Lisa

The problem here is just that a lot of people say that children pay off in terms of happiness, but happiness research isn't showing that. Perhaps this is because a lot of people have false expectations about what will make them happy (often the case). However, it also might be that a lot of people are using the term 'happiness' in a different way to happiness researchers (also often the case).

That would explain all the hand waving about 'meaning'. The hand wavers are really trying to say “well you might not get *that* kind of happiness out of having children, but there are still lots of other good things you get.”

Meanwhile I'm curious about an entirely different point. Presumably we are all down with the idea that more money will make us happier. And we know that having children involves taking a huge financial hit. And apparently having children turns out to be a wash in terms of happiness, or perhaps a slight negative. Doesn't it follow that, ceteris paribus, having children will make you happier? It has to be adding enough happiness (perhaps nearly) make up for the huge financial loss.

1. Happiness is not the only thing which is intrinsically valuable. There are other things like striving and struggling and acting and other experience independent stuff which is intrinsically valueable. I don't think I have to rehash Nozick's experience machine argument for everyone here right?

2. We may or may not be able to quantify how much we value these things. Given that we find a variety of things meaningful, is there any way to compare these things with eachother.

3. what is the use of these studies? None of us are the average person. The rationality of the action depends on how much the action satsifies your values/ meanings vis a vis other actions. Maybe if the science found a way to quantify how much we value various different kind of stuff, discovered how much different courses of action fulfilled those values, then weighted everything and churned out a reccomendation, you would have a much more quantified decision procedure.

4. Will you have to show how that a world where suh a procedure is used ubiquituously is actually a better state of affairs than one where it isnt.

I'd be interested in your take on Charles Murray's speech to the American Enterprise Institute. Here is a (notorious) quantifier employing the “meaning dodge” to defend politics you're sympathetic to.

If you are going to defend liberty, even when it comes in conflict with satisfaction, then don't you have to distinguish the good life from the pleasurable life?

John Stuart Mill tells you it's better to be Socrates unsatisfied than a pig satisfied. Are you saying Mill's “better” is just an arbitrary preference or that it is an arbitrary preference unless someone comes up with a way of measuring it?

Now measure that.

Say there's a study that says kids, without question, tend to make people less happy.

This study would not affect my decision to have children.

Is this your point? That I need to be up front about this?

A second question: isn't this 'meaning dodge' really just a play on the ambiguity in the notion of “happiness”? I think what most people are reacting to here is the idea that there is any quantifiable or otherwise reasonably concrete notion of happiness–one that holds, not only across diverse individuals, but across…ahem…time slices of the same individual.

I'm just having a hard time understanding the notion of happiness outside of some notion of time. If you asked me if my kids made me happy, my response would probably change depending on what day it is. The same can be said of any long-term project–philosophy, for example.

In regards to meaning, I find that it is literally a “personal narrative”. It's a person's place in a story, the story of their lives. It's an interpretation of the events in one's life as having to do with something bigger than themselves. It's an important part of a person, the ability to create meaning, the lack of which can be seen all around us in a world where such things are taken for granted, even actively suppressed.

I've got to say, this is a troubling proposition.

Whether meaning and (your) happiness can be truly quanitified is irrelevant. What can be quantified is the eradication of your particular genetic makeup from the human species.

I agree that the “meaning” rebuttal is a dodge, but to ask that proponents of reproduction admit they are “just going to do it anyway,” happiness be damned, is to dismiss the biological rationale (i.e. the science) for reproduction to begin with. Many of us accept reproduction as a necessary component of life – and we understand the consequences of large-scale circumvention – of reproduction (and by default natural selection) by a specific group of people.

What you are advocating for is an acceptance of the happiness research into the decision making process on human reproduction. What you are (unintentionally) causing is the increased likelihood that these people who accept the research don't reproduce, terminating their inclusion in the human gene pool. I don't see how this aids your long-term project in slightest.

Maybe this is where E.D. Kain's “meaning” discussion belongs. There is a clear, scientific meaning to reproduction (to reproduce.) When we focus on outcomes outside this meaning to justify our decision to not participate in reproduction, we invite the prospects of unintended consequences. Imagine if a large portion of the community of scientists and empiricists took the happiness research at face value, determined that their individual happiness could be improved (or at least not negatively affected) if they chose not to have children, decreasing the overall birthrates amongst scientisits/empiricists at some statistically significant level versus the rest of the population. Then 25 years later we wonder where all the young scientists are.

There are somethings, biologically, that we are intended to do. Keep it simple and do them; eat, breathe, and make babies.

This is not an argument to stop happiness studies (because they are illuminating, to say the least) , or to stop the multi-millennia ruminations about meaning. However, it is an argument that solutions to the human predicament or quantifying human happiness are part of the never-ending, wonderful conversation of philosophy, without permanent resolution. The study of humanity is not the study of sterile mathematics. Those of us who believe it is, are sometimes regarded as being, “eerie.”