Can Science Answer Questions of Happiness?

Some strengths and weaknesses of a scientific approach to happiness.

In our last article, we tried to set out our first question: What is happiness? However, there was one more thing we had to ask before considering this: How can we answer this sort of question? What method can we use to find what we’re looking for?

A question like, “What is the best way to learn about this thing?” is a question for the field of epistemology. Epistemology is the study of knowledge, asking questions like how it is that we know things and what it is that we can know. Our question seems to fit well into this field.

Today, when we ask an epistemological question like, “How should we study this particular thing?” the default answer is most often the scientific method. Advances in science in the last few centuries have given us a great deal of confidence in science. Many believe it’s the only reasonable way to answer any questions.

The Mistakes of “Scientism”

Now, it should also be clear that science is not the only way to answer questions. Some might support a worldview where science is the only way to gain “true” knowledge about the world. Under this sort of view, knowledge gained from something other than the scientific method is uncertain at best. Things like personal experience or philosophical reasoning are devalued as less meaningful.

In recent years, this sort of view has sometimes been termed “scientism.” Broadly, it means to support the scientific method to the total exclusion of other epistemological approaches. Often, it’s also marked by a strong and somewhat uncritical faith in science, seeing it as capable of tackling any problem available.

Regardless of what role science plays in understanding happiness, we have to avoid this sort of dogmatic approach to these questions. We can’t just take for granted that our preferred method is the only one, and we can’t just use it uncritically.

What are Science’s Blindspots?

It’s clear that there are some questions that science seems poorly suited for. Questions like “Why is this painting beautiful?” or “How much money should you give to charity if you have more than you need?” don’t seem to have an obvious scientific answer. We can try to quantify these concepts in some way, but the sort of answer we could get from that numerical analysis seems incomplete at best.

Often, it seems that science struggles to answer to a certain sort of why question. Science is excellent at describing the world and making predictions, but it’s not meant to offer explanations for why the world is the way that it is. It can say that gravity tends to have a certain effect or that animals have a certain behavior, but it’s impossible for science to explain if there is any purpose for the universe being the way it is. Science can only describe things as they are.

This may seem like a weakness of science, but it is simply part of science’s specialization. It’s a system made specifically for answering a certain kind of question and answering those questions very well. However, problems might arise if science is taken as a tool that can explain everything.

With this in mind, we’ll have to be critical of whether science is the right tool to understand happiness. It may be a good way to solve certain problems, but can it answer this particular question?

How Does the Scientific Method Think about Happiness?

Many people have tried to apply this scientific understanding to questions of happiness, whether it be through psychological studies or attempts to understand the chemistry of the brain. These sorts of studies use a typical scientific approach, using some kind of experimental observations to try to understand human happiness.

It’s clear that there is a way to take a scientific approach to happiness. It’s not something that’s impossible to address using a scientific method. We can look at happiness and describe it scientifically. Happiness corresponds with certain sorts of brain activity or certain sorts of chemicals in the brain. These are all true physical facts.

But again, it seems dangerous to use science as the only way to view these problems. We might be tempted to say that someone is happy because they have a certain chemical reaction in their brain or a certain psychological state. But a bit of reflection should reveal that this is absurd. That sort of chemical reaction or psychological state is not the cause of happiness—instead, it simply corresponds to happiness. The actual cause of happiness is something that leads to this state.

When someone meets an old friend for the first time in years, it’s easy to observe that they’re happy. If we scanned their brain activity, we might see certain neurons firing or certain chemical levels raising. However, nobody would reasonably say that those chemicals or neurons caused them to be happy. It’s obvious that the old friend did.

In this case, science’s ability to describe happiness doesn’t explain why that person was happy. It can simply say that they were and explain something about how the body processes happiness. This is simply not enough.

Psychology takes a different approach to this problem. It is still a scientific approach, but instead of trying to describe the physical facts about the human brain, it tries to create laws to explain human behavior. But again, this doesn’t seem to work. Psychology has generally failed to create universal laws for human behavior. In psychology, there’s nothing like the law of gravity that has to be obeyed in all cases.

If this is the case, maybe this approach to happiness through scientific laws and observations is simply not enough. It doesn’t seem to offer us the why we need to understand why humans do what they do.

What Sort of Thing Does Science Study?

There’s one more serious consequence of the scientific approach to happiness that we need to talk about. It’s a problem that goes back to the very idea of using science to understand happiness. We have to go back and ask ourselves a simple question: What does science study?

At its most basic level, science studies the behavior of physical things. It asks questions about how we can understand the natural world and physical things, with a particular interest in trying to understand the natural laws that determine how physical things act.

Importantly, everything that science studies has to be a physical object or phenomenon. Science cannot approach anything that isn’t physical and explained by deterministic natural laws. If we look back to the examples earlier of ethics and art, for science to try to explain either of those things would mean to say that they are just causal reactions the same as something like gravity or a chemical reaction.

If this is the case, then taking a purely scientific approach to happiness means taking happiness to be a purely physical object. It’s something that’s deterministic, explainable by natural laws, and can be reduced to simply a certain interaction of atoms or physical objects.

What Does This Mean for Our Question?

There are some concerning implications here. If this is the case, it seems that this scientific approach to happiness could imply a lack of human freedom, a lack of any sort of soul or immaterial consciousness, and a conception of humans as just a complex series of atoms.

For some, that might be fine. There are many people who recognize that the scientific approach leads to this and fully accept it. But for others, the idea of abandoning these concepts might seem unacceptable.

This might be why it is that so many people today find it so hard to believe in these ideas of human freedom and the human soul. When it’s taken as the default that our approach to the world has to be scientific, we only see those things that science can explain. If science can’t explain it, then some might think that it’s an illusion or a mistake.

But if there’s any reason to believe that science is not the only way to understand the world, we can abandon this reductive viewpoint. We don’t need to see the world through an exclusively scientific lens. There are other approaches that offer real knowledge and real ways to deal with things outside the scope of science.

If we want to avoid this and remain committed to these other ideas, we need to find a method of inquiry that can deal with things other than deterministic physical laws. What sort of method could work for this?

A Suggested Alternative Approach

We’d like to propose taking a primarily philosophical approach. Philosophy is capable of dealing with the concepts that science doesn’t seem to have a hold on. It’s capable of reaching into the why of the world, rather than just a description of what we see. It’s capable of understanding the human person beyond simply the atoms.

Next, we’ll have to consider what the philosophical method entails. What does it mean to approach these problems philosophically? What tools does philosophy offer us? And, ultimately, how can we use them to understand what human happiness is?

-Patrick Koroly