Should Happiness-Maximization be the Goal of Government?

‘If a starving wreck, ravished by famine, buffeted by disease, is made happy through some mental conditioning (say, via the “opium” of religion), the person will be seen as doing well on this mental-state perspective, but that would be quite scandalous’ (Sen 1985, p. 188).

A typical hypothetical example used here would be that of a surgeon who has five patients whose lives depend on organ transplants. Should he dissect, and hence kill, one person with healthy organs to save five others? To do so would appear to maximize utility, but is also fundamentally wrong. A real-world example comes from the Kingdom of Bhutan, which espouses a policy of Gross National Happiness, but in 1991 rescinded citizenship from, and then expelled, its Nepalese-Hindi minority—about 100,000 people—who continue to languish in refugee camps. At the time of writing, a group of these refugees was resettling in my own community. Can the forced expulsion of an unwanted minority be justified by the happiness of the majority?

This is perhaps being too generous to Diener and Seligman, however, as their review article does contain the assertion that ‘… market democracies have much more well-being than totalitarian dictatorships, so military expenditures that protect and extend democracy will increase global well-being’ (2004, p. 24). Published not long after the invasion of Iraq, this statement seems to be guilty of the kind of moral problem often associated with utilitarianism.

J.S. Mill commits all of the fallacies described above. He argues that, because people desire happiness, happiness is desirable. Since all this says is, ‘happiness is desirable because people desire it’, the so-called ‘proof’ is tautological. Further, the only reason he can give as to why people desire the ‘general happiness’ is that people desire their own happiness. Proceeding thus from a tautology, which he assumes to be a ‘fact’, he surmises that ‘happiness is a good’; and because it is a good to each individual person, it must therefore be ‘a good to the aggregate of all persons’ (Mill, in Warnock 1962, pp. 288–289). He does not stop to ask whether ‘happiness’ has any meaning beyond the subjective experience of one person at a time. However, he then proceeds to argue that ultimately we desire only happiness, because all other desirable things are desired only as a means to greater happiness. But the very premises of his case have to be dismissed. Furthermore, happiness suits his purposes as a super-ordinate goal partly because it is free of content and can thus be linked to any other desirable goals.