There's a disjoint, peripatetic cross-blog conversation going on that grapples with what appears to me to be the intellectual sewer of happiness research. There's some subjective data and a great deal of waffling about its meaning. In some ways the data is a Rorschach blot that is interpreted based on priors, each pundit seeing what is desired or at least expected. However, some of the pundits are aware of their biases and seek to overcome them.

Below is Table 6.1, from a 2008 paper on the “net affect” of 45 ways we spent our time. (Net affect combines six emotions felt during the activity: happy, tired, stress, sad, interested, and pain.) A simple policy of taxing low affect activities and subsidizing the others would have us subsidize not just parties, doing and spectating sports, exercise, playing with kids, walking dogs, and music, but also subsidize religion, eating out, and shopping. We would tax not just work, commuting, home maintenance, and most housework, but also tax school and homework, writing by hand, buying medical services, doing personal medical care, and caring for adults.

If you don’t endorse these policies, you must have other policy criteria than just encouraging activities that directly make us happy. . .

The idea that governments have any business taxing activities with any objective other than raising revenue is sick, so it is useful to expose the nature of the illness. Happiness is an excuse to pursue an agenda, so the science is spun as required to achieve the desired result.

What this work shows is that we’re lousy about predicting the consequences of possible future events for our state of mind. Our reported experience of happiness tends to return to a middling point after events that we expect to make us permanently happier or sadder (such as achieving major career goals or suffering a huge disability or tragedy). I agree this is a significant rebuke to the idea that rational actors will generally select actions which increase their happiness: if happiness in the long-term returns to a default setting regardless of the consequences of our actions, then a study which concludes that one choice objectively has more utility than another is missing the point. . .

I’m not sure the people debating the policy implications of happiness research are entirely getting the point, however. What this work also implies is that our younger selves are poor custodians of the interests of our older selves. Among other things, if you took this really seriously, it would mean that the entire idea of contract is profoundly flawed. How could I possibly make a binding commitment now on behalf of my older self, given that I have no ability to predict what will make my older self happy or unhappy? . . .

But if you were going to formalize the most extreme implications of this research, you’d need to see the self both as exceptionally discontinuous (that my younger self knew nothing of my older self’s needs, and therefore should have no determinate role in my older self’s condition) and as exceptionally continuous (that it doesn’t matter that much what my younger self chooses or what harm is done to me by others, because my happiness will return to a default state anyway).

That's one spin, but not one that much helps societies. Contracts aren't about happiness, they're about commitment, honor and responsibility. Making such commitments in part (lots of other factors) determines futures selves. Our younger selves are not, in any sense, "custodians of the interests of our older selves", they are one of many influences. Knowing this changes the decision process, changes the objective from command and control to resilience.

Other's don't even pretend to be reasoning in good faith - screw you, it's full throated culture war.

As Robin has been insistently pointing out, how good-looking we are, the quality of our mates, how smart and funny we are when we talk, and the impressiveness of our children’s achievements signals at least as strongly as our cars. If our investments in appearance, mate selection, Bourdieuian cultural capital, and children are not equally harmful, then why not? If you think regulating luxury consumption passes Millian muster, then why wouldn’t regulating extremely impressive feats of oratory or athleticism?

I think this line of thinking can be taken even further. Many so-called “culture wars” are largely about cultural externalities. Consider Linda Hirschman-like arguments to the effect that women who choose to stay at home raising children impose a significant cost on women who wish to pursue professional success by reinforcing traditional stereotypes of women’s relative strengths and by creating rational expectations among employers that firm-specific investments in female employees will have a lower than average expected payoff due to the possibility of maternity leaves or long-term exit from the labor market. The argument that stay-at-home moms ought to be stigmatized, or at least be extended decreasing levels of social esteem, is basically an argument for the cultural version of a tax on choices that have negative spillover effects for others. If the state took a side on this and actually did tax stay-at-home moms, would that pass Millian muster, on the grounds that mothering choices have spillover effects that “harm” other women?

I think that at this point Mill would suggest that something has gone dreadfully wrong. It looks like we’ve defined “harm” so loosely that the harm principle, so understood, could be the basis for the state regulation of any action whatsoever that affects anyone else in a way they don’t like.

Well, no. When we look at both sides of the harm equation the situation is clarified a bit, even if the desire to act (tax or whatever) is impeded. If you seek to regulate beauty and talent you must consider the harms done by the ugly and untalented as well as those of the beautiful and talented. If you seek to regulate behaviors such as home mothering due to harms done to working women then you would consider the harms done to home mothers as well as those done to working women since stigmatization and the threat of future behavior change are equal.

Now, when a black family moves into a neighborhood of white racists, thereby causing great unhappiness, or when the recognition of the legitimacy of gay marriages causes traditionalists to feel that their traditional marriages have been “devalued,” that’s the cultural analogue of a pecuniary externality. Somebody really is getting hurt in some real sense. But I don’t much care, and Robert Frank probably doesn’t either, if some racists are disgruntled by their neighbors’ color, or if some religious folk feel aggrieved by a perfectly accurate sense that the social esteem afforded their particular type of marriage has fallen in relative value.

Coasean logic focuses us on the duality of externalities. In the land of the deaf, there is no noise pollution. In the land of cosmopolitan enlightenment, there is no “there goes the neighborhood.” Progressive social change occurs through a revaluation of where to locate “the problem.”

Racists come in all colors and sexual bigots reside on both sides of the gay marriage war. All Wilkinson does is to privilege his concerns above those of others. Screw 'em. But in doing so he doesn't even see harms done to "his side". If a racial block buster lowers the value of homes in the neighborhood she is likely to be upside down on her mortgage too, and gays will find that marriage is indeed devalued, even for them, as has been the long term trend everywhere for some time. In both cases there appears to be a large dollop of spite and costly punishment. The harm suffered by the antagonists is a fair price for the greater harm done to the protagonists.

Beneath all the bloviation and obfuscation there's nothing but Old Texas frontier justice: He needed killin'

Robin might want to consider that moral categorization is by its nature contingently nominalistic. The fact that enough people just do consider one thing and not another thing a harm, due to the local history of cultural change and socialization, might seem to lack theoretical normative teeth, and leave little space for criticizing the actual system of norms. But the actual system of norms has actual normative teeth pretty much by definition. Which is why we work so hard fighting over the norms, whether or not we can come up with a unified, clear, coherent theory that accounts for their authority.

Might makes right, no need for all that fussy theorizing, civility or even reflection about the consequences of thoughtless conflict and abuse of outsiders. You can find these sorts of monsters on either side of the culture war - sociopathy does not respect norms or preferences. IMV we would do well to take names, point and laugh, and otherwise stigmatize them since they do nothing but harm.