Is it happiness just pleasure?

Happyism

Deirdre N. McCloskey (*)

A well-fed cat sitting in the sun is “happy” in the pot-of-pleasure sense of happiness studies. The pussy is a 3. But what the modern world offers to men and women and children as against cats and other machines for pleasure is not merely such “happiness,” but a uniquely enlarged scope to realize themselves. True, one can turn away fromBildung and read celebrity mags all day. Yet billions are enabled to do more. And they can also have, in proper moderation, more cat-like, materialistic, economist-pleasing “happiness” if they wish. Good for them. These are your sands of better life, though unmeasurable.

One could conclude about the 1-2-3 hedonists what Mill concluded about Bentham: “no one, probably, who, in a highly instructed age, ever attempted to give a rule to all human conduct, set out with a more limited conception either of the agencies by which human conduct is, or of those by which it should be, influenced.” The literature and the philosophy of grown-ups since Mesopotamia provide better concepts. Mill remarked that Bentham was always a boy. We do not need more Benthams, or more boyish games of 1-2-3. We do not need more hedonomics or utilonomics or freakonomics. We need humanomics, which may be not an -omics at all, and a liberal society supported by it, the one that has given us the scope to flourish if we are so inclined.

  (*) teaches economics, history, English, and communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago and economic history at the University of Gothenburg. 

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