Happy Mind: The Philosophy and Science of Happiness

 

The word ‘hedonism’ conjures up a ‘sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle’, so you might expect David Pearce, the Brighton-based author of The Hedonistic Imperative, to be a womanising party animal. Instead, David leads a quiet life, running a small web hosting business and, in his spare time, expanding his website, listening to music and meeting friends at his home from home, Starbucks in Borders, where he drinks copious amounts of black coffee and keeps up with the news.

HedWeb, which includes David’s numerous writings and musings, started in 1996 and now gets around 200,000 unique visitors a month. The core idea of David’s online manifesto is that we should use biotechnology to abolish all forms of suffering throughout the living world. More speculatively, David predicts that our descendants will be motivated by gradients of bliss which may be orders of magnitude richer than anything we can experience today.

 

 

 

 

If this remark sounds bizarre to modern ears, it is because our concept of happiness is very different from that of the ancient Greeks.
 

Before anaesthesia, surgery used to be agony. It's hard to imagine that anyone could have been anything but pleased when painless surgery was introduced in the mid-19th century. And yet, although many welcomed anaesthesia, some did object. In Zurich, anaesthesia was even outlawed. “Pain is a natural and intended curse of the primal sin. Any attempt to do away with it must be wrong,” claimed the Zurich City Fathers. Painless delivery in childbirth was a particularly contentious issue. Some insisted that “in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children” (Genesis 3:16). Others, like Doctor Charles Delucena Meigs (1792-1869), Professor of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women at Jefferson Medical College, believed that labour pains were “a most desirable, salutary and conservative manifestation of the life force”. There was even a belief, expressed in 1847 in The New York Journal of Medicine, that pain was vital to surgical procedure.

 

 

Many disagreements are factual in nature. Both sides of a debate usually share some common ethical principles and merely aim to determine how best to further those principles. For instance, socialists and free-market economists generally agree that poverty is bad; they just have different ideas of how best to combat poverty. But what happens when two sides disagree over the ethical principles themselves? What do we do when, e.g., Alice believes that suffering is bad, while Bob believes that suffering is good? I propose one solution below.