all right welcome to pillage here in philosophy lecture and my name is Robin Wow I'm Karina Taylor cheering love Sofia holder so let me begin first I want to thank you for Thank You Amelia right rise from Academy of Catholic thought and the imagination so basically this event sponsored by Academy with Catholics thought so that she really put a lot of work into it and also Alexis stolen and from philosophy department these are all this wonderful food they're make this event possible okay today we have distinguished philosopher and the speakers and almond climbing death Flanagan is professor of philosophy at the Duke University and also he is well known for his work on consciousness philosophy my moral psychology now regarding his education he tell me he's a good that Catholic boy because the high school is a Catholic a training and they graduate it's a judge with training in Florida so he knows what is a judge of Education and serving him well and then he has a published extensively and probably different 22:12 of books and in the 20 years of his professional life started the science of a mind so I cannot believe this bad that you see every two years I see the pattern every two or three years you will publish in a book and it's a book house of and I Mikey Oxford and the publishes and then so much to see professor of Flanigan's work and activity and for example is conducting work with hopes we actually stay the Pope's have a breakfast the Wiz pops and he also spent one week who was the Dalai Lama so it's very impressive right so but I don't want to see one of the goody characters his work is he's one of the established you know Western philosopher and then he's able to cross as he doing philosophy cross the bungees he looking into another philosophical traditions like a Buddhism Chinese a philosophy to [Music] understanding human conditions so I think this is a very unique rather than as a one last one I won't leave a little footnote so they don't antidote so I am the Franklin spend one year at center for advanced to studying Human Sciences at the Stanford University so two years ago so the center located help it's really high hill and next the campus Stanford campus so every morning I have to push my gas back I've had a very hard to get on at the top the hill is bother almost a half miles he had come to France of Flanagan and he ride a bike but lesson this is now that you liked Hong in the back it's a naked bike every morning he actually right up to that hill and is very impressive so I think there's a physical strength really contributed to his intellectual muscle so I will see Wow perspective this is meaning of life thank you Thank You Robin and thank you all for being here it's a great honor to be here I always feel comfortable among Jesuits I did tell Robin that I was a good Catholic boy but no I'm very I was very blessed by a wonderful education I had in the Catholic educational system and I think I would never have become a philosopher hadn't had been for the fact that my father when I was about 13 my dad had gone to was a soldier in the Second World War like many people who had came from families that never gone to college he came back and he went to college on the GI Bill and he I was about 13 and he could tell I was having theological doubts and he brought me a bridge version of Thomas Aquinas is Summa Theologica I was smitten and the rest is history I'm a philosopher for that reason so thanks dad and thanks thanks to Jesuits well Thomas of course wasn't a Jesuit but we Jesuits say he's one of us really okay so today I'm going to talk to you about well this is a good topic you know it gets people here now you're gonna leave disappointed because I'm not going to tell you exactly what the answer is but I always say when people ask me what I what I work on I do tend to tell people that I've had three interests three main interests in life and they do go back to when I was a little boy their questions about the nature of the mind the spirit the soul is it just the brain or is there something more to being a human meaning what's the meaning of life what's it all about why does it matter and morals how does being an ethical person fit in with a meaningful life with a good life how does it make us maybe special as a species today I'm just going to talk to you about so the topic is the meaning of life I'm going to be exploring some work I'm doing the reason I put up those other to fill creations besides Duke is that I've been doing work for the last few years with the Center for sustainable development at Columbia University which is headed by an economist Jeffrey Sachs who's been very involved in sustainability and ending poverty in the world and with some initiatives at the Vatican where we're working lately on a initiative for the next two years on science happiness and well-being now what we're thinking about what the connection is among those things so I'm going to be talking to you about meaning but you'll see these other concepts namely happiness and so on will come in and I'm interested in the connections between living a good human life living a successful human life flourishing as a human being being happy and so on so I'm gonna bring in some empirical evidence though because I'm part I'm interested I've always been a philosopher who's interested in the facts as it were on the ground likes or how people are faring here and now how we're doing and there's some now good collaborations going on between among psychologists philosophers theologians and economists in terms of thinking through what makes for a good human life so let me begin we'll have so one thing is a in Western philosophy we we tend to take this inspiration for this topic from Aristotle and Aristotle one way to read Aristotle on the topic of meaning and flourishing and happiness is to think of Aristotle actually as one of the first sort of besides being a great philosopher he was using sort of social scientific methods one thing that we know from his great text the Nicomachean ethics is he tells us that he went around among his fellow citizens and he would ask them what do you want more than anything else what do you want for its own sake like a lot of things you want like money clearly money is good for things you can buy things you want with them but just having the money is not a good thing and if you're attached to just having the money that's kind of peculiar because you're just attached to like dirty paper with you know little cocaine on it I guess right but that's just not a good thing to value the money itself but you value the money because of what get you so that's an instrumental good but what's the goal an Aristotle this is kind of surprising that you found this because it's kind of a new word in Greece at the time Plato doesn't use this word much Plato uses it once or twice this word eudaimonia the word aristotle says everybody says they want eudaimonia they want to be a you Damon and when I was in graduate school in the early 70s we translated that as happiness then all of a sudden in 1975 it was announced all of us graduate students we are not any longer translating eudaimonia as happiness we're translating it as fulfillment or flourishing and it had to do as you'll see in my talk there's this conflict between whether or not flourishing as a human has something to do with your inner subjective feelings like happy happy joy joy click your heels or whether it has to do with some objective features of a human life being an ethical person having proper values possibly feeling good about them but maybe not being in a high level sort of inner hedonic state and that's one of the debates that's going on right now when we talk about such things as flourishing in the meaning of life but even then Aristotle points out everybody wants you Damon Nia but if you ask them what brings you Damon eeeh what makes us flourish he said there's disagreement some people think it comes from fame or reputation some people think it comes from money some people think it comes from political power some people think it comes from sex drugs rock and roll and the minority he says think it comes from a life of reason and virtue and they're right now this is always an interesting thing that philosophers again and again do and I approve of it they're willing to say that everybody thinks such and so and they're confused or they're wrong so they're not wrong and thinking that what they want is eudaimonia but some of people maybe the hoi polloi as the Greeks would say have an incorrect conception of what brings it or what it really consists in okay so that's will be the sort of topic so this is a this word is a nice word from Aristotle and it just means you mean something like good and Daymond means spirit so it means it has to do with being a happy spirit and so on now key concepts that will be on the table today and I'm gonna be asking you to think about them with me this is really an invitation to think together as opposed to a talk in which I'm going to try to convince you of a certain way of viewing things although I will be trying to do that too but here's some key concepts and they're all different if you just think about your ordinary conception so the three that I'm going to talk about most today are the highlighted three happiness where I think that when I ask people what they mean by happiness most people I know refer to some kind of inner what we call an inner hedonic state it's the subjective state of me okay we might be doing something together I might be happy and you might not be happy it doesn't depend on the objective situation it just depends on sort of how I'm feeling inside my body whereas well-being is a more expansive concept and well-being is often used in surveys of so sometimes people will say as you'll see in a minute the world happiness report which is put out by the Center for sustainable development of Columbia that I'm working with is called the world happiness report but it doesn't always measure happiness it often sometimes doesn't even ask people if they are happy it does things like measure whether or not they have drink potable water whether or not their diet is nutritious whether or not they have education through high school and you don't ask the people are you happy with your water you just find out whether the water is pure okay and notice how that's testing something as it were objective so these are all concepts and I think most of us would think all of these things are good things obviously having a fulfilled human life having a purposeful human life having a meaningful life these are all good things if you can have them but they're not exactly the same concept and I won't be entirely careful about them so here's I'm going to talk about two hypotheses today and sort of take you through them this first hypothesis is one that identifies meaning with happiness it would say something like this a meaningful human life is a life that's happy for the person who lives it or for the creature who lives it so meaning or fulfillment or purpose comes from being happy if you live your life as a happy soul and you die you've led a successful human life a meaningful purposeful one we'll talk about so this is just this could be set in various mottos I put them up here meaning comes from happiness so that idea would be you can't be having meaningful life if you don't have if you're not happy meaning is happiness that's stronger a happy life is automatically a meaningful life and a meaningful life is a happy life okay so this is hypothesis one now right out of the gate there's actually this is where there is empirical evidence so this is the latest world happiness report cover and this is again one of the reasons we're having these discussions at the Vatican and elsewhere about these things so this is the 2019 report I believe it came out last February you might have seen it in the papers and here's the list now I don't doubt if you can see it in the back right probably