So, we've looked at why our emotions are awry and why I think there's something of a problem in responding to that using mood enhancement medications.
After I wrote all that, I listened to the next paper in my audiobook Enhancing Human Capacities and was blown away. It's a paper by Tony Hope, who is connected to the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, where I will be studying. I'd already listened to his short introduction to Medical Ethics, so I knew his name. This paper, 'Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Positive Psychology Combined', considered many of the ways in which the evolutionary history of our species leads us to struggle in the search for happiness - but it went further than that.
Hope seems intrigued by the promise of positive psychology and though I am somewhat more sceptical - I think there can be a little of the New Age guru, self-help charismatic about it - I do agree that we are indeed capable of transforming our emotional reactions.
Indeed, this was exactly what I was arguing in the post about setting ourselves up for ethical emotions.
Matthew Liao, another philosopher affiliated to Uehiro, has written a great deal about the control we can have over our emotional responses. He takes some of his inspiration, as it happens, from Iris Murdoch who relates an example of a mother-in-law who is inclined to dislike her daughter-in-law, but, after reflecting on the young woman's real qualities (rather than on her own prejudices), sees she has reason to consider her daughter-in-law more positively and thus this process of examination inspires in the older woman benevolent emotions toward her son's wife. Thinking deeply about the reasons why we we 'ought' to feel a certain way and questioning the reasons why we do feel as we do can help us to guide our emotional responses, over time, in line with what is rational in a given situation.
Liao says we can also 'induce' certain emotions by putting ourselves in circumstances where such emotions are more readily available. So, if we wish to experience more compassion, we could volunteer in a homeless shelter and train ourselves to become more compassionate. This seems somewhat contrived to me, but I get the point he's making.
In Hope's paper, he states that CBT has proven very effective at helping people who are experiencing 'too much' negativity (depression or anxiety) by using cognition to shape or reshape emotional reactivity so that it is more closely aligned with reality. He then goes on to consider positive psychology, which explores the range of emotional experience from normal to positive, in the aim of helping people to raise their general level, without necessarily having been in a 'disordered' state to start with. Through utilising the techniques of the successful model of CBT, but with the positive psychology - rather than 'normal range of health' - ethos in place, talking therapy could act as a 'mood enhancement'.
Now, one could still question authenticity, if one wanted to, but perhaps not if the protocol is strictly using reason and reality-based cognition. So, while the negativity bias is not a sign of disorder, it could be seen as leading to emotional responses that are not reflective of the real world in which we live, because the emotional responses still track conditions that would have been relevant on the savanna rather than in the city. Thus the negativity bias could be seen, as it's not in line with 'reason', as diluting our authenticity. Like a lens we are wearing that we could remove to see more clearly, rather than an instrinsic aspect of some 'essential' self.
Philosophers don't like the idea of an essential self - partly because they agree with the current science that the self is 'recreated' moment by moment as a means to interact with the world and partly because they recognise that we do change considerably over the natural course of our lives, through experiences and through reasoning about what matters to us. However, they are concerned that certain procedures could change us to the extent that we no longer instantiate the values that we once had and might experience a sense of self-alienation. They seem to worry about this a great deal more when it comes to cognitive and mood enhancements rather than physical enhancements, but just consider breast enhancement: a woman might feel so much more confident after surgery than she was before that she could very much develop into a very different personality. I think that there is a hidden dualism in this increased fear about the 'authenticity' threats of cognitive and mood rather than physical enhancements.
Rather oddly, though, this fear about personality changes does not seem to be a concern at all when it comes to sex alteration surgery and hormonal treatments for trans gender people. In that case, it seems as though there is some kind of consensus that there is an essential self which is the gender other than that which is physically demonstrated.
In a strangely reversed situation, philosophers also seem to find themselves treading on thin ice when talking about disability. Many disabled activists resent any claim that impairments are anything other than 'mere difference' and that the only negatives are caused by the failures of society to accept and provide equal consideration for disabled people. Thus, the impairment is not something to be 'cured' - and the bodily form or impairment, whatever it may be, seems to be viewed as an 'essential' aspect of the self. Philosophers, again, seem unwilling to emphasise their views about selfhood and authenticity in the face of these individuals. Which makes you wonder whether either a) the philosophers' theories are too abstract and conceptual to stand up to real lived experience or b) the philosophers are afraid of causing offense to such an extent that they mask their real beliefs. And that suggests they don't have a high regard for their own authenticity.
That is something of a diversion from the points I have been trying to address.
Back to the impact of the enhancement, though, and positive psychology might be a rational and persuasive means for us to encourage ourselves to spend time on pursuits that genuinely increase 'authentic' happiness: such as intimate relationships (which powerfully benefit positive emotions), meaningful activities and flow states. Through the use of CBT, we could come to reason correctly that such an investment would be more likely to improve our mood than chasing 'positional goods' like wealth and prestige items.
The problem with positional goods is that they draw us into a zero sum game and we get into a looping vicious cycle called the tip toe effect. So, I get a BMW and I feel a bit happier, while my neighbour feels a bit sadder as he only has a Datsun (that's the positional and zero-sum part). But then he gets a BMW and it's like we're both on tip toe and neither of us is any better off and neither of us feels happy. Say that instead of a BMW I decided to feel birds in my garden. I could feel happier by seeing the tits and finches, the robin with his piping call and the gentle sparrow, the blackbird who scuttles noisily over the gravel and the silly pigeons with that clattering, whirring wings. Nothing detracts from this and the pleasure and it doesn't involve any jockeying for position.
Now, I think this is excellent as far as our personal drives to experience a rightly rational level of increased positive emotion are concerned. To be able to overcome species biases or individual dispositional limitations seems an entirely good thing, without any clearly problematic concerns.
However, where this might encourage the moderately fortunate (wealthy, Western, educated) to focus essentially on individual well-being to the exclusion of social and political matters, then perhaps there is an issue. I mean, if those who are in a position to take some social responsibility are instead concerned with personal matters, then we could be disempowering the democratic process because fewer people might be inclined to feel that the status quo is unhealthy. It might be as offensive as the 'self-help' craze - all self-engrossed and devoid of community feeling.
That may be a false worry: people who feel more positive might be more empowered to seek to perform valuable social functions; people might realise that involvement in social justice and social improvement campaigns might enable them to find meaning and value in their lives.
But one worry does still remain: that by improving individual happiness we do not of necessity improve social happiness and might lessen the salience of the social factors that limit or harm our emotional responsiveness, which I am inclined to believe are more critically important than the individual ones - and a lot harder to navigate.
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