily or merely his own happiness but that of others) while only a conflicting course of action would be most “virtuous”? How can he resolve his problem? A rational decision can only be made on some common basis of comparison. Either happiness is not an ultimate end but rather a means to some further end, or virtue is not an ultimate end but rather a means to some further end. Either happiness must be valued in terms of its tendency to promote virtue or virtue must be valued in terms of its tendency to promote happiness, or both must be valued in terms of their tendency to promote some further end beyond either.
One confusion that has stood in the way of solving this problem has been the inveterate tendency of moral philosophers to draw a sharp contrast between “means” and “ends,” and then to assume that whatever can be shown to be a means to some further end must be merely a means, and can have no value “in itself,” or, as they phrase it, can have no “intrinsic” value.
Later we shall see in more detail that most things or values that are the objects of human pursuit are both means and ends; that one thing may be a means to a proximate end which in turn is a means to some further end, which in turn may be a means to some still further end; that these “means-ends” come to be valued not only as means but as ends-in-themselves—in other words, acquire not only a derivative or “instrumental” value but a quasi-“intrinsic” value.
But here we must state one of our provisional conclusions dogmatically. At any moment we do not the thing that gives us most “pleasure” (using the word in its usual connotation) but the thing that gives us most satisfaction (or least dissatisfaction). If we act under the influence of impulse or fear or anger or passion, we do the thing that gives us most momentary satisfaction, regardless of longer consequences. If we act calmly after reflection, we do the thing we think likely to give us the most satisfaction (or least dissatisfaction) in the long run. But when we judge our actions morally (and especially when we judge the actions of others morally), the question we ask or should ask is this: What actions or rules of action would do most to promote the health, happiness, and well-being in the long run of the individual agent, or (if there is conflict) what rules of action would do most to promote the health, happiness and well-being in the long run of the whole community, or of all mankind?
I have used the long phrase “health, happiness, and well-being” as the nearest equivalent to Aristotle’s eudaemonia, which seems to include all three. And I have used it because some moral philosophers believe that Happiness, even if it means the long-run happiness of mankind, is too narrow or too ignoble a goal. In order to avoid barren disputes over words, I should be willing to call the ultimate goal simply the Good, or Weil-Being. There could then be no objection on the ground that this ultimate goal, this Summum Bonum, this criterion of all means or other ends, was not made inclusive or noble enough. I have no strong objection to the use of the term Well-Being to stand for this ultimate goal, though I prefer the term Happiness, standing by itself, as sufficiently inclusive, and yet more specific. But wherever I use the word Happiness standing alone, any reader may silently add and/or Well-Being, where-ever he thinks the addition is necessary to increase the comprehensiveness or nobility of the goal.
3. Pleasure Cannot Be Quantified
Before leaving the subject of this chapter it seems desirable to deal with some of the objections to the eudaemonic view that it presents.
One of these has to do with the relations of desire to pleasure—the alleged “hysteron-proteron” fallacy mentioned at the beginning of the chapter. I suspect that the people who place most emphasis on this so-called fallacy are themselves guilty of a confusion of thought. Their position is sometimes stated in the form: “When I am hungry, I desire food, not pleasure.” But this statement depends for its persuasiveness upon an ambiguity in the word “pleasure.” If we substitute for “pleasure” the term satisfaction the statement becomes a form of hairsplitting: “When I am hungry I desire food, not the satisfaction of my desire.” What is involved here is not a contrast between two different things, but merely between two different ways of stating the same thing. The statement: “When I am hungry, I desire food,” is concrete and specific. The statement: “I desire the satisfaction of my desires,” is general and abstract. There is no antithesis. Food in this example is merely the specific means of satisfying a specific desire.
Yet since the time of Bishop Butler this point has been the subject of bitter controversy. Both hedonists and anti-hedonists too commonly forget that the word “pleasure,” like the word “satisfaction,” is merely an abstraction. A pleasure or satisfaction does not exist apart from a specific pleasure or satisfaction. “Pleasure” cannot be separated or isolated like a sort of pure homogeneous juice from specific pleasures or sources of pleasure.
