the way I am defining happiness is positive vs negative emotions. What I mean by this is the sum of any drives built into a human by evolution. Mostly when we do things it is either because we think it will give us some positive reward at some point in the future, we think it will avoid some negative reward in the future, or past positive and negative rewards have shaped us doing the thing automatically
So why should this setup motivate you to go along with it, to seek positive reward or avoid negative reward? The fact that evolution did something, or that your brain works a certain way, or that you’ve been behaving in a certain way so far, is no reason at all to keep doing it. A person can change the pattern of their behavior, and even though the past or evolutionary design hold some power, similarly the person’s decisions have power to influence what they do going forward, and in some sense they have more legitimacy to do so.
Perhaps there is a reason to keep doing some of what the past habits or evolution or anticipated emotions are prodding you to do, but being the kind of thing that does it is not by itself that reason, not overwhelmingly so on the practical level, and not at all on the normative level. Provided of course you are not making greater mistakes about normativity with your own decisions than evolution or its psychological adaptations do, which is an important trap and caveat to this discussion.
So why should this setup motivate you to go along with it, to seek positive reward or avoid negative reward? The fact that evolution did something, or that your brain works a certain way, or that you’ve been behaving in a certain way so far, is no reason at all to keep doing it. A person can change the pattern of their behavior, and even though the past or evolutionary design hold some power, similarly the person’s decisions have power to influence what they do going forward, and in some sense they have more legitimacy to do so.
Perhaps there is a reason to keep doing some of what the past habits or evolution or anticipated emotions are prodding you to do, but being the kind of thing that does it is not by itself that reason, not overwhelmingly so on the practical level, and not at all on the normative level. Provided of course you are not making greater mistakes about normativity with your own decisions than evolution or its psychological adaptations do, which is an important trap and caveat to this discussion.