Happiness

There are two dominant concepts of happiness in the west, and perhaps elsewhere. One is the concept which I associate with Aristotle and Augustine, the other I associate with early modern philosophers. We will start with the latter, move to the former, and then try to articulate a synthesis, as we did with the notion of fulfillment. Both concepts are utilized to make the claim that we all always seek to be happy, but because the concepts are different, the claims are different.

The early modern notion of happiness conceives of it as something one essentially feels. One can thus know whether or not one is happy. Happiness is an occurrent mental state: there is something it feels like to be happy. Further, all it is to be happy is to feel happy.

The older notion of happiness ties happiness to doing well. Thus, on this account, one cannot be happy, however one feels, if one is being vicious. One can "feel happy" and yet fail to be genuinely happy, and thus one will remain restless and unsatisfied no matter how many endorphins are soaking your brain. Further, on this account, it is at least questionable whether or not someone has to feel happy to be happy. It would be consistent with this theory to claim that some people who are doing well are happy yet feel unhappy.

What kind of synthesis can be made of this? Let me start by suggesting that the older notion is the more basic, and that the more recent notion is parasitic on it. Feeling happy is evidence of being happy, but does not entail it. Feeling happy--like other feelings--involves a construal. It involves construing oneself as living well, as being happy. Thus, we are generally warranted in moving from "I feel happy," to "I am happy," but not incorrigibly. There are two consequences to this. First, the source of our felt happiness should be what we take the source of our well being to be. Second, if we are unhappy, there are two routes to becoming happy: we can seek what we think we need to feel happy, or we can reorient what we take to be involved in living well.

This first point is the source of Jon Piper's claim that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. If God is the source of our well being, then he should be the source of our happiness. We should be happy primarily in God and only derivatively in other things if we take our well being to be dependent primarily on God and only derivatively on other things.

The second point should not be taken as the claim that we should simply alter our notion of what living well consists in whenever we are unhappy, nor that we should obtain a notion of living well which will be invulnerable. It is simply the point that we can move in either direction. We can seek what we think will contribute to a good life or we can redirect our efforts to a different conception of the good life. It is not always the case, however, that we should do what will most quickly make us happy. I take the goal to be, rather, to have a happy life. Not a life full of happy feelings, but a life which one would rightly feel happy about at the end.

I want to end by articulating a multi-leveled account of happiness. I have noted that we should feel happy because of God who secures our well being eternally. This should not be taken as meaning that we should be perpetually giddy which feelings of happiness. Rather, I take it that we feel at multiple levels. We can have an abiding sense of our own well being while feeling terribly morose. We can recognize our total well being in Christ while also mourning our sin. We can rest in God's sovereignty while striving hard to pursue sanctification. Perhaps I will say more about this later.

Divinity and High Standards

There are three ways of reacting to God's command to be holy as he is holy. We can lessen his holiness and feel righteous--or unrighteous--in ourselves, or we cal recognize his holiness and his sufficiency.

The commands of Scripture must not be made a dull blade, but must be recognized as sharp with God's divine standard. The commands hold forth the standard of God, and thus God's perfect goodness, as a standard we could never meet. If we seek to dumb down the commands, we must lose a sense of God's holy goodness.

If we are seeking our righteousness in ourselves, the commands will make us guilty or proud. If we know we depend on an alien righteousness, the commands will instead make us acutely aware of the necessity and sufficiency of Christ. We feel crushed by guilt only when we think that it is up to us to carry the burden of guilt. When we recognize that our guilt is a burden Christ bore, and which Christ only could bear because he fulfilled the standard we could not fulfill, because he is the standard, then the commands of God show us how great a salvation we have received: how free a gift we have been given, how dependent we are on that gift, and how unimaginable the goodness of God is. We would never have set so high a standard as God sets, for we know we would fail, but God sets the highest standard for himself, and calls us to try it, to show us how true and good and powerful he is, and how beyond human wisdom his wisdom is.

