The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

124 chapter 7He improves upon a famous mental experiment of Nozick’s in which you areasked whether you would like to be hitched up to an “experience machine.”“Superduper neuropsychologists,” Nozick had posited, in a traditiongoing back through Huxley’s Brave New World and Descartes’ thought experimentsto Plato’s cave, “would stimulate your brain so that you would thinkand feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading aninteresting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodesattached to your brain....Would you plug in?” 26 In other words, “what elsecan matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside?” Apparentlythere’s something more than instrumental feeling, more than what our goodfriend Max U cares about. As Nozick remarks in another book, “We are notempty containers or buckets to be stuffed with good things.” 27Or imagine a “transformation machine,” which would make us at the flickof a switch into the lives and characters of Albert Einstein or Queen ElizabethI, “really.” If you were starving on the streets of Calcutta you would instantlyagree. But among you, oh comfortably bourgeois readers, any takers?Roberts sharpens the questions by making clear, in his economist’s way,the opportunity cost. His character Sam Gordon is discussing the matterwith his class of high-school seniors:But there’s one detail that I neglected to mention. This imaginary life that you getto experience while on the Dream Machine must replace your actual life. You willnever wake up. You enter the room today as the teenager you are. You win theMasters, the Nobel Peace prize, surpass the popularity of the Beatles, then yougrow old and die. It can be a painless death, preceded by [the dreamt experienceof] a glorious old age. ...But after they unhook the last electrode, ...they putyou into the ground....They cart you away and bring on the next. 28“Still interested?” Sam asks his kids. Of course not. Max U would leap atsuch a chance to achieve—well, at least to “experience”—utility. But you asyour actual self would not do so, because you intend to go on being you.“While a cat will be satisfied leading an animal’s life of sensation andappetite,” remarks Daryl Koehn, “a human being needs something more.” 29The difficulty of life, within limits, is its charm. Sen makes this point withthe use of his somewhat veiled term “agency.” 30 He speaks of an “agencyachievement” that is not reducible to “enhancement of well-being” in a utilitariansense. His way of putting it sounds like David McClelland’s old idea of“need for achievement,” that is to say, the need for an identity that strives. Nostriving, no identity. You would agree to a magic spell to stop a cancer, surely.