Charles Kenny

Chapter Two of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Utility looks at what writers have said in the past about the links between the good life, income and institutions.

There was a widespread concern in the seventeenth century Dutch Republic that the country had too much wealth, and was having too jolly a time, for its own good. ‘It too often happens that riches bring self-indulgence, and superfluity of pleasures produces flabbiness as we can see in wealthy regions and cities,’ warned Calvin. The Dutch Republic was the richest country in the World at the time. Nonetheless, this fear of excess might seem strange to observers today given that the average income in the Republic was around $2,100 –approximately the same income as modern-day Lesotho, or somewhere around one thirteenth the average income per capita of the US in 2000.  This is but one example of concerns about an excess of plenty, an embarrassment of riches, that considerably predates modern economic growth.

While adequate food, shelter and health followed by a peaceful death has long been an element of the good life, from early in Western writing it appears that such problems were considered significant for only a minority of people, and more income was not seen as the answer to those problems. Indeed, poverty has long been described in terms of a social condition rather than a lack of animal needs. By the eighteenth century, when annual UK income per capita was somewhere around $2,000, Adam Smith argued that the rich, by employing the poor ‘for their own vain and insatiable desires…make nearly the same distribution of the necessities of life … had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants.’ And necessities for Smith meant ‘not only those things which nature, but those things which the established rules of decency have rendered necessary.’ Indeed, he argued for the creation of a minimum wage set at a level considerably above brute subsistence to ensure that the poor could afford social necessities required to avoid social stigma. For example, in England, one could not go out in public barefoot without embarrassment, so the minimum wage should be set high enough to allow for the purchase of shoes. (In Scotland, where wandering around barefoot was common, the minimum wage could be set lower, argued Smith.)

Partly as a result of the fact that low average incomes were not seen as a barrier to the good life, the idea that all could be happy on this earth considerably predates the Industrial Revolution. Darrin McMahon notes an explosion of works on the subject of achieving earthly happiness in the final two decades of the seventeenth century which suggested a wide range of different approaches (including, on the side of the rock, temperance and, on the side of the hard place, the consumption of ‘wine of English grapes’). By the eighteenth century, Diderot’s Encyclopedia was suggesting all people had a right to happiness.

It was institutional, not economic change that was considered the key to greater happiness. Thomas More’s Utopia is one example. The country was free from the ills of poverty, war and crime. This was not because of considerable advances in economic or technological knowledge, which were limited to certain elements of animal husbandry. It was instead because of a considerably improved social and political model which allowed, amongst other things, for women priests.

Chapter Three of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Utility discusses the role of health in philosophical discussions of the good life. 

Throughout most of the history of thought, philosophers have underplayed the importance of physical health as a constituent of happiness. Aristotle, for example, appears to have believed that the enjoyment of health throughout life depended greatly on one’s exercise of virtue and avoidance of vice—in other words, on the goods of the soul. But we can only deduce his position on the role of health in the good life by looking at his opinion regarding intentional suffering.  Aristotle suggests that a man cannot be happy under torture.  However, a person may be racked with pain through disease no less than through the malevolence of a tyrant, so that in consistency Aristotle should agree that a modicum of good health is a necessary condition for the good life.

As with Aristotle, most philosophers prior to the Industrial Revolution were more concerned with the possibility of human life being threatened by other human beings than by disease. Locke and Hobbes provide two examples of the centrality of such concerns.  But as the period of modern economic growth picked up, so did concern with the impact of progress on levels of health and violence. Thomas Carlyle maintained that the pursuit of utility by capitalists, instead of bringing great happiness to great numbers, had enriched the few by reducing the masses to a condition resembling Hobbes’s original state of nature. ‘Our life is not a mutual helpfulness’ he wrote ‘but rather, cloaked under due laws of war, named ‘fair competition’ and so forth, it is mutual hostility.’ Similarly, and acutely aware of how ill their poorer contemporaries were faring in newly industrialised societies, both Mill and Marx gave a prominent place to welfare in the centre of their notion of happiness.

Chapter Four of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Utility examines the determinants of welfare –the causal factors behind changes in levels of health and violence worldwide. 

