I love this question and have often pondered it myself. I don't think sufferings need to be compared with one another. All human pain is of moral concern and deserves unique respect.

Utilitarians like to quantify pain. Even if one does this, and thereby compares different pains, it does not follow that we need to devote our psychological attention to the place/person with the greatest quantity of pain. Utilitarians, do, however, think that our moral concern (but not our psychological attention) should be directed to where we can relieve the most pain or bring about the most happiness. Perhaps the audience to your suffering is telling you that they are more obligated to relieve suffering in African than to help you feel better. (I hope for your sake that your friends are not such utilitarians. Care ethics is a better moral framework for this kind of case.)

As for "stop moaning," I think this is often psychological advice. Often, we feel better when we consider others who are in much greater pain than we are i.e. "there but for the grace of god go I." Personally, I have found that this consideration works when I am suffering a bit, but not when I am suffering a lot.

Also, depressed people are often obsessed with themselves (this is a descriptive fact, not a rebuke from me!) It turns out that becoming concerned with the needs of others is often helpful, not only for those others, but also for the depressed person. (a kind of cognitive psychotherapy)

It is my understanding that depression is a medical problem--and one that can be effectively treated. My advice (not especially philosophical, admittedly) is to have a talk with your physician.

You're pretty clearly right. What's going on around us matters for our happiness, and though how we look at things makes a difference, it's not all. There may be some people (a fully enlightened being such as the Buddha supposedly was, perhaps?) who are able to maintain their equanimity in all circumstances, but for the rest of us, this would be a superhuman achievement. Moreover, it's not entirely obvious that it would be desirable to have that kind of detachment.

That said, there's a point to the saying that no one can make you happy. Making others responsible for one's own happiness is not a mark of wisdom, and not likely to succeed.

It's a nice question, and one that' s been discussed before in various versions. You've put particular emphasis on the idea that without negative emotions, we couldn't really be happy.

Let's suppose you're right. As your own way of putting things suggests, it doesn't follow that there couldn't be such a thing as eternal happiness. The reason is that the kind of happiness that's at issue isn't best thought of as an emotion or mood but as some more global feature of our lives. In fact, your own point is that negative states can be part of, well, our happiness.

We could also spend a bit of time on whether "negative states" that we enjoy (the frisson of "horror" we pay good money for at the movies, for example) really are negative states. But let that pass. I think the partisan of eternal life would probably object to being tied to the word "happiness." Some talk, for example, of "eternal bliss." But whatever state that's meant to pick out, it may not be quite the same as the one we describe as "happiness." This isn't to disparage happiness; it's just to say that there might be more than one kind of condition that we'd want to think about if we were thinking seriously about eternal life.

And while we're at it, we might want to query the word "eternal." Should we think of eternal life as unending? Or as outside time altogether? If eternal life is atemporal life, then our usual ways of thinking about what it is to be happy may not be up to the task.

Of course, the idea of life outside time might seem too paradoxical to take seriously, though the idea that God is outside time has a long history in theological thought. But the larger point here may allow us to dance around the question: if there is such a thing as eternal life, it seems a reasonable bet that we're not in a very good position to imagine what it's like.

Needless to say, the fact that we have trouble imagining something isn't a reason for believing that it's true. But the fact that we have trouble imagining something isn't always a good guide to whether it's possible either.

A couple of further points. The first is that I'm not particularly inclined to believe that something like eternal happiness awaits us, but that's not because I think the idea is incoherent. The second is a bibliographic note: there is a well-known paper by Bernard Williams, in which he argues, roughly, that anything that could count as one's own endless life would be intolerably boring, and that any sort of endless "life" that escaped this fate wouldn't be one's own. (Williams means to raise a problem about personal identity here; you can chase down the essay, which is called "The Makropoulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality." It's in his Problems of the Self, Cambridge University Press, 1973.) I find William's arguments singularly unconvincing, but you might feel differently. John Martin Fischer offers a reply called "Why Immortality is Not So Bad," in International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 1994 pp. 257-270. And you can read an interesting discussion by Tim Chappell here.

