[HI was written in 1995. Only the later Replies to Objections, added sequentially in Chapter Four, are more recent. For a contemporary outline, see The Abolitionist Project (2007) and Utopian Neuroscience (2008). Chapter Two of HI can safely be skipped or aggressively
skimmed even by the analytic philosophers for whom it was
primarily intended. It contains a defence of HI on the basis
of, first, practical means-ends rationality and, secondly,
ethical negative utilitarianism. The instrumental case
from means-ends rationality derives from the broad
applicability of psychological hedonism. This isn't here
construed as a universal law. It's just a trite everyday rule
of thumb: we spend a lot of time trying to make ourselves
happy. Often we fail. HI achieves what we're striving for
with unique efficiency and success. The ethical
utilitarian case for HI, on the other hand, rests partly on a
conception of how morality can be naturalised consistently
with a recognisably scientific account of the nature of the
world. Value is here construed as a distinctive - and
biologically maximisable - mode of experience. Its subjective
texture is coded by a particular type of biomolecular
architecture. That architecture can be enriched and extended.
Positive value can be maximised. Negative value can eventually
be eliminated. Thus HI, it will be claimed, amounts to
rather more than one individual's quirky set of conjectures and
value-judgements. The biological program is also our natural
destiny. The coming of the pain-free post-Darwinian Era will
mark both a major transition in the evolution of life and the
moral foundation of any future civilisation.]
2. Why?
"What right have we to be
happy?"
(Ibsen)
So technically, in principle, it can
be done. Paradise can be biologically implemented. Ubiquitous
well-being is neurochemically feasible. Yet is it really
worth having? What's wrong with suffering, anyway? What's so
good about happiness? What is the link, if any, between moral
value and maximising personal well-being? Are the
transcendentally happy states advocated here really
any more valuable than the Darwinian status quo? Or are
value-judgements intrinsically subjective and
truth-valueless?
There
are both practical and ethical reasons for planning a global
project to abolish aversive experience. The practical reasons
will be tackled first. The ethical case will be argued next,
followed by a [skippable; life is short] defence of an
ontology of objective values designed to redeem the ethical
stance adopted here from the charge of idle subjectivism.
The
instrumental rationality of the biological program derives
from nothing more abstruse than some hard-headed means-ends
analysis. This analysis is best introduced via an examination
of a biologised variant of the theory of psychological
hedonism. We all dance away our lives to the tune of the
sovereign pleasure-pain axis. It will be argued that for all
the complications and anomalies the theory brings in its
wake, psychological hedonism contains a substantial core of
truth. The point to be kept in mind throughout the
qualifications and elaborations to follow is that even goals
found worth pursuing only intermittently or inconsistently
are still worth pursuing rationally. As it is at present, we
pursue the many faces of happiness avidly but with
frighteningly irrational, and not infrequently murderous,
levels of ineptitude. Fortunately, all the severely
sub-optimal little local minima of ill-being in which genetic
vehicles get stuck can be replaced by a global maximum of
happiness and well-being.
So
what is this alleged inbuilt drive which the biological
blueprint finally allows us to achieve?
Psychological
hedonism has been variously regarded as a simple truism, an
obvious falsehood, and as so completely vacuous as to be not
even wrong. Here it is assumed to be a hypothesis which,
properly formulated, is both substantially true and important
in its implications. If it were even broadly correct,
and if we were all constitutionally motivated by the pursuit,
albeit typically under other descriptions, of a generic type
of mesolimbic core state that our competing diversity of
intentional objects only disguises, then the practical answer
to the question "why?" would in essence be simple.
Whether or not we should genetically reprogram the hedonic
treadmill reduces to a straightforward issue of means-ends
rationality. What is the most effective, and more pertinently
the only, way to achieve what constitutionally we're already
seeking in a multitude of guises? How can these emotionally
ideal sorts of meso-limbic mind/brain states we're striving
for be achieved and, more importantly, sustained?
Of
course, even if some variant of psychological hedonism were
to be in substance correct, it is always open to the sceptic
next to ask "but then why be rational?" He might
then even (ir)rationally advance (ir)rational arguments to
support(?) his (in?)consistent position. Yet the
self-defeating nature of irrational behaviour, and the
variably camouflaged incoherence of irrational thought, means
this option will not be explored here in any depth.
More
subtly, it is always open to a critic of the biological
program to acknowledge that psychological hedonism may be
substantially true, but to hold that there are countervailing
moral considerations why it would be good if we failed to
achieve what we were [sometimes only unwittingly] after.
Hence, on this view, it would be morally preferable for us to
continue on a selective basis to act irrationally and
ineffectually. In other words, given that the thought that
one is a moral agent is psychochemically satisfying, and the
proposals canvassed here are found, paradoxically, to be
unpleasantly immoral, it would be morally better if the
rational biological program outlined in this paper were not
adopted.
All
the above, however, presupposes rather than argues the case
for the broad accuracy of psychological hedonist hypothesis.
The chain of argument to be presented here for its
substantial kernel of truth is, at least at face value,
extremely weak. This is because one link is going to rely on an
appeal to introspection. Since the very word sends a shudder
of distaste down many fastidious scientific spines, a few
very brief reflections on the nature and epistemological
status of the suspect faculty are first in order.
Does introspection reliably tell us
we're pleasure-seekers and pain-avoiders? If so, is there a
better way of achieving what our mind/brains are up to?
Exteroceptive,
so called "perceptual" data are crucial to the
empirical method(s) characteristic, and arguably definitive,
of the natural sciences. Introspective evidence is generally
disparaged by the scientific mandarinate as cognitively
worthless. The curiously named "third-person"
perspective rules. Yet a distinctive and potentially
fitness-enhancing faculty - so central to so many ordinary
people's mental life - has presumably been selected for,
and not just adventitiously selected, in the course of
evolution. Even an unreliable and highly fallible system of
neuropsychological self-monitoring could still have conferred
differential adaptive value. Any insight, however incomplete,
into the underlying causal reasons for one's behaviour can
also, by analogy, logical inference or simulation, help one
partially to understand and anticipate the behaviour of
conspecifics and genetic competitors.
Methodologically,
it is admittedly unclear how introspection can be
studied or even defined scientifically. Moreover, though it
is an intrinsic part of the natural world, an unfortunate
conflation of the two senses of the term
"subjective" often leads to its being ontologically
downgraded as well as methodologically discounted. Of course,
it can't be denied that in trying to offer introspective
reports subjects sometimes confabulate. They can demonstrably
deceive both themselves and others. The different functional
modules of the brain, however tightly integrated, do not
simply interpenetrate. Hence the merely locally distributed
neuronal ensembles of one particular module can't always know
about what's going on in the others, nor report on it if they
can. This means verbal sincerity is no guarantee of veracity.
Worse still, in initiating some of one's actions, one just
doesn't seem to have much in the way of (even illusory)
introspective self-insight at all. We've got access to much
of the product but very little of the process. Moreover a lot
of our nominal actions would appear to be mainly automatic.
Many more are not preceded by any notable introspective
musings or a hedonic weighing of options and possible
consequences. So how can we be said to be "really"
seeking happiness?
