The Happy Button

There’s a thought experiment of mine that has always kind of bothered me, and I think I finally worked out my take on it today. That thought experiment is the “happy button.” Simply put: Imagine you have a button, which has a wireless link to an electrode in your brain. When you push this button, you are happy. Why should you do anything besides push the button?

Note that the happy button has several differences from “an IV full of heroin.” There are no physiological side effects and no withdrawal symptoms. Also, you can push the button as much as you want with no supply issues, so you’ll never have to worry about getting more. Finally, the button has no tolerance effect, except insofar as happiness itself does. It produces the same sensation of perfect happiness every time you push the button. I want to stipulate these things so that the heart of the matter is exposed. The question comes down to value systems—is the most important thing in life to be happy?

The reason I have struggled with this highly hypothetical scenario is that I can only answer part of the question. I strongly feel that I would not want to simply push the button. At the same time, I’m not sure why. (If we’re endowing the button with amazing happiness-giving properties, my vague emotional objections would presumably wilt away once I pushed it. Thus, “because I feel icky about it” is again, not a reason to vote against the button.) I like to be able to articulate my thoughts, it makes me feel clever. Yet I also believe that people ought to look after their own happiness as long as it does not harm others, which the button does not. I will use arguments like this in reference to homosexuality and drug legalization. I have said that modern society’s high divorce rate is far preferable to people remaining in unhappy marriages. For someone so opposed to a happiness button, I frequently make reference to happiness as a cardinal value.

Perhaps we can solve this problem with recourse to morality and ethics. Is it wrong to push the happiness button? Unfortunately, I can’t think of a moral system that I support that would consider it so. Years ago on this blog I brought up my issues with divine command ethics, so let’s just discard that right now. Utilitarianism would ask me to judge which of my actions would produce the most happiness. In this case, well, I can theoretically make myself so happy that I would be well in the right. If we judge that I can’t be made that happy, then we run into an issue of whether it is ever moral to pursue my own happiness. After all, it’s highly likely that I—as a middle-class American—could send all my money to the third-world poor and achieve more utilitarian happiness than I would by, say, buying myself Cane’s Chicken. (Oh man, do they not have Cane’s where you are? It’s like, better than Chick-Fil-A and you don’t feel guilty about gay people afterwards.) While I certainly respect that it’s a good thing to engage in charity work, I worry about a principle that suggests I totally retard my own well-being until everyone is at least as well-off as I am. We also have deontological ethics, which aren’t quite as helpful with easy-to-apply rules and formulas. Our best bet is Immanuel Kant’s “act according to that maxim which you can at the same time will to become a universal law.” So, “would it be wrong to press the button?” can be transformed to “would it be wrong if everyone pressed the button?” Everyone pressing the button just makes everyone in the whole world happy. Again, that doesn’t seem so bad.

I could also try to make an appeal to something more than happiness. One character takes this appraoch near the end of Huxley’s Brave New World:

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."
"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."

This is the most attractive option so far. It certainly seems very good, at least on some emotional level. Yet, somehow, I’ve never quite been able to buy it. The Savage seems to imply, after all, that he isn’t happy with hedonism. He speaks about all of his wants, desires not provided to him by the society he is being offered. This isn’t an argument for his position, it’s simply a statement of his position. Certainly, the Savage here is essentially rejecting the happiness button, but he doesn’t really explain why—just that he is. You’ve helped illustrate the position, my friend, but not gotten me any closer to understanding the impulse. I don’t like vague emotional sentiments underlying my philosophical opinions. I like to be able to write long blog posts about my motivations, you know?

I started to find a way out of this conundrum when I started to imagine what life would be like with this button. Eventually, even with the button, I would get hungry or thirsty. Happy people still need these vital biological inputs, after all. Like it or not, you’re made out of meat. Does the button remove the desire for food and water? If yes, then it will eventually kill me, and I have a very good reason not to press it. If no, then it can’t necessarily keep me happy; eventually, I will become unhappy with having not eaten, etc. And, when I go to find food, I’ll need to either hunt and gather for it or participate in the modern economy, which requires that I work. (Or, it requires that someone else work on my behalf—which is unsustainable enough to mount a moral argument against the button.) In other words, a being bounded by physical limitations simply cannot both survive and be happy all the time. Some thought experiments rely on simplifications, but we can see that this one actually has faulty premises which lead to a contradiction.

In the end, this was a pretty stupid thing to think about. Did I really just conclude that I shouldn’t use the happiness button because there can be no such thing? Why not stipulate away the issues, like I did at the beginning? To answer this, let’s look carefully at the original question: “Why should you do anything besides push the button?” My question was, given bountiful happiness for low effort, are there reasonable grounds to do something else? The limiting case of this argument is limitless happiness and no effort—and what we discovered is that there are still human needs left over. I used hunger and thirst, but humans have plenty of other desires—for risk, for freedom, for goodness, etc. Being happy may mean that you don’t want to act on those desires, but it doesn’t remove those desires.

So yes, there is an excellent reason to do something besides be happy: we, as human beings, want more out of life than happiness. In fact, I never wondered about the morality of using the button at all. A properly balanced person can seek out their moments of happiness and truly enjoy them—while the hedonist can’t, because their happiness is self-limiting. In the end, without all the unhappy parts of life, we’re left without any context or substance to fill our moments of happiness with.