Global average life expectancy was 24 years in 1000 AD, 31 years in 1900 and reached 66 years in 1999.  It is widely assumed that, because at any one time ‘wealthier is healthier’, income growth must be the most important causal factor in worldwide health improvements.  In fact, there is plentiful evidence suggesting otherwise.  Income may have a role, but it is not the major factor behind improved levels of global health.  For example, modern Vietnam has the same income per capita as the UK early in the Nineteenth Century.  Yet life expectancy at birth in Vietnam today is 69 years as opposed to 41 years in the UK in the 1800s. And Infant mortality is less than one quarter of the level of the UK two hundred years ago.  Furthermore, life expectancy has seen dramatic improvements even in countries that have seen zero or negative income growth over the past few deacades –Angola, Cuba and Nicaragua all followed this pattern, for example.

Instead, the history of health suggests that technological and institutional change has been key to advance.  The British Industrial Revolution was associate with lower levels of health until massive public water and sanitation projects in the second half of the Nineteenth Century.  Filtration and chlorination then played a large role.  The spread of vaccination has proven vital in wiping out a number of major killers.  Such interventions can be achieved at low (and dropping) levels of income, with the cost of a basic package of primary health care costing less than one percent of GDP even in the poorest countries. It is primarily institutional, rather than financial, barriers that stand in the way of improved health. 

A similar conclusion applies to levels of violence –both warfare and individual acts of murder.  Technology has been a factor beheind the growing power of the state to kill, but institutions rather than incomes appear to be more important in restraining acts of state violence.  Institutional and social change also appears to have played the larger role in increasing the efficacy of state attempts to reduce unsanctioned violence.

Chapter Five of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Utility discusses the components of dignity.  To possess dignity you must have a degree of choice and control over your life, the life that you lead must be a worthwhile one, and it must carry with it a degree of prestige.

To preserve choice, key elements of one’s cultural identity—such as one’s religion or one’s language— should not be forced on one unwillingly from outside. There is greater dignity in marriage to a partner of one’s choice and in working at a job that one has freely contracted to perform.  Dignity is conferred by one’s degree of participation in the political arrangements under which one lives. Regarding job types, the ideal life is one in which there is no clear boundary between work and recreation and which does not require considerable physical or human apparatus to conduct. 

Prestige is not an essential constituent of well-being; but it can undoubtedly contribute to and augment it. Prestige is based on one’s possession of goods that arouse the respect and envy of others. These need not be material goods but they are bound to be positional goods; goods that relate to one’s position in society and which of their nature cannot be universally shared, since—in the words of W.S. Gilbert—when everyone is somebody, then no one’s anybody.

Regarding the market, the great inequalities which its free operation builds up may cause great discontent among those at the lower end of the scale, even if in absolute terms their income is enough to provide adequate welfare. Some philosophers regard inequality of wealth as being in and of itself an affront to human dignity. There is no reason, however, why someone with average wealth should feel degraded simply because some other people are very much richer. If the existence of billionaires is the price to be paid for an economic system that is the most efficient method of reducing absolute poverty, we should not oppose it simply because it may mean that a man with only two yachts will be unhappy because his neighbour possesses three.

Chapter Six of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Utility explores the role that income plays in dignity but also about the broader relationship between economic development and dignity.  Over the long term, for example, measures of civil and political rights have gone up on average worldwide.  So has income.  This has led some to suggest a link between the two.  But you don’t need high incomes to preserve rights:

…many writers throughout history have believed that greatly increased incomes were not required in order to ensure the dignity of choice for peoples.  During the English Civil War, when incomes per capita averaged only a little above $1,000, Lilburn called for a republic with universal suffrage and equality before the law.  John Stuart Mill called for a full range of liberties including women’s equality, and was building on Mary [Wollstonecraft’s] Vindication of the Rights of Women written in the previous century.  Outside of Europe, Akhbar, the Mughal emperor in power at the turn of the Sixteenth century, issued edicts codifying rights including religious freedom from his capital at Agra.  Gandhi felt that India was quite capable of guaranteeing a full range of rights at a point when India’s GDP per capita was around $600.  More recently, a number of developing countries have developed and preserved systems that guarantee widespread civil rights at low levels of average income including Costa Rica, Botswana, South Africa and India itself.

Perhaps because of this, the link between growth in rights and growth in incomes is statistically insignificant, with the causal link from measures of democracy to measures of economic growth turning out to be stronger.  Institutional development which leads to stable democracies that protect rights appears to be a long-term process, perhaps linked in part to colonial histories.  Similar findings pertain to education –when the process of expanding education began is a key determinant of current rollout levels, it is possible to roll out universal access to basic education at very low levels of income, rapid income growth does not appear to speed this process and, if anything, education is more strongly linked to economic performance than vice-verca.

