What Is Happiness? — Happiness 1 (C1)

HAPPINESS · LESSON 1

What Is Happiness?

C1 (B2–C2) · 90 minutes

The experience machine

In 1974 the philosopher Robert Nozick imagined a machine that could give you any experiences you chose. Scientists would stimulate your brain so that you felt you were writing a great novel, making a close friend or reading a fascinating book. In fact you would be floating in a tank, wired to the machine. Once inside, you would not know it: everything would seem completely real. You choose the programme before you plug in.

Task Alone: score each statement on the 1–5 scale and write your numbers down. Keep them for later. In pairs: compare. Find the statement where your scores differ most, and explain your number to each other.

1

strongly agree

2

mostly agree

3

on the fence

4

mostly disagree

5

strongly disagree

1. I would plug in for the rest of my life.

2. I would plug in for one year, then come out.

3. A person in the machine has a happy life.

4. A person in the machine has a good life.

Lucky or happy?

Task In pairs: what is the word for "happy" in your language? Does it also mean lucky, blessed or fortunate? Is it a word for a feeling, or for a life?

The English word happy grows from hap, an old word for chance, which survives in perhaps and mishap. English is not alone. German Glück means both happiness and luck. French bonheur joins bon, good, to heur, from the Latin augurium, an omen. The Greek eudaimonia means, literally, having a good guardian spirit.

In 2013 the psychologist Shigehiro Oishi and three colleagues compared dictionary definitions of happiness from 30 nations. In 24 of them, happiness was defined partly as good luck or good fortune. They also traced American English over time. Webster's dictionaries from 1850 to 1910 gave good luck as the main meaning; by the 1961 edition, that sense was marked as archaic. Happiness had become a pleasant inner feeling: something you have, not something that happens to you.

READING

Three answers

What makes a life go well for the person living it? Philosophers call this well-being. In an appendix to Reasons and Persons (1984), Derek Parfit sorted the answers into three families. This course calls them the three answers.

Pleasure. On hedonism, a life goes well to the extent that it feels good: the more pleasure and the less pain, the better. The view is simple, and it explains why suffering matters. Its classic problem is Nozick's experience machine (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 1974). If only feelings count, plugging

in should be the best choice anyone could make. Nozick expected most people to refuse, because we want to actually do things, to be a certain kind of person, and to be in contact with reality, not a simulation of it.

Desire. On desire theories, a life goes well when you get what you want, whether or not it feels good. This explains what is missing in the machine: you wanted real friends, not the experience of them. But what if someone wants something strange?

READING · CONTINUED

Three answers

John Rawls (A Theory of Justice, 1971) imagined a gifted mathematician whose only wish is to count blades of grass in parks and lawns. Parfit added that the man knows he could do important mathematics instead. If getting what you want is all that matters, his life is going as well as it could.

Flourishing. On objective-list theories, some things are good for you whether you want them or not. Parfit's sample list includes moral goodness, knowledge, developing your

abilities and the awareness of true beauty; the bad things include being betrayed or deceived. The classic objection is paternalism, or elitism: who writes the list, and is a life really going well for someone who has everything on it but enjoys none of it?

Parfit did not choose between them. He ended by suggesting that each side had seen only half of the truth.

Three answers

Three answers to one question: what makes a life go well for the person living it?

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

Any claim about happiness

Four lives (lives 1–2)

Task Groups of 3 or 4. Read lives 1–4. For each life, give a score from 0 to 10 under each answer (Pleasure, Desire, Flourishing), where 10 means the life is going as well as a life could. Then rank the four lives from 1 (best off) to 4 and agree one reason for your top choice.

1. The grass-counter Tomasz is a brilliant mathematician. A few hours a week he solves hard problems for engineering firms, which pays his rent. The rest of the time he counts blades of grass in parks and on lawns, and records the totals in notebooks. He knows he could make important discoveries instead. Counting grass is what he wants most, and he is calm and contented.

2. The surgeon Dr Adaeze Okafor is a celebrated heart surgeon. She has saved thousands of lives, trained a generation of younger doctors and is admired across her profession. She chose this career and would choose it again. But most days she feels anxious and exhausted, and she rarely enjoys anything, at work or at home.

Four lives (lives 3–4)

3. The businessman Viktor dies contented at 70. He believes his wife loves him, his children adore him, his town respects him and the company he founded is thriving. In fact his wife was unfaithful, his children were kind to him only for his money, the town flattered him for his donations, and his business partner was stealing from the company, which will soon go bankrupt. He never found out.

4. The machine Mei plugged into the experience machine at 25. Since then she has lived, as far as she can tell, a wonderful life: she writes novels that people love, she has a happy marriage and she travels the world. In reality she is floating in a tank. She does not know, and she will stay there until she dies.

Life

Pleasure

(0–10)

Desire

(0–10)

Flourishing

(0–10)

Rank

(1–4)

1. The grass-counter

2. The surgeon

3. The businessman

4. The machine

READING

Measuring a feeling

Psychologists cannot observe happiness directly, so they ask about it, in two main ways.

The first catches feelings as they happen. In experience sampling, people are contacted at random moments and asked how they feel right now. In 2010 Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert of Harvard did this with an iPhone app. They analysed reports from 2,250 adults, about three-quarters of them in the United States, who rated their mood from very bad (0) to very good (100), said what they were doing and said whether their mind was on it. Minds wandered in 46.9% of the samples, and people were less happy when their minds wandered, even to pleasant topics. What people were thinking predicted their mood better than what they were doing. The paper's title summed it up: "A wandering mind is an unhappy mind." The direction of cause is still argued: a 2013 study by Emma Poerio and colleagues found that low mood tended to come before mind-wandering, not after it.

