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On Feldman's Theory of Happiness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2009

THOMAS BLACKSON
THOMAS BLACKSON*
Affiliation:
Arizona State [email protected]
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Abstract

Fred Feldman conceives of happiness in terms of the aggregation of attitudinal pleasure and displeasure, but he distinguishes intrinsic from extrinsic attitudinal pleasure and displeasure and excludes extrinsic attitudinal pleasure and displeasure from the aggregation that constitutes happiness. I argue that Feldman has not provided a strong reason for this exclusion

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , September 2009 , pp. 393 - 400
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

1 Feldman, Fred, Pleasure and the Good Life: Concerning the Nature, Varieties, and Plausibility of Hedonism (Oxford, 2004), p. 16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Feldman, Pleasure, p. 16.

3 In fact, Feldman now states his theory of happiness as an aggregation of what he terms ‘occurrent’ intrinsic attitudinal pleasure and displeasure. He contrasts occurrent attitudinal pleasure with the disposition to have attitudinal pleasure. ‘[S]omeone might say that throughout the time Bob lived in Massachusetts, he was always pleased to live there. He might intend to express the idea that Bob never had any complaints about living in Massachusetts and that, whenever he thought about it, he was occurrently pleased about it. When these things are true, Bob may be said to be dispositionally pleased about living in Massachusetts. If we are talking about dispositional pleasure, it would be acceptable to say that Bob is pleased to be living in Massachusetts throughout a certain interval of time even if Bob happens to be asleep at many moments during that time’ (‘What is This Thing Called Happiness?’, delivered to the Philosophy Department at Arizona State University, 2 March 2007, pp. 12, 22). Since my argument in this article does not turn on the distinction Feldman draws in these remarks, I state a simplified version of his theory of happiness that does not use the term ‘occurrent’.

4 Feldman, Pleasure, p. 56.

5 Feldman, Pleasure, p. 56.

6 Feldman, Pleasure, p. 55. In ‘What is This Thing Called Happiness?’, Feldman says that attitudinal pleasure is a propositional attitude.

7 As far as I can determine, these two attitudes would be equally expressed by sentences of the form ‘S is happy that P’ and ‘S is unhappy that P’. Feldman himself does not appear to deny this. His theory of happiness does not appear to be intended as an analysis. Nevertheless, in my argument in this article, I remain neutral on this issue.

8 Feldman, Pleasure, p. 60.

9 Dummett, Michael, ‘Bringing about the Past’, Philosophical Review 73 (1964), pp. 341–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Feldman, Pleasure, p. 63.

11 I do not know of anyone who has endorsed this theory of happiness in print, although H. A. Pritchard is a possibility in ‘Moral Obligation’, Moral Obligation: Essays and Lectures by H. A. Prichard, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford, 1949), pp. 100–2.

12 Feldman, Pleasure, p. 58.

13 Feldman, Pleasure, p. 58.

14 I received helpful comments on previous drafts of this article from Ben Bradley, Stew Cohen, Peter de Marneffe, Chris Heathwood, and Ellie Mason.