Truth and Happiness

This post is an expansion on “I’d rather be happy than right”, and sort of a reply to the comments from Xan, Bob, and Jonathan.

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I completely agree with Xan that we should be charitable when people say things informally. (Our language hardly allows for pristine logical statements anyhow.) When Bears says that he prefers happiness over truth, let’s not interpret that as “Bears rejects all truth.”

However, coming back to the specific topic at hand, happiness vs. truth, I think the general sentiment from Bears and from his students is that when truth is inconvenient (in this case to happiness), ignore it, and in this matter I think Kingwell’s rebuttal has legs. It is probably not a logically winnable argument as Kingwell seems to be going for, because Bears and others are merely stating a preference for happiness over truth, and all logical firepower seems to collapse under the weight of “preference,” but it does seem an odd preference indeed. Maybe the gravity metaphor isn’t completely fair, but I’ll extend it anyway, just for the sake of controversy: Preferring to ignore truth because you’d rather be happy is like preferring to ignore gravity because you’d rather fly. Ignore it all you want – I can’t argue against the preference – but you are probably going to fall flat on your face.

To be fair, what I hear Bears saying is saying is that his approach, even if it’s not true, allows him and others to metaphorically fly, and the aim is flying, he says, not Truth. Logically, I think that’s perfectly fine, and maybe even wise, but my beef is with his assumption that an untrue theory will work just as well, just as reliably, and for just as long as a true theory. Admittedly, there is no such thing as a “true” theory—all theories are merely approximations of Truth, and, who knows, maybe Bears’s theory is as good an approximation as any, but he seems sufficiently close to the murky philosophical waters of Truth-doesn’t-matter that I am with Kingwell in doubting the practical integrity of his theory to serve whatever interests he claims to have very reliably or for very long.

I think that for a lot of people – and for me – the end goal is not to have accurate beliefs but beliefs that take us somewhere, and on this point (preference) I am with Bears. But because Bears and I care more about other aims than Truth as an end goal does not mean that we can ignore Truth, or worse reject Truth with the cringeworthy ignorance-is-bliss line. Just as you have to learn to work within the constraints of gravity if you want to fly, you have to work within the constraints of Truth if you want happiness or gratitude or comfort or contribution or godliness or meaning or lots of sex or whatever, because some strategies are going to take you somewhere and others aren’t.

We don’t need to expend all our energy trying to make sure all of our information and our interpretations thereof are accurate – that would be entirely impractical – but when it comes to our beliefs regarding the approach that will take us to where we want to go, how could you possibly hope to get anywhere when your theory is suffocating without the fresh air of competing evidence?