In spite of all the above, it is
still worth making a crashingly banal but cardinally
important observation. It relates to the implicit criteria
one uses in deciding consciously to act in a certain way
rather than another when more than one option is perceived to
be available. For at face value one performs, at the very
least, an extraordinarily large number of actions because
one's image or concept of what they will notionally bring
about makes one apparently more satisfied or less
dissatisfied, however marginally; and because one's notion of
what not doing so would entail is either less satisfying,
affectively neutral or more aversive than acting otherwise.
There are other, probably more felicitous, ways of
formulating the idea, but their gist is essentially the same.
Banal
or otherwise, a knowledge of the existence and nature of this
difference in affective tone when one contemplates, and then
carries through, alternative courses of action can be derived
only from introspection; but is nonetheless important. From a
third-person perspective, it is true, biological science can
elucidate a physical counterpart to this subjective
motivational impression. By experimentally enhancing or
attenuating meso-limbic dopamine function,
neuropharmacologists can use stimulants or neuroleptics to
show the system's pivotal role in determining how the higher
vertebrates behave. Neuroscience can even christen certain
brain areas "pleasure centres", wire them with
electrodes, and then demonstrate their irresistible potency.
Yet it is only through correlating, and then identifying,
particular types of physiological function and structure with
particular modes of subjective experience that biology can
attempt to explain how a person acts, rather than just
physically behaves, at all.
Endorsing
psychological hedonism as a theory of action - and compulsion
in need of biotechnically rationalising - is not the same as
saying that one always acts selfishly, or at least not selfishly
in the sense of serving only one's own notional interests at
the expense of other people's. Selfish genes can sometimes
flourish by throwing up unselfconsciously selfless
phenotypes. Imagining the happiness of friends and family,
for example, can serve as a powerful source of motivation.
So, too, can satisfying an idealised self-image of oneself as
a moral person. More radically, there is a sense in which
even sacrificing one's life for one's family or country isn't
anomalous in the context of the hypothesis either. In certain
circumstances, the image of living may afford less
satisfaction than the image of oneself notionally acting and
dying for the sake of others. Hence one opts for (one's
emotionally encephalised image of) oblivion.
What
the hypothesis of psychological hedonism doesn't even begin
to answer is why the meso (cortico-)limbic dopamine system has
the extraordinary and uniquely addictive phenomenology from
whose encephalised inspiration, in a sense, our civilisation
has been built. Why does it feel so irresistibly good? This
question is simply too deep to answer here.
Even if it were true for the most part
as so defined, might psychological hedonism be tenable only
because it is effectively vacuous - "not even
wrong"? For what test could possibly falsify the hypothesis?
With what states of affairs could it ever be inconsistent?
I
don't think the charge of vacuity can be sustained. There is
indeed a close conceptual connection between the theory and
our notion of action itself, yet this is a reflection of the
theory's empirical adequacy rather than vacuity. Two examples
and potential falsifiers may be noted here. First,
psychological hedonism helps explain why one can never tire
of having one's pleasure centres stimulated, naturally or
otherwise, and why the standards of even the most priggish
paragon of moral rectitude can deteriorate under the action
of drugs such as heroin. The junkie and the total abstainer,
whatever they may suppose, do not occupy two ontologically
separate realms of being or chemical motivation. We are all
dependent on opioids to feel physically and emotionally well.
Opioids bind to receptors in the ventral tegmental area of
the mesolimbic dopamine system, the mind/brain's final common
pathway for pleasure. Here are the cells that call the shots.
If they're not happy, the whole organism will be miserable as
well until they've got their psychochemical fix. For their
cellular processes infiltrate the rest of the mind/brain. The
junkie derives his opioid supply exogenously; while the
release of endogenous opioids in the rest of us is triggered,
and not always very reliably either, by stimuli such as food,
sex, exercise and social interaction. We're all still seeking
the same core states of psycho-chemical well-being under one
description or other.
Hence even "psychologically" addictive drugs can
lead to criminal and compulsive drug-seeking and -taking
behaviour if supplies run out, even in formerly high-minded
and saintly souls. This is because the over-intoxicated brain
re-regulates its cellular receptors and reduces its
production of the relevant pleasure-chemicals; this in turn
increases the user's reliance on the exogenous route of
administration. Strong-minded individuals who are sure they
can safely indulge "recreationally" may
misunderstand the psychochemical roots of their behaviour.
The results of such ill-judgement can of course be
disastrous. Fast-acting euphoriants such as crack cocaine can
potentially corrupt even the most vehemently moralistic
opponent of the hedonistic hypothesis. Getting hooked on
heroin or crack may provide, indeed, a most illuminating
empirical insight into the nature of human motivation; though
there is a strong case to be argued that this is carrying the
experimental method too far.
As
a second response to the charge of vacuity, it is worth
considering the following thought-experiment. It is (purely
epistemically) possible that, keeping the laws of physics
constant, the commonly supposed closed causal sufficiency of
physical events meant that we found our bodies just behaving,
but with none of the phenomenological concomitants of willed
action which do in fact accompany much bodily behaviour. If
such were the case, then many of the behavioural options one
found one's body pursuing might be in one's mind's eye be far
more unpleasant in their envisaged consequences than those of
their notional alternatives. One wouldn't in this scenario be
surprised at what was going on: bodily behaviour might as now
be viewed as ultimately a mere product of the playing out
of law-like physical interactions. It's just that in this
setting any incidental phenomenology would just be along for
the ride.
Given
that we do experience a distinctive phenomenology of willed
action, however, it doesn't seem consistent with our current
understanding of the concept or the experience that one could
consciously, phenomenologically act in one way in
preference to another simply because one's image of the
chosen action and its effects seemed less satisfying
than the alternative(s). Even more dubiously coherent would
be the notion of someone whose pleasure-pain spectrum was
inverted and who acted in the conscious expectation of
securing the outcome (s)he least desired. This is not to say
that the practical effects of some people's actions don't
frequently defeat their intentions. Certainly, too, a person
may act in a superficially less satisfying way if (s)he has a
more satisfying long-term goal in mind; this is the
deceptively puritanical-sounding principle of deferred
gratification. But this is a principle which tends only to
corroborate rather than undermine the hypothesis at issue.
The
point here is that psychological hedonism presupposes that we
act as distinct from merely behave. Its distinctive focus is
of course on how we do so from the pleasant, less unpleasant
etc occurrent image or concept of the act's anticipated
consequences. Yet from the outset there does seem to be an
intimate, if often only implicit, conceptual connection
between something remarkably like psychological hedonism and
our notion(s) of action itself, and in particular of our
acting on one perceived choice in preference to another.
Now
even if, implausibly, it were deemed to be analytically true
that all action was motivated by desire for anticipated
happiness etc, whether overtly or under another description,
this wouldn't prove that psychological hedonism was correct.
"Paradigm case"-style arguments in the manner of
bad old ordinary-language philosophy certainly can't settle
the matter. Our terms, "analytic" or otherwise, may
simply fail to refer. One can't just define anything into
existence. What is definitionally stipulated to be
analytically true in one era may be treated as empirically,
or even analytically, false in another. So undoubtedly at
least as useful as armchair psychology is an empirical
investigation of the links between the brain's reward
mechanisms and the dopaminergically innervated, pre-frontal
motor cortical regions subserving experientially voluntary
action. Yet if it weren't for the deliverances of
introspection, there could be no notion that even one single
creature in the world ever consciously acted, as distinct
from insentiently behaved, in the first instance.
