Writing in the New Yorker, Will Storr argues Aristotle offers us “A better kind of happiness“.

To summarise his argument, Will claims Aristotle’s ‘eudaimonic’ version of happiness, the sort you get from doing things you find meaningful or fulfilling, is better than the ‘hedonic’ version, the sort we associate with pleasure. The killer evidence the article presents in favour of the eudaimonic version is that those without meaning in their lives are less healthy (observed via gene expression) in a way equivalent to being obese or a smoker. In contrast, people who score high on the hedonic version show no such health benefits. Case closed, if any further evidence was required, that Aristotle was right about everything 2,500 years ago, and we should eschew mere pleasure in favour of fulfillment.

Whilst the article is well-written – and I suggest you read it before or after this – I think it’s mistaken. As quite a few people seem to make similar sorts of pro-eudaimonia arguments, I want to explain why I think they’re going wrong (to give two examples, my ex-lecturer Paul Dolan argues happiness is pleasure and purpose in his recent bestseller “Happiness by Design” and it came up a lot yesterday during the What Whats Center for Well-being event at the London School of Economics). Although it’s rarely clear why people prefer eudaimonic happiness, I get the sense they think it is superior to other forms of happiness, or perhaps ‘the missing piece’ in our understanding of it.

I think such claims turn out to be either uninteresting, implausible or simply confused. I don’t think Aristotle offers us a better kind of happiness whichever way you look at it.

Let’s start with an apparently easy question and go from there. If ‘happiness’ refers to some mental states that feel good (‘happiness’ can also refer to accounts of ‘what makes my life go well for me’, which I’ll come back to) what is the difference between eudaimonic and hedonic happiness? We need to identify how they are different if we want to say one is better.

We might say that they tend to be caused by different sorts of things: say the former by hard work and study, the latter by partying. But that’s not very interesting. If I’m lying in bed in agony, it’s not clear why it matters that my suffering was caused by a head ache, a stomach ache, or even heart ache. What matters is how much I’m suffering.

Another option is that eudaimonic and hedonic happiness are different kinds of experience. It’s not what caused them that matters, but that they feel different: the joy of heroic volunteering feels different to the joy of injected heroine.

I can’t see why this matters either. Stomach aches, head aches and heart aches all feel different – no one accidentally confuses the sensation after a dodgy take-away for being dumped – but so what? We can distinguish the quality of a sensation (what it feels like) from its intensity (how good or bad it feels). What matters is not how it feels, but how good or bad it feels and for how long.

Advocates of eudaimonia have two options here, neither of which are very appealing.

The first option is to accept that duration and intensity are all that matter for happiness. Then you claim activities which generate eudaimonic happiness tends to produce more happiness than hedonic happiness. This seems to be the sort of line that the New Yorker’s author is taking. He suggests meaningful activities are good because they help us live longer.

However, if all that’s being said is that some things produce more happiness than others, that’s not very interesting. In fact, it’s obvious! Evenings with fine wine and company tend to be more fun than those when I re-assess how flammable I am.

It’s not very useful to say eudaimonic activities tend to produce more happiness than hedonic activities either. This is because eudaimonic activities are implicitly those with a long-term focus (studying hard, going the gym) whereas hedonic happiness refers to those which have a short-term pay off only (parting hard, eating cake). In other words, we can rephrase the conclusion as “activities associated with long-term happiness tend to generate more happiness over the long-term”. Hardly a revelation when put that way.

The second option is to say that eudaimonic happiness is somehow better even if it generates less overall happiness (i.e. positive mental states) than hedonic happiness. Readers might recognise a similar argument to that had between arch-utilitarians Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill in the middle of the 19th century. Bentham said that all that matters is the duration and intensity of happiness. This means, if they produce the same pleasure, that ‘pushpin is equal to poetry’ (pushpin was a Victorian pub game). Critics objected that this meant utilitarianism was the ‘philosophy of swine’. In response to these attacks J S Mill attempted to distinguish ‘higher’ from ‘lower’ pleasures. This would allow Mill to say that an evening at the opera is better than one raving to EDM on MDMA even if they produce the same ammount of happiness over the whole course of your life.

At first glance, this seems like a nice distinction to borrow: maybe a eudaimonic activity which produces 10 units of happiness (whatever these are) over a lifetime is still better than a hedonic activity which produces as many units. The question, which Mill never satisfactorily answered, is ‘better in what way?’ They can’t be better in terms of happiness: that’s what we’ve just ruled out. So they must be better in some other ways. Mill, however, thought that all that matters in the end is unhappiness, which left him on a bit of a sticky logical wicket.

By analogy, if I say wealth is just about money, then I say I’m wealthier than you even though I know you have more money, you might think I’ve confused myself about what ‘wealth’ and ‘money’ mean.

To sum up, saying eudaimonic happiness is a better kind of happiness than hedonic happiness is either uninteresting or implausible.

BONUS ADDITIONAL MATERIAL FOR THE VERY KEEN

Ah, but is there a third option? Yes: you could deny that happiness (positive mental states) is the only thing that matters. This is exactly the move Aristotle makes, which is why I think suggesting Aristotle offers a better kind of happiness is confused.

Hold on to your seats, boys and girls, because there’s another way we can, and do, use the word ‘happiness’.

Sometimes we use ‘happiness’ to mean ‘positive mental states’, whereas other times ‘happines’ means ‘whatever ultimately makes your life go well for you’. Ah. Now you see how this all got so messy.

Classically, there are three options for this second sense of happiness. Philosophers tend to call it ‘well-being’ (to avoid the confusion we get in ordinary language where we merrily swap the two around without realising it). These are:

Hedonism – your life goes well if you have lots of good experiences (i.e. happiness understood as positive mental states) and few bad ones

Desire satisfaction – your life goes well if you get what you want

Objective list – you life goes well if you it has certain objective properties, e.g truth, beauty, health, education, wealth

Where is all gets more confusing is that Aristotle advocated a version of the objective list. Aristotle thought your life went well when you had ‘eudaimonia’ (literally ‘good demons’) which is typically translated as ‘flourishing’. What does ‘flourishing’ mean? Something like perfecting human nature and living virtuously (whatever those mean I’ll leave to the Aristotle scholars).

The key point here is that Aristotle didn’t think that happiness, in the positive mental state sense, was what constitutes happiness, in the well-being sense. You could be flourishing and living virtuously whilst being deeply miserable. Aristotle realised this weirdness and suggetsted experiences of happiness (positive mental states) often followed from leading a flourishing life, but as a convenient by-product rather than the thing itself which mattered. However convincing this is I’ll leave for the reader to judge.

Does Aristotle offer ‘a better kind of happiness’ in the well-being sense? Maybe – that’s another question (to which the answer is incidentally, I think, ‘no’) – but that wasn’t the sense of happiness the article ever discussed. If I say I hate the kind of balls footballers kick, I haven’t said anything about the type of balls you wear bow ties to.