Happiness on Trial — Happiness 10 (C1)

HAPPINESS · LESSON 10

Happiness on Trial

C1 (B2–C2) · 90 minutes

The motion

Task Read the motion. Privately write your number on the scale and one sentence explaining it. Then show your number to the group.

MOTION

Governments should make happiness their main goal.

1

strongly agree

2

mostly agree

3

on the fence

4

mostly disagree

5

strongly disagree

Which government in the world, if any, comes closest to doing this already?

The greatest happiness principle

In A Fragment on Government (1776), the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham wrote that "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong". In 1789 he went further: pleasure and pain could in principle be measured, by their intensity, duration and certainty, and added up. The greatest happiness principle was meant for legislators. A good law is one that increases the total of pleasure over pain.

Pleasure

Desire

Flourishing

How does your life feel?

Are you getting what you want?

Is your life going well?

hedonism

desire theories

objective-list theories

Which of the three answers is Bentham's happiness?

Bentham's state

READING

Gross National Happiness

The phrase Gross National Happiness (GNH) is attributed to Bhutan's Fourth King, Jigme Singye Wangchuck (king from 1972), who is said to have declared it more important than Gross National Product. Bhutanese accounts place this in the 1970s, though no single first occasion is recorded. Bhutan's first written constitution, adopted in 2008, commits the state in Article 9 to "strive to promote those conditions that will enable the pursuit of Gross National Happiness".

The GNH Index, built by the Centre for Bhutan Studies, combines 33 indicators in nine equally weighted domains, from health and living standards to good governance and culture. In the 2022 survey of over 11,000 people, the index stood at 0.781, up from 0.743 in 2010; 48.1% of people counted as "deeply" or "extensively" happy and 6.4% as "unhappy".

READING · CONTINUED

Gross National Happiness

Defenders stress that GNH was never a boast that Bhutanese are happier than others. It is a test of whether policy creates the conditions for a good life.

Critics raise three problems. First, the brand shines abroad while problems remain at home: youth unemployment passed a quarter in 2022, and in the 11 months to May 2023 over 12,000 Bhutanese left for Australia, about 1.5% of the population. Second, an index that asks how seriously people take the national etiquette code, driglam namzha, lets the state define the good life. Third, the Lhotshampa, the

Nepali-speaking minority of the south. A 1988 census there classed people who could not prove residence in 1958 as non-nationals; in 1989 driglam namzha became compulsory and Nepali was dropped from southern schools. After protests in 1990, more than 100,000 people ended up in refugee camps in eastern Nepal. The government has said that many were illegal immigrants or left by choice; refugees, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reported arrests and forced departures. From 2007, over 100,000 were resettled abroad, most in the United States.

READING

Measuring a nation

In November 2010 the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, asked the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to measure national well-being alongside GDP, arguing that GDP alone is an incomplete measure of a country's progress. After a public debate, the ONS added four questions, each answered from 0 to 10, to its Annual Population Survey from April 2011. They are still asked today.

New Zealand went further. In May 2019 its Labour-led government presented what it called the world's first Wellbeing Budget: new spending was tied to five priorities, among them mental health and child wellbeing, with NZ$1.9 billion for mental health services. A 2020 law required every Budget to set wellbeing objectives and the Treasury to report on the state of the nation's wellbeing at least every four years. The opposition said it relabelled ordinary spending; others noted it set few measurable targets. After the 2023 election, the new Finance Minister, Nicola Willis, argued that the Treasury should concentrate on economic and fiscal advice. Her government introduced a bill in 2025 to repeal both duties, and the Public Finance Amendment Act 2026 removed the Treasury's wellbeing report.

What would a government measure?

Task Don't answer these questions: classify them. For each measure, write which of the three answers it mostly captures: P (Pleasure), D (Desire) or F (Flourishing). Then agree which ONE you would make a government's headline figure, and why.

