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{"id":4999,"date":"2012-09-24T13:32:19","date_gmt":"2012-09-24T17:32:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/?p=4999"},"modified":"2012-09-24T13:32:19","modified_gmt":"2012-09-24T17:32:19","slug":"what-are-your-utils-denominated-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2012\/09\/what-are-your-utils-denominated-in.html","title":{"rendered":"What are your utils denominated in?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

$\"\"$ <\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the comment threads for the \u201c Hey! I didn\u2019t say Science Says!<\/a>\u201d post, there were a couple attempts to come up with metrics to check the impact of changes to marriage law. \u00a0Some of them are definitely quantifiable (suicide rate, reported domestic abuse) but don\u2019t do a good job capturing the impact of a given marriage schema on the whole population. \u00a0Those kinds of outcomes are only tracking couples who hit a certain threshhold of dysfunction. \u00a0It\u2019s like measuring the effectiveness of a vaccine by just tracking the incidence of Guillain\u2013Barr\u00e9 syndrome<\/a>. We care about the data, and we might tweak our intervention as a result, but it doesn\u2019t give us the whole picture. \u00a0The purpose of marriage isn\u2019t simply \u2018lower the suicide rate\u2019 after all.<\/p>\n

There are ways to gather data for less extreme successes or failures. \u00a0One way to check data about subjective feelings is to give subject a beeper and have them answer some questions each time the beeper goes off (\u201cHow happy do you feel right now? How tired? \u00a0How calm\u201d etc). \u00a0The trouble is that some of the studies of this type have turned up some counter-intuitive results (childless couples are happier than parents, etc), and we have to decide what we trust more: our expectations of the right answer or this methodology\u2019s ability to reflect reality.<\/p>\n

You can pull out a Kahneman-type solution and draw a distinction between your experiencing self and your remembering self<\/a>, and choose which one to\u00a0privilege. \u00a0But another solution is just not to care much about\u00a0happiness<\/em> as an outcome variable. \u00a0If contentedness was our highest goal, we\u2019d never find ourselves saying \u201cI do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.<\/a>\u201d We\u2019d just try to want what our actions told us we wanted instead.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the difference between happiness and rightly-ordered happiness, but we can\u2019t tell the difference between these two by asking ourselves how happy a choice makes us. \u00a0And that\u2019s when we turn to teleology and ontology. \u00a0If we\u00a0<\/em>can\u2019t tell higher pleasures from lower ones subjectively (or, at least, there\u2019s an\u00a0inconvenient\u00a0time lag for epiphanies<\/a>), then we try to reverse engineer ourselves. \u00a0Figure out what we\u00a0are<\/em> and we might be able to suss out what we\u00a0need<\/em>.<\/p>\n

But that means that a fair amount of the time our needs are going to not track our wants or our happiness. \u00a0Parents might well be unhappier than non-parent couples, but happiness isn\u2019t the result we\u2019re most interested in. \u00a0And when enough of the world and culture have been optimized for happiness or contentedness, going along the other route will be more jarring.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Further reading: Rod Dreher riffs<\/a> on a Greg Wolfe essay<\/a> (of\u00a0 Beauty Will Save the World<\/em><\/a> fame) on the Catholic \u201ctragic sense of life.\u201d<\/p>\n

More further reading: Timothy Burke has a good essay on the difficulty of balancing even obviously valuable utils<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"