World Happiness Report 2013
Bartolini et al. (2013) present a statistical model in which the gains to US happiness from rising income have been offset by declines due to falling social capital.4 (They don’t explore whether adverse trends in psychological and ethical factors have also contributed to the paradox, but the decline in social trust in their data might well represent an average decline in ethical behavior in the US population.) We are now returning, step by step, to a broader conception of happiness. Yet I would argue that the ethicists are still mostly overlooked. Sociologists have powerfully shown how social ties are fraying in many countries, to the detriment of well-being. Psychologists have successfully championed a surge of interest in ancient and modern practices of psychological well-being, including self-help groups, meditation, and various approaches of positive psychology. Yet modern ethicists, who are generally overshadowed in the public discourse, have not yet been successful in placing their subject back on the public agenda. A renewed focus on the role of ethics, and in particular of virtuous behavior, in happiness could lead us to new and effective strategies for raising individual, national, and global well-being. To try to make this case, albeit in a highly preliminary and impressionistic way, I will briefly trace how virtue ethics were largely abandoned in modern thinking about happiness, and how virtue ethics might be restored to a proper place alongside economic, social, and psychological approaches.
Ancient Traditions of Virtue Ethics and Happiness Until the modern era, virtue and happiness were seen as intrinsically intertwined. One achieved happiness by living the right kind of life. The sages instructed us not to follow our base instincts for sensual pleasures and material possessions, but rather our higher potential for compassion and moderation. The better path was acknowledged
to be hard work, to be won through study, training, self-discipline and the emulation of great people. This philosophy is found in both East and West, and in both secular and religious traditions. Let’s briefly consider three leading examples: Buddhism, Aristotelian ethics, and the Roman Catholic Church. Buddhism teaches the path to escape from suffering. When Prince Siddhartha, the future Buddha, ventures beyond the palace walls, he finds a world filled with death, poverty, and suffering. He is overcome with a longing to find the solution to end this suffering. Siddhartha experiments with a variety of approaches, including hedonism (the unbridled pursuit of sensual pleasures) on one extreme, and asceticism (the self-denial of sensual pleasures) on the other. He finds both to be wanting. Neither frees him from suffering; neither is the key to happiness. Siddhartha’s great insight was that suffering and happiness are mainly determined by psychology, by one’s state of mind, rather than by the relative presence or absence of material goods. To escape from suffering, an individual must have the right state of mind towards material good and also towards other people. Since possessions, sensual pleasures, and physical life itself are all transient, suffering can be overcome only by acknowledging the transience of all things and all relations, and living in mindfulness of that transience. Moreover, since all things and all people are naturally interdependent, with the untrained “ego” leading to a false sense of separation, we gain happiness by our compassion towards others. The Buddha’s basic teachings on achieving happiness (more properly, the escape from suffering) are summarized in the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path. The Four Noble truths convey the response to impermanence and interdependence. Human beings tend to grasp for sensual pleasures, personal possessions, and attachments that are in fact impermanent, and these then become a source of inevitable suffering through the disappointment of loss and envy of others.
82