Happiness

 

Ayn Rand, on Pages 29 and 30 of her book, The Virtue of Selfishness, writes about happiness, and I will quote her paragraph there and then comment on it.

 

Rand: “This is the fallacy inherent in hedonism—in any variant of ethical hedonism, personal or social, individual or collective. ‘Happiness’ can be the purpose of ethics, but not the standard.”

 

My response: This seems intuitively correct to me. Jordan Peterson says something similar, that happiness as a purpose will not make one happy, that happiness is fleeting, and may come as result of doing what is right or meaningful. These two very differing thinkers regard happiness as perhaps a result, accidental or anticipated, of following a moral standard, that it is not the moral standard in itself.

 

Dennis Prager writes that being happy is a moral obligation, because the individual that is happy, feels good about himself, so he has no reason to hurt others to vent his anger elsewhere.

 

I think that happiness could be a moral standard if it was understood as striving to be maximally loving, moral, creative, and pious, that such wholesome existing would make one feel good and worthy, and therefore happy.

 

Still, it seems that happiness is a welcome reward for a life well-lived. And, of course, there are never any guarantees in life; one is not guaranteed by one’s good deity to be happy, if one is virtuous, that makes it more likely because when one is good, the divine spark in one glows with love and that is conducive with being happy and spreading happiness.

 

Rand: “The task of ethics is to define man’s proper code of values and thus to give him the means of achieving happiness. To declare, as the ethical hedonists do, that ‘the proper value is what gives you pleasure’—which is an act of intellectual and philosophical abdication, an act which merely proclaims the futility of ethics and invites men to play it deuces wild.”

 

My response: Rand has a point; if one lives ethically, then happiness might well follow acting well. One will have had to live up to one’s ethical standard first.