The things people name as making them happy are not for sale

The argument

A second argument for this position looks at what people actually point to when they describe a good life. Proponents observe that the answers are remarkably consistent: close relationships, being useful to others, work that feels worth doing, health, and the regard of people whose opinion matters to them. None of these, they argue, is purchasable. A person can buy a wedding but not a marriage, a gym membership but not fitness, a seat at a table but not the esteem of the people around it. Money can make such things easier to come by, but it cannot supply the thing itself, because each depends on what someone does and on how others freely respond. Proponents press the point by looking at how the lives of the very wealthy are commonly described: people with every material option available who nonetheless report loneliness, suspicion of other people's motives, estranged families and a difficulty in telling friendship from interest. On this view the pattern is not an accident of character but a consequence of what money does to relationships, since it gives people a reason to want something from you that has nothing to do with you. The argument also notes the cost at which money is usually acquired. The hours, attention and mobility required to earn a great deal are taken from precisely the areas that supply happiness: time with the people one loves, roots in a place, and the chance to do something for its own sake. Proponents conclude that money is at best indirect and often self-defeating, because the pursuit consumes the very goods it is meant to secure. On this account money cannot buy happiness, because happiness is made of things that are given rather than bought.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that this confuses buying a thing directly with making it possible. Money does not purchase friendship, but it buys the time, travel, housing and freedom from exhausting work that friendships need, and poverty is notoriously corrosive of exactly the relationships the argument prizes. They also challenge the picture of miserable wealth, arguing that unhappy rich people are conspicuous while contented ones are unremarkable, so the examples are selected rather than representative. Others object to the third premise: it describes one particular route to money, namely long hours in a demanding career, and says nothing about inherited, modest or easily earned wealth, which supply the same options without the same cost.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Critics accept the list but argue that money is a condition of most items on it, since poverty erodes health, work and relationships alike. [Rejecting P2] They object that enabling something is the ordinary sense in which money buys anything, so the distinction drawn here is too strict to be useful. [Rejecting P3] They note that the cost described belongs to one route to wealth rather than to wealth itself. [Rejecting C] They conclude that money cannot deliver happiness unaided, which is not the same as being unable to buy it.