What’s good for a squeaking hinge? For a sore throat? For human beings? For the hinge, we know a lubricant will eliminate the vibration caused by metal rubbing against metal. The remedy for a sore throat depends on whether it’s the result of dryness, allergies, a strep infection or something else. When it comes to identifying what is good for people, though – e.g., what constitutes a good life – the conventional wisdom is that the answer is not to be found in the objective world. Ethics, morality and “right” choices are considered the natural domain of subjectivism and relativism.
But we would not hesitate to proclaim some practices like slavery to be inherently immoral and antithetic to our nature as human beings – a nature that is objective and universal. We wouldn’t hold ants or bees to the same standard; servitude to their queen is appropriate to the kind of beings they are. We have horse whisperers and dog whisperers, whose insight into the nature of each species allows them to develop prescriptions for them that result (as far as we can tell) in peaceful, balanced, fulfilled animals. Why couldn’t there be people whisperers?
Positive psychology is a relatively new branch of that field that aims to do exactly that: identify the factors that allow individuals and communities to thrive by empirically studying them. Are there individual and group differences in what makes us happy and allows our societies to be their most productive and harmonious? Most certainly. But they no more rule out the existence of contributing factors that inhere to our nature as humans than individual and social differences in physical attractiveness rule out pervasive influences like the waist to hip ratio that evolutionary psychologists have demonstrated exist across cultures.
Beliefs about what is good for us both individually and collectively are as vulnerable to correction as any other. The life decisions we make are affected by many things (including our dysfunctions), but standing out above the noise in most people’s histories is a pattern of abandoning practices that didn’t work for them and gradually discovering and adopting ones that maximize their happiness and fulfillment. On a larger scale, the collapse of communism and the historical drift toward free and democratic societies may represent correction toward the type of political system best suited to humans qua humans.
What is good for us depends on what we are. We’re just beginning to crack the code of our alpha nature and learn about the predispositions and limits imposed on us by our hardwiring in such areas as personality, mating and social interaction. Until we’ve better illuminated the black box of human nature, there will be plenty of latitude for the beta construction of ethical principles and beliefs about how best to realize human potential.
