Development as if happiness mattered:

towards post-abolitionist and empathetic approaches to global

social progress. Neil Thin

University of Edinburgh

Overall purpose of presentationTo promote more careful consideration of what kinds of

difference a ‘happiness lens’ can make in planning, understanding, and evaluating development

Subsidiary purposes:Demonstrate the surprising absences of reference to

happiness in some areas of development discourseRecognize common reasons for avoiding happiness talk in

policyOutline the different components of what it means to

introduce a ‘happiness lens’

Is the ‘three pillars framework’ (economy, environment, society) really a balloon and two

pins?• 3PF dvd through critical ‘environmental’ and ‘social’ critiques of

techno-economic optimism

• Soc and envtl discourses have thrived on fear, anger, envy, and scepticism, but they must understand social and envtl goods

• Attention to good social and environmental change is crucial to the motivation (happiness) of developers

• Critical use of a happiness lens can help get us back on the rails

The ‘negative utilitarianism’ argument

Loving a person means wishing to make him happy. […] But of all political ideals, that of making the people happy is perhaps the most dangerous one. It leads invariably to the attempt to impose our scale of ‘higher’ values upon others in order to make them realize what seems to us of greatest importance for their happiness; in order, as it were, to save their souls. It leads to Utopianism and Romanticism.

[Popper, The Open Society, 1962/197:432]Implication? We shouldn’t let interpersonal subjective matters such as love, empathy, or happiness get in the way of the rational planning of harm removal.

Human betterment: ‘development/social policy’ versus media and business approaches

•No global agencies, and very few government agencies, declare an interest in happiness•But lots of businesses promise that their products and

services will deliver happiness, and media pay lots of attention to happiness•No refs to happiness in MDG discourse, and little ref to it

in dvt agency policies and dvt studies•Although ‘human rights’ discourse pays lip service to the

‘enjoyment’ of rights, there is no analytical follow-through.

Table: Criteria for consideration in development ethics and evaluation

Question Answers, regarding happiness

1.Does it matter? Yes, more than anything else

2.Does it matter to very disadvantaged people?

Yes, though basic needs may be more urgent

3.Does it vary? Yes

4.Would more of it be better? Yes

5.Can development institutions and policies affect it?

Yes

6.Can it be meaningfully assessed at reasonable cost?

Yes, though lack of expertise makes this harder in poorer countries

7.Can it be measured? Yes, though culture and context influence responses

Anticipating likely objections to happiness lens

1 HL complements other policy themes (poverty, rights, equality, unhappiness), doesn’t substitute for them.

2 HL doesn’t necessarily imply a ‘utilitarian’ approach.3 Attending to happiness doesn’t imply a naïve celebration

of the wisdom and virtue of subjective assessment. People can be mistaken about their own present, past, and future health and well-being, but their views should be heard and considered.

Limits of abolitionism and adversarial politics• ‘Health/mental health’ services/policies/research focus on illness and medicine, not on

resilience or on healthy social and biophysical environments

• Abolitionist wars-to-end-all-wars fail to plan for peace and prosperity

• ‘ethical’ discourse focuses on what people shouldn’t do rather than on what they ought to do, thereby inhibiting motivation and initiative; e.g. religious movements overemphasise disapproval of rival creeds

• Environmental officers and campaigners focus on fighting and mitigating pollution and unsustainable resource use, ignoring promotion of environmental goods.

• Feminists and gender reformers (even ‘ethics of care’) focus on female disadvantage vis-à-vis ‘male’ advantages (money, prestige, power), and on male harms (bullying, violence, domestic laziness), not on good gender relations and identities.

• ‘Social policy’ specializes in social problems rather than on social goods like healthy relationships and flourishing social institutions.

• Antiracist policies and institutions become defined by the kinds of prejudice they oppose, instead of by the desirable aspects of ethnicity and multiculturalism.

• Human rights agencies focus on wrongs and have little to say about rights.

• ‘development’ agencies seem more interested in poverty, injustice, and suffering than in social progress and the enjoyment of life.

Trends that encourage use of happiness lens

• Post-scarcity: As material provisioning becomes more secure, capabilities and opportunities for diverse happiness pursuits increase.• Post-inequality: As access to interim goods such as money, education,

and positions of power becomes more equitable, there remain important questions about inequalities in happiness and health.• Choice: Modernity and affluence bring new sources of both happiness

and unhappiness. Personal and collective happiness theories become more salient, more complex, more risk-prone.• Ageing populations: Spectacular life extension prompts debates about

adding ‘life to years’.• Overconsumption: can we find win-win solutions to the challenges of

sustainability, benefiting present and future generations?

Five expected features of the ‘happiness lens’

•Empathic respect for subjectivity•Attention to strengths and goodness•Holism•Lifespan perspective•Transparent objectives and causal theories

Empathy and subjectivity

•Poverty talk, abolitionism, adversarial politics, and rights talk can be empathy killers

•HL means respect for (but not naïve endorsement of) people’s interpretive and evaluative agency

•HL complements ‘objective’/quantitative with ‘subjective’/qualitative information

Strengths and goodness

•HL insists on attention to the capability to enjoy experiences and to develop meaningful narratives•Even ‘well-being’, ‘welfare’, and ‘health’ rubrics often serve as euphemistic smokescreens for pathologism•Removal of harms isn’t sufficient for a flourishing life•Excessive focus on adversity and ‘hygiene’ can have perverse outcomes

Holism and cross-disciplinarity

•HL is not just about domain or sub-domain satisfactions

•HL emphasises interactions among resources, abilities, activities, relationships, and environments

•HL is not about personal selfishness: H requires cultural, social, and environmental engagement

Lifespan perspective

•Happiness is a story about wellbeing that emerges over a lifetime

•By focusing on deficiencies and specific resources, dvt agencies and service providers tend to sideline people’s own happiness narratives.

•Progressive agencies must appreciate that it is people’s whole life narratives that ultimately matter

Transparent objectives and causal theories

• It is reasonable to ask ‘progressive’ agencies to spell out their values and their theories of how good lives are achieved.

• If this-worldly happiness is missing from, or denied in their narrative, we have good reason to suspect their motives.

•As we see from scurrilous commercial adverts, a promise of happiness is suspect too, if it’s not accompanied by a plausible causative theory.

Using the happiness lens: four aspects of the policy process

•Contexts and causes: empirical or hypothetical consideration of current status and effects of H, and influences on it. Instrumental value of H in promoting other values (health, peace, love, wisdom, creativity)

•Goals and values: Do goals refer to H and do they reflect cultural values?

• Justifications: are there clear evidence-based or plausible pathways from policy outcomes to H?

• Indicators: do these respect subjectivity by referring to satisfaction, enjoyment, and meaning?

Happiness in policy processesThemes and objectives

Analysis of contexts/ causes

Goals and values

Justifications Indicators

Education How do motivation and self-esteem influence attendance and performance?

Is happiness recognized as an educational objective?

Are academic outcomes plausibly linked to happiness during and after childhood?

Will pupils’ satisfaction and enjoyment be monitored?Will correlations between happiness indicators and other educational indicators be monitored?

Health Does socio-cultural context analysis explore the ways happiness influences health-related choices and outcomes?Are happiness-makers recognized as key health promoters?Are synergies between bodily and mental health recognized?

Do the goals describe how health outcomes form part of the good life?

Is the health intervention justified on the basis of evidence linking specific health outcomes to happiness?

Will subjective health indicators and/or happiness indicators be used?Will the enjoyment of health-promoting activities be assessed?

Happiness lens and global care ethic•Solidarity matters: human progress comes from empathetic,

loving relationships as much as from plans and policies

•Purely ‘negative’ empathy (or compassion, or sympathy) is an inadequate basis for solidarity. (‘Do-gooders’ are those who try to help but don’t respect the positive subjectivity of beneficiaries).

•Sponsorship, private aid, ‘immersion’ visits, and campaigns are good if they promote positive care and balanced empathy (recognizing strengths and happiness not just harm).

Conclusions: 4 empirical observations

•Happiness is rarely explicit in dvt objectives and theories

• Social dvt scholars, social policies, and social movements emphasise harms, adversarial politics, and interim goods

• Poor/disempowered people are less happy than they might be, but their happiness/resilience is a key capability

• The distribution of self-reported happiness often correlates surprisingly weakly with social justice indicators (e.g. ‘welfare’ expenditures, financial/political gender inequity).

Conclusions: two normative propositions1.Happiness matters more than any other dvt objectives, and should be explicit in missions, plans, and evaluations

2.Humanitarianism requires efforts to empathise with people’s happiness, not with their suffering or with their inadequate access to interim goods such as money and power.

… and two hypotheses:1: Increased use of a ‘happiness lens’ (in analysis, objectives, justification, and indicators) would improve the processes and outcomes of dvt work.2: By promoting empathetic and constructive approaches to dvt, the HL would increase the enjoyment of dvt work and reduce adverse stress, dissatisfaction, and staff turnover in dvt agencies.