In an interesting blog in the NY Times yesterday, Yale Psychologist Paul Bloom poses the following question: should we strive to live life as happy pigs or sad Socrates? In other words, should we lean into out short-term tendencies to seek pleasure, or should we err on the side of rational control? Bloom goes onto make his case for indulging the short terms pleasures that we often feel guilty about pursuing (cue happy pig rejoicing). He writes:
But what about short-term pleasures, like eating cake, drinking beer, or having sex? … These feel good, but if your long-term goals have to do with dieting, sobriety or chastity, you might regret them later. So there is a different dilemma: Do you live a good and happy life or do you satisfy your immediate appetites? …
You can see this as an internal battle between two individuals residing in the same body: one who wants to be thin, sober and chaste, the other who wants to eat, drink and fornicate. It’s the long-term self who is probably reading this now; this is the self that chooses to go to the therapist and read self-help books, working to thwart the short-term self when it comes to life in the presence of temptation.We shouldn’t underestimate the short-term self, though. It is not necessarily evil and not necessarily stupid. Sometimes the long-term self should stay out of its way.
He concludes with the following, “People are better off if their multiple selves establish a truce, respecting one another’s different strengths, and working together to satisfy shared goals.“
Bloom makes some good points in the article, and I think his project of developing a lived philosophy which integrates the relative merits of both pleasure and restraint is a good one. But how does Bloom get to this point, and does he really tell us anything which gives clarity to these types of ‘paths diverging in a wood’ moral decisions.
Let’s start by addressing the reasons he posits in support of both restraint and pleasure.
In making a case for the former, he argues:
- “People who succumb to short-term impulses often do awful things, such as driving drunk or beating up their children.”
- In addition, while not horrible thing in themselves, he also suggests that sometimes there are better things to do than approach pleasure. To take one of his examples, “perhaps there are better things to do today than go to a horror movie.”
As for his reasons to avoid deliberate ‘rational’ control, and indulge pleasures, he offers the following:
- “(Sometimes) it’s the long-term self that’s misguided. It can become committed to belief systems that have immoral consequences. Terrorism and genocide, for instance, are typically deliberate choices, not acts of passion”
- “Sometimes we deprive ourselves of perfectly good pleasures, including those involving love and companionship, because of the decisions of the long-term self. Think of the workaholic who never sees his children, or the anorexic who denies herself the pleasure of food.”
- “Pleasures reflect a form of safe practice — or, to use a more common term, a form of play. Some play is physical: It is a useful skill to be able to attack and defend yourself skillfully, and you get better at it the more you practice, but real fights are risky and painful, and so certain animals, including us, are constituted to take pleasure in play fighting, going through the moves of combat with someone we like, holding back so that nobody is hurt.”
- Building off this last point, he suggests “Even seemingly perverse pleasures have meaning; they have been shaped by natural selection to solve problems that we might not be consciously aware of.” He suggest this should reframe the way we see hedonism, and specifically in a way that is decidedly less negative.
Looking across these points, Blooms seems to be suggesting that we will be less happy in the short-run if we don’t indulge, and also perhaps worse off in that such activities might in fact be evolutionarily adaptive, and thus serve some functional purpose. But what determines when we ought to do one system (pleasure v. restraint) over the other?
Enter work on moral psychology. Jonathan Haidt’s research lends insight on how individuals think about moral matters, and specifically suggests that humans think morally in terms of the following five foundations: 1) harm/care, 2) fairness/reciprocity, 3) ingroup/loyalty, 4) authority/respect and 5) purity/sanctity. Haidt makes the case that liberals classically tend to activate the first two, and see the last 3 as being significantly less valid foundations for moral action. In contrast, conservatives tend to activate all 5 in some way or the another.
Moving back to Bloom, at an individual level he seems to push for a lack of restraint, unless it (1) harms people, or (2) is in some sense unfair. As such, he seems to be thinking of morality like a classic liberal. But is this the right approach, or should other foundations be activated? How do we know what is the ‘right’ approach… what are the ‘shared goals’ which our pleasure and restraint sides can jointly agree upon?
