麻豆传媒

Respect difference vs Maximise human happiness

Imagine a pill or therapy capable of rewiring your neural circuitry so as to make you more empathetic: one that decreases aggression, and causes your capacity for moral reasoning and tendency to forgive to go through the roof. Wouldn鈥檛 the world be a better place if we were all encouraged to have it? In fact, if human happiness lay on the other side of a tablet, why not embrace utopia and prescribe it by force?

Such a scenario may not be as far away as you suppose. Technologies to read and manipulate thought patterns are growing. Elon Musk鈥檚 Neuralink project is attempting to establish direct communication between our brains and computers, while Kernel, a company in California, has invested $100 million to develop intelligence-boosting brain implants. Electric shocks delivered to the brain have been found to combat depression, and certain chemicals can help us make more moral decisions.

But even if weeding out aberrant thought patterns and enforcing social conformity through technological or pharmacological means could be made to work in practice, would it be the right thing to do? Or do people have an inalienable right to be themselves, provided they pose no immediate risk to themselves or others?

鈥淐onformity may not be so good for society as we suppose鈥�

鈥淭his is a topic we need to be talking more about right now,鈥� says Chris Danforth, co-director of the Computational Story Lab at the University of Vermont. Letting the majority of the population redesign the outliers in the interests of their own safety might seem to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people, but opens the door to some terrifying possibilities. Historically, those who challenged the status quo saw their motivations recast as mental deviancy 鈥� such as Victorian women confined to asylums for rebelling against patriarchal society, or gay men like Alan Turing who were given the 鈥渃hoice鈥� of chemical castration.

鈥淏eing normal is a dangerous concept,鈥� says Mark Salter, a consultant psychiatrist and spokesperson for the Royal College of Psychiatrists in London. 鈥淗ow can we evaluate happiness or contentment, or a specific blood pressure come to that, as normal?鈥� Not only is 鈥渘ormality鈥� an illusory concept, but our conception of it is ever-changing. If we began to optimise people for the qualities we wished to see in society, who gets to choose what those are?

Perhaps conformity isn鈥檛 as good for society as we suppose. In 2015, psychologist Jesse Harrington at the University of Maryland published a study showing that highly restrictive societies fared worse in measures of overall happiness, rates of depression and suicide than moderate ones 鈥� but then again, so did highly permissive cultures. When it comes to how much abnormality we should tolerate, then, it seems we would be best off having the normal amount.

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淪hould we鈥� Make everyone 鈥榥ormal鈥�?鈥