are you guys seeing it like rows four or five how far back do you see it it's like an eye test okay so some of you are seeing it yeah there's an either well let me just I do need to talk about this and I apologize that it's just not in focus so this is typical of these reports the ranking of happiness is Finland first Denmark Norway Iceland Netherlands Switzerland Sweden New Zealand Canada then Austria okay it's the North Atlantic countries now what's going on here next to it in this in this area here is the statisticians do all kinds of analyses of what they call analysis of variance and all kinds of distich ated tests to try to figure out what contributes to these high rankings okay now this one here this first bar the purple one is the amount of the variation that's explained by gross domestic product so where a long time economists used to think that what made for happy people is a lot of money they used to make the mistake of thinking that you could measure the happiness of a people by the gross domestic product of the whole country as people back in my generation pointed out though the ghost gross domestic product of a country is counts things like the amount of nuclear weapons it has those are worth a lot it also doesn't control for economic inequality so you may know something The Economist called the Gini coefficient measures the amount of distribution from the variation from rich to poor and it was a very high genic or coefficient in for example the United States which has a very high GDP but as you know probably there are three Americans who have more than three American billionaires you know their names they have more than the bottom 50% of the people yes ma'am he has a mic in my on my chest here am I not projecting okay oh so I'm not projecting very loud I usually my voice usually does now you can hear me I apologize so alright so back sorry so what we have here is so this one is explained by GDP but these other ones for example is explained by social support and that's actually turns out to be the most predictive ant question you'll see in a minute I'll put up this question the question is something like this if you fell off the barstool here today do you think there's someone who would take care of you and in sub-sahara Africa lower than 50% of the people say there's no one there's no one okay so that's the most explanatory questions about social support now but the the main thing feature of this mapping here of these countries by the way the United States I think is number 19 in the latest okay we're never much above that but but there's anyway this other so the yellow here is explained by freedom to make life choices that actually doesn't fare that much it's not that explanatory okay in terms of the overall well-being scores that are given but what is is the social support is the biggest the actual average salary comes in about eleventh okay as you'll see so money doesn't bring happiness so this would be one way to start sort of where people where when Aristotle says some people say money brings happiness this is empirical data that says actually money doesn't bring happiness it has it's relevant okay it's good if you have it but above a certain point as you'll see I'll talk about it in a minute it doesn't actually produce much happiness now what's what's problematic about this ranking the right of way and this is where the concept the trouble with the concepts comes in is that I was just at a meeting with the president of Finland last week in New York the last president of Finland and she said this she said well if you've been to Finland you know that we're not illegally happy happy click joy joy click your heels kind of people okay we're not happy in this sort of inner hedonic sense she said but our people feel very safe because there's a social safety net that you don't fall through the bottom if you lose your job you don't lose your medical insurance okay so that and this is well known feature of these states in northern Europe they all have good social safety net systems okay and they have good educational systems so that there's not fear and anxiety about being law losing out in an economy where you lose work and you suddenly have to pay the $500 a month for your health care these countries none of those countries have that what they don't have and this is interesting for conversations we have at the Vatican is that you'll notice of the top 10 countries here I'll getting Finland Denmark Norway Iceland Netherlands Switzerland Sweden New Zealand Canada Austria you notice anything other feature about them that comes to you think about they don't what they don't have a lot of land they're actually relatively small they're not very religious there are actually the least religious countries in the world except for Austria I mean among the least okay so you have so this always adds interesting sort of discussions that go on about the importance of a kind of religious aspects of our life because these are even though a lot of them have state religions by the way Norway is a Lutheran country officially England has the Church of England and so on and so forth but they're actually less religious now it isn't that that stays all the way through because China is about 243rd and that's the least religious country in the world people by the way say who do these surveys that the two most religious countries in the world are India and America it's interesting okay it's an interesting fact about us that according to the social scientists that's the way things are okay but this so the first point is that this is called a ranking of happiness it's called a world happiness report but if you talk to some people in these countries they'll say well we don't score that high on inner happiness but it's the objective situation of our life that is the most important now I mentioned a minute ago that the single most predictive question is this one about social support but if you fall off the barstool if you are in trouble do you have relatives or friends you can count on to help you whenever you need them or not and this is the most predictive one okay whether there's an or solace solidarity among people whether or not you can count on someone and I think we all think in America if we're in the right coffee shop or the right bar there's someone who will take care of us namely the anonymous person next to us but to live in a to live in societies where they're so degraded by war and civil war and racism and other kinds of terrible terrible things the fact that half the people don't think there's a family member that they can count on is a disturbing fact and this is something that has everybody's attention now at the same time that there was a world happiness report going on in 2015 the United Nations passed unanimously 193 countries came together and passed the sustainable development goals so this thing I have on my chest here where this button here is a sustainable this represents the 17 sustainable development goals now this is a very important fact that in 2015 these goals were passed by the United Nations they are things like this by 2030 an end of poverty these were adopted by 193 countries including the United States it may not be that the administration in Washington knows this but some like Nikki hailey voted for this I don't think she was then well whoever was before her okay our representative to United Nations in the General Assembly was one of this people who voted for this the same year of course was when the Paris climate agreement was reached and the same year Pope Francis wrote an encyclical called laudato si care of our common home which is about the climate crisis so 2015 was an exciting year in terms of putting out there so these are things like no poverty end of economic inequality health care for everyone high school education for every boy and girl on earth okay there's about 50% right now worse for girls than for boys we know how much money this would cost it's not a lot the world economy right now is a hundred trillion dollars it would cost about a trillion dollars to meet all these 17 demands there are 1,300 billionaires out there right now probably 2,000 that was last time I checked okay but the point is there's money and economists can attach numbers to solving these problems but right now from 2015 to 2019 none of the countries in the world are on track to meet these urgent sustainable development goals so part of the project of looking at the connection between well-being and happiness and meaning is to try to sort of develop the connection among them and what's interesting about it going back to that first list is it turns out that the countries that score highest on happiness on that first list I showed you are also the ones that are furthest along in the sustainable development goals okay so is then there's Jeff Sachs to say this it is literally the truth that sustainable development is the path to happiness the evidence doesn't quite show that but it shows that there's some connection between how far along you are and the benchmarks there are 265 empirical benchmarks for the 17 sustainable development goals and as I say the countries that rank the highest and that are the ones you just saw on the list now here's that here's one of the problems and talking about the connections between meaning of life well being happy and flourishing not surprisingly the scientists who do this work don't agree on how you should measure it so here are three examples of ways that people use to measure what is called happiness and you'll see that the third one is not really a measure of happiness in some sense all so the first one is called affective hedonic well-being measures and these are actually things that sometimes I don't know if any students here have been paid to do this but Gallup and other places pay people to have an app on their phone and you learn throughout the day that every so often every five minutes maybe you enter a number on a contra ladder one two seven about how happy you were moment by moment you could go plus seven two minus seven or plus ten to minus ten okay so if you had a really wonderful experience you press a plus it plus ten and if you had a terrible miserable experience your plus a minus ten it's a little bit like when you go to the doctor and the doctor says so you're here for your knee you know on a scale of one to ten how bad is it okay that kind of thing so technically we're all supposed to be in touch with our inner life to the point that we can sort of press buttons and give a number assign a number to it and then using these things by collecting this as a big day to exercise some psychologists think that they can tell you at the end of the day what your day was like by how many like hedonic units a pleasure you had they could look at how how you're feeling overall some people think even that you can do this kind of measurement that all you do at the end of the day is subtract the number of negative experiences from the number of positive experiences and hope that it's positive not negative and if it's positive so here's here's what they sometimes say so Brazilians are very emotional so your average Brazilian will sometimes say I have 75 positive emotions today and 73 negative emotions today it was a good day plus two then they go to a British person the British person have three positive and one negative plus two they're just as they're equally happy okay now this is kind of bizarre but I'm just reporting to you on how these measures are sometimes done okay so this is one sort of crude measure but you can see from a philosophical point of view it's not going to be very attractive because it just doesn't tell you what the happiness is about or why they feel in these pleasant experiences and so on and so forth a different kind of measure that's very common are what are called subjective well-being or a valued of well-being scores and these are kind of interesting you actually ask people to give you