Happiness – Concept, Measurement and Promotion, Yew-Kwang Ng, Springer, 2022, v + 183 pages.

Abstract

One of my first encounters with a work of philosophy was John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism. I found it greatly inspiring. Mill’s utilitarianism involves an attention to those suffering, but has a positive outlook at the same time. When I developed in my studies, I was quite surprised to find that, while this may be changing these days, in both economics and philosophy, utilitarianism has few adherents. Interestingly, this is mostly for different reasons. Following Robbins (1932), economists abandoned the idea that we should think of the human good in terms of psychological properties, such as pleasure or happiness. Measuring these properties appeared impossible, or at least, not sufficiently scientific. Philosophers, on the other hand, were concerned about the reduction of all value to happiness, and to pleasure in particular. Robert Nozick’s (1974) wellknown thought experiment of the experience machine – a machine in which someone could have the experience of doing wonderful things without actually doing them – convinced many that pleasure (and happiness) is not all that there is to living a good life. Moreover, should we really aim to maximize welfare? A racist society built on the labours of a small racial minority could be maximizing its overall happiness, but is surely morally abhorrent. Or so the argument typically goes. Defenders of utilitarianism have become rare, in both fields, though there are of course influential utilitarian philosophers, such as Peter Singer, and various common practices in applied cost–benefit analysis keep an apparent utilitarian flare. Now utilitarianism is back. In particular the effective altruism movement has attracted much enthusiasm, evidenced by the Time Magazine cover of August 2022 for instance, dedicated to the effective altruists. The relationship between effective altruism and utilitarianism, and utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer in particular, is strong. In addition to this, we also find a new enthusiasm for research on happiness in economics and psychology, a research programme that often takes on a utilitarian flavour (Kahneman et al. 1997; Veenhoven 2004). Kew-Kwang Ng, however, was a utilitarian before it was cool. He is among the small group of thinkers who have been resisting the forceful pushes against utilitarianism for decades. Ng has, throughout his career, played a remarkable role in a variety of discussions about many different facets of utilitarianism. Writing in both economics and philosophy journals, he has contributed to utilitarian thought, and defended it unapologetically. Happiness – Concept, Measurement, and Promotion is a concise, but systematic defence of utilitarianism, and an insightful discussion of its implications. It contains 16 chapters that can,