Behaviourism is intellectually dead, and its grave should be
danced on as vigorously as possible.
With this in mind, all I can say is that,
most disappointingly, I have never been able introspectively
to catch myself acting in one way rather than another when
the thought of the rejected alternative was unequivocally
more satisfying, or less unsatisfying, than the option
chosen. Were this universally the case, then the biological
program would be instrumentally rational.
Could some variant of the pure pleasure-principle be true of anyone, let alone everyone? Now
one can easily be in the grip of a false theory which colours
one's sincere introspective reports. So there is no need to
get hot under the collar if those reports are challenged; one
may be genuinely mistaken. But if so, one is mistaken in very
distinguished as well as very numerous company. Furthermore,
there is no behavioural evidence to suggest that people whose
introspective avowals corroborate the hedonistic hypothesis
are more likely than anyone else to behave in ways one's
culture deems selfish. The deep and subtle conceptual connection between the concept of action and the pleasure-principle may reflect an important feature of the world.
For
if sceptical worries about the Problem of Other Minds may be
set aside here as idle, it is natural to assume that in one's
core mental attributes one is a representative member of the
species. On the unverifiable but cognitively indispensable
principle of the uniformity of Nature, it would seem that
something so fundamental as the affective coloration of
willed action is unlikely to be sporadic, but biologically
innate. Given the irreducibly personal nature of subjective
what-it's-like-ness, there is no way that natural science can
prove that certain causally efficacious decision-making states
actually have the differential hedonic tone one's
introspection suggests. But there is at least strong
presumptive evidence that they do, and that our genes have
biased our hedonic encephalisation accordingly. Indeed, it is
the substantial overlap between sociobiology's technical
genetic definition of selfishness and less formally defined
behavioural and psychological usage which suggests, yet
again, that one's defining attributes are a reflection of
one's status as a disposable genetic vehicle rather than an
autonomous moral agent.
What is crucial in the context of the
biological program mapped out in this paper, however, is
not to lose sight of the central and relatively
uncontroversial proposition about human motivation. We spend
a lot of time trying to make ourselves happy, whether
"vicariously" via our emotionally encephalised
concepts of other people or from more transparently
self-regarding motives. Often, in fact, we are quite candidly
explicit about our motivation. "I want to be happy -
without hurting anyone on the way" is an astonishingly
widespread secular sentiment. Instrumental, means-ends
analysis is extremely useful in general as a way of helping
us to pursue more rationally and intelligently all kinds of
titular goals that we seek only some of the time. So possible
counter-examples of people under weird self-destructive
compulsions, of weakness of will, and problems caused by the
lack of any unitary self are at best a diversion from the
practical rationale of the biological strategy. Such
anomalous phenomena are certainly intellectually interesting
complications for the hypothesis of psychological hedonism if
it is construed strictly as a universal generalisation about
human motivation. They don't challenge the large-scale
instrumental rationality of the intra-cranial strategy as the
only way to get everyone happy.
Thus
the practical case for some variant of the biological
program, stripped down to its essentials, is as follows.
Convergent evidence from realms as disparate as introspection
and neurobiology suggests that we all spend (at least much
of) our time acting to try and satisfy the insatiable hedonic
demands of the meso-limbic dopamine system, albeit under
myriad nominal descriptions which spring from the different
ways our emotions get encephalised. Everyone likes, if not only likes, the kind of experience which accompanies electrochemical excitations in the mesolimbic dopamine system, even though the idea of "electrochemical excitations in the mesolimbic dopamine system" is not one which is normally accompanied by any great mesolimbic pleasure (cf "the paradox of hedonism"). The earlier arguments of
this paper have, I hope, substantiated the claim that what
may be dubbed "Peripheralism" is hopelessly less effective than
the direct biological route in achieving what we're not
always wittingly after. Environmental reformism of any
conceivable kind fails, and will invariably fail, to overturn
the hedonic treadmill. We've tried it for ages, and it
doesn't work. Given our (sometimes) nominally disguised
purposes, and given that irrationalism is not a live option,
the only countervailing reasons against pursuing the
biological program's rational strategic course of action
will be moral considerations. So are there any
countervailing moral reasons why we shouldn't do what
instrumental rationality otherwise dictates? Or instead are
there cogent moral as well as practical reasons for adopting
the all-out biological panacea? Is universal happiness a bad
thing?
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" and misery, are
noted. It will be argued that the mass-production of
happiness will correlate with the production of actions and
experiences empirically found valuable too. Hence the
biological program will yield results which its
beneficiaries will find vastly more valuable than the
neurochemical status quo. Will they be right, or ultimately
is this mere opinion? In misguided support of the latter, the
orthodox physicalist and neo-Darwinian case against the
objectivity of judgements of value will then be spelt out.
This value-fictionalism will be countered by a form of
value-naturalism. It is argued that value, no less than, say,
redness, is an intrinsic feature of the world. It is so in
virtue of being a unique quality of experience which is
itself a spatio-temporally located and causally efficacious
property of the natural world. Value judgements, it will be contended, are in fact truth-evaluable because they
truly or falsely report the presence or absence of this
property of experience - irrespective of their ostensible
objects of reference. Several apparently devastating
objections to this view are stated, not least charges of
ignoring the fact that moral values may conflict, and of
equivocation. These objections are then rebutted.
But why negative utilitarianism?
Ethical negative-utilitarianism is a
value system which challenges the moral symmetry of pleasure
and pain. It doesn't deny the value of increasing the
happiness of the already happy. Yet it attaches value in a
distinctively moral sense of the term only to actions
which tend to minimise or eliminate suffering. It is
counter-intuitive, not least insofar as the doctrine entails
that from a purely ethical perspective it wouldn't matter if
nothing at all had existed or everything ceased to exist. No
inherent moral value is attached to pleasure or pleasant
states. Indeed, if the option were humanly available, the
logic of the position morally obligates bringing the world to
an end were this the only way to eliminate the suffering
endemic to it.
Following through the logical implications of this seemingly
bizarre and perverse perspective is clearly not for the
faint-hearted. Negative utilitarianism nonetheless stems, not
from sublimated self-hatred or a nihilistic death-wish, but from a
deep sense of compassion at the unimaginable scale and
dreadful intensity of suffering in the world. No amount of
happiness enjoyed by some organisms can notionally
justify the indescribable horrors of Auschwitz. [And the
Universal Schrodinger Equation (or whatever) entails them
both. Its solutions don't allow one without the other, albeit in disparate bits of space-time/Hilbert space.] Nor can the fun and games
outweigh the sporadic frightfulness of pain and despair that
occurs every second of every day. For there's nothing inherently wrong with non-sentience or [infelicitously] non-existence; whereas there is something frightfully and self-intimatingly wrong with suffering. This manifesto was written,
and will typically be read, in a relatively
"euthymic" condition. One doesn't feel too bad. So
it isn't difficult to dissociate one's feelings from a mere
printed litany of frightfulness. It's easy to convince
oneself that things can't really be that terrible,
that the horror I allude to is being overblown, that what is going on
elsewhere in space-time is somehow less real than the
here-and-now, or that the good in the world somehow offsets
the bad. Yet however vividly one thinks one can imagine what
agony, torture or suicidal despair must be like, the reality
is inconceivably worse. The force of
"inconceivably" is itself largely inconceivable
here. Blurry images of Orwell's "Room 101" can
barely even hint at what I'm talking about. Even if one's
ancestral namesakes [aka "younger self"] underwent
great pain, then the state-dependence of memories means that
much of pain's sheer dreadfulness is semantically,
cognitively and emotionally inaccessible in the here-and-now. So this manifesto's
rhapsodies on the incredible joys that do indeed lie ahead
tend to belie its underlying seriousness of purpose. For the
biological strategy is propounded here in deadly moral
earnest.
