ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION
- 0.1 The Naturalisation of Heaven
- 0.2 Saving Vehicles With Bad Drivers
- 0.3 Humans Are Not Rats
- 0.4 Life In Dopaminergic Overdrive
HOW?
- 1.0 Sabotage At The Mill
- 1.1 The Biological Program
- 1.2 Pumping Up The Volume
- 1.3 The Civilising Neurotransmitter
- 1.4 The Cardinal Importance Of Delayed Gratification
- 1.5 The Molecular Genetics Of Paradise
- 1.6 The Re-encephalisation Of Emotion
- 1.7 How Could Anything Be So Good?
- 1.8 All We Need Is Love?
- 1.9 The Taste Of Depravity
- 1.10 On The Misguided Romanticisation Of Feline Psychopaths
- 1.11 The Last Twisted Molecule On Earth?
- 1.12 The Persistence Of Hard-Core Porn
- 1.13 The Growing Pleasures Of Homunculi
- 1.14 Post-Perceptual Consciousness?
WHY?
- 2.0 The Psychology Of Armchair Hedonism
- 2.1 How To Contemplate An Introspective Void
- 2.2 The Importance Of Banality
- 2.3 Vacuous Desires
- 2.4 A Dirty Window On The Soul
- 2.5 Let's Get Rational
- 2.6 The Morality Of Happiness
- 2.7 Why Be Negative?
- 2.8 The Moral Panacea
- 2.9 The Significance Of An Empirical Correlation
- 2.10 A Tough-Minded Scientist Replies
- 2.11 The Selection Of Mysterious Reds
- 2.12 The Formal Successes Of Scientific Triumphalism
- 2.13 The Naturalisation Of Value
- 2.14 Four Deadly Objections?
- 2.15 Alone Amongst The Zombies
- 2.16 The Perils Of Idle Scepticism
- 2.17 The Price Of Inner Demons
- 2.18 Can We All Be Really Good?
- 2.19 Equivocal Values
- 2.20 Good Vibrations: The Value Of String
WHEN?
- 3.0 Our Emotional Future
- 3.1 Hedonism After The War
- 3.2 On Why We Need Better Drug Pushers
- 3.3 Good Code Gets Better
- 3.4 The Death-Spasms Of Peripheralism
- 3.5 And Yet It Still Grinds
- 3.6 The Technology Of Shop-Soiled Utopias
- 3.7 Living In The Real World
OBJECTIONS
- 4.0 ...impossible because happiness depends on contrast with sadness...
- 4.1 ...brain too complex...negative feedback mechanisms...
- 4.2 ...we'd just die out...gruesome fate of intra-cranially self-stimulating rats...
- 4.3 ...manifesto flawed by reductionist approach to the human soul...
- 4.4 ...unanticipated side-effects...thalidomide...
- 4.5 ...would need widespread animal-testing...inconsistent with the manifesto's animal welfarism...
- 4.6 ...unnatural...
- 4.7 ...perpetual happiness is boring...need for variety...
- 4.8 ...happiness should be rationally justifiable...
- 4.9 ...to be forced into chemically-driven happiness is wrong...false happiness...freedom to be unhappy is important...
- 4.10 ...would turn us into junkies...
- 4.11 ...one can sometimes like being sad...too precious to lose...
- 4.12 ...would eliminate personal development...lead to stasis...
- 4.13 ...why not just get high...?
- 4.14 ...no more Newtons, Picassos, Beethovens...end of mankind's intellectual progress...
- 4.15 ...makes mockery of current values and life-projects...too absurd to warrant serious debate...
- 4.16 ...would leave us helpless... manipulable by ruling elites...
- 4.17 ...sheer escapism...the importance of staying in touch with reality...
- 4.18 ...wouldn't be me...one is defined by one's sorrows as much as joys...
- 4.19 ...selfish distraction from what matters...helping the poor in the Third World comes first...
- 4.20 ...affront to human dignity...
- 4.21 ...track-record of utopianism is disastrous...terrible crimes committed on assumption the end justifies the means...
- 4.22 ...would undermine the basis of all human relationships...
- 4.23 ...might lead to (post-)humanity getting irreversibly stuck...
- 4.24 ... emphasis on mood-lifting drugs is disproportionate...easy to misinterpret...
- 4.25 ...abolitionist project presupposes a utilitarian ethic...HI collapses if utilitarianism is rejected...
- 4.26 ...will never be a Post-Darwinian Transition... there will always be selection pressure...
- 4.27 ...paradise-engineering is impossible...not evolutionarily stable...
- 4.28 ...contradiction...abolitionism can't be reconciled with an absence of compulsion...
- 4.29 ...why invoke nanotechnology; isn't genetic engineering enough...?
- 4.30 ..."pushy" parents will choose genotypes for children destined to be smart, driven and successful rather than happy...
- 4.31 ...persistence of "natural" reproducers with Darwinian genotypes means that suffering won't be abolished...
- 4.32 ...cosmic HI? Some pitfalls...
- 4.33 ...why stress gradients of well-being? Wouldn't permanent maximum bliss be ethically better...?
- 4.34 ...why the headlong rush? Let's wait until we have the wisdom to understand the implications of what we're doing...
- 4.35 ...the Simulation Argument suggests suffering can never be abolished...
CONCLUSION
HedWeb
Nootropics
Future Opioids
BLTC Research
Superhappiness
Utopian Surgery?
Wirehead Hedonism
The Good Drug Guide
The Abolitionist Proect
MDMA: Utopian Pharmacology
Critique of Huxley's Brave New World
E-mail Dave
dave@hedweb.com