P Pleasure

D Desire

F Flourishing

1. Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays? (ONS, 0–10)

4. Overall, how anxious did you feel yesterday? (ONS, 0–10)

2. Overall, to what extent do you feel that the things you do in your life are worthwhile? (ONS, 0–10)

5. Bhutan's GNH Index: nine domains, from health and education to good governance and culture

3. Overall, how happy did you feel yesterday? (ONS, 0–10)

6. GDP per person

Soma

In Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World (1932), the World State has abolished unhappiness. People are bred in hatcheries for their place in society, conditioned to love it, and given soma, a drug that brings instant calm without a hangover. Near the end, the World Controller, Mustapha Mond, admits the price: great art, unsettling science and religion have all been given up for stability. Soma, he says, is "Christianity without tears". John, the "Savage" raised outside the system, refuses the bargain: "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."

1. Is Huxley's world a failure of happiness, or a success we dislike for other reasons?

2. Which of the three answers does the World State satisfy, and which does it fail?

READING

The paradox of pursuit

In the autumn of 1826, aged twenty, John Stuart Mill sank into a long depression. Looking back in his Autobiography (1873), he drew a lesson: happiness is reached by aiming at something else. "Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so." The best chance, he wrote, is to treat some end outside happiness as the purpose of life. This is often called Mill's paradox.

Psychologists have tested it. Iris Mauss and colleagues (2011) found

that people who value happiness most highly tend to report lower well-being. But Brett Ford and colleagues (2015) found that this depends on culture: among students, valuing happiness predicted lower well-being in the US, none in Germany, and higher well-being in Russia and East Asia, where people more often pursue happiness through other people.

Happiness is also not the same as meaning.

READING · CONTINUED

The paradox of pursuit

In a survey of 397 American adults, Roy Baumeister and colleagues (2013) found that the two overlap strongly, yet happiness went with ease, having needs met and living in the present, while meaning went with giving to others, effort, stress and linking past and future. The authors called the results tentative.

Two critics go further. Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided (2009; UK title Smile or Die) began with the pressure to stay cheerful she met during treatment for breast cancer,

and argued that compulsory positive thinking blames people for bad luck and helped blind business to risk before the 2008 crash. William Davies's The Happiness Industry (2015) traces happiness measurement from Bentham to workplace wellbeing schemes, and argues that it can turn a political problem, such as bad working conditions, into a private one to be managed.

Prepare the debate

Task Each side has 8 minutes. Prepare a 2-minute opening speech with your three best arguments, and a one-sentence reply to the argument you most fear from the other side. Use the ideas below or your own, and name the reading you take them from.

Proposition

Opposition

Task Argue FOR the motion: governments should make happiness their main goal.

Task Argue AGAINST the motion.

Ideas for the Proposition GDP was never meant to measure welfare: Simon Kuznets, who built the first US national income accounts, warned Congress of this in 1934. Measures like the four ONS questions show governments what GDP misses, such as anxiety. Bhutan's Article 9 asks the state to create conditions, not to make anyone happy, which answers Mill's paradox. And if not happiness, what should a government aim at instead, and why is that better?

Ideas for the Opposition Someone must decide what counts, as the debate over driglam namzha and the Lhotshampa shows. A state that maximises Pleasure has every reason to hand out soma. Mill, Ehrenreich and Davies suggest that making happiness a goal can make people feel worse, or blame them for their circumstances. Perhaps a government's proper job is freedom, justice and security, and people's happiness is their own business.

The debate

1

Proposition opening

2 minutes

2

Opposition opening

2 minutes

3

Open floor: anyone may question either side, using the questions below or their own

4 minutes

4

Opposition closing

1 minute

5

Proposition closing

1 minute

6

Vote again on the motion, using the 1–5 scale

1 minute

A. Should a government measure happiness even if it doesn't aim at it?

B. Whose happiness should count most: the average citizen's, or the unhappiest?

C. Would you trust your own government with a happiness target?

D. Is GDP really less of a value judgement than a happiness index?

The six claims again

Task Alone, from memory: write a letter for each claim, and which answer it is mostly about (Pleasure, Desire or Flourishing). In pairs: compare, then choose the claim you have changed your mind about most since Lesson 1, and say what changed it.

