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Debating Human Happiness

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from: Steven Pinker
to: Martin Seligman

Oh, To Be a Happy Pig!

Posted Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2002, at 1:05 PM ET

Who are these people?

Marty, both kinds of circumscribed optimism—that we can try to reach the upper limits of our innate range of happiness and that we can control aspects of our well-being other than happiness—strike me as wise and humane. Certainly the difference between happiness on the one hand and a good and meaningful life on the other can't be overemphasized. Last year when I lectured to my introductory psychology class about happiness I made this point using a set of thought experiments from the late philosopher Robert Nozick. If a genie offered you the possibility of living the rest of your life in a state of sublime happiness, but you had to be asleep the whole time and dreaming, never to taste reality again, would you take it? How much extra happiness would you agree to if you had to lose a unique talent, like athletic or musical giftedness, or if you had to give up 30 IQ points? To take an extreme case, would you agree to a lifelong increment in happiness on the condition that you would be transformed into a pig? Would you agree to become happier if it meant that one of your siblings had never been born or one of your children? All these examples, I said, show that happiness is not our only goal, perhaps not even our main goal, in life.

A young woman raised her hand. "Professor Pinker?" Yes? I said. "I'd rather be a happy pig." Other hands shot up. "Me too!" "Same here!" "Pig!" "Pig!" "Pig!"

Well, these were overworked MIT students around midterms, so we shouldn't conclude too much from this, other than that professors should think twice before asking rhetorical questions in class.

I'd like to press you on the differences in heritability among the three kinds of well-being. You say that happiness in the smiley-face sense is partly heritable but that a person's ability to attain a good and meaningful life is not. Does this literally mean that behavioral geneticists have measured the ability to attain good and meaningful lives and have found that it shows low or zero heritability—that identical twins reared apart, for example, show no correlation in their success in attaining good and meaningful lives or that biological siblings are no more similar than adopted siblings? Or is what you have in mind closer to stability and changeability over a lifetime (regardless of their causes) and susceptibility to persuasion and advice—that therapists and patients (or consumers of self-help and inspirational books) are, as a practical matter, wasting their time if they hope to talk people into having a radically happier temperament, whereas the talking cure (or equivalent wise counsel) is demonstrably effective at getting people to improve their lives in the other two ways? Do we in fact know that people's ability to profit from such counsel is not heritable in the behavior geneticists' sense? I ask not out of skepticism of the distinction (which strikes me as correct) but because in The Blank Slate I reproduced the "First Law of Behavioral Genetics"—that all behavioral traits are partially (but nowhere near completely) heritable—and want to collect any counterexamples.

If you have space in your reply, I'd like to move the discussion back to another level at which optimism may (or may not) collide with an acknowledgment of human nature. Two years ago, as part of your Positive Psychology initiative, you convened an extraordinary collection of scholars—from fruit-fly geneticists to evolutionary psychologists to historians of the 20th century—to ponder why political leadership at critical points in history can result in relatively humane outcomes (such as the end of apartheid in South Africa) or horrific ones (such the breakup of Yugoslavia). Did those meetings lead you to analyze collective political choices in similar terms to individual ones? Are some forms of political action futile because of limits on human nature—for example, might utopian ideologies be the equivalent of a congenital sad sack trying to turn himself into a barrel of monkeys? Do humane leaders pursue more modest but more attainable courses of improvement?

dialogues
entries
123456789
from: Steven Pinker
to: Martin Seligman

Oh, To Be a Happy Pig!

Posted Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2002, at 1:05 PM ET
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Steven Pinker is Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard and author of The Blank Slate, How the Mind Works, and The Language Instinct. Martin Seligman is Fox Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, former president of the American Psychological Association, and the author of Authentic Happiness. Robert Wright, a visiting fellow at Princeton University's Center for Human Values and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, runs the Web site meaningoflife.tv and is the author of The Moral Animal and Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny.
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Remarks From The Fray, Day 1:

[The Dialogue] seems to be operating on two different levels already. Pinker is a scientist...he is interested in how things work (especially the brain) and does his best to make very few assumptions that are not backed up by empirical observation. To him, the unknown is close at hand...we don't even fully understand how a human brain recognizes its mother. For Seligman, however, it's no big deal to treat "The Pleasant Life" as an empirically validated REAL THING, and go on from there to discuss it …

Pinker's point is that "positive emotions" (I'm not sure what THAT means, either, since "positive" and "negative" don't usually mean "good" and "bad" in science) are as much adaptations as "negative" ones. They show themselves in specific situations. You can manipulate your environment to emulate those specific situations to a degree, given. However, the fact that Seligman still has clients in a "Sisyphean struggle" means that he has not come up with a reliable and communicable method for infinitely increasing happiness levels. I'm sure he would respond to such criticism by stating that a person's degree of happiness depends on how well they understand or agree with his point of view. Anyone who is still depressed "just doesn't get it". I hope everyone recognizes such arguments from discussions about ESP.

I'm sorry...I think I'm taking this from an unfairly scientific perspective. If Seligman's framework seems to be helpful for his clients, then it is as validated as it needs to be for its purpose. However, if we're going to allow for that kind of validation, then Pinker's more constrained discussion of human mental activity seems to be a poor fit for the discussion.

-- Mangar

(To reply, click here.)


I completely agree! What is he talking about? Even parts of his response that momentarily corresponded with external reality were soon obfuscated by a retreat to meaningless catch phrases. For instance he describes the meaningful life, wherein I might use my "signature skills" to accomplish something larger than myself. I agree, that sounds pretty meaningful. But then he goes on to say that he can`t see how "unfortunate and double-edged genes could compromise that?" Well, he might also give some evidence that he tried, or that at least has some idea what Pinker is talking about. First of all, Pinker isn`t saying that genes are double-edged, but that genetically programmed behaviors are. It`s not like genes are marching around the body saying "stop all of this meaningfulness, it`s just gone too far," although I wonder if Seligman might think so.

-- John

(To reply, click here.)


Seligman says something astonishing:

No one has yet discovered genetic constraints on the Good Life. Everyone has signature strengths and everyone is capable of recrafting their lives to use them more.

Surely this can't be true. No genetic constraints on one's willingness and ability to implement the program of change that you prescribe? Someone genetically cursed to live a life of major depression is as capable of implementing this program of change as someone who is genetically blessed with high levels of energy and competence? I may be missing something, but this seems implausible to me.

-- Engram

(To reply, click here.)

(10/16)

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