I-CUP

Jacob,

As an aside, I know what you mean when you say that you don't even know if you are happy now. For the longest time I couldn't figure out what people meant when they referred to "happiness" in a general way. I know what it means in a specific case but not the general. I know what it means to be happy you got an A on the exam but not what the Dali Lama means when he writes a book called "The Art of Happiness".

To me, happiness is a feeling you get when things are going right. I think the word actually refers to several classes of feelings, and absence of feelings. In one case I think it is associated with reward feedback chemicals released by certain neurons when you have behaved in such a way that certain neural paths need reinforcement. That feeling when you got the right answer. In some cases a release of chemicals that will cause you to be more likely to repeat the behavior, and in other cases more likely to remember a solution to a problem. The opposite is true in some cases of unhappiness. In that case "punishment" chemicals are released which cause neurons in your brain to avoid firing under the same circumstances in the future, or to remember that this is behavior to avoid.

Unhappiness feelings can be classified into groups such as shame, grief, disappointment, embarassment, etc. Each of which is colored by the type of corrective behavior it elicits, and on which part of the brain. Perhaps these feel slightly different to us depending on which part of the brain or which chemicals are involved.

It could be that the same chemical that triggers a shame feeling when operating on the part of our brain that processes moral issues feels different when operating in the part of the brain that deals with learning. Perhaps it feels different because there are analog but slightly different chemicals operating in both cases. In the latter case, if the chemicals bleed into other areas of the brain in small quantities, it might be that a extra sensitive area of the brain could monitor overall states by sniffing them out.

I know that certain of these feelings lead me to be more introspective of how to repeat the experience or avoid it.

In any case, I don't think "happiness" in general is someone should desire to be in if things are going bad. I think if a guy like the Dali Lama is sitting in a concentration camp and is happy about it then he's got more serious problems than the guy who's a bit upset.

I don't really care either way as long as nobody tries to use it to justify forcible redistribution.

You should look at Condorcet's method some time, since it's about the most accurate voting system ever devised. Being accurate, it also shares one of the flaws of interpersonal utility comparisons: it can exhibit cycles!

So even if you can make probabilistic comparisons between two individuals, when you start getting into larger groups, your results become more and more meaningless.

Forgive me if I go over already well-trodden turf, but I skipped all the other posts on this topic.

There is an important difference between measuring a mouse pad and measuring happiness. With the mousepad, all measurers use the same method. They hold the mousepad and ruler together and line up the little tick marks with the edge. On the other hand, when I measure YOUR happiness I rely on external cues such as facial expression, words, and body language. When I measure MY happiness, I rely on my internal subjective emotion. Our perceptions of other people's happiness and our perception of our own are two completely different experiences.

It is quite possible for a person to act OK and be upset on the inside, oblivious to onlookers. I'd like to see a mousepad fake that it's 12 inches when it's really 8. One reason why we ask people "How are you?" is because it's hard to tell based on anything other than self-reported opinion.

Heck, I can't even tell if I'M happy right now.

Perhaps a case similar to yours could be made for measuring qualitative differences in happiness across people (e.g. THIS person is happy and THAT person is sad). However, the quantitative measure of happiness strikes me as a little absurd.

The latter objection seems to be merely of the vein that there are obstacles to measuring utility, but I won't deny that and am not particularly interested in discussing it anyway.

The first objection, that of the difference between measuring one's inside experiences and others' experiences would seem at most to make the comparison of me and you problematic, but leave open the possibility of comparing you and someone else.

But I don't think it even shows that much. Imagine two people, one inside the boat and one on shore watching it. Certainly the experience each has is going to be different. Nonetheless, they can both tell when the boat isn't moving, and when it's zooming by.

Besides, if our lack of knowing ourselves from the outside is a real obstacle, then simply carry around a mirror with you---then you can experience yourself as others do, and peg your emotions accordingly.

As to people measuring utility in different ways---that's quite right, but using different ways of measuring to disprove the possibility of measurement would also, considering some rulers have centimeters and some have inches, disprove the possibility of measuring length just as easily.

Hilarious. Thankew.

I’m going to express my opinion that those who deny this are making an extraordinarily silly claim (and I do not express such an opinion lightly).

Well, of course it is an extraordinarily silly claim, if you get to redefine the terms so as to make it silly.

Here's an extraordinary silly claim: if you drop an egg from several feet onto hard concrete, the egg will probably break.

Why is that extraordinarily silly? Because I am taking "egg" to mean "basketball". Obviously, basketballs do not break, but bounce. QED.

Scott,

Second, we’ve got to flesh out some definitions here, primarily, what is “utility?” Some designate it as the fulfillment of one’s desires. “Efficiency” in the economic sense seems to be a variant of this idea, albeit within a fairly static paradigm of property rights....