judgments about how satisfied are you overall with your life a satisfied are you notice that's a different conception than happy how satisfied are you with your life overall or as is often done you can ask by domains so you can say how happy are you with your life as a student here at LMU how happy are you with a part-time job you have how happy are you with your relations with your family okay you see how you'd parse this out and you get interesting results so that for example sometimes they've done I've read reports where sex workers in Detroit and Calcutta were interviewed and the sex workers in Calcutta still had positive evaluations of their family life whereas Detroit sex workers didn't have any family life so they didn't have any positive ones so you can sometimes get cultural variations okay and it depends on the domain you're asking about what kind of answers you get the last one here and this has been the philosophers in the room will know that a Marchesa and Martha Nussbaum and they go back they think this is an Aristotle they try to look at objective well-being so they ask as I mentioned before they'll ask questions like this how good are the schools in this place dude does everybody get a high school education they won't ask people how satisfy that is used if you ask a middle-class woman in some places in Afghanistan how much education she has she'll say second grade if you ask her how much education in certain places she expects her daughter's to have she'll say second grade and then if you ask her is that okay with you she'll say yes it's okay with her objective well-being measures imposed philosophical normative criteria and say even though she thinks it's okay and she's satisfied with it it's okay it's objectively better to have schools education through high school it's objectively better just like it's objectively better to have clean water and you might not know that your water is harming you but if it's harming if it has bad stuff in it ecoli it's harming you whether you know it or not or think it or not so this is a this is an interesting move I think and it's important to recognize that it's out there and we probably need to do it in this study of life's meaning and of happiness but these are three different ways to do things here's an example though of how it shows up I mentioned the difference between Brazil and Finland say in terms or England so there's a separate poll but Gallup is an organization that does a lot of this sort of social scientific work so this is called the global emotions and this is more and you can't see this at all okay these are surveys that they asked people questions I can't even read them excuse me they they have a bunch of questions that ask do you feel well rested do you feel sort of calm are you very anxious and so on and so forth these are negative experience questions positive experience questions and what they find is a very different ranking from the ranking of the well-being that I showed you the happiness report there so here these countries are I'll speak up when I move here Paraguay Panama Guatemala Mexico El Salvador Indonesia Honduras Ecuador Costa Rica Colombia that's interesting now what's interesting about this is the only overlap with the other group is Costa Rica Costa Rica's number ten on well-being what I mean I call well-being now and but and it's also here maybe in number nine in this but otherwise some of these countries for example for reasons that we sometimes know about and read about in Politan the papers El Salvador and Honduras have serious serious social problems now but they're very there's still positive emotionality aggregated over large groups of people now this is interesting because again this is where my interest in cross-cultural philosophy sort of comes in it may well be that the standards for a good human life vary some from culture to culture and and we expect and make normative different sort of emotional cognitive packages for different people but this is an example of where if you ask how happy are certain people notice already what I have taught you is or explain today is that there's two entirely different measures those one measures that get you the northern European countries seem to be measuring subjective well-being how satisfied are you and also objective conditions this is a different measure this looks like it's measuring something closer to the how are you feeling about your life are you you know happy are you really happy you know in in the sense of okay sorry about this oh but this is relevant because I do think that there is a problem with happiness research in general which is that where the misery is is where you need to attend to first okay so it's very easy for well-off white people like myself to think things like what's the next way that I can self improve or get a little bit less anxious and more serene and so on and so forth but there are serious problems out there with people who are actively miserable and and this is just a general principle of first do no harm or first do something for where it's needed most and what you'll see here up sorry this that's positive so these are Chad Niger Sierra Leone Iraq Iran Benin Liberia well Palestinian territories Morocco toga Uganda okay sort of places that we know are politically unstable by the way one good predictor of well-being overall is a non corrupt government that helps a lot okay that helps a lot and okay but here's the so just so what I've done so far has just told you about a little a few different ways that we measure well-being and happiness I still haven't said enough about how it's connected to meaningfulness or meaning but this is a general since they've been studying this since the 1960s so you can see sort of there's a relatively small variation guess what that is that was 2008 yeah that was the yeah that was the 2008 grand we called it a great recession okay so that was bad but we were already not doing too hot there and now we're still pretty low okay there was a rebound I don't want to you know it's too complicated to say what caused it but you can see like here's this is not a great place to be and this is just in the US okay and we're we are the richest country in the world so again it's a so this happiness and well-being don't and flourishing and meaning and purpose don't necessarily track where the money is okay so what so here's the here's of one objection to the hypothesis remember the first hypothesis was that meaning is happiness or you know the purpose of an aim of life is to be a happy person but I asked you to reflect on this question was well maybe you haven't ordered some of these people you know about was Jesus happy sometimes you breed the Gospels you know happy is not what would come to mind happy is not what would come to mind what about the Virgin Mary nothing to indicate she was happy did any of you ready : toy wins the testament of Mary Meryl Streep did a one-woman show of it on Broadway Mary is depressed as it wasn't worth it wasn't worth it straw she's suffering Mary suffers she might be good wonderful sublime Jesus might be the Son of God happy I don't see it you might want to argue Socrates again students of Plato definitely not happy Buddha they represent him as a fat happy guy but he was scrawny again so Eleanor Roosevelt Mother Teresa Martin Luther King jr. Mahatma Gandhi Nelson Mandela Nelson Minelli Mandela you think of all these great people happy this is not what would come to mind I don't think now you might argue in any particular case oh they were really happy I don't see it but what did they live they live meaningful human lives okay not just by the effects they had but possibly from the inside that they saw that what they were doing was a matter of some consequence it was of some from some higher purpose so could a human life be a meaningful one without being happy so if you think yes based on just what you thought I asked you to think about a second ago that those people did live live good human lives but they weren't happy in the hedonic sense maybe then then you think that's that meaningful life doesn't require happiness you probably still think but in the best of all possible worlds you live meaningfully and happy right okay that's and I think that's fair in the best of all possible world we don't yet live in the best of all possible worlds though so there might be a price okay so next side question actually this is I'm somewhat interested in this about the difference between us and other animals do you think of us as an animal I do can an animal's life be a good one a meaningful animal life if the animal itself wasn't happy let me think of dogs and cats and possums and chickens and turkeys and so on what would it make for a good animal life should it be so I don't know I what you think about that I have used on this but I'm not going to tell you things okay so so far what we have is whatever a meaningful life is I haven't defined that I can't define it whatever we know so far is happiness is not necessary for meaningful life okay cuz you could have there these Saints and heroes who have meaningful lives that weren't happy once possibly they were happy for a long time and then they got unhappy but in general I don't see that you see a long time of sort of consistent happiness in most of the lives that I told you about yes man good yeah okay okay okay okay no but I already said I wasn't gonna do that so that's not fair yet okay I'm gonna hold you off until the question period though so so notice all all I actually need so far is these particular examples I don't need them all to be right and there I'm asking you a question I'm sort of inviting you to think along with me about based on and that's a good response based on these texts you know that we have available to us about the lives of these people would you say because there are some people you might say are is definitely a happy person you probably have people in your family who you just say oh boy just constitutionally you know the cup is always half-full for her you know and she takes she sees joy and everything even the challenges of life there are people like that I have no doubt about it I just want to point out here at least if any of these examples are good and I you know if any of them sort of draw your attention to the fact that they're that martyrs and saints very often are martyrs and saints in virtue of the fact that they struggled against powerful forces of oppression and nastiness and possibly evil in the world and the struggle was not sort of something that they went to bed every night feeling like they did about listening to beautiful music or being in love or something like that it was a struggle and it caused sort of internal turmoil that's all I need for this to be and and if those are great lives then these concepts can come apart but you're right I've already said that there's different definitions of happiness and meaning clearly is important okay so still you might think that even if happiness is not nestled oohed ly necessary for a good meaningful human life it's sufficient like that is if you are happy then you are have lived a meaningful life but even that won't work and I'll tell you a little story here about some my first interaction with Buddhist was in 2000 I was invited to Dharamsala to be part of this meeting on called destructive emotions and how to overcome them with the Dalai Lama and a few scientists and we spent a week talking about what are destructive emotions which one which emotions don't you want in your life and most of us would say oh if I could go through life without anger that would be nice but other people do always give me reason to be angry or whatever but you know people would say that's the negative emotion and it turns out Buddhists really think it's a very negative emotion now Buddhism historically was always interested in alleviating suffering the early Buddhist texts don't say anything about making you happy but new