A step by step guide to building a utopia

How do you imagine heaven? Perhaps the traditional image is that of sitting on clouds, Yahweh or Allah or Zeus always being around the corner not having to explain the problem of evil, where you meet all your friends in life as well as those people you admired but never met—and generally a world in which everyone is as happy as they can be. People and religions vary in their conceptions of what this utopia is like. Some Hindus, for instance, believe that heaven is a place where you have none of your earthly desires. Muslims, on the other hand, see heaven as a place in which all your earthly desires are sated. But what is a perfect world, and is such a thing possible in principle, even if not in practice?

It seems not worth considering how a world might be perfect without humans in it: after all, however perfect it might be, it certainly won’t be perfect for us. So a “perfect world” (in our understanding) must contain humans. All the humans in it must surely also be perfectly happy. How could it be otherwise? Well, it may be that happiness does not necessarily follow from utopia, or that for some other reason in this perfect world we lack the capacity for happiness.

That seems like an absurd proposition. Would you consider the world perfect if you could not be happy, even if you couldn’t care because you were unfamiliar with the very concept? It might be argued that that might indeed be a perfect world, because we would have absolutely nothing to complain about (even though having no capacity for happiness does not seem to entail no capacity for unhappiness or dissatisfaction). But surely we can’t define a utopia so negatively. If it is to be as good as possible, we want to be able to positively see how good it is, not lack the ability to see how bad it is.

If everyone has the capacity for happiness, what then are the criteria for achieving it? Does everyone have the same criteria? It seems self evident that if everyone has different criteria for happiness, then we admit the possibility that two people can have absolutely contradictory criteria. In a mild example, two roommates might want the kitchen wall painted different colours. If they find some halfway compromise, neither will be fully happy. Furthermore, if one gets his way he might be happy for a time, but when he sees how his roommate feels about the new colour, his happiness will probably be dimmed. It’s easy to imagine similar though progressively worse examples of this kind of situation.

Perhaps the worst imaginable is that engendered by evil. If an evil (or shall we say morally abnormal) person achieves happiness by committing evil, his happiness is hardly compatible with that of the majority of people. So there are two possibilities for something approaching utopia: either everyone has different happiness-criteria and there is no moral abnormality, or everyone has the same happiness-criteria.

Is the latter possible? Not if humans are anything like the way they are (even ignoring moral abnormality). For example, if I love a particular woman, one of my criteria for happiness is to marry her. If everyone’s criteria for happiness is the same, then everyone else must also love her, including herself. That is logically possible, but impossible in practice—and anyway, it would be very strange. Of course, you might object that people can have the same essential happiness-criteria (that is, love generally) but not the same instances. So if I think marriage will make me happy, then everyone else must also think so. In this case, it very much depends on what the common criteria are. If happiness universally comes from success at the expense of others, for instance, clearly not everyone can become happy.

There may be a solution to the problem of happiness-criteria in the form of defining what “perfect happiness” is. So we might define it in such a way as to preclude the possibility that an evil person can achieve happiness by committing immoral acts. In other words, they might think they are happy, but they are wrong, because it is a twisted happiness, and therefore not real happiness. But then, of course, the burden is on us to define this happiness (ideally a priori), and that seems like something near-impossible to do except in relativistic terms—thus we are back to the problem of moral abnormality.

Perhaps it can be safely asserted that, being fundamentally social beings, happiness always depends in some way on other people. As such, a part of its definition could be the happiness of others. In the wall paint example, it is possible that both of them might decide that a debate over the colour of a room is very shallow. They might both wisely say that they value their friendship over their wall—and this is entirely possible without a loss of happiness. But in our perfect world, that would mean that people would have to be born wise, since the same possibility of amicable settlement must exist at all times. If everyone is wise, that seems to slightly deflate the value of wisdom, but if it does lead to a world that’s much closer to utopia, we’ll have to live with it.

So in a utopia everyone must be wise and consequently consider the happiness of others as contributory to their own happiness. And what of heaven? Is it the utopia we think of it as? The Hindu belief that in heaven we have no desires seems not conducive to perfect happiness all round. After all, in such a world we may as well be robots—certainly we would not be humans in any meaningful sense. The Muslim vision of heaven, as expressed in the Qur’an, is also unviable, but a little less so. If all our desires are to be satisfied, then there is still the chance that our desires clash with those of others, unless we are all wise. But the paradise envisioned is one of animal lusts being constantly satisfied to our heart’s desire: this does not seem like the lifestyle of a wise person.

Neither the great world religions, nor anyone else, has offered a convincing illustration of a perfect world. Is this because it is impossible? Or is it just impossible if human nature is as it is?