Mill's Utilitarianism › What Psychology Reveals

Modern research on happiness offers both support and challenge to Mill's vision. The _hedonic treadmill_, our tendency to adapt to both good and bad circumstances, suggests that achieving happiness through acquiring pleasures is largely futile. Win the lottery, and within a year your happiness returns to baseline. Lose a limb, and within a year your happiness returns to baseline. This complicates naive utilitarianism: if people adapt to almost anything, how do we compare the value of different states? Research on _eudaimonic_ versus _hedonic_ well-being partially vindicates Mill's distinction between higher and lower pleasures. Studies consistently find that meaning, purpose, and close relationships predict life satisfaction better than sensory pleasure or material consumption. The competent judges were right: Socrates dissatisfied really is preferable to the fool satisfied. But research also reveals how poor we are at predicting what will make us happy. We overestimate the impact of both good and bad events. We neglect adaptation. We focus on salient features while ignoring background conditions that matter more. If we can't accurately predict our own happiness, how can we calculate the consequences of our actions for others? This epistemological humility suggests yet another reason to favor rule-following over case-by-case calculation. We're simply not smart enough to be act-utilitarians. But we can develop rules, institutions, and habits that have proven to produce good outcomes over time.