Buddhism is kind of into that because there's a happiness industry and so recent Buddhism's are interested in making helping people be happy and so after this meeting I was at there were a bunch of scientists there and they were starting to claim that they could measure happiness in people's brains okay so they instead of having people give subjective reports like on a scale of one to ten about how happy you are I don't even have to listen to your subjective report I can just look in your brain and basically the technique was this most people this is true right-handed people the poor 12% of you who are left-handed this doesn't apply to you and but if for right-handed people there's something which is called the hedonic set point allegedly this is what the scientists were saying at this time and there's a little bit of activity in your prefrontal cortex on the left side here most of us lean a little bit left that means that there's a tendency in the overall population of humanity for people to have a slightly positive set point like you don't think you're looking at the cup is half full or or at least 1/4 full rather than half empty most people lean that way by their biology by the neurobiology okay and the question was well is this set for life or do you can you can you is it plastic so you can move it this would be a question about the hedonic state inside you and some Buddhists of course say by doing meditation you can move it by doing yoga you can move it there's all kinds of techniques by running marathons you can move it and so on and so forth and there was a lot of controversy about this but after our meetings in Dharamsala I wrote a I wrote a piece called the color of happiness and what it was about one study that was done on this guy Matt Tootsie card some of you may have seen him he sometimes has reported to be the happiest person in the world and I remember when we were in Dharamsala India with him my son ate an apple and I saw my son eating an apple I said bents he was 17 I said Ben stop that Apple hasn't you know it's it's you're gonna get sick because this was not the cleanest circumstances we were and then Mattu took Ben immediately to a bar and made him drink two shots of vodka to solve the problem it solved that problem but but the next day Ben said to me dad Matthew is this is before he was known to be the happiest person world Ben said he's so happy and I said he's so happy and Ben said he hasn't he has no he's not married and has no teenage children in any case so the neuroscientists were really enthusiastic in the early 2000s about the fact that they we eventually could go around with cerebral scopes look at each other's brains and we could tell how happy people were now notice this has nothing to do with objective conditions of their life it just has to do with like the internal feeling states in the brain and here's the trouble with the whole view and I call it the Hugh Hefner problem now Hugh Hefner is an interesting case and he's a different kind of case than say Jesus or you know mother Teresa or that he he might have been happy I don't know he might have been happy in this sense in fact for all we know his brain may have lit up in exactly the same very left spot that Matt - Ricard's brain lit up but his was a life completely committed to hedonism it was okay he was always proposing to 20 year olds even when he you know close to death in his 80s and he woke up every day and his silk pajamas and he never left the Playboy Mansion and so on and so forth you know the story but this is a life dedicated to sex drugs rock and roll so this is at least one example where the hedonic tone of a life okay could be identical in a person a Buddhist monk of high virtue who lives a life of loving-kindness and compassion and a few Heffner who doesn't live the same kind of life so my thought here is simply that like with Aristotle some people are confused if you think that's sufficient for a meaningful life you're wrong because I want to say Hugh Hefner I want to say now you might object to this because you might be a person who thinks many people do happiness is in the eye of the beholder and it's whatever someone says and meaning in life is that way - and if Hugh Hefner says he was happy then we accept that and if this was meaningful we accept that I say we accept that he was happy if he was happy but we don't accept that this was meaningful so that's that's where the philosopher Andy comes in so if that's right that happiness is neither necessary sufficient for a meaningful or excellent human life but surely some kind of happiness is desirable so here's a second hypothesis remember the first this was that meaning is identical to happiness this hypothesis says something like this and this is back to a sort of more normative idea the best kind of human life is one in which the individual is happy in the hedonic sense I think it's good to be feel good about yourself that's clear plus lives meaningfully now that has of one bad consequence you might think it would say that the Saints and the heroes of the sort that I talked about who suffered think of the suffering saint and suffering hero that that's a second best kind of life their lives would be better if they were they did all the saintly and heroic and murderous things but we're also happy but we don't all get to live the first best life and that may be part of the human condition meaning has to do then I want to say so now I'm getting towards not defining meaning because I don't believe in definitions most things can't be defined but it has to do with the moral quality of one's relations with others that's why some people pass the test and other people don't and be although I'm not going to talk about this today with an alienated work okay this is something that Karl Marx in the economic and philosophical manuscripts in 1844 pointed out namely that the best kind of work is work that is contributes to sort of meaning and significance of one's life and is not just sort of labor that is not that is estranged from oneself so in the best world these bring self-respect and satisfaction even if and I want to emphasize here what I'm calling happy happy joy joy click your heels is a kind of distinctively American kind of idea of happiness there's good research done by psychologist Jeanne psy at the Stanford does research on the kind of inner state that is emphasized in children's books and she does studies where she takes the top ten books in Amazon that are read by children in any given country at a time and she measures the faces the ideal faces of the characters in them and American books emphasize as ideal a higher positive face it's a it's a happy face high arousal positive it's basically that sort of superficial shit-eating grin that's very American children's books in East and South Asia don't emphasize that at all there's a serene face a calm face a you know a face of equanimity a Daoist face something like that so this is important and matters is it just a clarification question well I was asking him if he just had it if he just had a clarification that's not it says a clarification because I didn't sentient Island okay so here's okay I'm gonna wrap this up and then I'm happy to talk about Thailand so meaning and morals so here's here's one thing you might wonder about because I've indicated that I think that with the philosophical consensus and with Aristotle that a good human life does in a meaningful human life there are certain objective standards possibly they have to do with the having certain virtues now what some people say is that there are certain virtues universally that are reliably associated with meaning and these are some examples of some people say a sense of justice as fairness humane as temperance courage these are the kind of virtues that are show up again and again so let me just sum up a few of the findings I call this inquiry you demonics after Aristotle it's a sort of the study of the connections among well-being flourishing and happiness so here are some findings that might be useful and I'll end with one sort of finding that may be useful in a negative way so here it is that money doesn't bring happiness after a certain point this has been known by economists since were : and more recently Dan Kahneman but it's basically the finding is this once this is a little bit old so just replace 75,000 with a hundred thousand once income is above a hundred thousand for the average family of two point three nine persons that's a u.s. there is relatively flat line and increases in affective well-being those are the the first two measures either like you're pressing the button every few minutes about how happy you are or I just asked about your satisfaction you see almost what economists call with respect to money dimension diminishing marginal utility the more money you have after you have about a hundred thousand dollars for that family of 2.39 people okay it doesn't increase your affective well-being you're not happier in the inner sense of happy your objective circumstances are different you have more money and you can buy more things people reliably think that having more money will make them happy they're just happy to be objectively wrong okay there there's a relatively flat line in fact Dan Kahneman causes the biggest flat line in the history of economics okay at seventy a little bit more than that at ninety five thousand to one hundred and five thousand the same as so for life satisfaction scores those are the scores about how good is your life going overall so around a hundred thousand for a family of three an hour to two and a half or three people American college students though and here's a caution for you you'll you know that there are some of your friends who think I need to make a lot of money you got to make money okay you're not gonna get ahead if you think that why you're a college student that you need to make a lot of money that money is really important if you rank it number one actually on a scale of five goods that do these studies with kids with college students they'll say what do you think's most important for your future money friendship community exercise and physical well-being there's a group of students not so small that says money is the most important thing if they say it now they need two times as much later to be happy okay so it's a it's a case of it's a kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy it's guaranteed that you will need more to be happy than other people and but the thing what should educators do here I think one thing is to educate people into noticing that it doesn't bring you as much happiness as you think it will the data show that high unemployment makes employed people less happy wealth inequality makes people less happy including those with most wealth so right now we have a very high Gini coefficient in America we're not as high as the Middle East but China and America are very very high I mentioned already the billionaires who have more than the bottom 50% and that makes the rich people unhappy as well as the poor people they get nervous for various reasons marriage makes men happier women less so having children this is important and this is a way to show that meaning and happiness come apart having children especially when the kids are between 3 and 18 makes parents less happy okay and in fact the happiest time of the marriage is before happiest is before the children comment after they leave if the marriage stayed together but that's interesting because notice there clearly if you say to parents is it meaningful they will say yes they will say yes it's the most meaningful thing I do is this sort of like joyous and free not really not not always I guess I say not always that's an interesting finding and I've said this already the social capital and Trust are the most important determinants of flourishing and here's a good news for those of you us who are getting a little older on all measures of hedonic