Sugar Blossom

Plural and Conflicting Aims: A good account of happiness

When we ask ourselves how we think in normal circumstances about
our state or condition, what presents itself to us is a plurality of
things. They present themselves under various rubrics. One “aims”
to do or achieve or acquire certain things. One “wants” this and that
and the other. One believes that such-and-such and so-and-so would
be “worthwhile” to do or experience. One knows that one would
“enjoy” or “welcome” certain things and not others. In each such
category a number of things come to mind. All of them are eligible
for figuring in one’s plans and choices.

The various such things that present themselves to one’s attention
are always rivals for a person’s efforts to gain or enjoy them. They’re
to some degree in conflict, if not intrinsically, then at the very least
in competing for the resources and time necessary to gain them or,
in the case of projects, to carry them out.

Having a plurality of aims isn’t caused by luxury or plenty. Those
in need have at least as much reason to have a plurality of aims as
those who are well provided. A human being doesn’t live by bread
alone, or water alone, or sleep alone, or any other single thing. Even
keeping alive in extreme straits can require attending to more than
one immediate need.

Likewise a certain kind of nostalgic historicist soul might think
that it’s only in the hectic modern world that people have come to
have lots of aims, etc. on their minds. But that’s implausible. Even at
the simplest level a person attends to various things simultaneously:
things like where to place one’s feet to avoid rocks in the path and
branches at eye level, like whether there’s a clearing ahead, like what
the sounds around one might signal, what the sky above tells about
the coming weather, and so on.

A good account of happiness has to begin with an awareness of
the fact of the plurality of aims and conflicts among them. It seems
to me that our development of a concept of happiness starts from
that awareness. And an articulation of the concept has to incorporate
it, and to show how the concept can be won from the plurality, with
its potential conflicts, that the awareness sets before us.

Moreover, any philosopher who succeeds in articulating what
happiness is has to bring his account of it back into confrontation
with the state of the person as he actually is - every person, that is -
who finds a plurality of aims presented to him. The philosopher
would have to be able to say plausibly, “From your standpoint you
can come to see that this, the condition of happiness as I’m describing
it, is a good condition to be in”.

For whatever condition happiness turns out to be, just about
everyone is willing to agree that it’s a good condition, a condition to
go for. So an account of it had better make clear to us as we are that
that’s so, or at least show how we can come to that point.
But that’s not easy to do. With good reason Milton in Paradise
Lost describes a part of Satan’s host who (to adapt slightly)