When I was 17 I was part of a six week summer seminar at Cornell on the theme of "the individual and the community." A dozen of us nerdly teens read an intensive diet of John Stuart Mill, Nietzsche, Marx and Freud, under the tutelage of two philosophy professors. After that I was a determined socialist who relied heavily on Mills utilitarianism for my ethics, even after I became one of the spokespeople for transhumanism.
My first book,
Citizen Cyborg, was an attempt to sketch out a left transhumanist perspective on the ongoing biopolitical debates. Under Bush we transhumanists had a bête noir in the President's Council on Bioethics, headed by the determinedly anti-enhancement Leon Kass, and aided by Frank Fukuyama and the vast right and left-wing conspiracy of people freaked out by a smarter, healthier, longer-lived future. In the book I started from what I thought was a hybrid left Millsian-transhumanist proposition, but which was really just a core Enlightenment tenet, that the more control we have over our lives, individually and collectively, the happier we will be.
I devoted a chapter to parsing ways that individual freedom, social egalitarianism, and neurotechnologies like SSRIs have made and will make us happier. I didn't interrogate the concept of happiness deeply. I discussed the control of physical pain and the treatment of mental illness. Then I discussed the evidence that our happiness set-point is genetically determined, and suggested that it will be possible to chemically or genetically increase the average level of happiness without negatively effecting motivation.
After
Citizen Cyborg I started a second book project,
Cyborg Buddha, and began wading into the quickly moving stream of neuroscience research to investigate how we may use neurotechnologies to improve moral behavior and spiritual experience. I'm still hip deep and struggling with the torrent of social neuroscience research. I also began teaching a course on "Happiness and Public Policy" at Trinity College, and began educating myself in the growing happiness literature. As a result, six years later I am much less enamored of my earlier attempts to rationalize either social democratic politics or transhumanism, or the "technoprogressive" syncretism of the two, with the utilitarian pursuit of happiness. Instead I've been drifting toward some kind of postmodern, and posthuman, Buddho-Aristotleianism, much to my own chagrin.
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