Gratitude. That word evokes some unsavory associations: a religious zealot insisting you are blessed, a parent lecturing you about their treacherous journey to school, or an out-of-touch celebrity on Thanksgiving.
The gut response may be to cite all of the debts, hardships, and frustrations one regularly endures, and/or to point out the many others who are far more (typically financially) fortunate than oneself. It feels natural to be ungrateful, knowing that so many of one’s peers will seldom need to worry about anything nearly as dire or consequential.
The most cynical among us may even paint gratitude as a tool of oppression used to shame us into tolerating unacceptable situations, stifle calls for a more equitable world, or perform apologetics for greedy billionaires. The truth is, however, that gratitude is far more than just a platitude or a wellness strategy; it is a moral duty. Beyond this, I argue, a necessary consequence is an even more radical proposition: We are morally compelled to be happy.
It is completely natural to be upset by what I just said. A lack of happiness is rarely considered voluntary, and regardless of culpability, is almost always met with sympathy rather than scolding. I do not seek to scold; however, I legitimately believe that an understanding of the happiness obligation will make one happier. It has worked for me at least, though this may be due to a Kant-induced spiritual Prussianness that renders even happiness unappealing unless duty is somehow involved.
I would also like to add that the degree to which the happiness obligation necessitates individual action varies widely across cases. Additionally, society almost always has a larger and more meaningful role to play in this process. I will proceed by demonstrating why this obligation exists and what we should do about it.
To begin, imagine yourself in a superhuman, timeless, monolingual plane wherein you are able to develop a relationship with every one of the 117 billion people who have ever lived, and you can perfectly recall the important features of each person and relationship.
Then, imagine that each person is brought into a massive room, lined up shoulder to shoulder, and made to learn about the fate of all people who have ever lived on earth. The vast majority of these will read something like: Herto Man, Rift Valley, 160,000 BCE, died at 20 years old from an infected toe. Akalamdug, Sumeria, 2,200 BCE, died at 17 from an Akkadian spear to the skull. Only a small fraction will read something like, Justin, United States, 2005, still alive, but situationship hasn’t texted him back in four days.
Next, individuals are selected one by one, a giant bingo machine is spun, and a ball is chosen, with each ball representing the birth order of the earthly person whose life they have to live. In the vast majority of cases, you would likely watch as your friends and colleagues got dragged out screaming and crying, forced to relegate the remainder of their sentient lives to a violent, resource-scarce, disease-riddled world. The lucky few (including yourself) selected to lead modern, developed-country lives would likely be overcome with both joy and guilt. You will close out your sentience with unmatched prosperity and peace, but with the knowledge that fewer than 2% of your compatriots will be able to join. I imagine it would be difficult to complain about your commute without picturing the distraught faces of thirty billion of your friends as they were hauled out of the room just to die within hours or days of their mortal births.
Though it may be tempting to dismiss that experiment on the grounds of its lofty hypotheticals, it is designed that way to give people of the past the empathy and moral concern they deserve. Imagining each person as a potential friend cruelly and nonconsensually thrust into a vastly unequal world makes it much harder to simply disregard them. When we face inequality in our current world, the natural response is to seek its rectification. We should feel the same way about the inequality between us and those in the past.
You may still object to that idea, even if you buy that arbitrary, uncompensated inequality is a moral wrong requiring rectification. People living now suffer experiential consequences of inequality; they are deprived of realizing the same amount of desires, while the dead have nothing left to experience. Consider funerals, to disregard the wishes of the person whose funeral it is, just because they will not be affected, would almost universally be considered immoral. Respecting the wishes of the dead is a necessary component of treating them as moral equals, and what would our potential friends of the past wish for us? The same thing we would wish for them, happiness. And compared to them, we are — as individuals and a society — both more strongly obligated to make good on that wish (because of our material inequality with them), and far more capable of doing so than they were, largely for the same reason.
To be clear, I will proceed by assuming that ought implies can. There is a robust body of literature on this topic, and it is by no means a settled matter. By assuming its truth, however, I limit discussion to cases where progress is possible, and avoid saddling struggling people with an unfair, uncontrollable burden. There are absolutely people, especially in developing countries, for whom — whether due to physiological, economic, or social impediments — happiness (at least in the foreseeable future) is essentially impossible. These people, many of whom are far materially closer to those of past generations than those of people in developed nations or have chemical imbalances that fundamentally alter their perception of reality, have essentially none or literally no happiness obligation.
For the rest of us, however, it may be argued that we are also free of obligation, as perhaps happiness is simply an inbuilt feature or a consequence of wealth. This does not seem very plausible; there are numerous diverse countries, poorer than our own, that consistently rank higher in happiness. These happiness disparities may, however, still be reasonably attributed to policy differences.
Not only is that plausible, it is probably (at least partly) true. The majority of the happiest countries differ substantially in their civic cultures, systems of government, and regulatory environments. Additionally, almost all of these countries broadly maintain less market-centric approaches in the aforementioned domains. This demonstrates some correlation between happiness and policy, even when controlling for factors like income (of the 21 countries that are happier than us, only four rank higher in median income).
Despite all of this, even if one believes that these policy differences causally contribute to greater happiness, a nontrivial happiness obligation still exists for us as individuals. This is because any society-level change, even one that nearly everyone supports, could still, in principle, cause a decrease in happiness. Not only this, but it is likely that we may all recognize and agree that said change decreases happiness, and nonetheless still prefer a world with it to one without it. Take modern medicine, for example, it may have made us less happy because it eroded the emotional solace and shared spiritual beliefs that folk medicine gave us. Even if this were the case, I assume the overwhelming majority of people would still prefer a regime of modern medicine. Furthermore, a similarly large proportion of people would, for their own family at least, prefer that they receive modern treatment when ill.
Still, one may conclude perhaps then that net happiness increase is simply not an adequate basis for policy decisions. This is quite dangerous, however, as the legitimacy of goods within democratic societies depends on public acceptance over time, and acceptance is highly subject to swings based on subjective happiness. When widespread unhappiness accompanies progress, even the most morally necessary institutions are subject to backlash. Thus, the obligation to cultivate happiness also rests in our duty to preserve the conditions under which our most morally necessary, material-welfare-enhancing institutions can persist.
The aforementioned pattern has so often given rise to reactionary, populist, authoritarian governments. People’s frustrations with modernity often lead to misconstrued notions of an idealized past, which have historically caused the development of welfare-destroying regimes. The solution is to recognize the grave dangers of ingratitude in the face of immense material progress. Recognize that those sorts of attitudes may undermine the very mission of pushing for better standards of living.
In other words, try your best to be happy. Try your best to, when looking at a society that is well off but unhappy, not solely blame said society’s institutions. Two societies with identical institutions may have quite different happiness levels. Thus, obviously, a certain set of institutions alone should not be regarded as the sole reason for either one’s happiness. Unfortunately, it becomes quite difficult as our memories of past societies fade to gain happiness from the sheer fact that we are not living in a pre-modern one.
We are naturally drawn to societies that push for material improvement and ones that achieve greater net happiness, but it is a very real possibility that these two have or will become mutually exclusive. We can change this, however. Though the material progress component seems the most within our control, the happiness one is as well.
Through gratitude, reflection on the suffering of the past, and concern for the future, those who live at least middle-class lives in developed nations can come to realize that we have not just an obligation to be happy, but so many things to actually be happy about. This absolutely does not mean we should stop fighting to improve people’s lives, but instead that we have a duty to separate the roots of our ingratitude from genuinely welfare-diminishing policies, technologies, and institutions.
Featured Image Source: Integral Society