Negative-utilitarianism
is only one particular denomination of a broad church to
which the reader may well in any case not subscribe.
Fortunately, the program can be defended on grounds that
utilitarians of all stripes can agree on. So a defence will
be mounted against critics of the theory and application of
a utilitarian ethic in general. For in practice the most
potent and effective means of curing unpleasantness
is to ensure that a defining aspect of future states of mind
is their permeation with the molecular chemistry of ecstasy:
both genetically precoded and pharmacologically fine-tuned.
Orthodox utilitarians will doubtless find the cornucopian
abundance of bliss this strategy delivers is itself an extra
source of moral value. Future generations of native
ecstatics are unlikely to disagree.
Of course, there's only any need for morality if there is anything wrong with the world. If there isn't, and suffering becomes biologically impossible, then morality - in any sense we understand it - becomes redundant too.
A built-in biological warranty of
happiness undercuts three standard critiques of
utilitarianism. First, the utilitarian ethic is often
contrasted with agent-centred moralities and charged with
making impossibly onerous demands on people. According to the
impersonal felicific calculus, one should, for instance, give
away perhaps 95% of one's money to feed the starving in the
Third World. Most people just aren't capable of such
generosity to anonymous strangers: our genes wouldn't let us. Thus utilitarianism may be
a useful sovereign principle for legislators but, it is
claimed, not much use as a personal moral code.
The
effect of the biological program is to transcend such
practical difficulties. There will come a time when saintly
altruism can always be fun, albeit largely superfluous. Our
genes can make it wretchedly difficult in the meanwhile, and
much more necessary.
Second, utilitarianism seems to justify, on occasion, various
types of behaviour e.g. lying, murder or even torture, that
in most agent-relative moralities would be reckoned wrong or
even wicked, if the net result is greater all-round
well-being. Many critics have argued that this flexibility
would, on balance, lead to a worse society. They have then
gone on to develop their critiques of the principle on
covertly utilitarian grounds of varying subtlety and
sophistication.
The
biological program sweeps these difficulties aside too. Its
effect is to eliminate odious evolutionary hangovers such as
murder and torture altogether. Lies, too, will become simply
pointless.
Third,
utilitarianism seems to demand, in effect, the ceaseless use
of hand-held felicific super-computers to calculate the
consequences of each of one's actions. This might prove quite
exhausting. Worse still, the distant long-term effects of
what one does might seem incalculable; possibly, on the
likely assumption chaos theory applies to human affairs, even
incalculable in principle. So, ultimately, there can be no
way of knowing at the relevant time whether a course of
action is right or wrong on such a strict consequentialist
ethic. One is reminded of an observation of Mao Tse-tung who,
when asked for his opinion on whether the French Revolution
had been a good thing, said that he thought it was too early
to tell.
The
biological program dispels such worries altogether. If it
is carried through systematically, human action need never
cause suffering again. The long-term effects of genetic
engineering will predictably be the abolition of this
category of experience.
Now the effect of this sort of
genetic enhancement and pharmacotherapy will be states of
mind that are not merely overwhelmingly more pleasurable than
anything physiologically conceivable before. Empirically,
subjects will apprehend such states as self-evidently more
valuable as well, again by a vast margin. At humanity's
current stage of development, countless actions and states of
mind, and not infrequently life itself, are judged to be,
truth-evaluably or otherwise, worthless and futile. After the
post-Darwinian transition occurs, then every single state of
consciousness in the world may be conceived as
self-intimatingly valuable by its very nature. Futuristic
biotechnology of a sophistication we can today only gesture at should
enable the prolific mass-manufacture of states all
apprehended as intensely valuable by their subjects. So in
phenomenological terms, if no other, the quantity and quality
of valued experience will skyrocket along with its biological
substrates. Every moment of the day will be far better than the best sex anyone's
ever had anywhere with anyone to date; and a lot more productive.
Again,
in an empirical sense at least, there is an extremely large
overlap between actions and experiences that are found valuable and
those found generically pleasant; and of those found
pleasurable but not valuable, most are accounted as such
because they are reckoned to endanger or diminish the
likelihood of future pleasurable experience, whether in
oneself or as imagined in others. All kinds of caveats,
refinements and exceptions spring to mind at such a
pronouncement. Yet in a secular age, this generalisation has
extraordinarily wide scope. It would be wider still if the
different intentional guises in which such judgements may be
cloaked are included too. Some utilitarians, notoriously,
have gone on to identify value with happiness. This is
untenably simplistic. Too many plausible counter-examples
present themselves for such a claim to be defended here. A
far more modest position is all our purposes require. If an
experience, either imagined vicariously as notionally
undergone by others or unequivocally personal by
self-ascription, is found to induce feelings of happiness or
satisfaction, or reduce feelings of unhappiness or
dissatisfaction, then it will be apprehended by its subject
as valuable in the absence of any countervailing reasons.
Less long-windedly, happiness is found valuable as the
default condition.
Now
this might serve as the cue for a heavy-duty treatment of the
relationship between value and pleasure. All that's needed
for the argument to follow, however, is to note that the
biological program will generate, both quantitatively and
qualitatively, immensely more experiences found at once
pleasurable and valuable than those characteristic of the
neurochemical status quo. The program's therapeutic
strategy will eliminate a whole host of states that even
today are thought worthless or obnoxious. With time, the
correlation between states found valuable and states found
pleasurable should get ever closer to 1. So if, first, value
judgements are also truth-evaluable, and if, second, subjects
were normally capable of reliably apprehending their truth,
then the biological program would indeed prove ethically
mandatory.
Yet so what? The contemporary
critic will not be impressed. Just as not everything that is
more desired is more desirable, surely not everything that is
more valued is thereby more valuable. Only if the valued were
indeed also valuable would the biological program be
vindicated in an ethical sense. It can't be, because its
defence attempts to derive, or somehow smuggle in, an
"ought" from an "is", which is logically
impossible. To argue otherwise is to commit the naturalistic
fallacy. For is value supposed to be some property of the
natural world over and above the ontology sanctioned by
physics?
Physical science, the scientific rationalist may freely go on
to admit, has not yet definitively settled on the ultimate
ontological furniture of the universe. There is plenty of
theoretical and experimental work to be done investigating
whether its ontological primitives are particles, fields,
probability waves, loops, superstrings or whatever. The
relationships between these primitives still tantalisingly
awaits a complete and unified mathematical description as
well. But whatever really exists e.g. macroscopic objects,
itself supervenes on mind-independent configurations of these
ontologically basic primitive entities, events or properties.
