DISQUS

Gabriel Mihalache · 3 years ago

This is a really great post... it puts into perspective your efforts on the study of happiness, which I had trouble following until you posted this.

John Brothers · 3 years ago

The logic of this man astounds me "So, for instance, state officials might know that the average person isn’t happy, while the average person mistakenly believes herself happy"

WHAT?!?!?!?!?

That's right up there with "We had to destroy the village to save it." Egads.


In addition to everything you've said in this article, there's another reason not to depend on ill-defined experts - power corrupts.

Blar · 3 years ago

Was I reading a different passage from the rest of you? I read Haybron as being reasonable, cautious, and measured, primarily pointing out that happiness research is likely to show that we are not in the "ideal markets - libertarianism is obviously right" corner of the chart and urging people to be open-minded in investigating the possibility that the much-derided government "paternalism" could make things better in some cases. He wasn't committing any fallacy, or assuming that the government was perfect. Were you all assuming that all of those subjunctives and hedge words, the 'if's, the 'might's, the 'much more would need to be said's, and on and on, were just put in for show?

I read him as saying that it is plausible that happiness research will reveal that people make errors in assessing their happiness that are 1) systematic and 2) large. If the errors are systematic, then researchers can make reasonably accurate generalizations about what they are, and the government can learn about them (just as it learns about damage to the environment, military tactics, and all sorts of other empirical facts). If they're large, then there is room for the (non-ideal) government to institute programs that would be improvements. So, in some particular cases, the government could have an advantage over individuals in this respect. Of course, there are other considerations in deciding on the extent of state paternalism (Haybron refers to consequentialist arguments and to "powerful reasons of autonomy"), which gives us cause to be suspicious of rampant paternalism even if the happiness data turns out as Haybron suspects.

(An aside: isn't the "So, for instance, state officials might know that the average person isn’t happy, while the average person mistakenly believes herself happy" point the one that Will was referring to approvingly in the previous post, where he was pleased to find someone who mirrored his doubts of happiness self-reports?)

Robert Schwartz · 3 years ago

On the theme of the ancients, is not Haybon simply identifying what Plato longed for 24 centuries ago?

"Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils, --nor the human race, as I believe, --and then only will this our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day. Such was the thought, my dear Glaucon, which I would fain have uttered if it had not seemed too extravagant; for to be convinced that in no other State can there be happiness private or public is indeed a hard thing."

BillKorner · 3 years ago

There are some good reasons to focus attention on the institutions of government and their performance in various areas. One of the best is that some people do really assume:

(1) that government embodies complete rationality and perfect integration of individual interests into a "general will".

Temptation to believe this patent falsehood is pervasive and libertarians are right to call our attention to that temptation. Its not even a bad idea, in my opinion, to set up some institutions to counter that mistaken and potentially disasterous ideology.

But rejecting (1) does not imply:

(2) that government institutions...

(which (a) have a leadership that can (hopefully) be voted out, (b) have effective and usually accepted police powers, and (c) will probably always command relatively large amounts of capital compared to most institutions)

...will function best if they are set up to run like simple rights-protecting machines that The People don't expect to play a role in promoting their individual and collective well-being.

So, long live the fight against (1) but don't confuse it with buying into (2).

josh · 3 years ago

Are we likely to find the right experts via Democratic means? It depends on whether the distribution of these errors in means-ends assessment are confined within a minority of the voting populace enough for the paternalism emposed by the majority to be a net gain in happiness. If the errors are too broadly distributed, the errors found within the majority could be systematically enforced.

Will Wilkinson · 3 years ago

Blar,

That's simply not what he's saying. He's saying that people don't know what's good for them, so the argument for paternalism is strengthened. Notice that he doesn't even consider that the means-ends unreliability of government might be a problem. As you note, he says there are reasons based in the value of autonomy for still resisting paternalism. Which is not to say that he doesn't think paternalism wouldn't work.

I was approving of Haybron's arguments that we don't necessarily know what makes us happy. Not his contention that the government may have a comparative epistemic and practical advantage.

Will Wilkinson · 3 years ago

Bill, I'm sure you know I'm not endorsing (2). I'm in favor of a minimal welfare state. But the minimalism is largely motivated by (1)-like considerations. You need a regime of individual rights because you really can't aggregate and so need to devolve moral authority to individuals in order to satisfy constraints of public justification in the face of the fact of reasonable pluralism.