happiness there's a ground word downward trend from 16 until age 40 and then it gets flat for a while and after 50 it goes up until you're dead and I find this all the time when I talk to mature people such as myself you just say are you happy say yeah I don't pay for my son's health insurance anymore the kids are not in prison they're not drugs yeah it's terrific it's terrific ok one final thing I I went here's one thing that's disturbing and in terms of meaning internet and meaning so here's I showed you a minute ago the general happiness of American population in general here's the general happiness of US 8th 10th and 12th graders so they just what 13 to 18 from 1991 over there to 2017 and that's 12th grade 10th grade 8th graders of different colors but notice notice here right so here we are that's bad that's bad ok now what's going on over here I don't know but anyway that's not so good that trendline and here's what the refine this correlation between hours per day that kids spend online playing either games texting or social media and there's just looks like there's a very high correlation between lower and lower levels of happiness among young people and use of Internet so this is time spent on the Internet and then times sleeping so sleeping goes down the more time you spend in person social interaction goes down happiness goes down and so on and so forth the more times that people are on screens and people are noticing this as a bonafide addiction it affects people older people as well as young people but it's it it's a disturbing problem and in some conversations I've had with some young people they have actually said to me that they think that it's more social media that does harm than gaming and that there's just you know sort of social comparison of one's life there's bullying that goes on there's disparaging negative values that are expressed but they think that gaming and texting are not a problem but that social media is a problem I guess that's for you to judge I don't know what all the things are but any case this final words of wisdom here are some things that I think at least I would say as a philosopher who's looked at the empirical data we could say with some confidence put your electronic devices away one reason is just just have more social interactions and those make people feel good as Aristotle said there's only one thing for sure I can say about good human life no one would choose to live with our friends and they you meant friends in the embodied next you sense work to be morally good because that will lead to a good life if anything will if you have you go to bed at nighttime and think that you were a good person that day that you showed compassion and love and kindness for other people that you were a just person that you worked for positive social change yeah when you go to bed and say your prayers you know at 9:00 time now I lay me down to sleep and you do the survey of your day if you sort of live up to your highest ideals and values that will be a good thing treasure your friends and family seek satisfying work I didn't talk about that and work for meaning don't work for money it will make you happy anyway thank you [Applause] so yeah I know people need to go so why don't you can I make a recommendation why don't you do XS because so people don't have to keep raising their hand then you can tell which order you want to go in well you don't have to do that you just do here you want me to do okay the people who want to ask a question now raise your hand I'm just going to do a map here and when I just pointed you I'll go I'll sort of do this kind of thing and you identify yourself as that person yes sir I just turn back good really smart question so I'll just repeat them because I don't think people can always hear and I'll try to project now as I'm answering the questions better so the question was I talked about these three I did something magical I talked about these three different ways that people empirically try to measure something in the vicinity of what we call happiness and so the question was do these things what's the connection among them yeah so alright let me let me start this way so remember so the objective well being people say something like this they say things so this is a Murchison and Martha Nussbaum are two people in this camp who have put forward what is called the capabilities approach and they have a list of what they think are things that reliably and objectively help with a good human life so here are some of them food clothing shelter okay now once you have those they think those objective things in place then I could ask you I could say well how do you feel about your house and you say oh I used to live in a nicer mansion than this okay so a person with like a super-duper house might still not be happy right but what they find is reliably overall people who don't have to live out in the elements will that will connect up whether they know it or not with these other things being good you know you just think about it if you've ever been really freezing cold at night or really hot those are miserable nights so you know those objective situations usually are notice by you or picked up by you what they do find is there's some studies on women in human development so in this Pam incentive study women in India and what they find is that if you go into a community with bad water and you say to the people there how's the water the men will complain about it and the woman won't even though the children have diarrhea and dysentery and so there's these difference so that's the question of you know you say something else is going on the woman is being strong she's carrying on through the men are wimps you know there's a whole bunch of other things going on but the idea was usually those things will be picked up somewhere up here and will be noticed so I in the best of all possible worlds people would like to say these are highly well correlated for reasons that I mentioned today I'm a little bit there might be more data on this that I'm not paying attention to know so I think that they are different conceptions of happiness you might just say this is a measure of what it's called affective hedonic well-being affective hedonic well-being we're hedonic just means how pleasurable or unpleasurable the experiences you're having right now are so inside your skin this one is more how is the thing which is usually some kind of extended thing like your vocation or your job how is that going how satisfied are you with it and you might say satisfactions is somewhat different concepts than happy so it's a really good question I'm people are working on this and as you notice like I gave that quote that Jeffrey Sachs he wanted to say so insofar as sustain insofar as those countries on that first happiness list are ones doing well by objective well-being measures then he wanted to say sustainability is the same as happiness but that matches there but maybe not up here no I had this gentleman Thailand things the question I have is there a way to address the specific cultures which cannot be reduced to just maybe some type of different subjective space so I think they convey that they don't think is there difficulty Express right now is there a way so you still have these types of empirical tools and also account for a question of the unique being of a culture so that you know the UN doesn't just invade them or they don't proposal here so let me see if I can rephrase that and no I get there I get the inspiration here so you might want to say one word you might have about all these measures let's go back to you know you might just say well as soon as you do a list like this whatever method you use you have a hierarchy and a ranking okay and you've then decided and then people think well these are these these are all commensurable that is means they can be compared to each other countries can be compared to each other across dimensions and so you suppose you find in fact this is probably in the data and it relates to the first question - so suppose you find as you will that there'll be some countries Bolivia is a good example actually was in the paper yesterday the heads of oil Bolivia is been a socialist country for a very very long time and they have the heads of their oil companies who make like only three times what the workers make those of us in the room who are old enough to I think well there are few of us the founding of Ben and Jerry's ice cream was important because among other things it was good ice cream but in addition Ben and Jerry said this they said we will never take more than three times what the janitors and the ice cream makers make they took $75,000 a year first and they paid their lowest paid workers 25,000 and they kept that and they sold it eventually I don't know what but 3 2 1 but you know now no in America that well you know what corporate executives get paid in America so what what came up in Bolivia the other day was someone said when they heard this report about the top executives at Bolivian oil companies only making 3 times they said but that doesn't motivate people ok so you could see how this argument would go so then the argument might be you start to accumulate data and you say look at all over even Europe and the United States you've got to pay executives a lot more money and the empirical data show that and then we say so those Bolivians are going to go down the tubes eventually and they better change their practices you're always worried about importing that's just a case of economic practice but that's the kind of example where you sort of say people need such and so and the countries that don't have it better get it and we have empirical evidence over here and and that is a that is a problem with using this kind of data because you have to make independent judgments about what's good sometimes you're also clearly going to have to allow cultural variation in terms of as I mentioned the data on positive emotions and I think you're getting at this to remember the one I showed you there a little later here the one you can't see but remember the one that has Paraguay Panama Guatemala Mexico El Salvador etc you might just say what wait those countries are not on that other list at all but those people are kind of in one sense of happy so I'm happy to at the end of the day as an analytic philosopher I say yeah you got to parse these things they say there's happiness one happiness to happiness 3 there's all these different concepts but you might just say well then someone might come along not the UN because they're not like that but some of them I come along and say well these countries are kind of happy but they're kind of simple-minded and they're not bad economically developed and we got to help them on the train of economic development that's what you're worried about so I think that that's you know you have to watch that so I hear you and it's pretty clear that different traditions I didn't mention on the list of on the list of what I put up as concepts I had happiness well-being flourishing fulfillment purpose meaning I didn't have up salvation and that's a form of life that many people think about whether it's a Christian salvation or whether it's Buddhist nirvana they're very different in kind but the idea of both traditions in some sense might be thought to be neither of these things I mean the moral quality of your life matters a whole lot for both those traditions but you might say how fussing too much about happiness and meaning on this earth that's not the main thing so there are multiple forms of life in complex multicultural cosmopolitan worlds where we're aware of these differences and we have to respect them yeah we should beware of that kind of using this data to sort of impose any kind of emotional or psychological or virtue equality the thing I'll say just go down here again oops on the these the colors there these are the variables which people think do most