Regarding the quality of jobs, Adam Smith was worried that industrialization would significantly reduce it. "The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations… generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become," he warned.  With the application of assembly-line techniques in services as well as manufacturing, many of today’s jobs are simple and highly repetitive.  And the new economy has done little to banish  mind-numbing employment, or reduce unemployment. 

Finally, looking at the role of income itself as a status measure, efforts to control its impact date back at least as far as sumptuary laws, and the primacy of status over welfare concerns in the chase for money was noted (once again) by Adam Smith, who noted that the pursuit of riches was primarily driven by “regard to the sentiment of mankind… to be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of…" Given income is a status good, it is unsurprising that definitions of an ‘inadequate income’ rise in lock-step with average incomes in a community. As such, in all but the poorest countries, our concern with poverty should center around questions of income distribution, not absolute levels of income.

Chapter Seven of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Utility asks "do people know if they are happy?":

If the most important elements in happiness are welfare and dignity, then individuals are not necessarily the best authorities on their own condition. We may be mistaken about the state of our bodily health,and our acquiescence in our social status may be the result of ignorance and lack of imagination. But surely each person is in the best position to say whether he or she is contented or not?

It is wrong to suppose that each of us has access to a private realm of consciousness, from which we have to think our way out to a public world. Even in our most secret thoughts we are using a language that only makes sense in the context of social activities shared with other beings like ourselves. This applies to emotions, too –the intelligibility of their expression depends upon their behavioural and environmental context. This must be particularly borne in mind when we are considering the role of mental states in the good life, and the value to be placed on self-ascriptions of them.

Contentment is not so much a feeling as a belief or judgement; a judgement that one’s life, considered overall, as a whole, is going well, and that one’s major desires are either satisfied or on the way to satisfaction. It is a judgement on these issues that the pollster wishes to elicit when he asks ‘taking your life as a whole, would you consider yourself very happy, somewhat happy, or not happy at all?’ The first person is certainly in a position of greater authority on the topic of contentment than she is on either the topics of welfare or of dignity. On the other hand, because an expression of contentment is a judgement about a long-term state, a person uttering it does not have the overriding authority that she would have if she were reporting a pain or narrating a dream. It is possible for a claim to contentment to be mistaken, and a person may well come to revise her own past estimates of her contentment. ‘In those days I thought I was happy. Now I know better.’ Or ‘I wish I had realised how happy I was’. Again, if someone gives a positive answer to an inquiry about his contentment, but is regularly irritable, frequently quarrels with family and friends, is constantly trying to change his job, and often exhibits symptoms of psychosomatic illness, it may not be unreasonable to discount his evidence even if given in good faith.

Of course, not all evidence is given in good faith.  Furthermore, a positive or negative response to a standard subjective wellbeing question will depend on imagination, ambition, and character. The problem is compounded when respondents are asked not just whether they are happy or not, but where they would place themselves upon a scale of happiness from one to five, or give themselves marks out of ten for well-being. Accuracy in answering here depends not just on unbiased introspection, but some estimate of an overall standard.

Questions regarding the accuracy of subjective wellbeing polls as a measure of contentment aside, surely the secret of contentment lies somewhere between the frenzied pursuit of every passing want and the total renunciation of desire.

Chapter Eight of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Utility explores subjective wellbeing polls ("taking your life as a whole, would you rate yourself very happy, somewhat happy, or not happy at all?"). Those who say they are happy smile more than the average person, appear happier to friends and family, have higher self-esteem, are comparatively infrequent visitors to psychotherapists and are less likely to commit suicide. They have higher than average levels of activity in the left prefrontal region in the brain,which is rich in receptors for the neurotransmitter dopamine, and they register considerably lower levels of cortisol, an adrenal hormone related to the risk of obesity, hypertension and autoimmune conditions. 

At the same time, subjectively happy people tend (weakly) to share a set of life circumstances: they are more likely to be married, employed, religious and relatively rich.  They are also more likely to be found in countries where people trust the police and their governments. On the other hand, absolute (as opposed to relative) income doesn’t seem to matter much at all.  This finding appears to hold in middle income countries, but not amongst poorer people in poor countries. 