S Strong

M Mixed

W Weak

F Failed

1. Money can't buy happiness.

4. Spending money on other people makes you happier than spending it on yourself.

2. Lottery winners end up no happier than before.

5. Close relationships matter more for happiness than anything else.

3. About 40% of your happiness is under your control.

6. Social media has made teenagers unhappier.

What the evidence says

1. Money can't buy happiness.

S Strong

M Mixed

W Weak

F Failed

F. Life ratings rise steadily with income, and for most people so do daily feelings. Money matters most to the Desire answer, with diminishing returns.

2. Lottery winners end up no happier than before.

S Strong

M Mixed

W Weak

F Failed

F. The famous 1978 study had 22 winners. Large later studies, including thousands of Swedish winners, found life satisfaction stayed higher for over a decade.

3. About 40% of your happiness is under your control.

S Strong

M Mixed

W Weak

F Failed

F. The 40% came from a pie chart that its critics, and later its authors, found could not be supported. Deliberate activities help a little; nobody knows how much.

What the evidence says

4. Spending money on other people makes you happier than spending it on yourself.

S Strong

M Mixed

W Weak

F Failed

M. The original 2008 experiment was small. Large replications find a real effect, but smaller than first reported, and dependent on how it is tested.

5. Close relationships matter more for happiness than anything else.

S Strong

M Mixed

W Weak

F Failed

M. That relationships matter a great deal is strong. "More than anything else" goes beyond mostly correlational evidence.

6. Social media has made teenagers unhappier.

S Strong

M Mixed

W Weak

F Failed

M. Teenage distress has risen in several countries, but studies disagree sharply about how much social media is the cause.

Back to the machine

In Lesson 1 you met Robert Nozick's experience machine (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 1974): plug in for life, and it gives you any experiences you choose, without your knowing they aren't real. Nozick expected most people to refuse. In 2010 Felipe De Brigard reversed the story: you are already in the machine; do you unplug? Told nothing about their real lives, 54% of his students chose to unplug; told their real life was in a maximum-security prison, only 13% did.

1. Has anything in this module changed your Lesson 1 answer?

2. If a government could offer the machine free to every citizen, should it? Should it ban it?

3. Is soma simply the machine in pill form?

4. Which of the three answers does the machine fail, if any?

Back to the machine

Task Choose one prompt and write privately. Nobody will read what you write. Sharing afterwards is optional.

Prompt 1

What is one thing that makes a life go well that no government measure could capture?

Pleasure

Desire

Flourishing

How does your life feel?

Are you getting what you want?

Is your life going well?

hedonism

desire theories

objective-list theories

Prompt 2 (lighter)

Which idea from this module do you expect to remember in a year's time, and why?

The experience machine

The end of the module

For the next claim about happiness you meet, ask two questions: which happiness, and how good is the evidence?

Pleasure

It might be a headline, an advert, a government report or a friend's advice. Name the answer it is really about (Pleasure, Desire or Flourishing), then grade it S, M, W or F, and notice how often a confident claim earns no better than an M.

Desire

Flourishing

Module complete: Happiness: Science and Philosophy, ten lessons, from the experience machine to the debate on the state.

TEACHER'S REFERENCE · SKIP OR DELETE BEFORE CLASS

Answer key (1)

THE GREATEST HAPPINESS PRINCIPLE

Pleasure. Bentham's happiness is the balance of pleasure over pain: hedonism applied to law.

WHAT WOULD A GOVERNMENT MEASURE? suggested; 5 and 6 are there to be argued over

1 D. Life satisfaction is a judgement about how life measures up to what you want; the module's usual reading puts a 0–10 life rating closest to Desire.

2 F. Asking whether what you do is worthwhile reaches towards Flourishing, though it is still the person's own judgement, so some will argue D.

3 P. Yesterday's happiness is a report of feeling.

4 P. Yesterday's anxiety is a report of feeling, measured from the other side.

5 F, mostly. Most of its nine domains are objective-list items (health, education, governance, community, culture); its psychological well-being domain includes life satisfaction and emotions, so a case can be made that it touches all three.

6 None directly. GDP measures output, not well-being. Some will argue it is a rough proxy for Desire (the means to get what you want); Kuznets himself warned against reading welfare from it.

SOMA

Question 2: the World State satisfies Pleasure fully. It also satisfies Desire, but only by manufacturing the desires, which is the classic objection to desire theories. It fails Flourishing: no art, no free inquiry, no real relationships or achievement. Question 1 is open.