Most philosophers (including several you have no doubt heard of, such as Plato and Aristotle) who have thought that happiness was the appropriate goal of a good life have not understood the goal they had in mind as a purely subjective state, so I would encourage you and your friend to consider the possibility that it is not simply feeling happy that matters, but actually being a certain way.

Consider the case of a drug addict who is provided a lifetime supply of his or her drug of choice. If you wish, imagine miraculously finding a way to ensure that the addict's life and physical health would in no way be threatened--his or her expected life span would not be shortened, nor would the lifelong addiction threaten the addict's physical health in any way. In short, the addict could go through life high as a kite with all other necessities provided with indemnity against any of the usual deliterious affects of drug-addiction.

The case I am asking you to imagine is probably impossible on various grounds, for it is plainly impossible to remove all of the negative effects of going around high all the time, but anyway consider at least some period of time during which the addict is high all the time and well protected against the usual bad effects associated with drug use. Is that person happy?

In the purely subjective sense of happy, I think we have to say that such a person would be happy--maybe even supremely so. But if this subjective sense were all that mattered, why do we recoil from wishing for ourselves such a life? Why is it that we find ourselves preferring lives in which our entertainments, engagements, and activities include much more than simply sitting in a delighted stupor all the time? If such a person is really more happy as a result of the constant subjective happiness he or she feels, why would we prefer our admittedly less happy (subjectively) lives to their's?

This sort of example seems to me to show either that "happiness" is not actually what we have in mind as an ultimate goal, or else that the correct understanding of what it means to be truly happy must include both an objective as well as a subjective element. I do not wish to suggest that a subjective sense of happiness is unimportant or irrelevant. Rather, I am proposing that this is not by itself enough--that some objective conditions that wwe regard as choiceworthy must also be included in the correct and fully adequate sense of what our life goal should be. We wish to lead lives that sensible people would wish to emulate. That is why some philosophers and scholars have suggested that the sense of "happiness" we should be considering for such questions ought to be something like "well-being" or perhaps "human flourishing," both of which seem to require subjective and objective success.

I hope this helps!

I wonder just how widely accepted this is. I suspect that most people, including panelists here, would agree that just because someone thinks they've been harmed, it doesn't mean that they actually were. In fact, it's perfectly possible that something someone takes to have harmed them actually did them good. (You might think your boss would be upset if he knew that you stood up to some obstreperous client. I know that he'd actually be pleased; he's been looking for an excuse to "fire" this client, you've provided it, and because I tell him what you did, you'll be in for a bonus at year's end.)

There are a couple of cases that might seem to support the equation of thinking one has been harmed with actually being harmed, but I'm not sure they're what you had in mind. First, suppose I think I'm in pain. It's been widely held that I can't be mistaken about this. I might be mistaken about whether the pain signals some sort of organic damage, but if I think I have a headache, it's odd to say that I don't -- even if it's all "in my head," if you get my drift. But that's a special kind of case.

Another sort of case might be when you've done something that upsets me. If my distress is unreasonable, I doubt we'd be inclined to say that you harmed me. If what you did could be expected to distress most people, we might count this as harm. For example: suppose you've mocked me in front of people whose opinion I might reasonably care about. The fact that I care is part of why I take myself to have been harmed. (Harm to reputation is a kind of harm.) If I were more thick-skinned, there would be no harm. But it might be unreasonable to expect me not to care.

I'm not sure how much that helps. As for objective ways of defining "harm," I don't have a lot to offer that's terribly informative, except to say that if I do something to you that interferes with your normal functioning, physically, socially, economically, emotionally... we might reasonably count that as harm. But the mere fact that I take myself to have been harmed doesn't settle the matter.

I think you've done a good job of answering your own question. Your example is a pretty clear case of someone being harmed without knowing about it.