of the explaining and they're things like social support and that really is only a measure of exactly that one question will someone take care of you if you fall off the barstool that one question okay so it isn't like social support in general and you might just say so then someone might say empirically it looks to be the case that you should answer yes to that question however the culture figures out how to do that it could be a family support system it could be good Samaritan laws etc the other one is explained by freedom to make choices Americans by the way price freedom much more than other people in the world but when people test it across cultures turns out and we're less free probably than we think but it turns out that that isn't one of the most important things that isn't one of the most important things but we'll see thanks for that question then the next person and let's see my map here there was a person in the back there and then I'm coming forward to two over here yeah was that you had your hand up yeah well one position I'm taking is that happiness is not the same as meaning happiness is not even necessary for a meaningful life cuz there are the saints and martyrs who weren't happy and they had meaningful lives and it's not sufficient because of Hugh Hefner and he's not even a great example I mean you might want to argue about Hugh Hefner I mean it depends on his other values you know I'm being a little bit superficial myself because I don't know much about him except that and I understand and appreciate the goods that he did appreciate I just don't think they sort of fit into the kind of a life of sufficient quality I had up there on the on the board you know thinking about what we say in eulogies we never talked about we don't we don't suddenly say how much a person had in their bank account or how many you know cars they had in the garage we talked about how they were a loving good friend and family member so but go on like that in particular that's very helpful actually I had that sort of hesitation myself about using him as an example because I think so this is where and it gets back to this gentleman in the front rows question about imposing our other values on this and you don't want to be too moralistic I mean John Rawls in theory of justice uses an example which I always think is interesting it's an example of someone who spends his life counting blades of grass now that clearly isn't like the case we you know that the hedonism case it's just you know flowers for algernon or something like that I mean and but imagine a person who's not just who's not in any way mentally challenged or anything like that but they just have preferences for some kind of pleasure that we the rest of us just don't understand and that seems like a life in which they're doing no harm right it's not like I mean maybe even better than hedonism you could go to something like Tony Soprano you know mafia you know sort of it and there's honor among thieves and you think like yeah so the Mafia there you know at least you watch those kind of shows Godfather and Tony Soprano you know some of those people like are they have fun they have buddies they definite they have social support they have good Italian food you know it's like there's a whole bunch of things in their life that is like their bada-bing I mean so it's bad yeah there's all this stuff they have you know and they're kind of like but there's problems like they have to kill you because you're not cooperating and you have wife and children and yeah so so there's some there's some lines that we do and it goes back to the sense of cultural sensitivity and what people what people do find value in is variable so when I say meaningful work that could just be in the eye of the beholder and the person who gets to count blades of grass may just be doing something which from their point of view is meaningful in the broad sense of meaning so I what you just said is very helpful I appreciate that yeah you there and then there's no coming forward you're next you know and who behind here with their hand up yeah okay and I just notice it like our country which is very rich in these things it's also very low in the scale of happiness so what what ideas are good and by the way you know who Aquinas was influenced by the philosopher Aristotle yeah you read Aristotle he would have been great on his own don't trust me but so I do think that Americans so this is an interesting one of the things that I was encouraging today is in the background is Americans do emphasize money too much we really do think that we need more money than we do even based on the findings of what Americans get satisfied with and what and these require sort of careful studies because people when they get a big raise you know they're happy and by the way there's a there so some of the empirical findings can help people get over certain cognitive biases they so I mentioned earlier but the the idea about people having set points in terms of their hedonic sort of mood that's even a different thing mood well one thing that's interesting is that when people there's a lot of mistakes people make so people think that when they win if they win a lottery they'll be very happy like a million dollars they are for six weeks for six weeks and then they're no happier than they were before the good news on the other side is that's called adaptation on the other side is this some people think that terrible things if terrible things happen to you you can there are certain terrible things you can never recover from so quadriplegic uh f---one obviously but people do bounce back from that more or less to the place that they were at more or less that's a remarkable one right that after a terrible spinal injury people can come back and be their old self so that shows that we're sort of adaptable and the same thing happens with money people mistake how much it will make them happy and in the short term it does but then they're back to normal and of course there are these things that are stressors about money because rich people have stress and and they're so there are some things which we can do to help correct empirical mistakes right now I don't know what it is here but Duke has at my university just like the hole on the East Coast the Ivy League and Duke are exactly the same in this 18 percent of our students go directly to Wall Street eighteen percent we don't have a business major so they're just going to Wall Street if you ask them what they're gonna do in Wall Street they're not sure but they know it involves a lot of money and their brother did it and there's a lot of planning now one trouble that we've caused by making it you think money so important is that your generation is the first generation to go to college since forever that has reason to think you'll make less money than your parents Federation and that creates the kind of anxiety for you it would be mitigated a little bit if you didn't think that it was so important I don't want to wax too nostalgic but did anyone ever read Patti Smith's book called it's about her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe oh what's it called rot no you know Patti Smith of rock & roll yeah she just tells of a time and it was in the late 60s when she just basically goes to New York to be a poet which means basically being a homeless person Mapplethorpe goes to New York for the same reason to be an artist and they lived in the Chelsea Hotel because anybody could live in the Chelsea Hotel and there was a comfort level with being having high aspirations in being poor that was something that's just completely disappear from the culture that's all I'll say it might be called rock and roll maybe that's what it's called but the book but it's a nice little book won the Pulitzer Prize so it's a good book but it tells you about a different time in the world being a little bit different where people American American people cared less about about money and as you saw there is that disturbing feature of where college students who rank who think they need money do need it the most and that's the sort of a personality difference in back to your question you might say well different strokes for different folks let's honor that but it might be better if we try to dissuade people that that's most important I'm going to go here first and then come back yeah I'm glad to 193 countries yep yep and these are all supposed to be met the 17 of them are supposed to be met by 2030 and we're 11 years away are these goals horrible questions that can actually be solved what I'm getting at is we'll be on the track in the United States before we got this current administration okay so you you might wonder about something like there's a good really excellent question there aren't there haven't been too many times in the history of the United Nations where there was unanimity about goals the first time I think about an important matter was in 1948 with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights now that was an interesting one because the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at that time there were only like 60 countries in the UN it was most of Europe and then a smattering elsewhere remember at that time most of Africa was still occupied colonial II I think probably every country in Africa except for Ethiopia that's not right because every except for Ethiopia was the only African country that was not occupied by colonial powers and they didn't start to be so all those countries which make up a huge number of countries were not part of the United Nations so the the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was an interesting case of what Charles Taylor a philosopher called an unforced consensus because it's not as if everybody in the world speaks about rights it's a very enlightenment German you know European enlightenment talk even but like Buddhists don't talk about rights because they don't think they're any intrinsic properties of persons but there were no Buddhist voting at that time so it was unanimously passed and how did they agree well they just didn't have to worry about the rights talk they just said look at things like murdering innocence is just something no civilized people go for so don't do it and that's a universal right sexual slavery is right to our own body is right so that was unanimously passed now we have many many more countries in the UN and I think your question is the right one these who are seen as by recognition that we live in an increasingly interconnected world the fate of one in the fate of all are connected may be climate issues and environmental issues have made us more sensitive to that than anything else but every country voted to do their part America we you're right about this administration but so gender equality is one of them now that's interesting again that you can get 193 countries to vote for gender equality that that's a goal by 2030 complete gender equality you can look this up there's a these are all listed there's various sites that have them climate action saving our seas okay these are lots of actionable items I can agree what that is peace anyway there's anyway the first one is no poverty and this is but the it's not just a problem the United States these things are expensive and they do involve redistribution but there's money out there there is the money to do these things some of them are easier than others I mean obviously the climate change one is more difficult some of them require technical solutions sometimes they're counterintuitive technical solutions it isn't like we're supposed to know automatically you need experts to tell you what the technical solutions for these problems are sometimes you say well all that we need to get equal education for boys and girls in Africa is the school buildings and the teachers well that's complicated you get the school buildings but then getting the teachers is complicated remember you have countries