Values, on the other hand, are merely mind-dependent
subjective fictions. We don't read them off the world, but
project them on to it.
The
scientistic hatchet-job on the status of objective values is
often supplemented with a neo-Darwinian account of their
genesis. If one claims that something is illusory, then one wants to explain how and why the illusion occurs. Pro-Darwinian polemicists oblige. What might seem to be eternal moral verities are
ritually unmasked by their debunkers as mere instruments of
the genes. People's devoutly-held personal convictions, we
learn, are just another means by which competing alliances of
information-bearing self-replicators - genes - manipulate their
throwaway vehicles at one remove to promote their own
inclusive fitness. Admittedly, genetic predisposition does
not equate with genetic determinism. Sociobiologists,
evolutionary ethicists and their ilk aren't claiming that
our genes directly code, rather than bias, the development of
each idiosyncratic set of cultural values. Yet
independently-arising cross-cultural universals e.g.
religious and secular incest-taboos, can nonetheless best
distally be explained by positing selective pressures which
act over many generations to shape our moral fetishes and
phobias. We would dearly love to believe that our subjective
values are somehow objectively underwritten by the nature of
the world, the scientific rationalist concludes, generally in
tones which suggest he bears their absence with remarkable
fortitude; but they are epistemically unserious verbiage. To
believe otherwise is to fall victim to wishful thinking or
the toxic mind-rot of New Age mysticism.
I shall now defend a version of
value-naturalism, and consequently the objective ethical
rationale of the biological program, against this
indictment. Is talk of objective values just claptrap? For it is ironic that at a time when the scientifically-informed current of analytic
philosophy is witnessing an embarrassed scramble to
"naturalise" everything from epistemology to
consciousness, any similar bid to legitimate value should
still widely be held to commit a logical fallacy. So it will
now be shown how, and in what sense, moral judgements can and
can't have truth-conditions; and how the existence of
objective values could be consistent with the apparently
austere ontology of physical science. An analogy is drawn
with phenomenal colour. It is argued that, appearances to the
contrary, moral judgements in fact report, truly or falsely,
a distinctive quality common to the experience of those who
avow them. What such judgements express is mind-dependent,
and on an identity theory thereby brain-dependent; and
thereby value is as much a natural, intrinsic and objective
feature of the world as phenomenal redness. The proposition
that it is otherwise is unnaturalistic, the legacy of a
dualistic perspective which sees mind and its experiential
attributes as distinct from the physical world rather than
as objectively existing features of it. We don't simply "project" our values onto the world. For we are literally bits of the world itself. Four objections, each
on their own apparently decisive, are levelled against this
sort of value-naturalist position.
So
to begin a value-naturalist defence, it is worth drawing an
analogy with, say, redness. On a mind-brain identity theory,
redness is a phenomenological property intrinsic to certain
patterns of neuronal firing. The presence of light of a
particular frequency impinging on the retina, or indeed of
any light at all, is neither a necessary nor a sufficient
condition for the production of red experience in a subject.
When dreaming, for instance, one can inwardly see or
instantiate red phenomena. Conversely, when one is awake and
in darkness, then a sufficient condition of one's having,
say, a brief punctate red experience in front of one's
body-image is that the relevant cortical area is electrically
stimulated.
On
the assumption that one is wholly a part of the natural
world, then phenomenal redness, too, is one of the properties
of the world. It is predicated of, and appears to inhere in,
many macroscopic objects. Yet it is an intrinsic property of
certain mind/brain states, and is not some relational
property involving the interaction of light from
intrinsically colourless objects and the mind/brain. The
presence or absence of red phenomenal experience can be truly
or falsely reported by the subject, whether the subject
believes it is a property intrinsic to mind-independent
physical objects or otherwise.
Given
the above, it is worth noting the sense in which redness can,
and more importantly can't, be explained within the current
conceptual framework of the natural sciences. Natural
selection has stumbled upon psychophysical phenomenal colour
states. These states are not inherently representational. But
natural selection has harnessed them so they now tend, in the
awake brain, to track certain causally co-varying patterns in
the organism's environment. The capacity to recognise these
patterns (simplistically, differential electromagnetic
reflectancies of macroscopic objects) bears on the
differential reproductive success of the genetic vehicles in
which phenomenal colours are periodically instantiated. This
explains why such states have been selected. It doesn't
explain their intrinsic phenomenal nature. So natural
selection doesn't in any but a shallow sense explain states
such as redness (or, it will be argued, value). It explains
why some such states have been selected rather than others.
It doesn't explain why any kind of experience has the
phenomenal properties it does. Nor does it explain why
experience exists at all. If telepathy had existed,
evolutionary psychologists would doubtless offer excellent
explanations and mathematical models of why telepaths had
been selected over non-telepaths. Telepathy, we would
tub-thumpingly be told, could thus be explained
"naturalistically", not as some divine gift of God.
Yet the phenomenon itself would still be utterly mysterious.
Physics and, derivatively, the rest of
the physical sciences can in principle provide a complete
account of the natural universe. It is (potentially) complete
only in the sense that the mathematical formalism of quantum
mechanics is correct and isomorphic to the world. The
equations themselves are topic-neutral. The intrinsic nature
of the stuff they describe, what "breathes fire into the
equations and makes there a world for us to describe"
is, as even Hawking concedes, unknown, and perhaps
unknowable. What can be known, however, since one is oneself
a tiny fragment of the "fire in the equations", is
that the experience of phenomenal redness exists as a matter
objective fact. This is so even though a (mathematically)
complete physics on its own has nothing to say about it.
This should be stressed because in conceptualising the
contents of the world, it is tempting to defer, not merely to
the unreasonable effectiveness of the equations, but also to
one's ill-defined notions of the basic physical stuff those
equations describe. And these notions don't include e.g.
redness, or tickles, or happiness, or moral values. But,
crucially here, the physicists' potential candidates for the
status of brute ontological primitives e.g. superstrings or
fields etc., are defined, ultimately, in purely mathematical
terms. So if particular phenomenal colours, say, were to be
identified with the particular numerical values of a set of
occipito-temporal cortical fields, this is in no way
inconsistent with the physical formalism. Redness would in
this case be just one spark of the "fire in the
equations". Likewise, if one identifies particular
phenomenologically valuable states with a finite set of
numerical values of intra-cranial fields, this is likewise
consistent with the mathematical formalism. For they too are
part of the fire in the equations which makes there a world
for us to describe.
Unfortunately,
it is all too easy to muddy the ontological issue here by
confusing the two senses of the word "subjective".
It is the case, objectively, that the world contains
subjective, experiential states such as redness with its
unique, nameable, but ultimately ineffable what-it's-like-ness. This property may be identified with complicated,
occipito-temporal cortical patterns of cortical fields.
Redness is a distinctive mind-dependent property. It lacks
any mind-independent existence, since neither electromagnetic
radiation, molecules nor their macroscopic object patterns
are red. This doesn't challenge its objective existence. When
one experiences, or is presented with, or instantiates,
redness, one can apprehend what colour it is and report the
experience, sincerely or otherwise. This judgement has
truth-conditions. Since red is mind-dependent it is also, on
any mind-brain identity theory, brain-dependent. It is as
such an objective property of the physical world. So what
judgements of redness express is both mind-dependent and
objectively true (or, if one's avowals are insincere, false).
