Ethics: The Science for Finding Happiness

Unless you are trapped in the tragic situation I’ll discuss later, you are trying to live a happy life. But you face a challenge: Feeling happy in one moment is not a fully reliable indicator of what will make you happy in the future. You can’t just say, “I’ll do whatever makes me happy right now.” You need to figure out what will make you happy your whole life.

Happiness is an emotion. As such it is (1) experienced with the immediacy of a sensation (you “feel” happy or afraid just as you “feel” cold or tired) and (2) it is an evaluation, performed by the subconscious, of your current situation. Feeling happy in one moment does not imply that you will feel happy a moment later. It all depends what caused the feeling in the first place.

So you need a way to judge what will make you happy in life, and being happy at one moment just doesn’t fit the bill. Maybe you have artificially induced the feeling with drugs that you cannot continue using. Maybe the conditions that are making you happy are fleeting.

In other words, short-range, in-the-moment hedonism is not guaranteed to bring you life-sized happiness.

You need some science that identifies what will make you happy. That is the science of ethics. Ethics is a science for those trying to be happy. It is the science that shows you why, that, and how, for example, being honest, independent, objective, productive, just, and so on will bring you life-sized happiness.

Ethics does this by identifying and then applying a standard or gauge for measuring the value of particular actions. And that standard, that gauge, is merely your life. If you take actions that promote your life, you will be happy. If you take actions that mess up your life, you will be unhappy. There’s no away around that. That’s just what happiness is—the emotion that comes from achieving values that are good for you.

Ayn Rand says it this way: “A ‘standard’ is an abstract principle that serves as a measurement or gauge to guide a man’s choices in the achievement of a concrete, specific purpose.”* Happiness is the highest purpose. Life is the standard. That is, you use life as your standard of value so that you can be happy.

Happiness varies in intensity and quantity. And it makes no sense to ask why someone would want more of it.

Keep that in mind when trying to understand Rand’s “Life is the standard of value.” One’s life is the yardstick, the measure, the gauge. This yardstick is used by those who have a reason to use it, namely those trying to be happy. They are trying to maximize something, and that’s why they need the guidance that the standard provides.

It’s not that you have some God-imposed duty to adopt your life as your standard of value. It’s simply that the way the human psyche works, if you are trying to be happy and are to succeed, you need to do things that are good for you. The more good they are, the happier you’ll be. If you take actions that are bad for you, you will be unhappy.

Some readers have difficulty with Rand’s phrase “qua man.” She says, “The standard of value of the Objectivist ethics—the standard by which one judges what is good or evil—is man’s life, or: that which is required for man’s survival qua man.”* She says those who reject life as the standard of good and evil are trying to live a “subhuman” life.

I take this not to mean that such a person is trying to survive by walking on all fours and eating dog food. Rather, such a person refuses to grow up and is living as a child: by mimicking. The life isn’t subhuman because the person has become a lower species but subhuman because his or her life is below the developmental level of a fully mature adult human.

No one really tries to go through life as a dog or a salamander. But many people do evade the contradictions and destructive implications of ideas and practices they pick up as children.

Now to the sad case of suicide. Wouldn’t saying life is the standard of value mean that suicide is always wrong? No.

Remember that life is like pinball: The reward for doing it well is that you get to play again. Some respond to Ayn Rand by saying, “You say there are no intrinsic values, but aren’t you saying that life itself is an exception, that it’s a universal and intrinsic good?” No. As one of my students nicely put it, “Life is a value, but only to the living.”** Playing pinball is a value to someone trying to continue the game. Life is a value to someone—and only to someone—trying to be happy.

Sadly, some who would try to be happy if they could, can’t. There are tragic cases where happiness is simply unavailable. Maybe someone has a terminal disease and all that lies ahead is three months of suffering. If happiness is unavailable, there is no value in living. And there is nothing immoral about such a person committing suicide.

Other cases of justified suicide work the same way. If a mother assumes responsibility for protecting her child at all cost and gets caught in a terrible situation where she must end her life to save her child’s, her choice to save the child is not a sacrifice. Happiness has become unavailable to her. She cannot be happy if she dies and she cannot be happy if she reneges on her commitment.

Was the soldier, police officer, or Secret Service agent right to jump in and take the bullet? Don’t such people sacrifice themselves? It depends on the pledge they made. They don’t go into the position planning to die, but they pledge to do so under certain conditions. Not fulfilling that pledge can ruin a life as much as fulfilling it would.

The cases are tragic, but they don’t refute the principles: Holding one’s life as a standard of value is not a commitment to range-of-the-moment hedonism. Nor is it an imposed duty. It is merely a commitment to finding and applying what will bring you a life of happiness. And since happiness is an emotion produced by and only by virtuous actions, holding one’s life as a sovereign standard of value is a commitment to those actions—to virtues such as rationality, objectivity, productiveness, honesty, justice, independence, integrity, and pride.

Now maybe you don’t think of ethics as the science that brings happiness. OK. Then start a new science, one whose task is to identify what principles of action will bring you maximum lifelong happiness.

If you use a good scientific method, you’ll come up with “Be honest with yourself and others,” “Act with integrity,” “Be rational and productive,” “Don’t be a burden on others,” “Act objectively and justly,” and other . . . well . . . virtues.

If you conclude that you can lie, cheat, and steal your way to happiness, then you made a mistake, just as if you had concluded you can cure cancer with crystals and bleeding. It turns out the human body and the human psyche just do not allow those causes to have those effects.

That’s science—whether you call the science “ethics,” or something else.

A final little bit: Note that above I don’t say “wanting to be happy.” I say “trying to be happy.” The two are not the same. “Trying” is the more fundamental concept. Only a person trying to be happy can want something. For emphasis you can say, “I want to be happy,” but that just means “It would make me happy to be happy.” For sorting out the dependencies in ethics, it’s important to see that try precedes want.