Rationally Speaking #37 - The Science and Philosophy of Happiness

Rationally Speaking Podcast

New York City Skeptics

Society & Culture, Skepticism, Science, Philosophy

4.6 • 787 Ratings

🗓️ 19 June 2011

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Debates over what’s important to happiness — Money? Children? Love? Achievement? — are ancient and universal, but attempts to study the subject empirically are much newer. What have psychologists learned about which factors have a strong effect on people’s happiness and which don’t? Are parents really less happy than non-parents, and do people return to their happiness “set point” even after extreme events like winning the lottery or becoming paralyzed? We also tackle some of the philosophical questions regarding happiness, such as whether some kinds of happiness are “better” than others, and whether people can be mistaken about their own happiness. But, perhaps the hardest question is: can happiness really be measured?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.
0:22.6	For more information, please visit us at NYCCEPTICs.org.
0:35.6	Welcome to rationally speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense. I am your host, Massimo Piliuchi, and with me as always is my co-host, Julia Galev. Julia, what are we going to talk about today?
0:47.4	Massimo, today we're going to talk about the science and philosophy of happiness. Oh, I'm so happy. Me too. We've got a lot to cover. We're going to talk about
0:55.1	the different things that people mean when they talk about happiness, because there's a lot of
0:58.6	different concepts being lumped together under that label. And we'll talk about whether happiness
1:03.5	is the sort of thing that we can even objectively measure, whether we can compare happinesses
1:08.2	between different people, between different countries, or even between
1:11.3	different periods in a single person's life. And then we'll also try to look at the question
1:15.5	of whether happiness is a good goal to pursue for individuals and also for societies.
1:20.8	All of that in 45 minutes.
1:22.4	Yes. All of that in 45 minutes. That's the magic of rationally speaking.
1:25.9	All right. So since we have so much time,
1:29.0	I think we should start 2400 years ago. Of course. Taking the long route. Take us back. Right.
1:34.2	So the reason I want to go back there briefly, obviously we're not going to stay there too long.
1:39.0	It's because for the ancient Greeks, particularly, of course, the usual suspects, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle,
1:46.1	all those people, that was the crucial question of philosophy. And in fact, that was even the crucial
1:51.5	question of ethics. So these days, we talk about ethics and morality as dealing with questions
1:58.8	of right and wrong. So, you know, you have Driitarian ethics, you have Kant, you have all these stuff.
2:04.0	But for the ancient Greeks, if you had walked up to Aristotle, for instance,
2:07.5	and told him that that's what you meant by ethics,
2:10.1	it would have looked at you with a strange look on his eyes and said,
	...

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