Overview
essay
Part 1.
Submitted, for your perusal: the Happiness Machine (well known to philosophers and science fiction writers).
Electrodes from this Machine are attached to many parts of your brain. (Perhaps there is a helmet or visor that feeds images, too.) You work with the technician to program all the happy experiences that you have ever wanted. Suppose that includes wanting to be a football star, scoring game-winning touchdowns; or a movie star or rock star, making millions of dollars and admired by millions of fans (probably including lots of “followers” on social media); or an astronaut who is the first human to leave our solar system for interstellar space; or ecstatic sexual experiences; and so on. The machine can deliver on these experiences. Of course, they are all simulated; yet while experiencing them, you would really believe that they were real, not simulated.
What if you learned that many people who experienced the Happiness Machine found reality so unsatisfying compared to the Machine that they continue to enter the Machine, become addicted to its pleasures, and believe that reality can never match the experiences in the Machine? Some people, however, decide that reality, however disappointing it often is, is better than the simulations, or fantasies, of the Machine and don’t enter the Machine again.
If happiness is subjective – in the eye of the beholder, we might say – then haven’t those who spend much time in the Machine achieved Happiness?
Aristotle’s ethical philosophy implies that such subjective happiness as this Machine can provide is not happiness at all.
So what is missing? Here are some ideas inspired by Aristotle’s philosophy:
A person in the Machine is purely passive; they never actually do or even choose to do anything. For Aristotle, isn’t an active life essential to genuine happiness, the good life? (An active life means that you must reason, deliberate about what to do, choose, and act.) But in an active life one must face obstacles, including, sometimes, ones that cannot be overcome, and that means failure and disappointment are inevitable – so from the point of view of Aristotle’s ethics, what is the good of dealing with obstacles and failure? What virtues does one need in order to do so well?
It seems impossible that anyone in that Machine, no matter how many times they enter it, could learn virtues, and if that is true, then, for Aristotle, they cannot have achieved happiness. So why can’t a person learn virtues in the Machine?
If such a Machine were available, would you enter it? (Just explain your answer.)
Part 2.
I mentioned this example in the notes on Aristotle. Suppose that I, a teacher, think that the good of teaching is the pleasure I get from it. Aristotle would argue that, while I should take pleasure in teaching, I am objectively wrong about the good of teaching. So what is that good? Do you agree with Aristotle? Or do you think that the good of teaching is relative to the individual teacher, so that if one teacher thinks it is one thing, and another teacher disagrees, then there is nothing to be objectively right or wrong about when it concerns the good of teaching? .