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Does Optimizing Happiness Destroy Freedom? Thinking Through Science Fiction

81 min read
EssaySci-Fi

0. Freedom and limits imposed by social institutions

Are freedom and a social system that pursues happiness contradictory?

When you were a child, you probably felt uncomfortable when your parents told you to do your homework. Many people share this intuitive resistance to external orders and corrections. Statements such as “this is how things should be” and “this is how things normally are” can feel suffocating from their form alone, even before considering their content. The problem is not so much the norms themselves, but the way they become fixed as something taken for granted.

However, at the same time, it is not enough to say that such restrictions should never exist or that freedom should always be absolute. There are certainly situations in which a highly rationalized order is preferable to the disorder that anarchy can bring. For example, the Destiny Plan in “Mobile Suit Gundam SEED DESTINY” and the Sibyl System in “PSYCHO-PASS” aim to achieve social stability by restricting individual freedom. Although they are depicted as dystopias, they are not dismissed as mere madness. They have a certain rationality.

The WatchMe system in “Harmony” is similar. A society in which happiness and health are managed through constant internal monitoring and mutual consideration appears to compress freedom, but it also appears to greatly reduce severe suffering. This structure cannot be explained from a standpoint that places freedom unconditionally above everything else.

The question that emerges is simple. Is freedom a supreme value in itself? To what extent does the reduction of suffering justify the restriction of freedom? Is it possible to achieve both in terms of system design?

The intuition of wanting to protect freedom and the intuition of wanting to make society as a whole happy often coexist. However, it is not necessarily obvious what standards should be used in situations where the two conflict. If standards remain ambiguous, the debate may degenerate into an exchange of emotions or a confrontation of abstract ideals.

Therefore, I decided to put the criteria into words. Rather than treating freedom and happiness as abstract virtues, we should reconsider them as principles for system design. The relationship between the two can then be organized as a structure rather than a feeling. Let’s try that.

1. Where is freedom violated?

First, let’s clarify what exactly happens when “freedom is violated.”

Modern liberalism has understood freedom primarily as the absence of external interference. As Isaiah Berlin said, freedom from interference from others is negative freedom. Based on this understanding, freedom is preserved as long as choices are formally secured.

However, there is a sense of discomfort that cannot be fully explained with this explanation alone.

George Orwell’s “1984” depicts a society where the state exercises extreme surveillance. But the surveillance itself is not what is truly frightening. In the story, an artificial language called Newspeak is designed. The principle of Newspeak is simple: systematically reduce the vocabulary and erase the means of expressing unorthodox thought. According to the novel’s appendix, “The Principles of Newspeak,” the word “free” remains in Newspeak, but only in usages such as “This dog is free from lice”; it can no longer mean “politically free” or “intellectually free.” Political and intellectual freedom no longer exists as a concept and therefore has no name. If a word disappears, the outline of the concept becomes vague, and it becomes difficult even to formulate the question.

Project Itoh’s “Genocidal Organ” has a similar structure. It suggests that violence can be ethically justified through certain linguistic manipulations. People do not become cruel simply because they are told to be cruel. By changing the way they understand the world, they come to believe that cruelty is right. What changes here is not behavior itself, but the framework of evaluation.

From this point, a hypothesis emerges. The core of freedom lies not in the abundance of behavioral options, but in the sovereignty of standards of value.

Value standards here means the evaluation frameworks that determine what is considered desirable and what should be rejected. This does not refer to mere emotions or temporary desires, but to the structure of judgment that gives meaning to actions.

To confirm this hypothesis, let’s compare three situations.

The first is a state in which you are being monitored, but you can make your own choices. The second is a state in which disorder creates a high risk of violence. The third is a state in which choices exist, but values themselves are being rewritten by outsiders.

If the third option is found to be the most unacceptable, then it follows that freedom is inherently more vulnerable to internal modification than to external constraints.

However, some qualification is necessary here. The Panopticon envisioned by Jeremy Bentham presents surveillance as a technology of rational governance, but that surveillance does not necessarily rewrite one’s inner self instantly.

Consider the situation where security cameras are installed in schools and workplaces. People restrain their actions based on the assumption that they may be being watched. However, usually a person’s criteria for determining right and wrong do not change immediately.

In this sense, surveillance remains, at the first stage, a device for regulating behavior.

The problem begins in the second stage. When evaluation metrics for monitoring are strongly linked to promotion, compensation, and trust, and when “being evaluated” itself becomes a central value, people gradually begin to base their actions on “how they want to be seen” rather than “what is right.” Moreover, when the costs of dissent and deviation are structurally heightened and access to alternative values is effectively closed off, external monitoring is transformed into an internal norm.

This is where the second stage becomes decisive. When external constraints become internalized and the possibility of reflection and reexamination is institutionally narrowed, the sovereignty of values, which is the core of freedom, is violated. Isn’t this where the boundary of freedom lies?

2. Kantian autonomy and its modification

Earlier, I presented the hypothesis that the core of freedom lies in the sovereignty of value standards. So how can this idea be connected to existing philosophical theories? What cannot be avoided here is Immanuel Kant’s concept of autonomy.

Kant defined autonomy as self-legislation by reason, and stated that personality is an end in itself and should never be treated as a mere means. This principle is clear. The refusal to treat people as tools takes the form of a theory here. It is unacceptable to reduce personality to a variable for achieving someone else’s goals. There is almost no disagreement on this point.

However, I hesitate to accept Kant’s framework as is. For him, autonomy is the capacity for universal legislation through reason, and it presupposes a kind of perfected image of the subject. Actual human beings, however, do not determine their value standards all at once according to a single law of reason. Values fluctuate through experience, change through dialogue, and are modified by emotions. Before the subject is a legislator, the subject is an entity that continues to update itself.