Now moral value itself will be examined.
It is going to be suggested that value, and conversely
disvalue, are distinctive features literally inherent in the
world no less than phenomenal redness; and thus there can be
objective, truth-evaluable judgements of value. This property
is mind-dependent, hence brain-dependent, hence a natural
and objective property of the world. In consequence, the
states of mind of our ecstatic descendants are inherently
more valuable by their very nature than the relatively
worthless psychiatric slumlands of our own era.
Of
the finite, potential 101 000 000's of
interestingly different types of conscious state of the human
mind/brain, some are subjectively apprehended as
experientially valuable and some aren't. Some states seem
essentially neutral; some are merely pleasurable but not
valued; some are found complex and ambivalent; some involve
the mere parroting of received wisdom in the absence of the
relevant experience; and the fuzzy boundaries of what the
concept of finding something experientially valuable entails
are an added complication too. Some valuable qualities strike
one as intrinsic to the very nature of (one's emotionally
encephalised virtual simulation of) the mind-independent
world. Some seem to be local to one's body-image. Yet the
presence or absence of any particular mind/brain-independent
state of affairs is in principle neither necessary nor
sufficient for the experientially valuable states to occur;
whereas a necessary and sufficient condition for those
experiences is the occurrence of the relevant pattern of
neuronal firings.
Once proto-utopian neuroscience can identify the biomolecular
substrates of experiential value, or redness, or pleasure
etc, it will be feasible to mass-manufacture redness,
pleasure or value. Value can be biologically synthesised in extant organisms or in
mind/brains-in-vats. [Hence the derisive tag earlier of
"biological program for Cosmic
Value-Maximisation".] Futuristic vats could contain
colours and values in virtue of containing brains. This
sounds odd; but no category-mistake is involved.
So
analogously to redness, then, value should be construed as a
property of a delimited class of mind/brain states. In future
it can be both quantified and synthesised. Certain forms of
experience are indeed often said to be unquantifiable:
happiness is the most commonly cited example. But if
particular types of chemical (or perhaps, ultimately,
relativistic quantum fields, or modes of vibration of
10-dimensional heterotic superstrings etc) embedded in the
relevant neural state, are either identified with, or found
to be invariantly positively correlated with,
phenomenologically valuable states, then scaling up or down
the number and size of the relevant states by the relevant
number and disposition of molecules increases or decreases
the level of happiness, redness, value etc in the world
accordingly. Problems of vague concepts with fuzzy
boundaries, and of ill-defined criteria of usage, complicate
but do not change the issue. In an ideal taxonomy of the
mind/brain, experiential states would be as quantifiable, and
their exact texture as mathematically precisely defined, as
any other feature of the natural universe. The notion that
what-it's-like-ness can be described by a set of equations is
indisputably counter-intuitive; but this is what any scientific mind/brain
identity-theory entails. And given such a theory, the
biological program can vastly increase the amount of both
happiness and naturalised value in the world.
Now for four potentially devastating
objections that can be levelled at the position sketched
above.
First, when people express value-judgements, they frequently
refer to states of the world. They're not alluding to some
distinctive quality of their own experience. They may indeed
frequently project aspects of their experience onto states of
the world. Yet it is the world they are referring to, not
their own phenomenology.
Second,
surely values can conflict. They are sometimes violently
contested. We even go to war over them. If two putatively
truth-evaluable judgements of value are mutually
contradictory, they can't both be objectively true; or
perhaps they don't, and can't, have truth-conditions at all.
Third, by taking value to be an intrinsic phenomenological
attribute of certain mental states, the value-naturalist
position apparently makes some singularly obnoxious
prejudices morally valuable, even immensely so. After all,
Hitler found persecuting Jews extremely morally valuable.
Given that, by every indication, Hitler was sincere in
reporting at least this aspect of his mental states, albeit
under another description, then from the value-naturalist
perspective persecuting Jews would have to count as valuable:
not as valuable as the exalted states alluded to in this
paper, admittedly, but morally worthwhile nonetheless. This
is surely a pretty conclusive reductio of the
position. In any case, the above example exposes the
argument's internal inconsistency. Hitler's value-judgements
contradicted those of his victims. Therefore it is logically
impossible for them both to be right.
Fourth, does not the value-naturalist case rest on an illicit
equivocation? Not everything that is desired is desirable, a
slide from the factual to the ethical. Likewise, surely not
everything that is valued is valuable? Even if it were
objectively the case that value-judgements obliquely
reported, truly or falsely, a distinctive experiential state
or family of states, this wouldn't mean that such types of
state actually ought to be valued, or that one ought to
strive for their maximisation.
The reply given here to these seemingly knock-down rejoinders
to the value-naturalist is highly counter-intuitive. For it
depends for its key premise on what might appear to be a
completely different issue altogether, the nature of what we
optimistically call perception; and in particular the falsity
of any sort of direct realism. The answer to be given is
arguably consistent with several non-direct realist theories
other than the one set out below; but the account, and the
heuristic fable it contains, is designed to highlight as
starkly as possible the falsity of a presupposition common to
at least the first three charges above. The position defended
here as a basis for the argument to follow is a radical
selectionist account of perceptual experience. It contends
that the difference between "dreaming" and
"being awake" lies essentially in the mode by which
states intrinsic to the mind/brain are selected. The most
that the extra-neural environment can ever do is partially
select which of a finite menu of mind/brain/virtual world
states is instantiated at a given moment. Subjects can never,
directly, do more than apprehend their own
mind/brain/virtual-world states. The values they appear to
find in the mind-independent world are instead intrinsic
features of particular states of their own brains. And
insofar as future ecstatics are capable of truly reporting
this quality of experience, their states are objectively more
valuable than anything existing today. So the world really
will get better and better.
These rather dogmatic and elliptical
pronouncements may first be illustrated by use of the
following case study.
There
is a rare sleep disorder in which the victims lack the
muscular atony which, ordinarily, functionally decouples the
bodily musculature from a dreaming brain. This decoupling is
in the normal way highly adaptive. For it stops the rest of
us from unwittingly acting out our dreams. In the absence of
a functional decoupling of the musculature, all manner of
dream-scenarios will be acted out. In such circumstances the
external vocalisations and other forms of bodily behaviour of
the dreamer are uncorrelated, except by chance, with the rest
of the world outside the mind/brain.
Within
the dreamer's virtual world, however, nothing will seem
amiss. The meaning and reference of terms used by the central
body-image are grounded purely internally in its
pseudo-perceptually apprehended environment. Inside the
neural dreamworld, a conscious, unwittingly private language
of thought masquerades as public speech. The dreamer's
body-image uses it to converse with the behaviourally
intelligent homunculi his visual cortex intermittently
activates. These noisily animated zombies, and other
ostensibly perceptual experiences of macroscopic objects in a
macroscopic world, are purely autobiographical. The whole
virtual world flickers in and out of existence as its
instantiator passes in and out of dreamless sleep. For it is
not just the dreamer's non-occurrent beliefs and desires
which are dispositional, but the macroscopic dreamworld
itself. Its episodes are nonetheless readily reactivated.