If our religion did not hold out commands high above any we would set for ourselves, if Christianity did not call us to come and die to ourselves, if it did not set a standard which we could not hold each other to for fear of hypocrisy, then we might argue that it was a merely human religion. But the commands are so far above any this world has produced, yet so true to what we are most certain of that the fulfillment of these commands would outshine the most righteous human of our imagining. Because the commands outstrip our wildest dreams of righteousness, we can claim with confidence that this must be of God, that this religion cannot be a mere invention, for no one would dare to invent this. No one would dare to hold himself to this standard. Unless that someone were God or had the righteousness of God. God came down, and we now have his righteousness, so that we can confidently face commands which we still do not fully satisfy, and be confident that we stand secure in the righteousness of Christ who accomplished all that God called for.

To lower the standards is to cheapen the Gospel, because it makes our salvation petty and our God meager. To raise the standards is only legalism when Christ is not permitted to satisfy them for us, and then it leads naturally to lowering the standards to be within our reach. We can only be consistently legalistic by lowering the standard. Raising the standard places the emphasis on Christ's righteousness, not our own.

Truth

A Christian account of truth should be able to do three things, at a minimum.

1. Show how statements can be true or false.
2. Show how God can be the truth.
3. Show how truth can be something one walks in.

Now, it is possible that these three involve different sorts of truth, the term "truth" used in three different ways. Even so, a Christian account should show how the uses are connected and that the extension of the term makes sense.

If we start with the everyday notion of truth as correspondence with reality, we can make some vague headway. We will need to articulate what correspondence consists in, but we can make sense of how we can walk in correspondence with reality, and how God can be the ultimate reality and thus in fundamental correspondence with it. With this talk of correspondence uniting our success at achieving our the three criteria, we now must show what this correspondence consists in in each case, and how the kinds of correspondence are at least similar.

The standard talk about correspondence as a theory of truth applied to statements tends to be quite unclear. It says that a statement is true if and only if what it says actually is. But this does not get us any further: it is still unclear what has to be if what it says is to be.We have other resources, however: recall that I have already argued that knowledge that something is the case can be understood in terms of the capacities which one possesses if one possesses that knowledge. Thus, the truth conditions of a statement should be able to be cashed out in terms of capacities in some manner. We may better expand this to dispositions in the case of beliefs, although true beliefs produce dispositions which are also capacities.

How shall we articulate this truth in terms of dispositions? There are two properties which the dispositions must possess: they must be are fruitful and they must be stable. Fruitfulness means that the dispositions have benefit: you can get something from them. Stability requires that the dispositions stick. It means that having further experiences does not remove the disposition. To articulate truth in these terms, however, we should take the long view: fruitfulness and stability over the course of eternity is what matters, short-run fruitfulness and stability are only hints of the long-run fruitfulness and stability.

With an account of the truth of statements in place, the account of walking in the truth is relatively easy. To walk in the truth is simply to act in such a way that one is exercising those dispositions and capacities which knowing the truth produces. We can also articulate it as walking in correspondence with reality, since this is what knowing truth claims enables one to do. Knowing the truth enables walking in the truth.

In the case of God being the Truth, correspondence is not much at issue. Rather, the fact that God is who must be known if we are to live rightly, if we are live fruitful and stable lives in accord with how things are, is made clear. It is only in knowing God's power and mercy, his foresight and provision, his deep knowledge of us and his deep love for us, that we can live well. To live without this personal knowledge is to be doomed to live without good dispositions and without the capacity to--at least reliably and for the right reason--do what is right.

Multitasking

The term "multitasking" is ambiguous. We can consider different forms of multitasking along two dimensions: how multi and how tasking. As to how multi the multitasking is, I do not mean how many tasks, but how close together the tasks are in time. Thus, the basic three options are: simultaneous, rapidly alternating, and slowly alternating. The options for tasking have to do with how much of a task the various tasks are, by which I mean how much they require attention. Again, there are roughly three options: no attention, second-nature attention, and full attention.

Simultaneous no attention/other multitasking occurs all the time. Your heart beating is a case of a no attention "task." Simultaneous second-nature/second-nature or second-nature/full attention multitasking, on the other hand, never fully occurs, but likely approximates slow cycling multi-tasking because of the low attention required of the second-nature tasks. When we think we are simultaneous full/full multitasking, we are actually rapid cycling multitasking.

Rapid cycle multitasking involves shifting one's attention between tasks at a fast pace. It is what we generally mean when we colloquially refer to something as multitasking. because rapid cycle multitasking precludes keeping one's attention on a single task for much time at all, it thereby encourages short attention spans, and precludes following an argument of much depth, since one is likely to miss bits in-between. Because one will tend to miss things in both tasks while multitasking, and because it precludes careful argumentation and giving someone else careful consideration and giving careful thought to one's own words--since one is spending, say, half as much time considering them--rapid cycle multitasking is corrosive to community and promotes sound-bite discourse.