Nor can pleasure be measured or quantified. Bentham’s attempt to quantify pleasure was ingenious, but a failure. How can one measure the intensity of one pleasure, for example, against the duration of another? Or the intensity of the “same” pleasure against its duration? Precisely what decrease in intensity is equal to precisely what increase in duration? If one answers that the individual decides this whenever he makes a choice, then one is saying that it is his subjective preference that really counts, not the “quantity” of pleasure.
Pleasures and satisfactions can be compared in terms of more or less, but they cannot be quantified. Thus we may say that they are comparable, but we may not go on to say that they are otherwise commensurable. We may say, for example, that we prefer to go to the symphony tonight to playing bridge, which is perhaps equivalent to saying that going to the symphony tonight would give us more pleasure than playing bridge. But we cannot meaningfully say that we prefer going to the symphony tonight 3.72 times as much as playing bridge (or that it would give us 3.72 times as much pleasure).
4. Socrates and the Oyster
If we abandon the “pleasure” as the standard and substitute satisfaction, it becomes clear that if the satisfaction that it yields is the standard of conduct, and John Jones gets more satisfaction from playing ping-pong than he does from reading poetry, then he is justified in playing ping-pong. One may say, if one wishes, again following Mill, that he would probably prefer poetry if he had “experience of both.” But this is far from certain. It depends on what kind of person Jones is, on what his tastes are, what his physical and mental capacities are, and his mood of the moment. To insist that he should read poetry rather than play ping-pong (even though the latter gives him intense pleasure and the former would merely bore or irritate him), on the ground that if he plays ping-pong and abjures poetry he will earn your contempt, is to appeal to intellectual snobbery rather than to morality.
Now it may be doubted that the other party to the comparison knows both sides. An intelligent man has never been a pig, and does not know precisely how a pig feels, or how he would feel if he were a pig: he might then have a pig’s preferences, whatever these should turn out to be.
In any case, Mill has simply introduced an irrelevancy. He is appealing to our snobbery, our pride, or our shame. No one who reads philosophy at all would like to admit that he prefers to be an ordinary man rather than a genius, let alone that he would prefer being a pig to being an ordinary man. The reader is expected to say, “A thousand times, no!”
But this does not happen to be the issue. If we stick to the issue, then, we will reply: It is better to be Socrates satisfied than Socrates dissatisfied. It is better to be a human being satisfied than a human being dissatisfied. It is better to be a fool satisfied than a fool dissatisfied. It is better even to be a pig satisfied than a pig dissatisfied.
Each of these, if dissatisfied, is usually capable of taking some action that would make him less dissatisfied. The actions that would make him least dissatisfied in the long run, assuming they were not at the expense of other persons (or pigs), would be the most appropriate actions for him to take.
The choice of such actions is a real choice. The choice implied by Mill is not. Neither a human being nor a pig, regardless of his own desires, can change his animal status to that of the other. Nor can a fool make himself into a Socrates simply by an act of choice, nor Socrates into a fool. But human beings, at least, are capable of choosing the actions that seem likely to bring them most satisfaction in the long run.
If a moron is happy gaping at television but would be miserable trying to read Plato or Mill or G. E. Moore, it would be cruel and even stupid to try to force him to do the latter simply because you think such reading would make a genius happy. It would hardly be more “moral” for a commonplace man to torture or bore himself by reading high-brow books rather than detective stories if the latter gave him real pleasure. The moral life should not be confused with the intellectual life. The moral life consists in following the course that leads to the greatest long-run happiness achievable by the individual concerned, and leads him to cooperate with others to the extent of the capacities he actually has, rather than those he might wish he had or might think he “ought” to have.
