4 - Feeling better
Summary
A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.
(Dorian Gray, in Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray)The proposal to make people morally better by manipulating the way they feel about certain things is fraught with difficulties pertaining to the very nature of morality. Yet even if we cannot make ourselves or others morally better by the suggested methods of biological enhancement, we might at least make ourselves and others feel better, and that seems in itself a worthwhile goal, perhaps ultimately even the only worthwhile goal. Many people are not entirely happy with their lives and very few are happy most of the time. Almost everyone is unhappy sometimes, and many are frequently unhappy. This is not only because bad things happen to us – “into each life some rain must fall” – but because even when there is nothing particularly worrisome happening in our lives, it is hard to sustain an emotional high for a longer period of time. Arthur Schopenhauer, the nineteenth-century German philosopher, argued that happiness must remain the exception because it is nothing but the experience of a fulfilled desire, while the desire itself is the felt awareness of a want, and as such painful.
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- Information
- Better Humans?Understanding the Enhancement Project, pp. 55 - 72Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2013