Having read storied authors even less than you have, my first stop is the dictionary. There I find that the first definition of 'utility' is 'usefulness', which happens to agree with my uninformed intuition. Slaves may have utility, free men do not unless they so choose.

A log has an objective (and conceivably measureable) utility in producing heat when burned in a fireplace.

However, this is independent of any human. The economic value of a log to an individual is its marginal utility or usefulness in being a means used to achieve a particular subjective end, i.e. being sufficiently warm.

Humans start by subjectively ranking ends or goals. Through action and exchange individuals attempt to achieve as many of their highest ranked ends or goals as possible, given the means available for either direct use or exchange.

I was under the impression the question of measurability came up with regard to the marginal utility of a means. Since no two people will ever have the same array of unsatisfied ranked subjective ends, there is no possibility of measurement, even ignoring the fact of diminishing marginal utility with the increased quantity of a means possessed.

Regards, Don

Happiness is not the same as utility. Utility is “preference among choices", taking into account the large and conflicting set of goals and time horizons each individual has.

But even if we take immediate happiness as the universal goal, you can’t validly make the comparisons you want unless you come up with conversion factors among individuals and among different expressed levels of happiness.

Let’s try a different analogy of comparable things. How long does it take to learn algebra? At first glance, it seems measurable, and people might even think you were silly if you claim it not to be possible to validly compare the answers for different people. But then you have to ask what is actually measurable here? You can’t test for understanding, you can only test for specific applications of knowledge. And then you have to account for people who take more time, but learn more theory. And that the answer changes in an untestable way (since any individual can only learn it once) as people age. And it depends on what they learned before - does learning to understand language count as part of learning algebra? And we haven’t even touched on the fact that measurement of time even for objective events doesn’t work without specifying velocity and other physical-relativistic (as opposed to personal-relativistic) data.

It’s a seductive, but fundamentally incorrect, measurement. Same for utility (or for happiness). It appears comparable, but it turns out that every example of such measurement contains a bunch of assumptions, usually unstated, which have big gaping exceptions that add up to a useless mismash of made-up estimates.

The burning questions for believers in utility comparison are:
1) What are you really measuring? As far as I know, there’s no happiness-o-meter, and different people express happiness differently, sometimes to the point I’d call self-deception. I do not disagree that there are measurements of phenomena which are comparable, I disagree that any of them are all that close to “utility".

2) What conversion factors do you use for people with different “models of happiness", for want of a better phrase?
2a) someone who appears unhappy most of the time vs someone who appears to have a wide range of happiness states.
2b) someone who appears to feel unhappiness very strongly, but only mild happiness vs someone with a more normal (in the bell curve sense) distribution of measurements.
2c) someone who has preferences that appear to make them unhappy vs someone who is more effective at maximizing their happiness.

1 and 2 repeated in a practical quiz) If a smoker and a diabetic have only $3 between them, should they buy the bag of gummi bears or the pack of smokes?

Oh, and 3) If you’re not justifying coercive behavior based on this comparison, what ARE you doing? Why do you need to claim this comparison to be objective truth rather than just your own personal model that informs your own personal decisions?

Suppose there were some happy imbecile and some tortured genius and I was in a position to decide which of them died and which of them lived (and if I did nothing, both would die).

I would probably choose to save the tortured genius, even though his level of happiness was lower. Why would I do that? Well, the obvious, and empty (because tautological) answer would be that, given a choice, I preferred that the tortured genius lived rather than the happy imbecile.

How does that square with utilitarianism?

Scott,

It appears that you have made Tom Anger happy. I don't even have to see his facial expression. Read your article yourself then answer this question "Do you find the same "happyness utility" from reading your own article?"

Economic utility has nothing to do with happiness. Even if it did happiness is so ill defined and subjective that it too is not comparable. Imagine the scenario of fifty pirates stranded on a island with a beautiful nubile sixteen year old nun. I am sure it would make the pirates quite happy to ravish the nun. Likewise I am also sure that the girl would be quite unhappy with it. Likewise the pirates would be quite unhappy to go without sex for the duration, and the nun happy to reserve her body for Christ. How do you do the math?

Can utility be approximated by dollars you ask. Well think about this. Can we use money as a proxy happiness if the pirates happen to have their booty with them? That is, if the going rate for a prostitute is one daubloon a session and the nun would normally earn one daubloon a month in her current occupation can we do the math and say that the happiness index is multiplied by a factor of 150 if she is forced to have sex with all the pirates daily?