that are very degraded by long histories of racism in Elsa and when when Nelson Mandela when apartheid ended in 1993 I think Africans Africans in South Africa were only entitled to a sixth grade education so you have a backlog of problems of creating a teaching force okay of a whole population ninety four over ninety percent of your population who are not even allowed to be educated okay so these are huge logistical problems but which countries have the most responsibility I have opinions about that we have huge responsibilities throughout the world for places where we went into the places and broke and broke the toys broke the ceramic objects that we have to pay for them but we don't do that so but we can't do this alone - is it better for countries to pursue an increased quantity or just more quality of happiness or meaningful links on a factual standpoint or is it better to pursue okay good good that's a great question let me frame it this way so in the olden days as you know like the the well-being of a country and took the economists a long time to get over this was measured on the gross domestic product like how much wealth was there and you could just attach there's a number that there's the final number of that but but we now know and it took economists actually during the Arab Spring some economists I know it was during the Arab Spring that they started to notice gee during the Arab Spring the gross domestic product of the countries during the Arab Spring would kept going up up up but there was huge turmoil okay and so other measures were going down the happiness and well-being of the people and they started to come apart and and so they're starting to be more discussion but what you're right about is you could imagine a world in which a small group of people are very very happy and most people are not very happy there are the masters and mistresses of the universe the winners of the world and they're happy and they're SuperDuper happy okay imagine those scales they'll only go to ten well now there are those 1,300 billionaires that are happy to a hundred this has always been the worry about back to utilitarians like Bentham and mill about if you start to calculate these things if you look for the overall sum a few SuperDuper happy people with AB a whole bunch of people that the mediocre level could have a higher final number than if everybody's at a 10 and that's your question so this is a completely I think normative philosophical question or almost entirely and the answer should be something like that we should care about the well-being of all people equally okay and so somebody's gone wrong with the world if we only care about the well-being of the fat cats or the people in power or the riches but now you might say there's an empirical component that can help you defend that by saying that we know that in cases where the there are soup there's a high Gini coefficient that's the the economic coefficient so imagine a high Gini coefficient also in happiness okay we know that in those circumstances the rich people get nervous when they have much more than the other people they get nervous Ben and Jerry were not nervous they had happy workers Mark Zuckerberg is scared shitless of Elizabeth Warren and he should be but seriously you did you see he was really nervous last week yeah he said oh that she's against billionaires so yeah so that's a really important question yeah yes you have a go ahead and you oh no and then I'm gonna go back I got two in the back there to discourse on capital to an outside being or outside the dodging that's not authentic themself that that is immoral but it's immoral because it doesn't come from their own being so yes I would agree with you that that kind of thing is wrong because the language is used as a tool in these cases impose upon the being of a specific area of a specific person of a specific class of people such that their being will be distorted in some sense by that language hence why I've criticized these types of UN goals because I view them not as a kind of way to bring people to have happiness but historically if you look at I know that you have not the same in behind us so I make a little bit unfair saying this if you look at monocropping with with the IMF and Africa and other places often these transnational or international organizations are used as a ways in which their legislation is put upon local areas and undermine of sovereignty of local countries I personally believe we live in the world so my concern is that this type of moral evaluation in which there is a difference between the subject and objectives of the world is random the subjects being authentic literally I really believe that it changes the way by okay I think I got your your point I was yeah good thank you in the back please and then I got and then your next oh oh yeah please the young woman in the back yeah you two are the next two so I don't care what order you go and what is joy oh yeah I don't enjoy and the other is wisdom yeah it's curious as to your list can only be so long yeah yeah there are other concepts which are also in the vicinity you might say I I have some I guess I think of wisdom is sort of different so I don't have anything powerful to say about that joy once you unpacked something like a concept like happiness or joy would be a kind of it right I guess it just was a little bit too specialized sort of but what tell me why more you think yeah yeah okay yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so that's good these things could come apart I mean the good news about the reason I was sort of confident in saying about and you're right I mean the good thing about Saints is that there are so many of them and you'll find something who are definitely happy and many who are joyful and some who were ecstatic at certain times right so they have some kind of experiences you know so it would be peculiar if you ever you know probably most of us with long enough have a whole range of very positive experiences so it couldn't be that the people that I was talking about didn't have a lot of pleasant experiences and meaningful times it's just what I was thinking about if we if we were hoping that at eulogies of ourselves and other people that we'd be able to sort of sum it up by saying that was a happy life sort of from beginning to end then I was just saying that but you're right these are other concepts that are useful and they would depend for their applicability on certain overall philosophical surrounds that involves salvation and connection with God yeah well it's a little bit like I always still I'm puzzled all the time by the fact that people always say things like and I want to object to that behavior because it's neither moral nor ethical nor legal and I always wonder what they mean by moral and ethical there's something in mind that people have but especially people in Washington DC say it all the time I don't even think there I just don't live in that world where we use terms that way but what you said is very helpful and there there are some people who think psychologists were writing lately about exuberance and there's concepts out there like for you know so that's very helpful yes so following the idea that have leading like meaningful life versus happy life like we've made a distinction between them and jumping off of like the themes of redistribution of money international organizations contributions to helping people potentially be happy or leading meaningful lives my question is more towards like accountability in terms of depriving people of leading meaningful lives I think we go into more treacherous water of trying to like provide happy lives yeah I just think the theme of prioritizing money too much individually can be harmful but I think what about governments or these billionaires or what have you these examples like where's accountability of them depriving people of leading more meaningful lives taking away opportunities from them things like that because I think um with the set UN goals like there's no enforcing entity in the UN these are just goals like they can they can sign 193 countries consign off on this but is there any follow-through most likely not and we've seen that historically so how can we use concepts that we're discussing today to kind of have more conversations about not letting people lead meaningful lives or gift even giving them the opportunity to thank you a great question so I and this is something actually your generations gonna have to figure that out it's like and I really I think I think we live in a time where it's very it's a very profound problem that you just raised so I'll just say this because I so first of all among those so these are questions about whether these are collective action problems and let's focus like you were saying let's not worry about like you know Flanagan's happy enough just leave that alone I don't need anything from anybody to get better I'm just fine and but there are people who are really suffering and this is where I think that certain traditions like the Sermon on the Mount and the Gospel of Mark yeah the Sermon on the Mount is a kind of Christianity that I think is you know that's that's the side of the Gospels that are focused on the poor and the suffering original Buddhism was focused on that Taoism is focused on that confusions not so much I'm always about to create I always opposed to criticize the Confucians once in front of her but there are these spiritual and ethical traditions which have told us that we too take care first of those who are not able to live meaningful lives or satisfying wise or happy lies yes and I think that some of these goals you're right there are no enforcement mechanisms but there are in place good bureaucracies that keep at least reminding the UN countries where they are in relation to satisfying them just like there are people tracking climate now but but the the fact that these are collective collective action problems I think makes it very hard for individuals to know what to do and like just speaking like Bill Gates Melinda Gates went to Duke and Bill Gates is actually like a good guy and Melinda Gates is a good person but they and they have these interesting worries about they could give all their money away too and then the question is fill in the blank they intend to give most of it away but they want to have control of how the money is spent so they give to rich institutions like my own the following gift all Duke students can go away in the summer time to do philanthropic work somewhere in the world getting in the way of people like they for free they can go to Haiti and help earthquake victims and you know and that's a way of these students feel good about themselves but it's just kind of a peculiar gift given the kind of poverty and suffering there is in the world and a lot of their gifts are or like that but they're always there intended for the good but then again you have worries that governments are not always the best places to give money and to do effective so this is there's some philosophers now you may have heard about this movement called effective altruism movement and the effective altruism movement involves really trying to do empirical research on like I've been trying to do stuff recently because I fly a lot I including flying to meetings where I talk about the sustainable development goals right so you have to do sort of start to figure out carbon offsetting for yourself and there's a lawful lot of companies where that they'll help you do that but then you got to find out whether or not those are doing it well doing it effectively how much they pay their CEO and the CFO and it's kind of complicated and there are websites now that will help you do that but as far as individuals especially when individuals themselves don't have the resources these are these are fairly these might be the first time in our lives where we have these intractable intractable problems that