The Hedonism of Liberalism

Should we be happy that someone is happy? At first glance, an affirmative answer seems unobjectionable. What we must query, however, is what we mean by "happy." Liberalism, or, more accurately, that form of liberalism which has adopted evangelicalism's use of "testimonies" to convince people to adopt certain views, presumes, as its evangelical predecessor often did, that I can easily tell whether or not I am happy. This requires a conception of happiness as something one feels, an experience which is accessible both when it is occurring and later, in memories which cannot be systematically distorted.

While how I feel right now may be easy for me to detect, how I felt a week ago about something which I have ideological reasons to want to feel a particular way about may be very hard to accurately detect. I will, after all, be prone to think about how I felt, how I should have felt, and in the remembering and re-experiencing I am very likely to confabulate how I wish I had felt. My memories about my happiness are thus unreliable.

Even if these memories were reliable, this kind of happiness is not actually so important on its own. If people feel happy in this way as a result of hurting others, or as a result of opiods, we are unlikely to be happy for them. We may rather feel sad for them, since they seem deluded or trapped in being happy for bad reasons. So, to feel happy for someone's happiness, one must believe that the person's happiness is valid, that is, that the person is happy for a good reason. One must not think that the happiness is a mistake, that the individual should instead be sad.

To suppose that each moment of this experiential happiness counts for the same amount is hedonism. This may take the form of holding the best life to have the most experiential happiness in it, which might give the right results in the case of the addict, or it might be generalized to the best state of affairs being that in which the most people have the most experiential happiness in their lives, as in utilitarianism, which would give the right result in the case of the sadist. However, both of these theories go around the reason we are not happy when people are happy in these ways. Our problem is not that they are decreasing total happiness (in their lives or among sentient beings or otherwise), but that they are not justified in their happiness. They are experiencing something which is not justified by the circumstance, and thus are in a similar position to someone who is deluded with respect to how the external world is in other ways.