Meet “Mr. Happy,” the man who can’t feel sadness.
After surviving a stroke in the right frontal lobe of his brain, Malcolm Myatt cannot feel sadness or depression – and he is very happy about it:
I am never depressed. Being sad wouldn't help anything anyway. I would definitely rather be happy all the time than the other way round. It's an advantage really. The stroke could have become my worst enemy but I wouldn't let it. Now I barely even notice that I don't feel sadness.
His family has a more mixed view of his situation. They usually love having him around, since he is constantly cheery and his laugh is infectious. However, his jokes are much less funny at funerals, and he often impulsively says what he thinks without considering if it is rude. The stroke had other unpleasant side effects too – he has short-term memory problems and has lost feeling on the left side of his body. Even so, he called it an "advantage."
Is he better off after the stroke than before? Would people in general be better off if something like this happened to them?
Hypothetically, neurosurgeons could remove the part of your brain responsible for sadness. I doubt that anyone would offer to perform this surgery right now… but, assuming that it is safe, would you want them to? Would it be "good"?
British philosopher David Pearce would probably say yes. He views the abolition of suffering as a moral imperative. Actually, his vision goes even further:
Over the next thousand years or so, the biological substrates of suffering will be eradicated completely ... Post-human states of magical joy will be biologically refined, multiplied and intensified indefinitely. Notions of what now passes for tolerably good mental health are likely to be superseded ... Such ugly thoughts and feelings will be diagnosed as typical of the tragic lives of emotional primitives from the previous era.
If this vision is actualized, then we will no longer be stuck on the "hedonic treadmill." Right now, a person's mood usually adapts fairly quickly to their situation. This is helpful for tough situations, but also makes it very difficult to become happier in the long term by changing your situation. Future generations of humans may no longer have this problem if Pearce's predictions prove accurate.
Since we are considering hypotheticals, let’s say that you find a cheap and easy way to never feel sad again. You would only feel happy all the time. If you took it, would you ever be able to go back?
Research says no – or at least that you would never want to.
We already saw how Mr. Happy feels about his life after losing the ability to feel sad, but a few morbidly fascinating psychology experiments have confirmed his experience. In one experiment, researchers hooked up electrodes to the pleasure center of rats’ brains, and then gave the rats a button to activate them. The rats started pushing their "pleasure button" like crazy – sometimes as fast as “1920 responses an hour; that is, about one response for every 2 sec.” Similar experiments showed that rats would rather self-stimulate than eat, ignoring food to the point of starvation.
This effect is not limited to rats. In the most bizarrely unethical experiment that I have ever heard of, Dr. Robert Heath tried to turn a gay man straight by stimulating his brain while showing him heterosexual pornography and providing him with a prostitute. Apparently that kind of thing was fine back in 1972, even though it would be smacked down for multiple reasons by any modern ethics board worth its salt. Anyway, the man was given a device to stimulate the pleasure center in his brain, and acted almost exactly like the rats did:
He was permitted to wear the device for 3 hours at a time: on one occasion he stimulated his septal region 1,200 times, on another occasion 1,500 times, and on a third occasion 900 times. He protested each time the unit was taken from him, pleading to self-stimulate just a few more times.
If you could buy such a device right now, would you? Hypothetical-future-you would call current-you crazy for not taking it. Pearce is a fan of this general idea – fondly nicknamed “wireheading” – for several reasons: It “doesn't harm others; it has a small ecological footprint; it banishes psychological and physical pain; and arguably it's a lot less offensive to human dignity than having sex.” Also, a similar technology called "deep brain stimulation" is a uniquely effective treatment for treatment-resistant major depression.
Suggestions like these are bound to make some people uneasy, since they can feel unnatural and squicky (that’s a technical term). While those do not bother me and I am sympathetic to ideas like transhumanism and human genetic engineering, I have found that Pearce's ethical basis, utilitarianism – the belief that anything which increases happiness is good and anything that increases suffering is bad – is highly problematic.
If maximizing happiness and minimizing suffering are the only moral obligations, why value honesty? Why not increase the population infinitely to increase the total happiness, or kill anyone who is sad to increase the average happiness? Should a minority be oppressed if it increases the happiness of a tyrannical majority? If committing some crime can make the perpetrator(s) happier than it makes the victim(s) sad, is that crime good?
All of those problems, however, can be avoided by maintaining the principle of informed consent. Some people will choose Pearce's "utopian bliss" if it becomes realistically available — which is fine, as long as they do not infringe on others' rights to choose their own path. Many will choose otherwise, and that is fine too.
I usually have no problem with people pursuing happiness. Still, the increasing overlap between technology and neuroscience will raise plenty of interesting ethical questions to consider for the future.
For more information on this subject, check out some of David Pearce's massive Internet essays:
