Happiness

[Phoebe]

a broader trend I find both irrational and dangerous. My biggest complaint against "liberals", as presently identified in the US, is that they adopt their preferred set of utilitarian outcomes as "good" and then set about justifying illiberal methods of encouraging those outcomes. Yet one major point of being a free people is that we do not have to accept one another's ideas about what constitutes happiness or a good life. It doesn't always work out that way, as when certain people successfully impose their ideas about things like dying a prolonged and miserable death upon others, but that's part of the ongoing struggle over the boundaries of what's permissable.

The idea that we should reconceptualize the right to pursue happiness as we see fit, and treat it as a challenge to support some cross-culturally informed goal based on consequences, is loathesomely illiberal. One obvious question is who decides the right consequences, and the impossibility of that task and spectre of foisting its result on people is, hopefully, why we wanted people to be free to decide for themselves. But this whole idea that happiness is something like a mood that precludes sad feelings or frustration is batshit to begin with. Someone recently wrote a popular article about how wrong this is - I'm thinking maybe in the Atlantic? I need to find it. And this is assuming happiness is even a mark of a good life, which is far from agreed upon.

Anyway, this becomes a cultural and political problem when people who share this way of thinking decide that other people's happiness pursuits aren't worthy, and then try to tell them what's good for them. And then people who dislike being condescended to have their own irrational reactions. None of this is helping.

[Phoebe]

No idea why there are two of these threads. Feel free to delete one, o gods.

Indeed neither one contributed anything of value, except that I found it slightly cathartic at the time.

[bralbovsky]

Sadly, the desire to impose one's egocentric vision of bliss on others is not a partisan issue.

[Phoebe]

True, and would that it were. The imposition of utilitarianism one pretends is value-neutral is the special liberal part, imo. Usually the people who want to impose their beliefs about abortion or assisted suicide or bathrooms or whatever are happy to tell you how sick and immoral you are according to some supposedly universal principles or moral foundation. Liberal utilitarians will just slip it in there without comment, as if it goes without saying that whatever makes people "happy" or gives them the most "pleasure" automatically equals the moral good.

[Bonefish]

What is a moral good though? And what level of happiness is accepted? Generally, I find it best to err on the side of non coercion. If your actions do not trouble me, if they do not inflict financial harm, or provable mental or physical harm, then I have no right to constrain your actions. While simple in theory, this becomes complicated in practice. If you like to play loud music at 3am when I am trying to sleep, that's a bit different from posting an offensive banner on your lawn.