剑桥雅思13阅读Test4Passage3原文翻译

文章指出，对于某些人来说，幸福似乎是一种不言自明的善，他们认为政府的目标应该是促进集体幸福感。然而，这种思维方式较为简化，忽略了对幸福的深入探讨和评估。文章还提到了哲学家边沁对幸福的理解以及他对政府管理和幸福科学的贡献。然而，文章指出，将幸福作为唯一目标可能限制了道德探讨的方向。随后，文章提到了威廉·戴维斯的著作《幸福产业》，展示了幸福科学如何成为资本主义的一部分并对经济问题进行重新定义。此外，文章还提到了幸福的客观量化和对内心体验的影响，以及行为改变作为政府目标的根源。最后，文章强调政府追求幸福的想法可能对人类自由构成威胁。

第1段

‘Happiness is the ultimate goal because it is self-evidently good. If we are asked why happiness matters we can give no further external reason. It just obviously does matter.’ This pronouncement by Richard Layard, an economist and advocate of ‘positive psychology’, summarises the beliefs of many people today. For Layard and others like him, it is obvious that the purpose of government is to promote a state of collective well-being. The only question is how to achieve it, and here positive psychology – a supposed science that not only identifies what makes people happy but also allows their happiness to be measured – can show the way. Equipped with this science, they say, governments can secure happiness in society in a way they never could in the past.

“幸福是最终目标，因为它显然是好的。如果有人问我们为什么幸福很重要，我们无法给出进一步的外部理由。它显然很重要。”经济学家、《积极心理学》倡导者理查德·莱亚德的这一宣言概括了今天许多人的信仰。对于莱亚德和其他类似他的人来说，政府的目的显然是促进集体幸福感。唯一的问题是如何实现这一目标，而积极心理学——一种被认为不仅能够识别使人们快乐的因素，还能够衡量他们的幸福感——可以指明方向。他们说，有了这一科学，政府可以以一种他们以往从未能够做到的方式保障社会的幸福。

第2段

It is an astonishingly crude and simple-minded way of thinking, and for that very reason increasingly popular. Those who think in this way are oblivious to the vast philosophical literature in which the meaning and value of happiness have been explored and questioned, and write as if nothing of any importance had been thought on the subject until it came to their attention. It was the philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) who was more than anyone else responsible for the development of this way of thinking. For Bentham it was obvious that the human good consists of pleasure and the absence of pain. The Greek philosopher Aristotle may have identified happiness with self-realisation in the 4th century BC, and thinkers throughout the ages may have struggled to reconcile the pursuit of happiness with other human values, but for Bentham all this was mere metaphysics or fiction. Without knowing anything much of him or the school of moral theory he established – since they are by education and intellectual conviction illiterate in the history of ideas – our advocates of positive psychology follow in his tracks in rejecting as outmoded and irrelevant pretty much the entirety of ethical reflection on human happiness to date.

 但正如威廉·戴维斯在他最近的著作《幸福产业》中所指出的，认为幸福是唯一不言自明的善是一种限制道德探讨的方式。这本丰富、清晰和引人入胜的书的优点之一是它将当前的幸福崇拜放在一个明确定义的历史框架中。戴维斯在他的著作中以边沁开始他的故事，指出他不仅仅是一位哲学家。戴维斯写道：“边沁的活动是我们现在可能会与公共部门管理顾问联系起来的。”在1790年代，他致函内政部建议将政府部门通过一套“会话管道”连接起来，并向英格兰银行提出了一种可以生产不可伪造的纸币的印刷装置设计。他制定了一个保存肉类、鱼类、水果和蔬菜等食品的“冷库”计划。他著名的“全视监狱”设计几乎被采纳，囚犯在监狱中被单独监禁，同时又随时可见到警卫。 （令人惊讶的是，戴维斯没有讨论边沁的“全视监狱”不仅是一个模范监狱，也是一种可以应用于学校和工厂的控制工具。）

 

第3段

But as William Davies notes in his recent book The Happiness Industry, the view that happiness is the only self-evident good is actually a way of limiting moral inquiry. One of the virtues of this rich, lucid and arresting book is that it places the current cult of happiness in a well-defined historical framework. Rightly, Davies begins his story with Bentham, noting that he was far more than a philosopher. Davies writes, ‘Bentham’s activities were those which we might now associate with a public sector management consultant’. In the 1790s, he wrote to the Home Office suggesting that the departments of government be linked together through a set of ‘conversation tubes’, and to the Bank of England with a design for a printing device that could produce unforgeable banknotes. He drew up plans for a ‘frigidarium’ to keep provisions such as meat, fish, fruit and vegetables fresh. His celebrated design for a prison to be known as a ‘Panopticon’, in which prisoners would be kept in solitary confinement while being visible at all times to the guards, was very nearly adopted. (Surprisingly, Davies does not discuss the fact that Bentham meant his Panopticon not just as a model prison but also as an instrument of control that could be applied to schools and factories.)

