Money removes the conditions that reliably make people miserable

The argument

Proponents of this position argue that the question is best approached from the bottom rather than the top. Much of human unhappiness, on this view, has straightforward material causes: not knowing whether the rent will be met, being unable to afford treatment for a painful condition, working hours that leave no time to see anyone, living somewhere unsafe, and the grinding attention that managing all of this demands. Money removes each of those directly. Whatever is true of a yacht, they argue, it is plainly true that having enough to stop worrying about money makes people less miserable. The argument gains its force from an asymmetry. Proponents concede that beyond a comfortable position further money adds less and less, but they treat this as a point about diminishing returns rather than about money being irrelevant. The comparison that matters for most people is not between comfort and great wealth but between insecurity and comfort, and across that range money does something nothing else can. They describe the familiar claim that money does not buy happiness as a sentiment available mainly to people who have never had to choose between heating and food. Proponents also point to what money buys that is not a possession at all. It buys the ability to leave a bad job, a bad landlord or a bad marriage; the capacity to absorb a setback without catastrophe; help with the tasks that consume a life; and the option to be present for the people one cares about. Each of these is a condition of the things everyone agrees happiness consists in. On this account money can buy happiness, because it buys the removal of the obstacles that otherwise prevent it.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics accept most of this and argue that it establishes something narrower than the position claims. Removing misery, they say, is not the same as producing happiness; a person relieved of money worries is not thereby content, as the many comfortable but unhappy people demonstrate. They also argue that the concession about diminishing returns gives the game away, since if money stops helping beyond a modest level then money is not what happiness is made of, only what clears the ground for it. Others add that the obstacles listed are features of how a society distributes security rather than of money as such, and could be removed by other means without any individual becoming richer.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Critics object that these are causes of misery rather than of unhappiness in general, and that unhappiness persists in their absence. [Rejecting P2] They argue that conceding diminishing returns concedes that money is not what happiness consists in. [Rejecting P3] They note that the capacities listed clear the ground for happiness without supplying it. [Rejecting C] They conclude that money can remove obstacles to happiness, which is a weaker claim than buying it.