It is at this point that empirical psychology fails us in its in ability to move us beyond the descriptive to the normative. Even after answering Bloom’s question (how did we evolve and what does this mean about the functionality of our hedonistic desires) and the questions of Haidt (what moral foundations do people activate when making decisions), we still do not have a good sense of how to mix the perfect cocktail of moral motives, and how they should interact as we decide when to be happy pigs, and when to be sad Socrates. This is the personal dilemma of the social scientist– knowledge of empirical causality does not necessarily lend clarity in identifying the things that one ought to want to cause. In the next post, Ill try to take us beyond this point and outline a theory of ethics which builds off, while not claiming complete dependence upon the social sciences.
Sep. 18, 2009 at 11:18 am
So, my disclaimer here is that I’m already biased against even the possibility of psychology to offer up a viable ethic. Like any soft science, I think psychology often errs on claiming too large an arena of action, and in this case it seems to be encroaching on a traditionally philosophical one. I’m not willing to grant a science such as adaptive or cognitive psychology the space to make claims on How We Live.
That said, I find Bloom’s remarks rather… assumptive and misguided, right from the beginning. But my first question is perhaps larger than Bloom’s article: why is Socrates considered sad? My instinct from reading Plato is that Socrates is one of the last philosophers whom I would consider sad, and perhaps one of the first who could be considered cheerful.
This isn’t just a remark about the history of philosophy or something silly like that, it’s against the assumptions already within “happy pig or sad Socrates.” As Socrates would be the first to point out, before one can distinguish which road to take, one would have to actually do some leg work to figure out what happiness is. And, unsurprisingly, the classical philosophers often found that Happiness is equal to Goodness. They are the same, and at least for Aristotle (dang, name dropping again…), the best road accounted for long-term and short-term pleasures through moderation.
As for Bloom’s actual separation of short-term and long-term pleasures, I think he is making an early and unfair distinction, one he has to make as a social scientist because the alternative is too diverse and human to be within the grasp of a science. I would imagine that many of us don’t think about our choices of Pleasures as short-term or long-term as much as we think about what the actual pleasure Is. To use Bloom’s example, the workaholic who ignores his children has a commitment to financial security, perhaps even believing this is the best way to love his children, that supersedes his commitment to outward affection. In a classic psychology example, the child told that she can have two cookies a few hours later if she does not eat one now delays gratification based on the order of her commitments: two in a few hours is greater than one now. Of course, if she had to be in bed in One hour, these commitments would be different (given that she’s a bright child).
This then relates to another of Bloom’s points. Is it really the individual’s looking for long-term/rational pleasure that leads him into working in a genocide? Or is it that the object of this pleasure is wrong, the thing itself? What is the difference between a conservative American’s commitment to the war in Iraq, the liberal American’s commitment to her country as a place for peace and equality, and a 1940s German’s commitment to weeding out the Jewish population? It’s the object, the actual commitment, not the form of this commitment, not the fact that it is long-term.
Finally, Bloom reveals a dangerous beginning point in his second to last paragraph where he mentions natural selection as the possible root of perverse pleasures. Really, I can’t fathom how this meshes with his prior points Against perverse pleasures, like, say, beating up one’s children. Once one goes down the natural selection-morality route far enough – far enough where ‘perversity’ is explained as a subconscious problem solver given to us my nature – then I think we have left the realm of morality all together.
Sep. 18, 2009 at 1:01 pm
It seems to me that a critical concern and problem that needs to be addressed in our decision making processes is whether at the end of the day one has asked the critical question of how and who will this choice of behavior impact. It also seems that increasingly we have become a society of making decisions outside the realm of community (i.e. mentors). Many of our decisions are ahistorical (that is there is no sense of understanding of how we are often repeating the mistakes of former generations) and that we also can lack the strength of intergenerational thinking and influences. All of this leads us to be vulnerable in our decision making and at best self-indulgent. Best decisions are done in community with a good grounding in history and will often require time and reflection – something our fast paced society often does not encourage or allow.
Sep. 18, 2009 at 5:03 pm
@Tim
Thanks for the comments. You make several good ones, but I want to address one in particular which I hope to take up further in the following post:
You write:
“As for Bloom’s actual separation of short-term and long-term pleasures, I think he is making an early and unfair distinction, one he has to make as a social scientist because the alternative is too diverse and human to be within the grasp of a science. I would imagine that many of us don’t think about our choices of Pleasures as short-term or long-term as much as we think about what the actual pleasure Is.”
This is good push back. There are several ways to think of this distinction, but I don’t know if there is a clear one that encompasses all the possible issues. So, we can think of the distinction between individual and. We can think of activities which benefit the in-group, versus that which benef collective it the collective. We can think of the distinction between biological drives (i.e. sex, eating), and those which question those drives as a result of consciousness and language… thinking of alternative ends as better or more holy (chastity, fasting). Bloom seems to (at least in this article) confound a bunch of these issues and the blog therefore lacks some clarity.
What I would like to know is whether its possible to develop a lived philosophy which understands how we see the tradeoff between individual goals pursuing aesthetic ends at the expense of more collective altruistic ends. imagine here the tension between buying a beautiful expensive painting to decorate one’s house versus giving that money away to someone who needs to eat. should we always pursue the latter… is the latter an obligation… is the pursuit of beauty a valid end, in and of itself. I want to address how we should approach these types of issues… or at least try to (I really don’t have any answer)
Sep. 18, 2009 at 5:06 pm
@ Jane
I agree… there is a necessity to have our decisions informed by history and collective concerns. But even then, its still tricky.
For example, when we go on a nice vacation as a family, you’ve said you can often feel somewhat guilty going to a nice place when you could use that money on people who need it more. What I want to know is whether this feeling is valid… when it should be listened to, and whether we can (and should) pursue some ends even if they conflict w more collective concerns.
Sep. 19, 2009 at 8:50 am
So this is how my thinking and choices are influenced by the decision of going on a family vacation. My Christian faith which is grounded in history states that I should take a sabbath (i.e. rest)but also do justice, so I attempt to make those priorities and determine how to live them out with those I live in community with. The intergenerational factor is seen primarily through my children’s eyes that help/remind me to never loose sight of “play and rest”. My husband, companion, friend and mentor, supports our decision to monthly tithe 10% of our income – so the act of writing that check every month to causes of justice and faith takes away the temptation to perhaps spend more than is required to play. Different generations, coming together with a historical context which hopefully leads to good choices and decisions. And given my personality and profession as a social worker who sees the needs of the world ever before me, I may still struggle with guilt but I attempt to live boldly (Martin Luther referred to sinning boldly). That is my process.
Sep. 19, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Peter,
I guess i don’t believe that it is possible to develop a lived philosophy that holds across individuals/cultures/etc. Not completely at least. The question reminds me of Kierkegaard’s take on ethics – there is a wide range of questions available for universal, community prescription (such as the Ten Commandments, or the rule of a nation’s government, etc), but there is also a higher directive that works only individually. As Kierkegaard explains it, this higher directive takes precedent when it comes into play, sometimes even as a direct opposite of a universal moral claim (Abraham agreeing to kill Isaac for God is K’s clearest example).
I think this goes a long way regarding your question of pursuing beauty versus social action: it’s an individual question, not a universal one. I think creating a universal ethic for social action can end – and has ended before – in an abundance of judgment towards whoever may not accept this ethic. But these are just initial thoughts (I also quite enjoyed what Jane said about work and play), and I look forward to your next piece.
Sep. 20, 2009 at 10:32 am
tim
those are really good points… I guess I am trying to better lay out the basis of this individual personal directive… and trying to outline how it comes rationally and narratively out of one’s life.
thanks for the perspective… i hope i can address some of those points in the next post.
pb
Sep. 20, 2009 at 3:27 pm
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