How To Be Humanhaving won a race. However, Aristotle convincingly argued that
this notion is inadequate. He said that a happy person is one who
is good – note the moral quality of that – and good in two senses.
First, they are good at what they do. And second, they are good
because of the person they become in doing it. In short, hap-
piness comes to a life lived with an overall good purpose. This
explains his use of the other wise rather puzzling maxim that a
person cannot tell whether they were truly happy until they die:
happiness is a refl ection of the shape of a life as a whole, not a
measure of isolated or even extended moments in it.
Another important point was made by John Stuart Mill who
realised that happiness is one of those things in life, like love,
which has the property of becoming more elusive the more
doggedly you seek it. Better, Mill concluded, not to think about
happiness at all, for only then might you have the chance to
‘inhale happiness with the air you breathe, without dwelling on
it or thinking about it, without either forestalling it in imagina-
tion, or putting it to fl ight by fatal questioning.’ It was partly
for such reasons that politicians after Mill focused on things like
maximising people’s rights or opportunities – legal entities that
are tangible in ways that the pursuit of happiness is not.
One cannot question the frustration that lies behind Layard’s
hope. Why, he asks, have human beings in the West become
no happier over the last 50 years, a period that has seen unpar-
alleled economic growth? Add to that, the aftermath of the
global economic crisis of 2008, the pain of which will be long
lasting, the damage profound. The problem here is that for too
long, we ceded our ability to decide what we want to markets.
Isn’t it time to re-organise how we live so that instead of relent-
lessly pursuing effi ciency and growth we pursue what actu-
ally makes us happy? He also rightly laments the limitations
inherent in the kind of politics based mostly upon rights and
opportunity. They are endlessly contested and make people
highly individualistic. All in all, Layard wants neuroscience to
‘ vindicate’ Bentham’s approach so as to make for a new politics.
But it cannot. We need to think ethically, not scientifi cally.