BillKorner · 3 years ago

Will: Cool. I myself happen to believe in general wills, but do not think that the state is the unique vehicle through which it is formed (thus, I reject (1)). That's an essential analytical distinction. Probably in modern societies states are necessary conditions but not sufficient and, in any case, do not themselves represent a general will. I'm not sure (can't remember) if Rousseau would agree, i.e. maybe his sovereign has to be read as identical with republican institutions. After all, Rousseau was considerably less sympathetic than me toward modern societies.

Also, unlike Rousseau, I think that you can have a defective general will in which lots of individuals and/or groups get the shaft. For R that would be the "will of all", the honorary title general will just going to a good union of wills. I'd say the question of (a) whether you have a unity of individual interests that is different from the aggregation of those interests is analytically distinct from (b) whether you've got one where each "remains as free as before".

Arrow pretty well showed that you can't get a unique social choice from aggregating individual interest but, importantly, did not show that there can be no general will where each "remains as free as before" (or, for that matter, where each does not but perhaps thinks he does). In fact, Aarow was I'm told something of a Rousseauian.

BillKorner · 3 years ago

Also, I think I put (2) badly before.

Simple rights-protecting machines could conceivably promote individual and collective well-being better than anything else. I guess I meant (2) to deny that participation in goverment was a good in itself, part of -- though not the whole of -- cooperation with one's society.

Blar · 3 years ago

Will, what do you think that he means when he says "Plainly, much more would need to be said actually to undermine consequentialist arguments for liberal strictures on state paternalism"? He is not talking about autonomy there, because the next sentence clearly raises autonomy as a separate issue, which would arise even if those consequentialist arguments were undermined. I read that sentence as saying "Hey, this is just the beginning of a debate here. It's an empirical question whether state paternalism would be an improvement on individual decisions, and I don't have the data to give anything close to a definitive answer."

I guess the important thing, whatever you think Haybron is saying, is that we agree that this debate is worth having. I got the feeling from the way you called "fallacy" on Haybron that you were trying to nip it in the bud, but from your other posts I know that's not so. Human cognition and government institutions are both non-ideal, and figuring out what to do about that is an important, complex, and unresolved question, one about which we have different priors but are still open to evidence. I think that Haybron's passage suggests that he's in the same boat, but I doubt that it's worth having a big debate to try to parse the meaning of his words.

Will Wilkinson · 3 years ago

Blar, You're right. He is careful not to claim that he has as an a drop-dead argument against liberal anti-paternalism. Nevertheless, I do think he is not at all careful to subject government to a level of scrutiny even roughly equivalent to that with which he examines individual psychology. That's the fallacy. Like I said, I really, really like this paper. I just thought this section of it was striking and telling. If he had said,

If it could be shown that a realistically feasible government meeting widely accepted conditions for legitimacy could successfully implement policies that would significantly improve the rate at which individuals successfully fitted their actions to their ends, THEN the liberal presumption against paternalism would be weakened.

I would have been quite happy. But he did not say that. He said, people make systematic errors in prudential reasoning. And therefore the presumption against paternalism is weakenend. But---and this was my point---that conclusion is a non-sequitur absent any consideration of the reliability of government action in this kind of domain.

BillKorner · 3 years ago

Will and Blar: Systematic errors could justify other kinds of "paternalism" than "state paternalism". We're paternalistic w/r/t each other in all kinds of ways that don't involve the state. Some of them can be just as illiberal. That's part of the point I'm making.

As for presumptions, I cannot see the point in attempting to establish them one way or the other in general. Political philosophy, even informed by psychological and institutional research probably can't give us useful generalizations in this regard. (That's my opinion.) The intricacies of particular policy questions are so complex that focusing on given cases seems much more productive. I have not posted on your "What is Philosophy Good For?" thread but that is an intersting topic and I'm trying to get to it through this discussion and the one on the moral significance of growing wealth.

A Christian Prophet · 3 years ago

This may not be helpful to you at all, but I thought you might be interested... a message directly from the Holy Spirit today on the Christian Prophecy blog says that government will someday be funded totally voluntarily without taxation. It that were the case, and if government only did the things which were earmarked when people send in money....

malaclypse the tertiary · 3 years ago

What doesn't seem to be taken into account in any of this is the limits of reason. I, for one, assert my right to be means-ends irrational. It has been my experience that only failures can lead to novel insight.

Will, Sir: Thank you for having a great blog. Reading it after having not done so in some months makes me wonder why I don't read it more regularly.