On this topic, I have always been intrigued by Simone de Beauvoir's comments in the introduction to The Second Sex. She says:

But we do not confuse the idea of private interest with that of happiness, although that is another common point of view. Are not women of the harem more happy than women voters? Is not the housekeeper happier than the working-woman? It is not too clear just what the word happy really means and still less what true values it may mask. There is no possibility of measuring the happiness of others, and it is always easy to describe as happy the situation in which one wishes to place them.

In particular those who are condemned to stagnation are often pronounced happy on the pretext that happiness consists in being at rest. This notion we reject, for our perspective is that of existentialist ethics. Every subject plays his part as such specifically through exploits or projects that serve as a mode of transcendence; he achieves liberty only through a continual reaching out towards other liberties. There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future. Every time transcendence falls back into immanence, stagnation, there is a degradation of existence into the ‘en-sois’ – the brutish life of subjection to given conditions – and of liberty into constraint and contingence. This downfall represents a moral fault if the subject consents to it; if it is inflicted upon him, it spells frustration and oppression. In both cases it is an absolute evil. Every individual concerned to justify his existence feels that his existence involves an undefined need to transcend himself, to engage in freely chosen projects.

What this suggests to me is that happiness may be at odds with freedom or transcendence (these latter aren't necessarily the same, of course). The idea seems to be that genuine freedom (and transcendence) are difficult and one is not likely to be happy if one pursues them. And yet, they are more valuable than happiness. (And more valuable than the experience of being free or of transcendence.)

Others are likely to say that virtue is more valuable than happiness, and these two are often in conflict. Many philosophers have tried to argue that there is a necessary connection between virtue and happiness, but it is a hard case to make. For example, we often make commitments to others and it would seem that we have a duty to fulfill those commitments, even if doing so would make us worse off -- and even positively unhappy -- in both the short and long term.

I'm inclined to think that happiness, at least according to most interpretations, isn't the most important or valuable thing. Freedom and virtue are more important to me. Moreover, I'm also inclined to think that actively pursuing happiness isn't the best way to achieve it. This is connected to the idea of "flow" Eddy mentions. Happiness comes when you are engaged in meaningful activity that is well-suited to your abilities (it challenges you, but not too much); it's a byproduct of activity, not the goal of activity.

Several pertinent posts can be found in Question 362 and Question 2156.

As usual with such a philosophical question, much depends on how you define the key concept, happiness. One conception of happiness identifies it with a type (or types) of feeling(s), such as contentment, joy, excitement, and pleasure. These are the feelings a happiness pill would presumably supply. And some utilitarians pick out this sort of happiness as what should be maximized. Some then object along the lines you suggest: utilitarianism seems to entail that we should want to take a happiness pill (and if things would keep running smoothly, for everyone to take happiness pills)--or for us all to enter a Matrix that would keep us all happy--but there seems to be something wrong with living on such a pill (or entering such a Matrix), so there must be something wrong with utilitarianism. This objection works against egoism as well (the view that all we want is pleasure).

Perhaps the intuition here is that only 'authentic' happiness is truly valuable, the sort of happiness that one derives from doing the right sorts of things and doing them well. Such a conception of happiness makes it less subjective (it's not just based on how you feel) and more objective (you can be wrong about whether you are happy, e.g., if you get pleasure from the wrong things). This conception also sounds more like Aristotle's notion of eudaimonia (often translated as 'flourishing'). An interesting question then is whether such flourishing necessarily makes you feel happy (in the first 'pleasure' sense of the word). But it is clear that feeling happy (pleasure) is not sufficient for flourishing, and you can't take a pill to flourish.

The recent movement in 'positive psychology' attempts to study happiness and the connections between pleasure and flourishing. The notion of 'flow' describes that feeling you get when you are doing something challenging and doing it well (sports, music, art, conversation, good sex, mountain climbing, etc.). Though you may act without conscious attention on the details of what you are doing (you are 'in the zone'), you are very aware of what is going on. Perhaps if there was a 'flow' pill, it'd be wonderful to take it. But it seems like authentic flow requires that you are engaged in the activity itself. So, perhaps no pills allowed.