This is because its features lie latently encoded in the
connection and activation weights of the dreamer's brain. The
difference between us and a victim of this sleep disorder is
that his extra-neural body acts out, obliviously, the
actions performed by his body-image internal to the dream;
whereas when we are asleep our bodies are effectively
paralysed.
Now,
counterfactually and for heuristic purposes, imagine a
possible world in which this sleep disorder is both chronic
and ubiquitous. Dreamers never "wake up". Nor do
they have any notion of what such a familiar if
ill-understood expression might mean. Natural selection goes
to work over millions of years. It differentially favours the
genotypes of organisms whose dreamworlds, initially just by
chance, serve as though they were akin to quasi-real-time
simulations of certain patterns in the extra-neural world.
For genetically selfish reasons, each differentially selected
genotype spawns an egocentric virtual world. It is a virtual
world centred physically and affectively around one focal
body-image. More proximate selection of dreamworld events
comes into play due to a bombardment of patterned sequences
of electro-chemical impulses from various afferent
proto-nerves. These extend to what serve to become peripheral
transducers in the organism's bodily surfaces. Over the
generations, the fitness-enhancing correlations between the
behaviour the extra-neural body unwittingly acts out and
macro-patterns in its environment tend to get tighter and
tighter.
With the passage of time, many dreamworlds quite regularly
become, so to speak, thoroughly undreamlike. Normal infant
dream-worlders will learn, over several years, pseudo-public
criteria for language use from their virtual mothers. A
maturing dreamer may discover that his body-image's
surroundings show a good deal of coherence, law-like
regularity and even predictability. He may discover that his
body(-image) can intelligently manipulate and re-engineer,
within sharply constrained limits, aspects of the (neural
dream-)world beyond itself. Obliquely and obliviously,
dreamworlds will tend in some degree mutually to select each
other's contents. With time, the unwitting behavioural
by-products of purposeful actions internal to billions of
dreamworlds spin off an ever more elaborate material culture.
The collective result of these by-products is that the
eternal sleepers' host bodies act out the construction of
everything from skyscrapers to computer networks,
particle-accelerators to jumbo jets. The resultant artefacts
enjoy a dreamworld-independent existence. They themselves
serve thereafter partially to select what kinds of dreamworld
are neurally activated.
Should an overly-lucid dreamer ever doubt
the ontological integrity of his particular virtual world,
the consequences may be grave. Dreamworlds can be refractory
and inhospitable places. His virtual body-image may be mauled
by virtual lions or, in a later era, knocked down by a
virtual bus. Thanks to millions of years of selective
pressure, such agonies correlate highly with parallel,
mind-independent events befalling the organism whose skull
encloses the dreamworld brain. So any genes notionally
predisposing to such idle philosophers' fancies tend not to
be passed on to the bodily vehicles of potential
baby-dreamworlds. Instead, each dreamer strives to re-order
his emotionally encephalised world so that its unsuspectedly
mind-dependent states more nearly match his desires.
Some
dreamworlds are chaotic and schizoid; some are seemingly
well-ordered and amenable to quasi-scientific investigation;
some are happy and suffused with spirituality and magic; and
some are violent and nightmarish. None of these gargantuan
psychochemical extravaganzas is inherently about anything
external to itself on the other side of its skull. Yet
evolution has differentially selected genes which predispose
to the self-assembly of a very particular range of
phenotypical dreamworlds. These are the world-phenotypes
which serve as effective vehicles for the propagation of more
copies of the genes that made them. One of the properties of
a successful vehicle is that periodically some of its
patterns causally co-vary, albeit on a highly selective
basis, with other patterns beyond itself.
How is this relevant to a value-naturalist
defence of an objective warrant for the biological program?
The fable's significance may be illustrated by envisaging a
counterpart to Hitler, say, in the dreamworld scenario. In
his dark and sinister virtual world, his body-image fights
against terrible inner demons/neuronal firings. He spends his
whole life pitted in a struggle to exorcise once-and-for-all
their malevolent and conspiratorial presence. The evil
occipito-temporal homunculi lurking beyond his somato-sensory
body-image are of course mindless phantoms. But their hostile
intent appears frighteningly obvious to their host.
Tragically, Hitler's dreamworld brain is fully coupled to the
bodily musculature of the organism which houses such
nightmarish neurochemical patterns. There is no muscular
atony to prevent the microcosmic horror story from being
acted out in the mind-independent macrocosm by the
extra-neural body. Natural selection has ensured that many types
of event in his dreamworld causally co-vary, albeit in a
grotesquely selective manner, with the wider world, its
organisms and the dreamworlds they host. In consequence, over
fifty million people die in a brutal war.
Now
this fable is all very well as a thought-experiment, it may
be said. Even in our own world, there are rare and tragic
cases of people who blamelessly and unwittingly kill their
partner while asleep, whether during
"night-terrors" or in the course of an exceedingly
violent dream. But the real Hitler wasn't asleep. He was
fully awake and acted quite deliberately in full knowledge of
what he was doing. He perceived real, flesh-and-blood,
sentient people. They were wholly innocent of the monstrous
crimes he imputed to them.
And
herein lies the crux. If real-world Hitler did directly
apprehend or perceive his victims, or alternatively if
certain neurochemical events in his mind/brain/virtual-world
were, somehow, inherently about Jewish people in the world
outside, then the argument shortly to be presented is false.
If, on the other hand, Hitler was wrestling with horribly
emotionally encephalised inner demons, apparitions of his own
(involuntary) creation whose foul behaviour really did blight
his early virtual world, then his behaviour in trying to
banish such sources of negative value amounted to an
epistemic rather than evaluative failure. Likewise today, in
billions of other egocentric virtual worlds, desperate and
often ineffectual attempts are being made by each genetic
host's central body-image to exorcise all kinds of obnoxious
phenomena. Unfortunately, in the absence of the biological
program and the presence of naive realism, the net results
are frequently tragic.
In
the case of Hitler, profound sources of objective
experiential "disvalue" did indeed neurochemically
transmit and present themselves to the functional modules
mediating his sense of self and neural body-image. It wasn't
the case that he somehow "projected" such experience
onto his virtual world; instead that quality of experience
was intrinsic to it. Natural selection ensured that Hitler,
in common with all but a few philosophically and
scientifically-minded humans, was implicitly a naive realist
about a perceptual world. So when he apprehended great evil,
a quality of experience located in what he couldn't know was
only his emotionally malencephalised virtual world, he tried
to destroy it in the only manner he knew how. By his lights,
he was trying to make the mind-independent world a better
place. Had he been a brain-in-a-vat, he might temporarily
have succeeded. Tragically, he wasn't; and a mere
epistemological error turned into a moral catastrophe.
Now if the human predicament were akin to
that of a dreamworlder, a very big and controversial
"if", admittedly, then the following answers may be
given to the four objections to value-naturalism levelled
earlier.
First,
yes, people certainly believe many of their value-judgements
refer to the world and its properties rather than to some
distinctive quality of their own experience. But both the
philosophy of perception and quantum mechanics suggest that
what a person treats as the mind-independent world - and to whose
properties he linguistically refers - are toy, data-driven simulations
his mind-brain is running. If so, then he is referring in a
direct way only to aspects of his own neural experience in
another guise. What his value-judgements express is still an
objective property of the natural world. But it is
mind-dependent. Experiences found valuable, whether by
brains-in-skulls or futuristic brains-in-vats, have a
distinctive, nameable, but ineffable what-it's-like-ness about
which physical science has nothing to say.