When people face a lack of income sufficient to support the basics of welfare, then, they are less content.  But once income becomes a status marker, the income that matters is relative, not absolute.  And this happens pretty early on in the process of development. For example, real incomes per capita in China increased by a factor of 2.5 between 1994-2005, and this was associated with rapid increases in the ownership of goods—color television ownership increased from 40 to 82 percent of households, telephones from 10 to 63 percent, for example. Incomes started at a very low level, averaging $2,604 per capita. Nonetheless, the percentage of people satisfied with life declined.

The subjective happiness literature suggests that nonpecunary goods such as insurance and leisure are not viewed purely in relative terms, so that we should focus on increasing the supply of these goods rather than income. 

At the same time, there are limits to the policy relevance of subjective wellbeing.  The majority of variation in subjective wellbeing between people appears to be related to genetic factors rather than objective circumstances. Because of this, people lose little long-term contentment even as a result of catastrophic events that we may still want to minimize (accidents that lead to paraplegia, for example).  Furthermore, what little varaition we can correlate with factors such as unemployment and poverty may be related to reverse-causation.  Finally, the finding that having children has no impact on subjective happiness suggests that contentment lacks (even) as a overarching motivational force.

Chapter Nine of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Utility suggests that there are three elements essential to a moral system. There must be a moral community, a set of moral values, and a moral code.  Just as philosophers have disagreed about the nature of happiness, so they have disagreed about each of these elements of morality.  Are animals part of the moral community?  Is the supreme moral value happiness?  Does the code include absolute prohibitions?  On the second and third issues, we disagree with Benthamite philosophy. We believe that there are some actions, such as rape and torture, which should be ruled out without consideration of consequences. Furthermore:

The pursuit of happiness is a right, not a compulsion or an obligation. We disagree with those who maintain that every human being, in every action, pursues his own well-being willy-nilly. We also disagree with those who believe that there is an obligation to pursue one’s own well-being that overrides all other considerations. We believe that it is possible, and may often be admirable, to cease from the quest for one’s own happiness in favour of the pursuit of some altruistic goal.

As to the shape of that moral community, an undifferentiated concern for the general good is implausible. At the same time, it is not clear how sensible it is to defined levels of obligation of care by civic and national boundaries, many of which are accidents of history. 

Finally, at both the national and global level, there can be no simple recipe for the maximization of happiness because of its disparate elements.  Indeed, such maximization is a chimerical goal for moral or political policy. But this does not mean that we cannot seek ever better systems of trade-offs to protect and promote the well-being of the inhabitants of the planet.

Chapter Ten of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Utility discusses policies at the national and international level that might increase welfare, dignity and contentment.  The chapter suggests that:

The ‘self evident truth’ contained in the US Declaration of Independence that all men have the unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is perhaps as good a guide to the role of the state as any. The state has a primary duty to ensure that absolutely necessary to life (peace, shelter, food, sufficient measures for public health), it has a secondary duty to ensure freedom from captivity and extortion as well as sufficient means to be free to take part in society as an equal and, as a tertiary responsibility, it should put in place other conditions that allow all the possibility for achieving individual happiness (broadly defined).

Given the limited role for GDP growth in furthering welfare, dignity and contentment in most countries, the justification for corporate welfare programs including subsidies, tax breaks and defense of private monopoly is even weaker than usually assumed.  Furthermore, actions which redistribute a fixed stock of prestige while creating significant negative externalities should be taxed.  Robert Frank provides the example of large houses sitting on larger plots which increase commute times for all.  A declining marginal utility of income suggests progressive taxation can increase average contentment as well as providing resources for improved levels of welfare and dignity. The general finding that non-rival goods such as insurance and time off may be under-supplied compared to rival goods suggests a further rationale for state sponsorship of insurance mechanisms covering events such as unemployment and health.  Regarding dignity:

Because the evidence is against a strong tradeoff between basic human rights and economic growth or welfare there is no justification for such a tradeoff (even were it a good one to make). Indeed, because what evidence we have points the other way—civil rights improving the state’s provision of welfare—we should encourage development of such rights most particularly in the poorest countriesBecause of the importance of institutions in determining levels welfare, dignity and contentment, the role for international support might appear limited.  Having said that, we broadly accept Pogge’s argument for a globalization of Rawls‘ difference principle (that to the extent social institutions create social or economic inequalities, they should be designed to the maximum benefit to those at the bottom of these inequalities).  Our moral obligation to individuals in the developing world is to promote some basic, sustainable, minimum level of well-being.  his suggests a role for reduced barriers to trade and migration, but also increased, and far better designed, aid flows.