THE SIX CLAIMS AGAIN / WHAT THE EVIDENCE SAYS

The same grades as the reveal slides of Lessons 6–9, with the evidence behind each.

TEACHER'S REFERENCE · SKIP OR DELETE BEFORE CLASS

Answer key (2)

1 F. Money can't buy happiness. Kahneman and Deaton (2010, PNAS; over 450,000 US Gallup responses) found life evaluation rises steadily with log income, while emotional well-being seemed to level off around $75,000. Killingsworth, Kahneman and Mellers (2023, PNAS), an adversarial collaboration, found that for most people feelings keep rising with income too; the plateau holds only for the least happy 20%, around $100,000. Lindqvist, Östling and Cesarini (2020, Review of Economic Studies) give causal evidence: large lottery wins raised life satisfaction for over a decade. What survives of the claim: diminishing returns, and smaller effects on Pleasure than on Desire. Answer: mostly Desire (life evaluation), partly Pleasure.

2 F. Lottery winners end up no happier than before. Brickman, Coates and Janoff-Bulman (1978, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) compared 22 major lottery winners with 22 controls and 29 people with paralysis after accidents; the winners were not significantly happier. The samples were tiny. Gardner and Oswald (2007, Journal of Health Economics; British Household Panel Survey) found better mental health two years after medium wins; Lindqvist, Östling and Cesarini (2020) found sustained rises in life satisfaction among Swedish winners 5 to 22 years later, though much smaller effects on happiness and mental health. Answer: Desire (life satisfaction) more than Pleasure.

TEACHER'S REFERENCE · SKIP OR DELETE BEFORE CLASS

Answer key (3)

3 F. About 40% of your happiness is under your control. The figure comes from the "happiness pie" of Lyubomirsky, Sheldon and Schkade (2005, Review of General Psychology): 50% genes, 10% circumstances, 40% intentional activity. Brown and Rohrer (2020, Journal of Happiness Studies) showed the decomposition has little empirical support, and that population variance figures say nothing about how far one person can change. Sheldon and Lyubomirsky (2021, Journal of Positive Psychology) themselves revisited the pie chart and accepted that it needed revising. Interventions do help a little, but White, Uttl and Holder (2019, PLoS ONE) found the effects much smaller than earlier meta-analyses reported. Answer: mostly Desire (life satisfaction scales).

4 M. Spending on others makes you happier than spending on yourself. Dunn, Aknin and Norton (2008, Science) gave 46 people $5 or $20 to spend on themselves or others; the prosocial spenders were happier that evening. Aknin and colleagues (2013, JPSP) found the correlation in 136 countries. The registered replications by Aknin, Dunn, Proulx, Lok and Norton (2020, JPSP) found the effect is real but smaller than first reported and depends on method; the FORRT replication atlas records the outcome as mixed. Answer: Pleasure (mood after spending).

TEACHER'S REFERENCE · SKIP OR DELETE BEFORE CLASS

Answer key (4)

5 M. Close relationships matter more than anything else. Strong evidence that relationships matter: Diener and Seligman (2002, Psychological Science) found all of the happiest 10% of 222 students had strong social relationships (necessary, not sufficient); Holt-Lunstad, Smith and Layton (2010, PLoS Medicine; 148 studies) linked strong social ties to about 50% higher odds of survival; the Harvard Study of Adult Development has followed its original 724 men since 1938. But "more than anything else" overreaches: the evidence is mostly correlational, causation runs both ways, and health, work and income also predict strongly. Answer: all three, measured mostly through life satisfaction (Desire).

6 M. Social media has made teenagers unhappier. For: Haidt (The Anxious Generation, 2024) and Twenge argue a causal link; Braghieri, Levy and Makarin (2022, American Economic Review) found that Facebook's staggered arrival at US colleges worsened students' mental health. Against: Orben and Przybylski (2019, Nature Human Behaviour; three datasets, 355,358 adolescents) found digital technology use explained at most 0.4% of the variation in well-being, and Odgers (2024, Nature) argued Haidt's book outruns the evidence. Answer: mostly Pleasure-side measures (symptoms of depression and anxiety), plus life satisfaction.