The second asks people to step back and judge.

READING · MEASURING A FEELING · CONTINUED

The Cantril ladder, devised by the psychologist Hadley Cantril in the 1960s, asks people to imagine a ladder with steps from 0, the worst possible life for them, to 10, the best possible life, and to say which step they stand on now. This life evaluation is the measure behind the World Happiness Report, whose 2026 edition placed Finland first for the ninth year in a row.

The two measures can disagree. Mood follows the moment: the task, the company, where your attention is. A ladder score is a judgement, made by comparing a life with what you hoped for, and often with the lives around you. A hard year of study or of caring for someone may lower a person's mood on most days and still raise their ladder score. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman described the contrast as one between an experiencing self, which lives through the moments, and a remembering self, which keeps score.

Experience sampling

Cantril ladder

best possible life for you

How are you feeling right now?

10

9

8

7

6

5

0

100

4

3

very bad

very good

2

1

0

worst possible life for you

Which number counts?

Task Discuss as many questions as you can. Then choose the one you disagreed about most, and be ready to give both sides in one sentence each.

1. If someone's mood and ladder score disagreed, which would you trust more about their life?

2. Is a happy moment worth less if nobody, including you, will remember it?

3. Should governments aim to raise average mood, average ladder scores, or neither?

4. Which of the three answers does the ladder capture? Could any number capture Flourishing?

5. People rate their lives partly by comparing themselves with their neighbours. Is this true where you live?

6. Would you rather have mostly good days, or a life you would later rate 9 out of 10?

Six claims about happiness

Task Groups of 3 or 4. For each claim, write the letter for what you expect the evidence to show. Then choose two claims and say which happiness each one is about: a feeling, getting what you want, or a life going well.

S Strong

M Mixed

W Weak

F Failed

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

1. Money can't buy happiness.

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.

Private reflection

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

Prompt 1

Think of someone you know, or a character from a book or film, whose life seemed happy under one answer but not another. Which answer fits them best, and which leaves them out?

Prompt 2 (lighter)

Think of an ordinary activity that many people love, such as cooking for friends or a long walk. Is it good for them under Pleasure, Desire or Flourishing? Could it count under all three?

Back to the machine

Task Score the four statements again on the 1–5 scale. Has any of your numbers moved? Why?

1

strongly agree

2

mostly agree

3

on the fence

4

mostly disagree

5

strongly disagree

1. I would plug in for the rest of my life.

2. I would plug in for one year, then come out.

3. A person in the machine has a happy life.

4. A person in the machine has a good life.

Before Lesson 2

This week, ask two people what "happy" means to them, and note which of the three answers they give.

Pleasure

Anyone will do: a friend, a colleague, a grandparent, a child. Listen for whether they describe a feeling, getting what they want, or a life going well, and whether they mention luck.

Desire

Flourishing

Next lesson: Ancient Recipes: Epicurus and the Stoics. Two ancient schools offered a recipe for a happy life: one built on pleasure, the other on virtue alone.

TEACHER'S REFERENCE · SKIP OR DELETE BEFORE CLASS

Answer key (1)

FOUR LIVES teacher notes; there is no correct ranking, and the point is that every ranking takes a side

1 The grass-counter. Pleasure: high, he is contented. Desire: high, and this is the trouble. He knows the alternatives and still wants this, so a desire theory must say his life is going as well as it can. This is how Parfit used Rawls' case against desire theories. Flourishing: low on most lists (knowledge and developed abilities wasted), though some lists include autonomy, and he chose freely. Desire theorists tend to put him first; most other groups don't.

2 The surgeon. Pleasure: low. Desire: arguable. She has the career she wanted, but she may also want to enjoy her life, and doesn't. Flourishing: high (achievement, developed abilities, moral goodness, the good she does). She is the test case for paternalism: is it right to tell someone her life is going well when it feels bad to her? Parfit's closing suggestion, that what is good is both doing valuable things and wanting and enjoying them, would rate her life as falling short.

3 The businessman. Pleasure: high. His experiences are exactly those of a man who really was loved and respected, so hedonism must rate his life as highly as that man's. Desire: low. He wanted to be loved, respected and successful, not just to believe it, and those desires were not fulfilled, even though he never knew. Flourishing: low; being betrayed and deceived are on Parfit's list of bad things. Kagan ("Me and My Life", 1994, building on an example by Thomas Nagel) uses the case against any theory on which only states of mind count: most people find it hard to believe this life went as well as a life could.

TEACHER'S REFERENCE · SKIP OR DELETE BEFORE CLASS

Answer key (2)

4 The machine. Pleasure: very high, by design. Desire: low for any desire about the real world (real readers, a real marriage), high only if she wanted nothing but experiences. Flourishing: low; no real achievement, relationships or knowledge. Nozick: someone floating in a tank is an "indeterminate blob".

• Pattern to draw out: hedonism ranks lives 3 and 4 near the top; a desire theory ranks life 1 first; an objective list ranks life 2 first. When groups disagree about the ranking, they usually disagree about which answer is right.

SIX CLAIMS ABOUT HAPPINESS no grades today; the lesson that tests each claim reveals it, and Lesson 10 reviews all six

1 Money can't buy happiness: Lesson 6.

2 Lottery winners end up no happier than before: Lesson 7.

3 About 40% of your happiness is under your control: Lesson 9.

4 Spending money on other people makes you happier than spending it on yourself: Lesson 6.

5 Close relationships matter more for happiness than anything else: Lesson 8.

6 Social media has made teenagers unhappier: Lesson 8.