Slow cycle multitasking also has some costs to it, since one still has to refocus on what one was doing, but, provided that slow means slow (that is, probably over an hour between shifts) it is far less corrosive to one's ability to pay attention when one needs to, and thus is more civically responsible. This is, presumably, what employers mean by "multitasking" when they list it as a desired skill, although my proposed time between shifts is unlikely to be the actual time in such environments. In any case, since rapid cycle multitasking is what we mean by the term colloquially, the use of the term "multitasking" to refer to a valued skill promotes the value of rapid cycle multitasking and is thereby civically irresponsible.

Value and Money

Money has the property of being exchangeable for anything which one can exchange for. It is the medium of fungible value, or to put it in the vernacular, it can buy anything that can be bought. There are valuable things which cannot be bought. These are internal goods, such as virtue, or social goods, such as community. These goods which cannot be purchased are still considered worth monetary value, however, via the supposed equivalency of time and money. The value of the internal goods may not correlate with how much time they require, however.

It is also worth noting that the value of items is variable. I do not simply mean that prices change, but that the value of an item is agent relative, and this in several ways. The most obvious way in which the value of an item is agent relative is that we prefer different things and have different needs. Another way in which things vary in value is that we have different funds, and thus for the poorer, the more essential items are worth more. The essentials are of basically infinite worth, although how one attains those essentials, what kind of food one gets, may depend on other factors, including one's budget.

Some of the preferences we have, and thus the values we regard things as having, are irrational. The costs of some items therefore do not fit with what it takes to make those items, but is simply dependent on how much we want them. This drives up costs for those who do not regard those items as worth the cost.

Some items could be made so that they would be worth more to us, and yet no one has any interest in producing them. In particular, planned obsolescence ensures that purchasers buy more often, and introduces more bad quality items into the market, and thus into the junkyard. If a company wants to prove that it cares about the environment, making products to last would be a good way. Other ways cost companies little, but gain them the applause of nominal environmentalists.

Some internal and social goods have an absolute value which is independent of both economic status and preferences. It is just as worthwhile to cultivate virtue and community no matter where one is in society. Nevertheless, it costs differently for different groups. The time it takes is actually worth more for those who are poor, despite their hourly wage generally being lower, because it costs more directly in the necessities of life. The rich can cultivate virtue in the spare time which they can afford because they have more money than is requisite to securing the necessities of life. The opportunity costs, then, of living a good life, are greater for the poor than for the rich.

In fact, this can be generalized to almost anything: opportunity costs of acquiring goods, internal or external, are greater for the poor than for the wealthy. Not every dollar is of equal value. Because of this, the less one has, the less ability one has to impact the economy, and thus the more one must buy according to a traditional account where quality and cheapness of the goods matters, and the supplier is fungible. Thus, the poor cannot use their purchasing patterns to push back against companies which hire them for little, because they are either dependent upon those companies for acquiring what they need, or could not purchase from those companies if they wanted to.

The same applies to work choices. The wealthy can afford to be concerned with life/work balance. The poor cannot. If a company requires workaholism (otherwise known as being "career oriented" "dedicated to the company" etc.), and it pays, then there is a class of workers which cannot avoid being formed into a vicious form of life.

None of this is limited to the poor qua low income. There is also a group which we may call the poor qua high outgo. What matters is that both groups get to keep a small amount of money, if any, after food is bought, bills are paid, etc. Whether this is due to loans or bad jobs, both are in a situation which is harmful to cultivating virtue and community. Companies then sell to these groups by promising them community and virtuous living--promises which cannot be kept, because they promise what cannot be sold.

Legitimacy and Responsiveness

In the context of the free will debate, Fisher and Ravizza use a concept of reasons responsiveness to account for when an action is performed freely. I want to apply a similar account to the legitimacy of actions performed by government entities.

