Some experimental philosophy on Happiness

Hey you all,

here’s a link to a blog post of mine on the Experimental Philosophy blog that describes experiments that I think suggest that the folk concept of happiness is a normative one:

Moral Judgments and Happiness

According to the hypothesis I am testing in my experiments, if the folk thinks that somebody is living a bad life—perhaps by being a morally bad person—then they are unlikely to, or will not, attribute happiness to this person even if they believe that she is in the kinds of mental states which we usually associate with happiness.

Most psychological research on happiness uses definitions of happiness that are wholly non-evaluative. This means that, when some psychologist judges that somebody is happy, the folk might not. That, I think, is an interesting result. Why? Because it means, I think, that when we give a philosophical account of happiness, then this will be a normative project at least in the following respect: we will have to give reasons for favoring either the normative concept of happiness used by the folk or the non-normative one used by psychologists and many philosophers. (That is, if, as I think, the kinds of experiments that I’ve been running show that the folk are using a partly normative concept of happiness. Again, see the link for descriptions of these experiments.)

sentimentalism and fit

Sentimentalism is an account about the meaning of some evaluative terms in natural language. In general, the sentimentalist about some evaluative term E proposes to analyze E in terms of the notion of fittingness of some emotion. So, for example, ‘x is shameful’ gets analyzed as ‘it is fitting to feel shame at x‘. Fittingness in turn gets analyzed in terms of the truth of the representational content of the relevant emotion. That is to say: shame at x is fitting just in case x-directed shame represents x truthfully. (And, in general, an emotion with representational content p is fitting just in case p.)

The sentimentalist analysis of ’shameful’ avoids making a mistake that other accounts of the meaning of ’shameful’ have made. Say that we propose to analyze ‘x is shameful’ as ‘x’s bearer ought to / should be ashamed of x‘. This is clearly wrong. It is possible that John should be ashamed of smoking — say Osama will blow up India unless John’s ashamed of smoking — even though his smoking is isn’t itself shameful.

This is all seems pretty much correct. Still, the following sentences sound pretty odd to me.

Identity and agency

1. Sam, is there any way to get a log-in thingy on this page rather than having to go to the wordpress home page?

2. Scarily, I woke up this morning and the first thing I thought of was something that might help me solve a problem in my dissertation. I’m wondering whether this idea can fly.

How far can I go with a distinction between “identity” and “agency”? I mean ‘identity’ in the sense of who you live your life as (not yet sure if this is the best formulation for my purposes)—intended to be something related to but not completely conceptually identified with the usual metaphysical sense of personal identity. And I mean ‘agency’ as the thing the action theorists are after. These two things have in common the possibility of describing “where the agent really is”, but I think this phrase is ambiguous and I’m exploring whether it can be disambiguated.

Reasons ascriptions

(Note: this post is in large part a reprint of a couple posts I wrote on the subject a few weeks back on my own blog.)

1. The case

I take it that most people are familiar with what Williams’ petrol case (”petrol” cuz he was British lol), so my exposition will be cursory. Wilfrid wants a gin and tonic and has good epistemic reason to believe that the glass of clear liquid on the counter is a gin and tonic. Actually, though, it’s a glass of petrol. Consider the following two sentences:

(1) Wilfrid has reason to drink what’s in the glass.

(2) Wilfrid has reason to drink the petrol.

My intuition in the case is that (1) is true while (2) is false. In the comments to my first post on this topic, Pitt grad student Shawn Standefer offered the following diagnosis: