Happiness as an end in itself

The Utilitarian position that, 'happiness is the sole basis of morality and that people never desire anything but happiness,' can be rather jarring. Narrowly understood, 'happiness' is a kind of emotional pleasure. Yet some of out finest moments might lack this. Take for example, jumping into a pool to save a child. Or the endurance of many, many months of work on a worthy project. Now, it is true that these things can bring us a narrow happiness. After saving the child, we may feel this in the form of pride, but we may not, we may only feel anger at the useless lifeguard, or terror at the frightening situation now behind us. In either case it doesn't matter, for we entered the situation not for the feelings we would experience afterwards, but for the child.

Similarly, we may feel many points of pride when working on the work project. But we will also for the most part feel not very much at all, as one does when they 'enter the zone' for several hours a day. If feelings of pleasure were paramount, one could spend that time on pleasure-seeking.

On the other hand, it would be a little silly to assume happiness plays no role. There is a sense in which we jump in the pool to save the child because we find the state of things where the child lives a happier one than the one where the child dies. And there is a sense in which we enter into this long and tiresome work project at the expense of many pleasures we could instead pursue, because the worthiness of the project makes us feel more fulfilled than anything else could.

Our problem is that, once we broaden the definition of 'happiness', to include all these different types of things--pride,  fulfilment,  abstract happiness, and physical happiness--and anything else they may be included, we face the dilemma that happinesses conflict, and it is not obvious which we maximise and which we leave behind. Mill's solution to this problem was a rather unsuccessful appeal to human nature. He divided happiness up into 'higher pleasures' and 'lower pleasures'. It was essentially a kind of Victorian snobbery, which mistook the trends of his time and class for human nature. Indeed, his mistake was in thinking that 'human nature' could be any help to us at all in solving the problem.

But if we put aside human nature, what are we left with? Nurture. We are left with the ideas and values of an individual, to which our happiness (of any kind) are subservient.

Happiness is an end in itself then, not because happiness is intrinsically good, because in fact happiness isn't intrinsically anything it seems, but because some form of happiness or another is the end expression of actions that realises our values. Likewise, some form of unhappiness or another is the end expression of actions that don't. What determines the hierarchy then, is not kinds or quantities of happiness, but what we value most highly.

Ayn Rand, the Academic Philosopher

Rand wasn't an academic. She didn't write like an academic. She wasn't exceedingly well read or studious on academic philosophy. And the tendency is, academic philosophers do not take her seriously if they've heard of her at all.

But underneath the style she chose and the approach she took, how well would her ideas translate into academia? Or to put it a more interesting way: can Rand be taken seriously as a *philosopher* and not just a guru.  

Philosophy problems Rand offers solutions in:

The meta-ethical problem 'why be moral?': what if you don't want to be moral? Doesn't the whole thing kind of fall apart if you don't care about doing the right thing?

Rand's solution is that she never asks you to care. But, she argues, it would never be in your interest not to. Rand's morality is utterly self-interested, and is more concerned with freeing you from not doing the moral thing (e.g. being altruistic) due to cultural standards or pressures, than it is in commanding you to act any way you might not see the point in.


The meta-ethical problem of objectivity: Objective morality is hard to defend meta-ethically. Values that are 'mind-dependent' are subjective. They are governed by preferences. For a value to be objective it must be good 'mind-independently'. But how could something be valuable if its not valuable to the subject? What other authority could determine a values status as valuable?

Obviously 'objective morality' is important to Rand, enough she named her theory 'Objectivism', but actually she never insists on objective values. What she insists on instead is that our chosen values be thought through rationality. So for example, a heroin addict isn't acting wrongly because they value having a high, if this is what they choose, they may. They are acting wrong because they are picking a destructive way of attaining a high, one that causes them distress and other things *they* don't enjoy. With rational thought, they could realise a better way to get their high.

Rand manages to not be a subjectivist without having to awkwardly discover a way in which this mysterious thing called 'mind-independent value' exists.

The ethical problem of altruism: If we're motivated to do what's good for us, why care about what's good for others?

What makes Rand's account of altruism so interesting is that it's negative. For Rand, 'altruism' is her word for 'self-sacrifice for the sake of others', that is to say, putting someone else's values before you own. To do so is for Rand wrong. But she acknowledges that sometimes your own value may contain in it the consequence of doing something nice for another.

Forget whether or not this is true, this is a very interesting answer to the problem because she explains away the problem: All morally permissible acts that are altruistic are also self-interested. Others have attempted this answer, but they always end up with a morality being nothing more than prudence. But because of Rand's interesting combination of values and selfishness she doesn't fall into this trap.


Verdict

The above three problems are each major hot debates in contemporary ethics. Rand actually offers interesting and worthy solutions to them. She is not ignored by academic philosophy because of lack of content then, but lack of being understood. This may be her fault for being unclear, it may be the fault of her advocates for not being good enough at philosophy to represent her, or it may be the fault of academic philosophers who have heard of her, for dismissing her based on character.

The Utilitarian Cost of Free Healthcare

Oregon Health Plan is state funded healthcare, and with euthanasia legal in the state, the local government are finding interesting ways of cutting from the budget in this time of financial crisis.

The OHP no longer covers medication that slows the growth of cancer, but they do offer euthanasia in its place. The reason: price. 

If you've ever learned about the five transplant patients of any other thought experiment that tried to test the claims of utilitarianism against our moral intuitions, you might have heard them be described as 'exaggerations', or 'extreme examples', but the reality of State funded healthcare, such as the OHP, or the NHS, is they do operate on some, occasionally quite distributing, utilitarian principles. They have to. As Dr Walter Shaffer of Oregon put it, "We can't do everything for everyone." There are always more patients than resources and choices have to be made. Value judgements have to be made about what helps the greatest number, and indeed what makes the greatest number happy (after all, why help a cancer patient that has low chance if you can help a cancer patient that has a high chance?)

In the UK euthanasia isn't yet legal, but there are back-door euthanasia programs like the Liverpool Care Pathway, an NHS program where those who are 'dying' can have their medication, food and water withdrawn, hastening the process of death. Professor Patrick Pullicino recently came forward with information about thousands of elderly patients killed on the NHS prematurely every year because they've been diagnosed as terminal.  Why are the elderly picked on? Well, even if they aren't actually dying, they soon will be, right? Why waste resources?

Most good people turn up their nose at the five transplant patients. To treat life as non-sacred for the benefit of others is a disguising idea. Even if the 'others' are a larger and preferable group. Yet in real life, are we OK with a bit of utilitarianism or what?

While a Libertarian, and some conservatives, would happily argue that there are private healthcare options that'd solve this problem, it's the supporters of State healthcare that strike up my curiosity. Is this the cost they happily pay for free health care for all most?