occur at the level of old nation states David Hume a philosopher from the 18th century who I remember the first day I read David Hume it just happens that the beginning of one of his texts think the inquiry starts out by saying something about the air is not something we would ever price because we all just share it equally and is there you know and that was only two centuries ago and of course that thought is no longer viable and so I wish I could say something I mean it's a it's a very very very complicated question people are talking about it though at least like you are yes please durian so on the bottom there on all measures of hedonic happiness that's the first two kinds yeah there's a gradual downward trend from 16 until age 40 then it's flat for a while - you're about 50 and then from 50 it goes up I guess when I hear these statistics now remember you know we all hang a role in these bubbles so I tend to be around people who've been blessed like I have been you know by wonderful life circumstances and good healthcare and you know even though you know you know you get to that age where you know every part of you aches all the time but it's it's great it's a great life it's just the way it goes but I think it's basically that if you're if you're blessed to begin with and you've had you know lots of support achieving your life goals and there's a serenity and having accomplished what you accomplished and being having realistic expectations about a life your life and so yes I see it I don't quite know if we were to sit around I mean I do I was telling Robin today you know I have I worry a lot about the young and the way you know obviously I have my own children and I worry about the fact that these sustainable development goals people think that the the money that's needed to meet them is one trillion dollars right now Americans hold 1.3 trillion dollars in student loan debt and everybody is watching how that's affecting the economy and life and I have one of my best friends I live part of the year in a small town in Maine with 800 people and I have my friends are mostly working-class people lobstermen who also put ruse on houses and paint and farm and and one of my best friends sits with me sometimes he said oh and I just turned 60 he said do you know anything about how to handle this I I put my three kids through the University of Maine it's not expensive and my wife went back to school and took student loans to become a teacher and she's a teacher he said but I'll never ever finish I'll die in debt and there so he's a 60 year old man but I know there's young people so the point is there's that's a different kind of person and I don't know whether he's on that upward trend that some of us more privileged people are I don't know it depends I mean yeah I don't it's a whole bunch of different things probably and it includes that it includes and includes probably a certain amount of understanding about how things work and you don't always get what you want and you didn't always need what you wanted that helps too right it's wisdom that's back to wisdom yeah yes please they mindset and I was just wondering if you think it's safe to say that an elusive concept such as happiness maybe need not be defined I feel like the definition of happiness and where those felt knowledge is so what I'd say about definitions I when I said that I thought I'll want to I'll regret that later today but there there is a long tradition it starts actually in Plato's dialogues where philosophers are always acting like you better define this before we can go on but work in psychology and linguistics bye-bye recent times has shown us that actually not only do sort of private language terms lack definitions but most things outside of technical scientific terms don't have definitions I mean for example odd an even number have definitions that give you necessary and sufficient conditions an even number is a number divisible by itself into an odd number is divisible by one okay and so on so you can do it that way but outside of things like numbers and you know certain technical scientific terms like take a chair define a chair four legs not necessarily does to have it back on it yeah could have could a piece of wood fallen in the forest be a chair yeah it's very hard to give necessary and sufficient conditions of chairs you point to instances all the time and if there was a log there and I say here sit in this chair that becomes a chair but it's not as if you can define these things so I think with the long wrists or Vick and Stein I think that these things have family resemblances and zhongsha you point to instances and you say there are these different kinds and you could start to say like a little bit did with the different conceptions of happiness you say there's one kind here which has to do with just your minute-by-minute feelings there's another kind which has to do with emotional tonality there's another kind that has to do with your definite your overall set mood and your orientation towards life there's another one that has to do with your feeling of satisfaction for your whole life and domain by domain and then there's another kind which has to do with like whether your life is objectively okay and sometimes those come apart right because sometimes people who have objectively okay lives will say things suck and then you want to say you want to sort of take them by the shoulder and say come on wake up and look at it is okay it's good it's good enough but so but you did ask this other question to which is I mean I I think the concept you were getting at when you said both the term you use allusive say that again because I like that but you how you put it it's like is it one of those are private felt knowledge yeah yeah there might be things I think there probably are things like that I mean there's a whole language you know we can sort of regiment how people are using color words because the color is out there and we sort of we see where it well it could be I didn't mean it's an objective property but I just mean you know as long as we're functioning with like you know normal color vision and are not colorblind we we sort of reliably know when people say red if they're seeing red when someone says you know it's the old thing when two two people walk look at each other's eyes and they say I love you I love you too you say well I love you nine say hi love you seven what you know he would want to know like you love me as much as I love you I don't know it seems like infinite amount of love I have for you Oh mine does too well I don't know what they're talking about at that point yeah I mean it's all better than I don't know some other way of speaking but it's these are concepts which you know and we know we fall all over ourselves if we try to cut and define concepts love's a good example tell me what love is you know there's romantic love there's familial love there's love for pets they have things in common they overlap but they're not the same thing yeah please yeah Bhutan exactly so yeah you may all know this story thank you have you been to Bhutan yeah so you may all know the story in the early 70s the someone said to the king of Bhutan gee your country is pretty pathetic as as far as GDP goes and he said we don't care about the gross domestic product we care about gross national happiness and ever since then the government of Bhutan in fact they're often involved in these meetings that I am involved in there they do all kinds of on the ground measurements and actually what's quite interesting about them in terms of this cultural hegemony issue the Bhutanese government Bhutan is a country of about 3 million people does that sound right yeah it's a landlocked country between India and China and it's probably the most Buddhist country in the world 99.9% of the people a Buddhist and they actually collect data on wholesome and unwholesome emotions and I'm interested in this now what they think are wholesome emotions or unwholesome emotions are things that will surprise you this you'll be interested in this so I mentioned earlier Buddhist think that anger is the worst emotion it poisons your soul I poisons relations Americans so I've done work on anger and I read the anthropology and psychology of anger so there's a lot of cultural variation in the world about how people think of anger Americans in addition to thinking money is really important Americans like anger and if you ask an American what they want to do when they're angry guess what they say yeah hit punch you in the face and if you ask a Japanese person what they want to do when they get angry they want to leave the room they don't want to punch you in the face so these things are very culturally sort of specified and if you ask an American what thing makes you most angry do you think they say ignorant say I can see where you're going you're back to your other problem the guy the lack of money no not relationships no it's about individual think of yourselves a ninja you're funny you're old yeah you've all been attuned to be to sort of polite okay here's the deal so picture a situation like this you know you're you're in a Starbucks in a line and someone someone's in front of you and she gets to the front of the Starbucks line and she says could I have a triple macchiato with Antiguan virgin coconut shavings and and then she tries to pay by cheque now you're behind that person and you go to your friends and you say you won't believe what happened to me you will believe what happened to me yeah and then your friends say oh you poor thing that this is insane is safe people comforting other people for being in lines and have the number one problem in America that makes you angry is people wasting your and I have to say it this way your time because it has to be yours and it's angry so we that doesn't show up in the top five reasons for anger in any other country in the world so this isn't these are very important these are important things because they show us how we create sort of social and cultural ecology which reinforce it's also by the way the case that in children's books that Americans read anger is legitimate response to frustration and an East Asian and South Asian children's books it's not problem-solving is so these are things that we take for granted when I when I've done my work on anger in the last 5-10 years I asked people I say do you think Americans are anger they say yeah and then I say why and then they sometimes give reasons but they often say it's just natural everybody behaves that way but everybody doesn't behave in the same ways with it so when boot back to Bhutan when people in Bhutan now go around to houses one of the things they try to measure is the dispositions to be angry and if those are very very low like in America right now with political disparities you got the left and the right everybody's angry all right everybody's anxious and angry and that they would be very worried about that as we should be too but I'm just pointing that out so thank you for mentioning Bhutan yeah please that first one of the ranking this one this pink thing I know it's this is explained so this part is explained by perception of that's the amount this will a one here this blue one is explained by the perception of corruption and this one is I'm sorry III could I can look on the computer where it will show me Oh a sideshow to go beer and so on here Emily yeah go to slideshow I apologize okay dystopia 1.88 plus residual I don't know what that means it is probably bigger but this is maybe all the sort of variations that aren't accounted for and other explanations yeah yeah so so this just so you know yes so this one is how much of the ranking is explained by their per capita income and then this is the social support one that is the one single one that shows up the most yeah I don't know thank you for asking that I'd have to look up now what that means okay we have any other hands up okay [Applause] you