The Value of Happiness

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLVIII, Issue 21841, 19 December 1940, Page 4

The Value of Happiness

A London message reports that seven Law Lords applied themselves to questions which have engaged the attention of philosophers for centuries when a ease concerning the amount of damages which should be awarded for loss of the expectation of life came before the House of Lords. Mr Justice Asquith had awarded £1,200 damages in the case of a boy aged two and a half years who had been killed in a motor accident. The Law Lords, however, took a less optimistic view of the value of life to the child and reduced this verdict to one of £2OO. But in doing so they made interesting general observations on life and the relationship between money and happiness. These are old subjects; writers have dealt with them, brightly or dejectedly, according to the temperament. They have also engaged the attention of every human being mentally capable of reflection. The poor man believes that the perfect state of living would be close at hand if he had a good share of the golden store of the wealthy. The dyspeptic millionaire on the other hand will think that all would be well if he could go ragged into the sunlight with a sound digestion and a crust of bread in his shabby pocket. That happiness seems to be so often round the corner, but never abidingly hand in hand with the individual, has often provoked the reflection that sustained happiness is not in the lot of man, and that it would not be particularly welcome if it were. Life, it seems, is best balanced by contrasts.

Any way, the view of the Law Lords is that the prospect of length of days is not to be valued greatly, since what matters most is the prospect of a predominantly happy life. Therefore had the child ’in the case before them come of a long line of centenarians his prospect of life should not be valued more than that of a child whose forbears had a tendency towards early deaths. What matters, declares the Law Lords, is the prospect of happiness, but at this point they cautiously aver that even happiness is not assessable in terms of money. That is elementary, for some persons must by nature be much more capable of happiness than others. They took a safe course in finding that moderate damages only should be awarded in these cases and that small damages should be given in cases where children are concerned, for in this uncertain world it is impossible even for a bench of Solomons to decide whether any child is going to have a merry fling in this uncertain world where men are so morbidly employed in making new rods for their own backs.

“Samuel Taylor Coleridge was profoundly right when he defined man’s true freedom as ‘the power of the human being to maintain the obedience, which God through the conscience has commanded, against all the might of nature’,” said the Archbishop of York, Dr. Temple, in a recent address. “So our service of freedom in these days requires of us two things; first, that we should save it from the threat which hangs over it, by driving back and destroying the Nazi tyranny; but also that we should see to it that our freedom is rooted in that faith in God which alone can nurture it as a vigorous and healthy plant. We must return to God, and learn again, by experiment and experience, how true it is that His service is perfect freedom, and that the only true freedom is His service.”