但正如威廉·戴维斯在他最近的著作《幸福产业》中所指出的，认为幸福是唯一不言自明的善是一种限制道德探讨的方式。这本丰富、清晰和引人入胜的书的优点之一是它将当前的幸福崇拜放在一个明确定义的历史框架中。戴维斯在他的著作中以边沁开始他的故事，指出他不仅仅是一位哲学家。戴维斯写道：“边沁的活动是我们现在可能会与公共部门管理顾问联系起来的。”在1790年代，他致函内政部建议将政府部门通过一套“会话管道”连接起来，并向英格兰银行提出了一种可以生产不可伪造的纸币的印刷装置设计。他制定了一个保存肉类、鱼类、水果和蔬菜等食品的“冷库”计划。他著名的“全视监狱”设计几乎被采纳，囚犯在监狱中被单独监禁，同时又随时可见到警卫。 （令人惊讶的是，戴维斯没有讨论边沁的“全视监狱”不仅是一个模范监狱，也是一种可以应用于学校和工厂的控制工具。）

第4段

Bentham was also a pioneer of the ‘science of happiness’. If happiness is to be regarded as a science, it has to be measured, and Bentham suggested two ways in which this might be done. Viewing happiness as a complex of pleasurable sensations, he suggested that it might be quantified by measuring the human pulse rate. Alternatively, money could be used as the standard for quantification: if two different goods have the same price, it can be claimed that they produce the same quantity of pleasure in the consumer. Bentham was more attracted by the latter measure. By associating money so closely to inner experience, Davies writes, Bentham ‘set the stage for the entangling of psychological research and capitalism that would shape the business practices of the twentieth century’.

边沁也是“幸福科学”的先驱。如果幸福被视为一门科学，就必须对其进行测量，边沁提出了两种可能的方法。他认为幸福是愉悦感觉的复合体，建议可以通过测量人类脉搏来量化幸福。或者也可以使用金钱作为量化标准：如果两种不同的商品价格相同，就可以声称它们在消费者身上产生了相同的快乐数量。边沁更倾向于后者的衡量方式。戴维斯写道，通过将金钱与内心体验如此紧密地联系在一起，边沁“为塑造二十世纪商业实践的心理研究和资本主义的纠缠铺平了道路”。

第5段

The Happiness Industry describes how the project of a science of happiness has become integral to capitalism. We learn much that is interesting about how economic problems are being redefined and treated as psychological maladies. In addition, Davies shows how the belief that inner states of pleasure and displeasure can be objectively measured has informed management studies and advertising. The tendency of thinkers such as J B Watson, the founder of behaviourism, was that human beings could be shaped, or manipulated, by policymakers and managers. Watson had no factual basis for his view of human action. When he became president of the American Psychological Association in 1915, he ‘had never even studied a single human being’: his research had been confined to experiments on white rats. Yet Watson’s reductive model is now widely applied, with ‘behaviour change’ becoming the goal of governments: in Britain, a ‘Behaviour Insights Team’ has been established by the government to study how people can be encouraged, at minimum cost to the public purse, to live in what are considered to be socially desirable ways.

《幸福产业》描述了幸福科学项目如何成为资本主义的一部分。我们了解到经济问题是如何被重新定义和治疗为心理疾病的。此外，戴维斯还展示了内心的愉悦和不悦的状态可以如何客观地被量化的信念如何影响了管理研究和广告。像行为主义创始人J·B·沃森这样的思想家的倾向是，人类可以被政策制定者和管理者塑造或操纵。沃森对他的人类行为观点没有任何实际依据。当他在1915年成为美国心理学会的主席时，他“甚至从未研究过一个人类”：他的研究局限于对白鼠的实验。然而，沃森的简化模型现在被广泛应用，以“行为改变”成为政府的目标：在英国，政府已经成立了一个“行为洞察团队”，研究如何鼓励人们以对公众资金的最小成本来生活在被认为是社会上希望的方式。

第6段

Modem industrial societies appear to need the possibility of ever-increasing happiness to motivate them in their labours. But whatever its intellectual pedigree, the idea that governments should be responsible for promoting happiness is always a threat to human freedom.

现代工业社会似乎需要不断增加的幸福可能来激励他们的劳动。但无论其知识来源如何，政府应当负责促进幸福这一想法总是对人类自由的威胁。