Reason Review of Layard’s Happiness

Jason, Yes! And here's what I said about it:

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If one has aspirations for the totalizing rule of one’s comprehensive moral conception, it seems that one should accept a fair burden of persuasion. But Layard treats classic objections to utilitarianism as annoyances, or bad manners, and brushes them off with incompetent “argumentation.” Here’s what he says about Nozick’s famous experience machine:

If offered the chance, asks Nozick, would you plug in? Of course, many people would not, for all sorts of reasons. They would not trust the machine to deliver what it promised, so they would prefer to keep their real autonomy. Or they might have obligations to others that they could not perform if they were inert. And so on. Thus this is a weak test case, especially because it describes a situation so far from our reality that we have almost become a different animal.

That the machine perfectly delivers as promised is stipulated. Inability to entertain the counterfactual–to actually conduct the thought esperiment–is not an argument against it. And “obligations to others they could not perform”? Well, yes. This is precisely the sort of thing people might worry about because people generally think they ought to meet their obligations, regardless of the hedonic payoff. That’s part of Nozick’s point, dipshit. If Layard was honest, he would bite the bullet and say, yes, plug in. And if there was an experience machine for each of us that would maximize the hedonic quality of our experience, then we would be obligated individually and collectively to forgo a real life of actual action and actual engagement, and instead climb into our pods on the Matrix pod farm, and dream sweet virtual dreams until we die. If Layard will not deign to explain to us why, despite our deep sense of revulsion, we ought to see this scenario as the happiest of all possible circumstance, he cannot expect us to acquiesce to his Benthamite Philosopher Technocrat fantasy.

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From this post.

Having been exposed to Layard in two seminars now, I found that your review was excellent. It really diagnosed what's so off-putting about his project. Did you catch his beautiful attempt to wave away Nozick's Experience Machine?

Fine review.

On a different but related note, thought you might be interested in this post from Tim Blair about a study that seems to correlate self-reported "happiness" with political voting patterns.