Yet this crypto-snobbish standard is appealed to again and again by moral philosophers. Bertrand Russell, in one of his many phases as a moral philosopher, once repeated, in effect, Plato’s argument about the life of the oyster, having pleasure with no knowledge. Imagine such mindless pleasure, as intense and prolonged as you please, and would you choose it? Is it your good? And Santayana replied:
Let us carry Santayana’s argument a step further. Let us assume that the moral philosopher asked: “Suppose you could get more pleasure, both immediately and in the long run, than you now get from witnessing the plays of Shakespeare, but without ever reading, seeing, or hearing a Shakespearian play, and remaining entirely ignorant of Shakespeare’s work? Would you choose this greater pleasure?” Every lover of Shakespeare would probably answer No. But isn’t this simply because he would not believe in the hypothetical choice? Because he simply could not imagine himself getting the pleasure of Shakespeare without reading or seeing Shakespearian plays? Pleasure can hardly be conceived as a pure abstraction apart from a particular pleasure.
The antihedonist may reply in triumph that if people refuse to substitute one kind of pleasure for another, or one quality of pleasure for another, then they have made something else besides “quantity” of pleasure their test. But it should be pointed out to him that the test he applies to specific intellectual or specific “higher” pleasures could be applied, with the same kind of results, to specific sensual, carnal or “lower” pleasures. If the question were put to a voluptuary: “Suppose, by some other means, you could get more pleasure than you could get from sleeping with the most seductive woman in the world, but without having this latter privilege, would you choose this greater but disembodied pleasure?” Any lecher who was asked this question would probably also reply with an emphatic No. And the reason would be basically the same as for our Shakespeare lover. People cannot imagine or believe in a purely abstract pleasure, but only in a specific pleasure.
When a man is asked to imagine himself feeling pleasure, though deprived of all his present sources of pleasure—of all the things or activities that now bring him pleasure—he naturally finds himself unable to do it. It is like being asked to imagine himself in love, but not with anybody.
The answer becomes clearer when we abandon the word “pleasure” and substitute satisfaction. We do not ordinarily speak of “quantity” of satisfaction, as we are tempted to do with “pleasure,” but only of greater or less satisfaction. Nor do we speak of “quality” of satisfaction. We merely ask whether this or that object or activity gives us more or less satisfaction than another. We recognize, moreover, that different people find satisfaction in different things, and that the same person who finds satisfaction in one activity today may find it in quite another tomorrow. None of us permanently or always chooses “higher” pleasures to “lower” pleasures, or even vice versa. Even the dedicated ascetic stops to eat, or to satisfy other bodily needs. And the devotee of Shakespearian tragedies may relish a good dinner just before he goes to the theater.
We will return to a fuller discussion of the “pushpin-vs.-poetry” problem in Chapter 18.
5. Psychological Eudaemonism
I announced at the beginning of this chapter that I would argue in defense of at least one form of the doctrine of “psychological eudaemonism.”
This refutation itself rests on a series of fallacies, which become particularly apparent when we abandon the word “pleasure,” with its special connotations, and instead talk of “satisfaction” or “happiness.”
At the cost of repetition, let us review some of the principal fallacies in the attack on psychological hedonism:
2. The refusal to see that the hedonist or eudaemonist position can be stated negatively. Antihedonists accuse hedonists of contending, for example (and some ill-advised hedonists actually do) that a man voluntarily becomes a martyr because he thinks the “pleasure” of martyrdom will predominate over the pain. Rather he accepts martyrdom (where he might avoid it) because he prefers the physical agony of torture, burning, or crucifixion to the disgrace or spiritual anguish of repudiating his God or his principles or betraying his friends. He is not choosing “pleasure” of any sort; he is choosing what he regards as the lesser agony.
The contrast here between “desire” and “satisfaction” is of dubious validity. It is a verbal distinction rather than a psychological one. It is merely tautological to say that what I really desire is the satisfaction of my desires. True, I will not try to satisfy a desire unless I already have the desire. But it is the satisfaction of the desire, rather than the desire itself, that I desire! Rashdall’s objection comes down to the triviality that we desire a pleasure only because we desire it. To say that I seek the satisfaction of my desires is another way of saying that I desire “happiness,” for my happiness consists in the satisfaction of my desires.