PDS · 3 years ago

I agree with Malaclypse. Great blog. Your comments about Objectivism are, as they say, on the nuts. And I love the last line of your profile/bio page.

Dan Haybron · 3 years ago

Will,
Thanks for your comments on my paper, and thanks for a very interesting blog. I look forward to reading more of it when I get a chance! I think you're right to worry about the way this research can be used to support paternalism; I'm worried too, since there is so much potential for abuse, though I'm also hopeful that some good can come out of it.

You are also right that I do not, in that paper, subject governments to much scrutiny. But that's not necessary for my purposes there, and it's a major reason for the qualifications in my argument (which Blar noted). My point was simply to illustrate why we should be interested in the idea that people may systematically botch judgments regarding their happiness. And one reason is that such evidence can weaken--not defeat, but weaken--consequentialist arguments for liberal strictures on paternalism. Those arguments will be weakened insofar as premises about governmental incompetence have to bear greater weight than they otherwise would. Maybe this won't amount to much if governments are *obviously* completely inept in this realm, but that's an extremely strong assumption, one that seems to me implausible.

We can agree that in most personal decisions the individual is better placed to decide how to promote her own interests. It is doubtful that the public welfare would be served by a Ministry of Happiness with meddlesome case workers who must sign off on our marriage proposals, choice of occupation, etc. But most liberals (myself included) want to prohibit certain sorts of intervention altogether, save perhaps in extreme cases. I think the sorts of considerations discussed in my paper should weaken our confidence in the idea that such interventions could never be effective in promoting well-being.

My target is not liberalism, which I take as given (though not on consequentialist grounds!). People are entitled to be treated with respect, and not like children, whether that makes them happier or not. I suspect that some forms of paternalism--there are many, of which classic "gun to head" coercion is just one--would be both effective and acceptable means of promoting happiness. But if a proposed form of paternalism violates principles of respect for persons, then it is impermissible. And if that means we are doomed to unhappiness, then so be it. (I fear we may be in a bit of a bind: perhaps human beings are morally entitled to broad freedoms, but psychically ill-equipped to fashion good lives for themselves under such conditions.)

Regarding John Brothers' comment: I don't see the problem here. If most people believe themselves to be happy, yet most are not, and the state knows this, then there is a perfectly clear sense in which the state knows more about how happy people are than they do. They would enjoy an important epistemic advantage over the public in such a case. I suspect you were taking me to say that the government could more reliably judge how happy any given individual is than she herself could. But that is a stronger claim than what I asserted.

Will Wilkinson · 3 years ago

Dan,

I'm glad you found my blog! Like I said in the comments, and a previous post, I really like this paper. It is far and away the best thing I've found regarding the problems of self-reports. Do you know J.D. Trout at Loyola Chicago? He's working on a book on happiness, and as far as I can tell, he's not very skeptical of self-reports. I'd love to see the two duke it out on this score.

I realize (especially after this comments discussion) you were making a pretty modest claim about paternalism. I've got a larger project in the works on what a good consequentialist argument for paternalism based on cognitive limitation would have to look like, and the core of it, as you can see, is an empirical comparison of the means-ends reliability of government institutions against individual decision making. I can't blame you (or anyone) for not stepping carefully around one of my intellectual pet peeves.(But on my blog, I fixate on them!) The whole point of the project is to help people see that cognitive limitations have no particular implications for paternalism absent actual evidence for the reliability of paternalistic policy. I think it really is fair to expect symmetrical treatment of minds and institutions, and fair to point it out if there is an undefended assumption about the relative merits of one over the other.

Here's something I would love to talk to you about: I think the survery instruments fail to track a very likely increase in real happiness. You seem to think the reverse. In this post, I argue that we'll have to get good and reductive, measuring the physical correlates of good and bad feelings, in order to know for sure.

Dan Haybron · 3 years ago

Will,

Thanks very much for the Trout reference--his paper looks very interesting. While I do incline to the view that people have gotten less happy in recent decades, particularly in relation to stress, this is only a suspicion that could well prove wrong, and I wouldn't stake a lot on it at this point. (I'll be circulating a paper extending the ideas in that paper later this spring.) Glad you're pushing us to take a more optimistic view seriously, since we need to have a real debate on these matters and not let our prejudices drive the inquiry!

I'm also inclined to agree with your points about physiological measures; while there'll be issues figuring out what to say when they diverge from self-reports, I expect we'll learn a lot from them.