What is the difference between artificial happiness and the real thing?
Can someone be happy and still be in terribly difficult and painful
circumstances? That seems a bit contradictory.
Perhaps the real difficulty here is the difficulty of knowing what the
true mental state is. Obviously, creating someone with a fixed smile
on their face is no indication that they are actually happy. Even if we
have good general understanding of genetics it may be much longer before
we can say with confidence that a particular design will lead to a happy
being, one which does not suffer.
Still, in terms of judging morality, I'd say we have to use our best
understanding of these matters, just as in other areas of uncertainty.
We may want to err on the side of caution, in which case creating beings
with drastically new mental structures could be considered immoral,
since we might unknowingly create a being who was constantly in terrible
pain, and who (of course) never volunteered to undergo that experience.
This would obviously hinder the growth of understanding the mind and
brain, but it would be wrong to gain knowledge at the cost of involuntary
suffering by others.
Hal