Happiness

Is it possible to measure sorrow or happiness, if so can a person's grief or joy be greater than another persons'? BJ Hebert Lafayette, LA

Comments

This is one of those questions where your first impulse is to say "of course!" and "impossible!" at the same time (which is of course impossible): Of course! We have little trouble discerning that the suicidal depressive is less cheery than the tiny tot with her eyes all aglow. We're very confident even about much subtler discriminations: for instance, that runner who has finally achieved his personal best is more elated than this chef who is satisfied that her new dish will maintain the restaurant's reputation. But, impossible! We can't get the chef's satisfaction into the same mind as the runner's stoke. And don't we have to be able to do that to compare them? Couldn't it be that the chef's joy is far greater, and yet she reacts to that level of joy in a far more subdued way than the runner would (perhaps her "baseline" mood would make the runner skip and sing)?

Maybe brain science can help us? Suppose we've determined experimentally (imagine a really enormous and exceptionally well-designed study), that there is an extremely tight match between the level of a certain chemical C in the brain and the degree to which careful observers of spontaneously-acting people take them to be feeling joy. Suppose it is further discovered that C-levels are responsible for the paradigmatic physiological effects of joy, and even its paradigmatic cognitive effects (perhaps these include optimistic thinking, high energy levels, generosity, and so on). Then, couldn't we conclude, with some confidence, that C-levels provide a measure of joy itself?

I think some philosophers would answer, absolutely! Of these, some would reason that joy is whatever it is that actually plays a certain causal role: that of producing joyful behavior and joyful cognitive dispositions; and we would have discovered that high C-levels do this; so joy is having a high C-level. Others would reason (only subtly differently) that joy is having some or other state that plays that causal role, so we would have discovered that having a high C-level is how joy happens in humans. Both camps would conclude that joy is measurable and comparable between people.

Another camp of philosophers would dissent. They would insist that what's been correlated with C-levels isn't joy itself, but its behavioral and cognitive effects. Who's to say that the very same "joyful" behavior and cognitive dispositions might not be produced by vastly different amounts of joy in different people? Still other philosophers would shake their heads at the naivete of the rest of us for treating an ordinary word like "joy" as if there's any hope for the idea that there's some "aspect of reality" that it labelxs.

Stay tuned for the answer. We'll have it for you in a century or two, easily.

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