Can “expected future happiness” be quantified, or at least ranked among alternative futures?

Question

Question prompted by Sam Harris' "The Moral Landscape", where he argues that "well being" can serve as an objective measure for ethics.

If we define "well-being" as the expected value of future happiness, then, in principle, if can we adequately quantify "happiness" to the point where we can order the "expected happiness" of alternative futures, we can use that as a basis for comparing ethical choices (so I guess this is a form of utilitarianism...with all its faults as well).

If you think it can, what could be the possible objective correlates of "happiness" - for example, the metabolic rate of a particular neurological system in the brain. If not, what is preventing "happiness" from being quantified, in principle?

Answer 1

If not, what is preventing "happiness" from being quantified, in principle?

Quantifying whether someone is happy is not the same as being able to stimulate the happy feelings. The experience machine is critical to your question:

Nozick asks us to imagine a machine that could give us whatever desirable or pleasurable experiences we could want. Psychologists have figured out a way to stimulate a person's brain to induce pleasurable experiences that the subject could not distinguish from those he would have apart from the machine. He then asks, if given the choice, would we prefer the machine to real life?

Nozick also believes that if pleasure were the only intrinsic value, people would have an overriding reason to be hooked up to an "experience machine," which would produce favorable sensations.

It turns out that when Nozick asked people if they'd like being hooked up to an 'experience machine', most people said no. I found a random poll which has 38% of people wanting to plug in and 62% wanting real life. Note that this is just a forums poll, so take it with a grain of salt.

Assuming 'no' to the experience machine: We are not guaranteed that human thriving has finite 'definition'. Consider an analogous question: will science ever 'finish'? Will we ever discover every physical law, with the only possible research left to be discovering the initial conditions of the universe to finer and finer precision? It's not clear. Using induction, we could say that we ought to expect science to continue finding deeper and deeper laws of the universe. Perhaps human thriving is the same: so far we seem to be finding more and more complex forms of human thriving; who says it will ever cease? Indeed, we know from addiction studies that just about any routine stimulation of the brain loses its effectiveness in creating fulfillment, over time. Our brains seem to get bored of things and want new experiences.

Given this, I would say that no, we will be very bad at predicting future happiness, just like we're bad at predicting future science, unless you're talking only one or two years into the future. We can make very broad predictions—like more greenery makes for more happiness—but there is no evidence that we'll be able to be precise in the way that Sam Harris seems to require.

Answer 2

You are deriving "well-being" from "happiness", which is a fallacy. Does a drug-induced happy feeling sound like well-being to you? There is a lot more to well-being than happy emotions, or even expectation of happy emotions. Otherwise the maximal well-being could be achieved by putting a person in a comatose state and inducing perpetual happiness with a direct stimulations of certain portions of the brain. A Matrix-style perpetual bliss, so to speak.

Or, to put it more succinctly, happiness to well-being is what masturbation is to sex.

So the answer to your question is "yes" for objectively detecting the feeling of happiness by neurological measurements and "no" for objectively measuring well-being with such methods.

Answer 3

I think the prior answers miss the point and focus on the term "happiness" instead on the question whether "well-being" could be used as basis for comparing ethical choices.

I believe that this is how we make daily choices - we optimize our future well-being in alternative futures. However we cannot use such technique for resolving ethical choices, because personal well-being may contradict the ethical implications.

We should also factor in our inefficiency of predicting and correctly evaluating the future.

Answer 4

The only way you can really rank future outcomes is by preference. Someone might want the happiness derived from the stimulation and frustrations of a math problem more than that associated with, say, communal drunkenness. These experiences are qualitatively disparate, but are both happy for many people. It is the evaluation of these experiences by the individual after the fact that decides which one was MORE happy; this involves instituting an order on the space of experiences. Because this order is arbitrary (both of the previous experiences simply where, and where not inherently negative if such a thing exists) and because the choice of distance function on the space given the order is even more arbitrary (as it is not implicitly overlaid by the experiencer, but by a theoretician on the outside), the expected value of future happiness for one person is not objective. Additionally, just because we have finally arrived at a number does not mean that it is trivial that the Euclidean norm of the happinesses of all people is the "right" norm for determining the happiness of the population.