Money Can Buy Happiness.

Thank you again for the debate, Rubikx, and for having the nerve to pick the position which is harder to defend. I look forward to a spirited engagement.I accept your definitions, except for happiness. Your definition is a tautology. I propose:Happiness: a mental or emotional state of well-being characterized by positive or pleasant emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy (1).For this debate it is important that we point out that happiness transcends pleasure, elation, etc in that it is a broader, longer-lasting, dispositional state of mind rather than a transient mood.I will begin with rebuttals, and then present my position.Rebuttals1. You have of course engaged in anecdotal speculation in the first paragraph. This is a good starting place for investigation, but does not constitute a sound argument.2. You have no means of determining their happiness, so you don't know that money makes them happy (or sad).3. You are confusing correlation with causation; how can you dismiss the possibility that there may be more rich people in your area, especially living in a developed country, and that the lifestyle and lack of disease and relative safety are what lead to happiness, but by pure numbers there must be a higher number of rich happy people than elsewhere in the world?4. I think you are wrong about "happiness being a temporary emotion"; having sex causes pleasure, not happiness. Wining a medal is rewarding and gives you what we call 'joy' or a sense of accomplishment, but in and of itself this is not what is widely regarded as happiness.ArgumentsYou are dismissing your definition of 'buy'Firstly, you are dismissing your own definition."Buy: exchange money for an object or service."By definition, you cannot 'buy' happiness because it is not an object or service.Now, this may seem like pointless semantic nitpicking, but it's actually a crucial logical implement that we have to employ to answer our question. Let me explain.When you have eaten enough food, you are full, or 'satiated'. (2)Now in a symbolic sense we can say that money buys satiety. But it doesn't exactly. Money buys food, which, when consumed, leads to satiety. A leads to B which leads to C. But that does NOT permit you to say that B = C, or that A = C. What happens, for instance, if you buy food but don't eat it? Then you aren't satiated. This is part of the trouble with the problem of curing world poverty; throwing money at it doesn't seem to make it go away. What is ALSO required is thinking power, planning, space, agricultural education and a host of other intermediary points. Now these things can be bought with money, but they can also be donated or volunteered. Before money, there was a barter system. The point is this: the money might buy you things which may give you pleasure, but it's the things or the people or the places you travel or your experiences or accumulated knowledge about the world that amalgamate into something we call happiness. And money cannot purchase this emotion because money has, by definition, no inherent value. It is completely valueless plastic, metal and paper, and its currency is only valuable to the extent that we ascribe it. For these and a number of other reasons that I will discuss later, Money cannot purchase happiness, because that's not how money works.Best of luck,Phem.(1) [http://en.wikipedia.org...](2) [http://www.nlm.nih.gov...]