4. Another objection to hedonism is that originating with Bishop Butler. It declares that what I want is not “pleasure” but some specific thing. To quote again the sentence cited a while back: “When I am hungry, I desire food, not pleasure.” We have already pointed out that this merely emphasizes the specific means by which I seek the satisfaction of a specific desire. There is no real antithesis here; there is merely a choice between the concrete and the abstract statement of the situation.
5. Antihedonists seek to discredit psychological hedonism by pointing out that a man often refuses to take the action that seems to promise the most immediate or the most intense pleasure. But this proves nothing at all about psychological hedonism, and especially not about psychological eudaemonism. It may merely mean that the man is seeking his greatest pleasure (or satisfaction or happiness) in the long run. He “measures” pleasure or satisfaction or happiness by duration as well as by intensity.
6. The final argument against psychological hedonism or eudaemonism is that men frequently act under the influence of mere impulse, passion, or anger and do not do the things calculated to bring them the maximum of pleasure, satisfaction, or happiness. This is true. But it remains true that, in his cool moments, it is his long-run happiness that each man seeks.
Let us restate and summarize this. It is true that men do not seek to maximize some mere abstraction, some homogeneous juice called “pleasure.” They seek the satisfaction of their desires. And this is what we mean when we say that they seek “happiness.”
A man’s attempted satisfaction of one of his own wishes may conflict with the satisfaction of another. If, in a moment of impulse or passion, he attempts to satisfy a merely momentary desire, he may do so only at the cost of giving up a greater and more enduring satisfaction. Therefore he must choose among the wishes he seeks to satisfy; he must seek to reconcile them with the conflicting wishes of others as well as with his own conflicting wishes. He must seek, in other words, to harmonize his desires, and to maximize his satisfactions in the long run.
And this is the reconciliation of psychological and ethical eudaemonism. A man may not always act in such a way as to maximize his own long-run happiness. He may be short-sighted or weak-willed, or the slave of his momentary passions. But he is a psychological eudaemonist none the less; for, in his cool moments, he does wish to maximize his own satisfactions or happiness in the long run. It is because of this that ethical argument may reach and convince him. If one can successfully point out to him that certain actions, satisfying some momentary passion, or appearing to promote some immediate self-interest, will reduce his total satisfactions in the long run, his reason will accept your argument, and he will seek to amend his conduct.
This is not necessarily an appeal to mere “egoism.” Most people feel spontaneous sympathy with the happiness and welfare of others, particularly their family and friends, and would be incapable of finding much satisfaction or happiness for themselves unless it were shared by at least those nearest to them, if not by the community at large. They would seek their own satisfaction and happiness through acts of kindness and love. Even thoroughly “selfish” individuals can be brought to see that they can best promote their own long-run interests through social cooperation, and that they cannot get the cooperation of others unless they generously contribute their own.
Even the most self-centered individual, in fact, needing not only to be protected against the aggression of others, but wanting the active cooperation of others, finds it to his interest to defend and uphold a set of moral (as well as legal) rules that forbid breaking promises, cheating, stealing, assault, and murder, and in addition a set of moral rules that enjoin cooperation, helpfulness, and kindness.
Ethics is a means rather than an ultimate end. It has derivative or “instrumental” value rather than “intrinsic” or final value. A rational ethics cannot be built merely on what we “ought” to desire but on what we do desire. Everyone desires to substitute a more satisfactory state for a less satisfactory one. As Pascal put it: “Man’s ordinary life is like that of the saints. Both seek satisfaction, and they differ only in the object in which they set it.” Everyone desires his own long-run happiness. This is true if only because it is tautological. Our long-run happiness is merely another name for what we do in fact desire in the long run.
This is the basis not only of the prudential virtues but of the social virtues. It is in the long-run interest of each of us to practice the social as well as the prudential virtues and, of course, to have everyone else practice them.
Here is the answer, and the only persuasive answer, to the question: “Why should I be moral?” An ought to is always based upon, and derived from, an is or a will be.
