Richard Layard’s blue pill utopia

A Benthamite would say that Cypher had made a rational, self-interested choice. By returning to the Matrix his life would be more comfortable and less stressful than it would be in the real world. However, there is one aspect of Cypher’s deal that ought to make us stop and think. Cypher not only asked to return to the Matrix, he asked Agent Smith to erase his memory of the real world. Why would he do that?

Was Agent Smith right?

The Architect never explained why the first Matrix failed, but Agent Smith thinks he knows:

Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery.

Friedrich Nietzsche would have agreed. Nietzsche argued that there were two kinds of happiness. The first was the pleasure of falling asleep: “… the exhausted want rest, to stretch out their limbs, they want peace, quiet …” This was the happiness of the nihilistic religions. Utopia, nirvana or heaven arrives when human beings stop struggling and accept the world as it is. But in the process, they will their own extinction.

The other kind of joy comes from power - from overcoming obstacles and vanquishing opponents. Any human being who longs for life rather than annihilation wants power. According to Nietzsche:

Man does not seek pleasure and does not avoid unpleasure: it will be clear which famous prejudice I am contradicting here. Pleasure and unpleasure are mere consequences, mere accompanying phenomena - what a man wants, what every smallest part of a living organism wants, is an increment of power. Striving for this gives rise to both pleasure and unpleasure; out of that will man seeks resistance, needs something to oppose him. Unpleasure, as an inhibition of his will to power, is thus a normal fact, the normal ingredient of everything that happens in the organic world, and man does not avoid it but instead has constant need of it: every conquest, every pleasurable feeling, everything that happens presupposes a resistance overcome (p 264).

When Cypher makes his deal with Agent Smith he doesn’t just ask to return to a world where his brain is fed pleasurable sensations, he wishes for power:

I don’t want to remember nothing. Nothing! You understand? And I want to be rich. Someone important. Like an actor. You can do that, right?

Unless he forgets that his new power is illusory, he cannot experience the joy of overcoming. By asking to forget his real life, Cypher is acknowledging that pleasure is not an end in itself. The desire to return as an actor is a sign of what is wrong with Cypher’s solution - he will not return as himself, the power he has will not be his own. In this way he wills the destruction of self. Cypher surrenders to the will of another.

Will Wilkinson and value monism

Both Bentham and Nietzsche insist on the same thing - life must have a single purpose. Both philosophers reduce everything worth desiring to one thing. For Bentham and Layard it is the desire for pleasure and for Nietzsche is the will to power. But in a 2005 post, Will Wilkinson takes issue with this assumption:

I think I need to stop arguing with Layard about utilitarianism because he’s really just too philosophically inept to take all that seriously. The chapter at the middle of Happiness defending the principle of utility as the sole standard for judging right action and public policy is just laughably dumb.

If I was still TA-ing ethical theory classes, and Layard turned this in, he’d get a solid “B”:

“Why should we take the greatest happiness as the goal for society? Why not some other goal - or indeed many? What about health, autonomy, accomplishment or freedom? The problem with many goals is that they often conflict, and then we have to balance them against each other. So we naturally look for one ultimate goal that enables us to judge other goals by how they contribute to it.

“Happiness is that ultimate goal because, unlike all other goals, it is self-evidently good.”

How is it that health, autonomy, accomplishment, and freedom are not self-evidently good? Layard will want to insist that we only want these other things for the sake of happiness. But that is just so much table pounding, and it is false.