Are humans too bad to act justly?

Gornick has written a review, marked by genuine curiosity, of Sandel’s new book, Justice: What’s The Right Thing To Do? The book tours through the philosophical history of justice from the ancients to Rawls and beyond. Gornick, though, admits that she is a newcomer to the subject, and considers a general puzzle: how does all this theory square with the imperfection of the real world? More precisely, Gornick observes that for all the attempts that religious leaders and scholars have made to codify the norms of justice, real people tend to break the rules consistently.  She has her finger on an important problem in political philosophy and ethics, and one that often widens the gap between the theory of justice and practical matters like living a just life and creating a just community. The problem is moral psychology.

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The Experts of Happiness

A Taoist master once spoke to me disdainfully of those who fill their lives with others’ large, faraway problems while leaving their own life unexamined. So, even as I remain alert to every update from Iran, I invite you to join me on my current meditation.

Several weeks ago I watched Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert’s TED Talk on why we are happy. Presenting some of his experiments, he argues that what makes us happy is not getting what we want. As we should see from the astonishing fact that an equal 50% of both paraplegics and lottery winners are happy several months after their tragedy or day of fortune, we exaggerate the impact events will have on our lives and we really “synthesize” happiness – find a way to be happy with what we have. In fact, what really causes unhappiness is not failing to achieve our desires, but uncertainty. Recently Gilbert used this finding to explain that many Americans are anxious and unhappy during this recession not due to decreasing income, but due to uncertainty about the future. Imagine Camus’s Mersault, content and happy in the routine of his life in prison, realizing the richness of life.

I remain skeptical. While I see this manifested in my own experience, the dark side of this idea is all too reminiscent of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor: the priest responsible for the Spanish Inquisition who believes that in relieving men of their freedom he is rectifying the mistake Jesus made in giving this terrifying, unwanted freedom to man in the first place.

What Gilbert’s theory needs is to be fit into a holistic whole. And he need only look across campus to psychiatrist George Vaillant’s longitudinal study of the physical and mental well-being of a disparate group of 268 Harvard men, classes of ’42 to ’44, composed of those who “literally fell down drunk and died,” aged full of regrets, had no regrets… and John F. Kennedy. Studying their lives for nearly eighty years, he has seen how the pieces of emotions fit together. In contrast to Gilbert’s inward focus, Vaillant’s outlook makes room for synthesizing happiness, but concludes, “The only things that really matter in life are your relationships to other people” and “Happiness is love. Full stop.”

Now I called this a meditation, and this is why: At spring’s onset, I suffered a setback, finding what had been a path of happiness ended abruptly. As I often do, I dealt with the blow by tying up my sneakers and pounding out some miles up and down the hills above campus. Now this painful episode no longer grips me the way it once did, when I felt the sun I revolved around was gone. Gilbert could easily explain this – a part of my life closed, so I synthesized happiness out of what I have: sharing an apartment with friends in sunny California (not difficult to do). But Vaillant would see more. I have since made that episode the object of darkly ironic jokes and, as you can easily see in this post, of careful thought and consideration. He would see my humor and intellectualization as two forms of “adaptations” or “defense mechanisms” in response to pain. These defense mechanisms allow us to shape our reality in response to painful realities: I changed a past setback into humor and intellectual material to be happy in the present.

One can easily read into defense mechanisms the idea of synthesizing happiness. But for Vaillant, they are not the whole story. Beyond its synthesis, important objective factors for our happiness exist ranging from the profound (stable marriage) to more banal (some regular exercise). Suffering a setback, I found a way to transfigure the pain and be happy, but that setback is not arbitrary, and depending on its nature, could still be a key to my happiness. I find it hard to say whether that is unfortunate, or a relief.

Looking at these two experts of happiness, I find myself paradoxically surprised and deeply resonating with the assertions of both: that happiness comes from within, that we manufacture the happiness we are constantly chasing, and that happiness comes from outside us, that “the only things that really matter in life are your relationships to other people… Happiness is love. Full stop.” So I challenge you to ask yourself the simplest, most obvious question that we always fail to ask: what makes you happy and why? And of course, don’t forget to ask whether happiness is really the final goal.