Does 1 unit of happy - 1 unit of sad = neutral? I don't think so. That doesn't work interpersonally and furthermore it doesn't work on an individual basis. If got an F grade on the evaluation test and was sad, took the course then on an A on the final and felt happy is that the same as the reverse. Doesn't seem so to me.

I also remember as a child being extremely sad over the most trivial of things. I still occasionally loose the top to my ice cream cone but it doesn't make me nearly as sad. In both cases the ice cream was easily replaceable. For some reason as a kid it was more upsetting because I wanted to eat "that" ice cream cone, and not a replacement. I also was more upset at not being allowed to have and ice cream back then. It made me sadder than when I can't have one now. So even with the same individual what makes them sad or happy changes.

-Brian

Scott,

To show that I understand what you are trying to get at I'll give you and example. Assuming we have identical twins who both like ice cream, and both drop their cones at the same moment, and cry the same amount of time, then why can't we deduce that they have suffered the same loss of utility defined either as happiness or economically? Isn't this at least one case where things are comparible? If so then cannot there be others?

Regards,
Brian

Assuming we have identical twins who both like ice cream, and both drop their cones at the same moment, and cry the same amount of time, then why can’t we deduce that they have suffered the same loss of utility defined either as happiness or economically? Isn’t this at least one case where things are comparible?

It depends on how you define it. If it's ordinal then you can't compare. It's mathematically meaningless to compare. If you postulate a cardinal something that is utility and if you further postulate that similar physical states mean similar levels of happiness, then of course you can conclude it. But don't drag me along. I'll stick with ordinal utility.

But cardinal happiness. Happiness is cardinal, utility is ordinal. We can compare happiness. I know people get them confused. Even I accidentally use one word when I mean the other thing.

Happiness is not the same as utility.

Specifically, happiness can remain constant as utility increases. Each time your situation improves, you're briefly happy, then (likely) your level of happiness returns to your norm. So you can infinitely improve your situation (as measured by your preference) while remaining (apart from brief rises and dips) equally happy.

Since happiness can remain constant as utility increases, happiness cannot be utility.

Why do you need to claim this comparison to be objective truth rather than just your own personal model that informs your own personal decisions?

Well, if you are trying to predict their reaction then you care about an objective something. For example, if you don't want them to hit you then you don't want to annoy them to the point that they hit you. It's objective because it's testable (by whether they hit you).

You can compare across people by identifying them at reaction points. I.e., "punching mad" means the same thing for two people: it means so mad that they'll punch you.

Constant,

I would probably choose to save the tortured genius, even though his level of happiness was lower. Why would I do that? Well, the obvious, and empty (because tautological) answer would be that, given a choice, I preferred that the tortured genius lived rather than the happy imbecile.

How does that square with utilitarianism?

There are lots of reasons to think that utilitarianism is problematic, but this certainly isn't one of them. There are all sorts of possible explanations here. I'll give the two most obvious ones.

1. You're a crappy utilitarian.

Utilitarianism tells us what action we ought to perform. That doesn't imply anything at all about what you, personally, will prefer.

2. Utilitarianism cares about net happiness, not about the happiness of one particular individual.

The utilitarian would, I suspect, say that saving the tortured genius would be the right thing to do because the chances are pretty good that the tortured genius will, during the remainder of her life, do lots of things that will have the effect of making other people happy. If you can show for certain that the tortured genius will do no such thing and will instead continue only to be miserable and unproductive, then the utilitarian might say to save the imbecile. And I'd wonder a bit if your intuitions still didn't match up. Why, after all, save someone if all she will do is suffer?

You can compare across people by identifying them at reaction points. I.e., “punching mad” means the same thing for two people: it means so mad that they’ll punch you.

Sure, but there's clearly no reason to believe that this is the same emotional state in two people. The threshold for punching is incredibly different in different people.

Sure, but there’s clearly no reason to believe that this is the same emotional state in two people. The threshold for punching is incredibly different in different people.

You can simply define it the same. It's up to us to define how we define our terms. All I'm saying is that you can define *something* objective and testable that you can call "anger". My example is maybe oversimplified, because there might be something else objective and testable which is not as crude as "punching mad". For example, degree of anger might be measured by the resulting cognitive deficits - i.e. being so mad you can't think straight. If you can measure i.q., then you can measure the effect of anger on i.q.

Stuff like that might be possible. And any or all of it might be useful for purposes other than playing Utilitarian God to decide who receives braces and what unlucky joe is robbed to pay for those braces.

Can I add that I loathe utilitarianism. I consider it the height of arrogance. Just felt like getting that off my chest.

Feel free, Constant. I'm not particularly fond of utilitarianism either. Nonetheless, it's hard to deny it's one of the better moral theories, even if it's wrong.