philosophy assignment

Critical Thinking PHIL 1290 Final Exam 1

Final Exam

Read the following short essay, and then write a 3-5 page response (12-point font, double-spaced, normal margins, no cover page, no binders). Your response should do the following three things: (1) state what the main conclusion of the essay is; (2) state what the most important premises (including sub-conclusions) are—i.e., state which premises are most important if the argument is to rationally convince its audience; (3) evaluate the quality of the argument, giving detailed reasons to justify your evaluation. For purposes of evaluation, assume that the speaker is a contemporary Canadian philosopher and the audience is a group of students in Introduction to Philosophy, all of whom have a basic knowledge of statistics.

What Makes People Happy?

Yolanda Ypres

Some people might be inclined to claim that the meaning of life is this: you should learn about all the things that matter most to you, and devote yourself to them. But wait a minute! Can you devote yourself to just anything you care about and expect life to be satisfying? You can devote yourself to your children and they can turn out to be spoiled brats, strategic planners for Monsanto, or other disagreeable types. Or similarly, you can devote yourself to a political cause, only to see it lose all its political battles. Whether devotion to your causes is the meaning of life or not, it sure doesn’t sound like a recipe for happiness. Surely, if we want to be happy, it would be safer to devote ourselves to the only thing that guarantees happiness if attained: happiness itself.

Now, the obvious question to ask is: “What makes people happy?” Fortunately, something systematic is known about this. The description of a few different experiments and studies should make it possible to make some quite well-informed guesses about where happiness lies.

To begin, consider an experiment performed by Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues. 1 In this

experiment, human subjects were first required to hold a hand in painfully cold (14° Celsius) water for 60 seconds, and then afterwards to hold it in cold water for 90 seconds, with the first 60 seconds of exposure at 14° Celsius and the final 30 seconds slowly climbing to 15° Celsius. 80% of subjects who experienced this slow warming as decreasing the pain preferred to repeat the 90-second condition rather than the 60-second condition, even though it involved more time in unpleasantly cold water! This experiment shows that what matters most to people’s happiness is not just what they feel at the moment, but also the overall pattern of these experiences over time. Bad experiences that get less bad before ending are found to be better than shorter bad experiences that just end suddenly. From this, we can conclude that the happiest lives will be the ones that end well—the ones that display an “upward trend.” The alternative—that the happiest lives are those that display a downward trend—is obviously absurd. Who would want to start life as a famous athlete, only to end it as an ignored, alcoholic homeless person?

So the challenge to us, as seekers after a happy life, is to figure out how to have a life with an upward trend in happiness. How can we make our lives better as they go on? Obviously, this cannot involve each minute being happier than the previous minute. Life is always throwing little obstacles in our way which bring us sadness, no matter how we might try to arrange things otherwise. The upwards trend in happiness has to be something that is seen year by year, or even decade by decade, rather than moment by moment. Put this way, however, the problem seems easier to deal with, more tractable. Our challenge is to find out what we can add to our lives to make them better. Here, some empirical research can again help out.

1 Kahneman, D., Fredrickson, B., Schreiber, C., and Redelmeier, D. 1993. “When more pain is preferred to less:

Adding a better end.” Psychological Science 4, 401-5. Reported in Kahneman, D., Diener, E., and Schwartz, N.

(eds.) 1999. Well-Being: The foundations of hedonic psychology. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

2

According to Argyle (1999), 2 “many surveys have correlated educational level with measures of

happiness, either using number of years of education received or the level attained (for example, high school, college). In all such studies, a small positive correlation has been found, of the order of .10.”

3 So getting an education is a good step, bringing a certain level of happiness. It has to be

admitted, though, that Argyle also finds that getting an education raises expectations for incomes, which can lead to frustration if things don’t work out. So after getting a good education, one needs to get a well-paying job. What about marriage? “Marriage has often been found to be one of the strongest correlates of happiness,” Argyle reports, though still the correlation isn’t much more than .15. You might think that this is a mere correlation—that it doesn’t show that marriage causes happiness, since it might be the case that naturally happy people are more likely to get married, but since (as Argyle says) 90% of people get married at some point, this isn’t likely to affect the statistics. From all this, it seems that the next step in a life with an upwards trajectory in happiness is to get married. Kids, however, are out. Reported marital satisfaction goes down with having kids, especially when the kids are teenagers. Having teens, it seems, would put a downward dent in the happiness trend in one’s life, and so would not be the route to happiness.

What about our happiness when we become old? Here there are many considerations, but I want to deal with one in particular. Avoiding a significant, long-term negative trend in happiness can be very difficult when a person is faced with a chronic and debilitating disease, and this is a problem that faces older people much more often than younger people. Some forms of cancer, for instance, cause constant pain which cannot be alleviated without basically rendering the victim unconscious or delirious. Senility can decrease a person’s quality of life for years before bringing death. And so on. These sad facts must be confronted when thinking about the future. Is there any way to plan for happiness, knowing that such disease is a possibility? Perhaps meditation, or a loving family, can do much to make even these conditions bearable, so that one’s happiness need not decrease so much. But perhaps there are kinds of suffering that can only be avoided by death. If so, then the happiest life in some particular case might be one that the individual chooses to cut short, rather than end unhappily. Fortunately, we can hope that medical improvements (and continued support of publicly funded health care!) will save us from ever having to face such a situation.

Now of course, all this needs to be seen in a statistical context. For one particular person, the route to happiness might be that she spends all her money on a classic convertible car and spend the next twenty years cruising up and down the California coast, taking odd jobs in bands no one has heard of to pay for gasoline, eventually dying in a car wreck just like James Dean or Albert Camus. But this probably is not the path of the happiest life imaginable for most people. Given the scientific studies just described, the route to happiness for most people is quite likely to be a familiar one: a good education, a good job, and marriage (though no kids). Each of these steps is known to increase average levels of happiness, and so we can expect that, on average, taking each step in turn is the best way to ensure that the happiness in one’s life tends, in the long term, to go up.

Note: You may wish to consult your fellow students, parents, or friends about your essay. Feel free to do so. However (and this is crucial), any help you get must be acknowledged in your paper. If your mom reads your paper over to check your grammar, include a footnote or endnote thanking her for this service. If you discuss the general ideas you have with a friend, write “Thanks to Lisa Kudrow for a helpful discussion” or something of the sort. If you borrow a specific idea from someone, put in a

footnote saying “I got this idea from Mark Improvement” or whoever. Also important: although I’m all in favour of talking about philosophy with others, you are not permitted to actually write papers together, or to write up shared outlines, or to share written work with one another. Conversation is good for thought; shared written work is a good way to get charged with plagiarism.

2 In Kahneman, D., Diener, E., and Schwartz, N. (eds.) 1999, op. cit., p.355.

3 For those who don’t know, this means that (.10)

2 percent, or 1%, of the variability in measured happiness seems

attributable to level of education.