On a reasons-responsive view of freedom, an action is performed freely only if it is caused by a mechanism that is somewhat responsive to reasons. This concept of "being responsive" needs to be spelled out more, however. The strongest way would be to say that an agent performs an action freely only if they would have done something else in any situation where there was good reason to do otherwise and not good reason to perform the action. This is likely too strong, however. For one, it requires an agent to be omniscient as to what the reasons are (at least, on reasons externalism). Alternatively, we could hold that the agent performs the action freely only if the action is performed via a mechanism which might have produced a different action in some close situations where there was good reason to do otherwise.

My aim here is to use a similar notion to account for the legitimacy of government actions. I take it that, to be legitimate, the government action needs to be responsive to the values of the people it governs. The values of those people should be responsive to reasons, of course, but that might not be required for the legitimacy of the government. The government action must be performed through a mechanism which usually produces actions as if motivated by the values of the people it governs.

There is a problem here, of course: how do we aggregate the diverse values of a populous? I am not sure there has to be just one answer to this question. It is open to a government to weight different values differently, provided that the weightings, in turn, are motivated by the values of the citizenry. So the aggregation scheme must be such that it provides the result that it is legitimate. Further, it should count all the citizens. It is possible for it to weight the values of some values differently than others, although this should be motivated by values regarding whose values are expected to be the most accurate, rather than which class is preferred. The limit here is provided by the threat of citizens regarding the government as ignoring them. When this occurs, it is safe to say, that government has failed to be sufficiently responsive.

This may be because it is impossible to be responsive to the values of the whole citizenry, or it may be due to failure to attend to the values of some group and take seriously the concerns of that group. In either case, there is a failure of society, a failure of the state as social body to maintain its unity. At such points, the government becomes either a tyranny of one group over another, it splits into two governments, or it finds some way to satisfy both parties, e.g., by ensuring that members of both groups have a role with some degree of efficacy in the government, so that both groups are confident that they are having a say. All of these are attempts at preserving at least a veneer of legitimacy. A government becomes illegitimate in the first case alone. In the other two cases, the legitimacy is repaired. My claim, then, is that a state becomes illegitimate only when it regularly fails to take the values of the whole citizenry into consideration, and thus where a mass of the citizenry has a long-standing sense of disenfranchisement, whatever their legal situation may be.

This is the root of representative democracies. A representative democracy is an attempt at ensuring that the government is responsive to the values of the citizenry. It is possible to maintain this level of legitimacy in non-democratic systems, however, and it is possible to impose a democratic system which fails to be legitimate precisely because it is democratic. The latter case would occur, for instance, if one tried to impose democracy somewhere where people believed that it was a terrible system of government. The former case would occur where a king, for instance, truly cared about his people and considered their values and well-being in his decisions (as, e.g., will be the case in the divine government in heaven).

Government and Fallenness

It seems to be a common assumption that government exists because of the fall, not as a symptom of the fall, but as a bandage. The view seems to be that we would have anarchy if the fall had not happened, but because of the fall we need government to restrain us from the more egregious sins.

I disagree. As plausible as it is to suppose that government would be extraneous in a perfect world, this relies on a one-sided view of the role of government. Government exists, not only to secure justice against unrighteous agents, but to impose an order on society which will go beyond not sinning to securing justice which requires logistical support.

Here is one way of putting my claim: systemic injustice can occur without any individual qua citizen sinning. It may instead involve individuals qua government authorities sinning--I am not claiming that systemic injustice could occur in a world which did not fall, but that it could, and likely would, occur in a world which was perfect except for lacking government.

Apart from the fall, it may be that the government would have just been God, and that in heaven we may again find ourselves in a theocracy. My argument does not hinge on this, however, and God may well have seen fit to work through humans granted logistical gifts in an unfallen world just as he has in our fallen world, and this need not involve God's presence being mediated, only his logistical procedures being realized through a human being. Either way, such government would have existed without the fall.

If we recognize that the government has this logistical role, then we must recognize the authority of government to regulate, to tax, to build roads and such. These are all logistical roles. We might argue about the proper shape of regulation, but, granting that we are aided in doing the right thing by having regulations laying down how we are channeling our efforts toward the common good, even a sinless society would benefit from regulations which would ensure harmony between the actions of different individuals and companies.

Consider how important logistical thought is in putting together the simplest event, or in shipping items from place to place. Such logistics do not presuppose a fallen world. My claim is that similar logistical thought would be required in a perfect world, that this logistical thought would need to be performed from a relatively high vantage point on society, and thus that whatever performed this role would be, in function, a government.