Hedonic adaptation

Hedonic adaptation is the theory that individual humans have different basic levels of subjective life satisfaction (SLS). When major changes in life circumstances make life change for the better (e.g., marriage) or worse (e.g., divorce or unemployment), life satisfaction goes up and down, but then over five years it creeps back to roughly where it was even if the circumstances do not change back.

Suppose this theory is true. Can we draw any philosophical conclusions from it?

Here is one thought. Suppose the right theory of human well-being is hedonism. It seems plausible to think that SLS measures one’s overall hedonic level averaged over a medium term. If so, then hedonic adaptation makes means we have less reason than we might have thought to seek out gains and to avoid losses in objective life circumstances for ourselves and others. Not that we have none. Short-term pains and pleasures are still real, and major changes in life circumstances do have a genuine effect on the life-time total hedonic level even if after five years much of the change in SLS disappears—and in the case of negative changes, even if much of the change disappears, it probably doesn’t disappear entirely.

Still, it seems plausible that if hedonism is the right theory of human well-being, then the discovery of hedonic adaptation (assuming it is real) should make us, both individually and societally, more passive than is plausible. One’s hedonic level, according to hedonic adaptation, is just not very responsive in the long-term to costly interventions. E.g., is it really worth a society’s putting a lot of effort into preventing unemployment if the unemployed would anyway return to a basic hedonic level, and hedonic level is what matters?

This suggests that hedonic adaptation provides an argument against hedonic theories of well-being, by yielding an implausible consequence of those theories. Now while this argument initially seemed to depend on hedonic adaptation being empirically true, perhaps it does not even require that. All we need, perhaps, is that hedonic adaptation is possibly true, and then we can argue:

1. If well-being is hedonic in nature, then if hedonic adaptation is true, we would have much less reason than we thought for major societal improvements.

But I think we may also find ourselves with the intuition:

2. Even if hedonic adaptation is true, we would not have much less reason than we thought for major societal improvements.

And it arguably follows from 1 and 2, together with

3. It is possible that hedonic adaptation is true

that:

4. Well-being is not hedonic in nature.

(The move from 1–3 to 4 uses modus tollens and two principles in subjunctive conditional logic, namely (a) if p → q and p → r then p → (q&r), and (b) if p is possible and p → q, then q is possible. I think (a) is true, but I am dubious of (b) in general, even though it is true on Lewis’s theory of counterfactuals. However, even if (b) is not true in general, I think it is true in typical cases, and seems likely to be true in the context of my argument agaisnt hedonism.)

In other words, thinking about hedonic adaptation might well shift us to thinking that a major portion of our well-being is more objective than hedonism would make it be. The reason for fighting unemployment isn’t primarily its deleterious effects on subjective life satisfaction, but its (typical) deleterious effects on objective human flourishing.

But there is also another even more speculative consequence of hedonic adaptation. Even if we reject hedonic level or SLS as the measure of human flourishing, it is clear that that we all want SLS, and indeed want long-term SLS. Hedonic adaptation tells us that improving our life-circumstances won’t get us long-term SLS: after half a decade, we’ll go back to where we were. Plausibly, our desire for long-term SLS is a normal and central human desire. Plausibly, normal and central human desires are fulfillable. Yet this desire for long-term SLS is not fulfillable in this life. Hence there is life after death.

In other words, the phenomenon of hedonic adaptation would empirically bolster the argument from desire considered as an argument for an afterlife.

A personalized argument from need

In the case of certain kinds of transformational experiences—such as meeting the love of your life—you have the realization that this is something you really needed for flourishing, but didn’t know it. Further, in many cases of these kinds of experiences, part of that realization is not just that you need the subjective experience for flourishing, but that what you need for reality the flourishing. For instance, if it turns out that your experience of meeting the love of your life was a hallucination, it would be a part of your realization not just that you need an experience of meeting the love of your life, but that you need the reality.

Now I think this kind of realization is a part of the life of many theists in connection with the experience of a relationship with God: they come to realize that they have always needed both this experience and the reality of it. But then the theist has this argument:

1. What is needed for the flourishing of a human being is in principle possible.

2. A relationship with God is in principle possible only if God exists.

3. A relationship with God is needed for my flourishing.

4. So, God exists.

An interesting thing about this argument is that for a number of people, the full realization of the truth of premise (3) only comes about once they believe in God. The argument thus has a circularity of sorts: it works best for those who already believe the conclusion. This is an innocent circularity: the relationship with God, of which belief in God is a part, makes available significant evidence for that belief.

This is a bit like Kierkegaard’s “argumentum Spiritus Sancti” which is only available to those who believe. It sounds paradoxical, but I do not think it is actually all that paradoxical. Imagine you have a friend who is accused of some crime, but refuses to show you evidence of their innocence unless you believe in their innocence first. Then, your belief is needed for you to have the evidence, but the evidence can be perfectly genuine and unparadoxical.