Happiness in a Brave New World

Happiness in a Brave New World

It requires an effort of the imagination to conceive how a Universe in which all humans and non-humans alike led richly fulfilled and joyful lives could be a morally worse place than where we are now. If we were to discover an alien civilisation of ecstatics, would we try to introduce a bit of suffering into their lives to stiffen their moral fibre? I fear the critic, however, is likely to find this remark of only autobiographical significance. The question, (s)he would presumably reply, is where do we go from here, not how would we go from there. And at this point there might seem a danger that this paper will run into an all-consuming quagmire of subjectivism. For whatever other functions they may perform, the hard-headed scientific rationalist will argue, value-judgements don't have propositional content and thus aren't truth-evaluable. The universe may contain some extraordinary things, but objective values aren't among them. After all, what in the world could make such judgements true?

In the remainder of this section, the course of the argument runs as follows. I shall first define and set out an ethical negative utilitarian case for abolishing all forms of aversive experience. It will be argued that only the apparently extreme overkill of the biological hedonist program can realistically achieve this. Hence the practical consequences here of the negative-utilitarian ethic will not significantly differ from standard utilitarianism in which maximising pleasure is accorded equal moral worth with minimising pain: both variants of the doctrine mandate implementing something akin to the program advocated just as soon as it becomes biotechnically feasible. The intimate links between both moral and non-moral value and happiness (construed here in the sense of generically pleasant experience), and between "disvalue"