Second,
people's value-judgements can mutually contradict each other
only if they succeed in referring to the same thing. Hitler's
internally-issued value-judgements couldn't really contradict
those of his extra-neural body's inadvertent victims. Those
same judgements accurately reflected the character of the
emotionally encephalised bestiary of monsters that populated
his mind/brain; and against whose machinations he fought, at
terrible cost.
Third,
what is morally wrong on a consequentialist ethic is the
effect of the unwitting behavioural spin-offs of Hitler's
attempts to extinguish his inner foes. He wasn't mistaken to
find certain phenomena obnoxious, sources of profound
objective "disvalue". Mein Kampf is testimony to
their horrible phenomenology. He just mislocated their
distinctive properties and origin as external to his
composite self. The effects were of course catastrophic.
Now
to what extent the dreamworld fable above does capture an
aspect of the human predicament is, to say the least,
controversial. Aside from certain details included for
reasons of expository convenience, I would argue that the
account is empirically indistinguishable, at least, from more
familiar approaches to perception. To explore in any depth,
however, the perceptual and semantic minefields into which
the question leads, not to mention the paradoxes of self-reference it might seem to entail, would take us too far
afield. The account does nonetheless offer one programmatic
way to naturalise value, albeit at a price that may be
considered too high for comfort.
The fourth charge was one of
equivocation. The valued is being confused with the valuable. Even
if it is granted, the charge continues, that value-judgements
are true or false reports of a distinctive type of
neurophenomenological state, that state itself is, as the
term suggests, just that: truth-valuelessly phenomenological.
Finding an experience morally good or bad in such a sense
doesn't carry any logical implication that one should objectively
do anything about it. Hence, whatever its instrumental
merits, the claim that the biological program advocated
here is ethically mandatory is untenable if construed as
expressing an objective truth. Yes, executing the biological
blueprint would vastly increase the number and intensity of
states found phenomenologically valuable; and yes, it would
abolish altogether states that aren't. But value-judgements,
and the qualities of experience they describe, are like
tickles. They exist, and they may make you want to do
something about them. Yet they don't refer to anything beyond
themselves and they don't logically mandate any course of
action.
I
would argue that properly understood there is no
equivocation. We happen to live in a universe whose ontology
includes literally valuable experiences in the same way as it
contains literally painful experiences, visual and auditory
experiences, feelings of irritation or obligation or
indignation, and a teeming profusion of other forms of
what-it's-like-ness most of which remain so far completely nameless.
So the universe really does contain phenomena that are,
literally and intrinsically, valuable. The utilitarian ethic
championed here, and the biological program it
instrumentally dictates, leads ultimately to the amount of
intrinsic value as well as happiness in the universe being
maximised; and all sources of negative value extinguished.
It
will then no doubt be asked, perhaps somewhat impatiently as
well as sceptically: but is an experience found really
valuable really valuable? Why couldn't it just seem to
be valuable? Yet one wouldn't, and couldn't, sensibly ask if
an experience found really painful was really painful. One
can apparently imagine a universe without values, in the same
way as one can apparently imagine one without pains or
pleasures or redness. But for reasons we admittedly don't
understand, we don't live in that sort of Universe. We live
in a Universe where some things intrinsically matter and have
positive or negative value. If our image of a respectable
physicalist ontology can't cope with the objective fact such
modes of what-it's-like-ness exist, then we are
misinterpreting what the formal mathematical description of
the world is telling us.
Now perhaps a value-nihilist can
sincerely deny having any such quality of experience. The
nihilist can ask why should (s)he value value, whatever that
might be. Yet this scepticism doesn't impugn the existence of value, any
more than the status of pain is compromised by rare cases of
people congenitally insensitive to it. The relegation of
either kind of experience to some kind of ontological
demi-monde is unwarranted and should be rejected.
This
objectivity doesn't entail that valuable experiences can
have, as distinct from simulate, a type of mind-transcendent,
truth-evaluable "propositional content" over and
above their intrinsic phenomenology which somehow manages to
alight on properties of the mind-independent world. But then
there are desperately hard problems in the context of a
naturalistic world-picture of explaining how any other
spatio-temporal electrochemical event or episode of
experience, whether deemed cognitive or otherwise, could
literally have abstract propositional content either. Worlds where they don't can apparently be empirically indistinguishable from ours - and a lot less ontologically fishy. A lot
of the time, one just has to cross one's fingers, whistle in
the dark, mix one's metaphors, and try and pretend otherwise.
Russell once observed that "Ethical
metaphysics is fundamentally an attempt, however disguised,
to give legislative force to our own wishes." Perhaps he
is right. Mixing up prediction and prescription is usually a recipe for confusion. Attempts to ground the post-Darwinian project - or any other moral enterprise - in something more exalted than the pleasure-pain principle may simply be spinning a fantasy world of
self-deception. Perhaps talk of the moral goodness of eradicating suffering - or any other kind of moral discourse - is merely
idle opinion: just a lot of high-falutin noise amid the digital babel of cyberspace.
The traditional-minded scientific
rationalist, for one, will surely be unmoved. It will be claimed that the world's [allegedly inherently] valuable and valueless experiences as touted in this chapter are
"really" "just" something else: patterns of neuronal firings, the differential modes of
vibration of superstrings (or whatever) with which they are
posited to be physically identical. Yet this is sophistry. The reductionist argument can be turned on its head. Presumably
certain modes of vibration of superstrings etc are
"really" "just" valuable experiences.
This isn't very illuminating. Whether, why, how, and with
what significance, different values of what-it's-like-ness
should be mapped on to, or read off, the different numerical
values of solutions to the equations of physics are deeper
questions altogether, and not ones that can be explored here. They may all just be glorified tickles; or they may not: we simply don't know.
Instead, this section may be concluded with a quick
restatement of the plot so far. The biological program holds
out the promise that, within a few millennia at most, states
of conscious mind everywhere will be by their very nature
more enjoyable than anyone alive today can imagine. Our hereditary neurological pleasure-deficit stops us getting a grip on what biotechnology can genetically engineer. In (at the very least) an empirical sense, implementing the
post-Darwinian program can fill the world with valuable experiences. They
will be enjoyed by human, non-human and post-human beings.
Post-Darwinian modes of experience are likely to be of a diversity,
profundity and liquid intensity that goes beyond anything accessible
to the impoverished hunter-gatherer-evolved imagination. All the moral ills identified by contemporary secular value-systems can be rooted out for ever. Suffering will one day
become physically impossible. This all sounds rather
bombastic; but the strategy is biologically feasible as a
species-project should we choose to pursue it.
Whether
maximising the valued in the world amounts, in practice
and/or theory, to maximising the intrinsically valuable in
the world is another, and harder, question. There is, I have
argued, at least a prima facie case that it does. We
may one day live in a Universe whose equations describe
something which is intrinsically valuable by its very nature.
DP Contents : HedWeb
E-mail Dave : dave@hedweb.com
