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.

 

“For many years, I’d felt frustrated that the case for using biotechnology to abolish suffering altogether had gone unheard, even though the project was technically feasible,” he tells me over coffee. “So I was excited at the prospect of reaching a global audience without the need to please a conventional print-publisher. My ambition at the time was to gain the abolitionist project at least a recognised place on the lunatic fringe. Most people who stumble across the idea still do think it’s pretty crazy, of course, but a small minority of people are enthusiastic.”

David is well aware of the difference between mild sadness and depression, or everyday anxiety and anxiety disorders, but he thinks current standards of mental health are too low.

“I think we should treat the suffering in the world as a global emergency,” he says. “One deserving of an urgent and organised response akin to the bid to put a man on the moon or the human genome project.”

Unpleasant emotions evolved for a reason. People who aren’t scared of predators or frustrated by lack of sex, are not as likely to pass their genes on. What’s more, suffering can be useful to us, in the here and now, not just to our genes. Pain makes us quickly withdraw from situations that would otherwise cause us damage, and dissatisfaction can motivate us to improve ourselves and our circumstances. Having experienced unpleasant emotions, we are better able to sympathise when others are in distress and might even become more altruistic, or be inspired to create richer art.

David agrees that, at present, a degree of suffering is beneficial to our lives, but he doesn’t think this will always be the case. The stick works, but so does the carrot and, according to David, one day we could be motivated by gradients of pleasant emotions alone.

But why the emphasis on all suffering? There are forms of emotional and physical pain which people (and other animals, presumably) don’t mind feeling from time to time – it’s even common to seek them. What would be the point of eliminating the fear caused by reading a ghost story, the cathartic sadness of a weepy film or the pain of a playful bite?

“Sad music doesn’t cause suffering,” says David. “If you find hearing Wagner causes you real pain, then in future you simply won’t listen to his music! Instead, when listening to sad music, we typically experience a cocktail of emotions. This cocktail can potentially be improved, for music that induces an agreeable, wistful melancholy is, I’d argue, inferior to music that induces sublime well-being.”

There are times, however, when suffering is not part of an overall positive experience and yet is, in a sense, appropriate, as can be the case with negative emotions like grief and guilt.

“That’s one reason for predicting our descendants will be animated by gradients of well-being,” says David. “In certain circumstances, it might be appropriate to experience a diminution in well-being, but tomorrow’s functional analogues of suffering needn’t have the texture of suffering as we understand it today.”

David believes that, within the next few decades, we are going to witness a reproductive revolution. Prospective parents will be able to choose the genetic make-up of their children, and, in time, code sequences predisposing to depression, anxiety disorders or malaise could be weeded out.

According to David, it's also possible that we will, one day, put a stop to the suffering non-human animals endure in factory farms and slaughterhouses.

“Implausible as it sounds, we may well see global veganism in the next 50 years,” he says. “We will soon be able to mass produce single-celled genetically-engineered vat food that will be cheaper and tastier than flesh from intact animals. The traditional meat ‘industry’ may collapse; or more plausibly, be forced to convert. Market economics, not morality, may be the prime motor of change here.”

David thinks that even wild animal suffering isn’t endemic and inevitable.

“Redesigning the global ecosystem is technically feasible,” he says. “The big question is: will we ever opt to do it? Doubtless some people would prefer our future wildlife parks to remain true to our savage evolutionary origins, but naïve as it may sound, I believe in moral progress. I don’t think we will choose to sustain or recreate the horrors of the past indefinitely.”

David’s ideas are controversial.  The future David describes can seem uncomfortably close to that imagined by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, where gloomy sentiments are cured by a drug called soma, but the characters' lives come across as flat rather than desirable. Polling data collected by GfK NOP shows 72% would not take a legally available drug that made them happier, even if there were no side-effects. It seems we are very suspicious when it comes to meddling with emotions.

According to David things may well change and one day The Hedonistic Imperative could be seen as intellectually trite, just as a tome on the merits of anaesthesia would be at present. He agrees that in Brave New World there is no depth of feeling, no ferment of ideas, and no artistic creativity, but he thinks the problem lies with the drug, soma, not the idea of altering one’s emotions.
 
Nick Bostrom, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute, part of Oxford University’s Faculty of Philosophy, is sympathetic to David’s ideas, but advises caution.

“The project will require sophisticated methods and technologies, much more advanced than what is available today,” he says. “When we trim our feelings we need to take heed lest we accidentally reduce the fertility of our plots and end up in a sterile Brave New World. This is not a necessary consequence. Yet fools will build fool’s paradises. I would recommend we go easy on our paradise-engineering until we have the wisdom to do it right. It is worth getting it right!”