Happy to torture?

      This elevation of transgression itself into a moral injunction has a precise name: happiness as the supreme duty. No wonder that, over the last decade, the study of happiness emerged as a scientific discipline of its own: there are now “professors of happiness” at universities, “quality of life” institutes attached to them, and numerous research papers; there is even the Journal of Happiness Studies. Ruut Veenhoven, its editor-in-chief, wrote:

      We can now show which behaviors are risky as far as happiness goes, in the same way medical research has shown us what is bad for our health. We should eventually be able to show what kind of lifestyle suits what kind of person.⁴¹

      This new discipline has two branches. On the one hand, there is a more sociological approach, based on data gathered from hundreds of surveys measuring happiness across different cultures, professions, religions, social and economic groups. One cannot reproach these researches for cultural bias: they are well aware of how the notion of what constitutes happiness depends on the cultural context (it is only in individualistic Western countries that happiness is seen as a reflection of personal achievement). One also cannot deny that the data collected are often interesting: happiness is not the same thing as satisfaction with one’s life (several nations that report low or average life satisfaction at the same time report high percentages of very happy people); the happiest nations—mostly Western and individualistic ones—tend to have the highest levels of suicide; and, of course, the key role of envy—what counts is not what you have so much as what others have (the middle classes are far less satisfied than the poor, for they take as their reference point the very wealthy, whose income and status they will be hard-pushed to match; the poor, meanwhile, take as their reference point the middle earners, who are more within their reach).

      On the other hand, there is a more psychological (or, rather, brain-sciences) approach, combining cognitivist scientific research with occasional incursions into New Age meditation wisdom: the exact measuring of brain processes that accompany feelings of happiness and satisfaction, etc. The combination of cognitive science and Buddhism (which is not new—its last great proponent was Francisco Varela) is here given an ethical twist: what is offered in the guise of scientific research is a new morality that one is tempted to call biomorality—the true counterpart to today’s biopolitics. And indeed, was it not the Dalai Lama himself who wrote: “The purpose of life is to be happy”⁴²—this is not true for psychoanalysis, one should add. In Kant’s description, ethical duty functions like a foreign traumatic intruder that from the outside disturbs the subject’s homeostatic balance, its unbearable pressure forcing the subject to act “beyond the pleasure principle,” ignoring the pursuit of pleasures. For Lacan, exactly the same description holds for desire, which is why enjoyment is not something that comes naturally to the subject, as a realization of her inner potential, but is the content of a traumatic superego injunction.⁴³

      Consequently, if one sticks to the end to the “pleasure principle,” it is difficult to abandon a radical conclusion. The artificial-intelligence philosopher Thomas Metzinger considers artificial subjectivity possible, especially in the direction of hybrid biorobotics, and, consequently, an “empirical, not philosophical” issue.⁴⁴ He emphasizes its ethically problematic character: “it is not at all clear if the biological form of consciousness, as so far brought about by evolution on our planet, is a desirable form of experience, an actual good in itself.”⁴⁵ This problematic feature concerns conscious pain and suffering: evolution

      has created an expanding ocean of suffering and confusion where there previously was none. As not only the simple number of individual conscious subjects but also the dimensionality of their phenomenal state spaces is continuously increasing, this ocean is also deepening.⁴⁶

      And it is reasonable to expect that new artificially generated forms of awareness will create new “deeper” forms of suffering . . . One should be careful to note how this ethical thesis is not an idiosyncrasy of Metzinger as a private person, but is a consistent implication of his theoretical framework: the moment one endorses the full naturalization of human subjectivity, the avoidance of pain and suffering cannot but appear as the ultimate ethical point of reference. The only thing one should add to this is that, if one follows this line of reasoning to the end, drawing all the consequences from the fact that evolution “has created an expanding ocean of suffering and confusion where there previously was none,” then one should also renounce human subjectivity itself: we would have had much less suffering if we had remained animals . . . and, to push it yet further, if animals had remained plants, if plants had remained single cells, if cells had remained minerals.

      One of the great ironies of our predicament is that this same biomorality, focused on happiness and on preventing suffering, is today invoked as the underlying principle for the justification of torture: we should torture—impose pain and suffering—in order to prevent more suffering. One is truly tempted to paraphrase De Quincey yet again: “How many people began with committing a little act of torture, and ended up embracing as their cause the fight against pain and suffering!” This definitely holds for Sam Harris whose defense of torture in The End of Faith is based on the distinction between our immediate state of being impressed by the suffering of others and our abstract notion of others’ suffering: it is much more difficult for us to torture a single person than to drop a bomb from a great distance which would cause the more painful death of thousands. We are thus all caught in a kind of ethical illusion, parallel to perceptual illusions. The ultimate cause of these illusions is that, although our power of abstract reasoning has developed immensely, our emotional-ethical responses remain conditioned by millennia-old instinctual reactions of sympathy to suffering and pain that is directly witnessed. This is why shooting someone point-blank is, for most of us, much more repulsive than pressing a button that will kill a thousand absent persons:

      Given what many of us believe about the exigencies of our war on terrorism, the practice of torture, in certain circumstances, would seem to be not only permissible but necessary. Still, it does not seem any more acceptable, in ethical terms, than it did before. The reasons for this are, I trust, every bit as neurological as those that give rise to the moon illusion. . . . It may be time to take out our rulers and hold them up to the sky.⁴⁷

      No wonder that Harris refers to Alan Derschowitz and his legitimization of torture.⁴⁸ In order to suspend this evolutionary conditioned vulnerability to the physical display of others’ suffering, Harris imagines an ideal “truth pill,” an effective torture equivalent to decaffeinated coffee or diet coke:

      a drug that would deliver both the instruments of torture and the instrument of their utter concealment. The action of the pill would be to produce transitory paralysis and transitory misery of a kind that no human being would willingly submit to a second time. Imagine how we torturers would feel if, after giving this pill to captive terrorists, each lay down for what appeared to be an hour’s nap only to arise and immediately confess everything he knows about the workings of his organization. Might we not be tempted to call it a “truth pill” in the end?⁴⁹

      The