The issue here is whether to view autonomy as a “decision based on reason” or as “a state in which one can revise one’s own value standards.” The former assumes stable laws. The latter assumes variability.

Taking this point into account, freedom may be rephrased as follows. Freedom is a state in which one’s standards of value are not fixed by an external source and can be updated through reflection. “Fixing” here does not simply mean influence or persuasion. It means that access to alternative values is closed off and opportunities for reconsideration are systematically taken away. Culture and education inevitably participate in the formation of values. However, when that formation turns into an irreversible constraint, autonomy becomes hollow, leaving only its form behind.

This definition has two aspects. One is the inviolability of value standards: final decisions are not made by outside parties. The other is mutability: the subject can question and revise those standards. One or the other alone is not enough. Freedom does not come from clinging to fixed beliefs, nor is it possible to completely eliminate outside influence.

“Harmony” puts pressure on this definition directly. In the society of the story, nanomachines called WatchMe are introduced into the bodies of adult citizens, and constant internal monitoring automatically prevents disease and maintains health. Alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine are prohibited, and the individual’s body is positioned as a public resource of society. The problem is that this society does not function as a cold surveillance system, but as a system of mutual watchfulness based on goodwill and kindness. Health and mutual consideration have become so internalized as norms that it is difficult to reject them head-on. If Kantian autonomy is self-legislation based on reason, where does the subject of self-legislation remain in an environment where bodily sensations and desires, which are prerequisites for legislation, are themselves technologically controlled, and objecting to that control is considered an “attack on society”?

The fact that the main character, Tuan Kirie, uses alcohol and cigarettes to outwit WatchMe is a way to maintain her autonomy. At the same time, it is evidence of a structure that allows only a limited amount of deviation.

Freedom may not be a completed self-identity, but a state in which self-formation is not closed. There, value is not determined, but remains undetermined. Autonomy is a concept that includes instability.

3. Acceptance and limitations of utilitarianism

When a social system pursues happiness, where does it conflict with this sovereignty?

I basically support utilitarianism. When designing social systems, I believe that the criterion of “how many people can feel happy” is both intuitively and rationally correct. Quantitative utilitarianism, as proposed by Jeremy Bentham, is simple and powerful, and provides clear indicators for evaluating institutional design.

However, I am closer to the qualitative distinction that John Stuart Mill made in Utilitarianism. Happiness is not simply a sum of pleasure, but rather a qualitative experience that involves meaning-making and character maturation. Additionally, Mill’s defense of individuality in On Liberty suggests that the quality of happiness depends on the development of diverse personalities.

Furthermore, I believe that it is important not only to “maximize” happiness, but also to “minimize serious unhappiness.” In this respect, it connects with Karl Popper’s position of piecemeal social engineering. Popper placed more emphasis on the “elimination of concrete suffering” than on designing an ideal society.

However, if we try to extend this utilitarian principle without limit, a danger appears. The distinction between “restrictions on behavior” and “changes in personality” begins to disappear.

Restricting actions is an operation that adjusts consequences based on existing standards of value. Here again we can refer to Mill’s principle of harm to others. Mill stated that personal freedom should in principle be respected to the fullest extent, but that justifiable restrictions can only be imposed if they cause harm to others. According to this principle, the prohibition of violence and fraud is not a correction of character, but a restriction on behavior to prevent harm to others.

In contrast, what is a change in personality?

What we need to distinguish here is the adjustment of external actions and the design of the evaluation function itself. If we follow Bentham’s utilitarianism, changing personality tendencies can be justified if it increases the total amount of social happiness. However, at that moment, the subject is no longer an autonomous entity, but an object of optimization.

This issue is also in tension with Kant’s inviolability of personality. If we view personality as an “end in itself,” redesigning personality itself for social consequences risks turning the subject into a means.

For example, suppose a society introduces a system that thoroughly corrects the emotional response of anger from childhood, based on the utilitarian reason that “aggression is the cause of social unhappiness.” This is not an attempt to forbid acts of violence. It is an attempt to reorganize the “meaning of anger” and the emotional structure itself.

The Destiny Plan in “Mobile Suit Gundam SEED DESTINY” depicts this structure most directly. This social concept, proposed by Gilbert Durandal, chairman of the PLANT Supreme Council, attempts to structurally eliminate the causes of dissatisfaction and conflict by analyzing the DNA information of all humans and assigning each person an appropriate occupation or role based on genetic aptitude. Durandal himself promotes this plan based on the belief that “people are happiest when they know themselves, do what they can to be helpful, and live contented lives,” and he is not portrayed as a simple tyrant in the story.

However, under this plan, even those who acquired a profession through effort can be forced out of that profession, and choices that go against genetic aptitude are treated as institutionally irrational. Genetic analysis is said to have already determined what individuals want. The problem here is not that specific acts are prohibited, but that standards for “what should be desired” are set from outside.

Here, the object of design is not the scope of action, but the structure of desire and value judgment itself. This is the crucial difference between behavioral restriction and personality modification.

Therefore, the position here can be summarized as follows.

  • The primary purpose of system design is the minimization of severe suffering (utilitarian criterion).
  • However, this purpose does not justify targeting personality itself as an object of optimization (autonomy constraint).

In this sense, this may be called “constrained negative utilitarianism.”

4. Subjective well-being and the problem of competence

So far, I have shown the position that internal sovereignty limits the violation of freedom that occurs when utilitarianism is applied without restriction. So, who judges “happiness” and “pain” and how?

Utilitarianism has traditionally emphasized subjective utility. If the person is satisfied, it is considered a good state. However, Amartya Sen modified this premise. He points out that subjective satisfaction alone is not enough. What matters is not only “how you feel,” but also “what you can do” and “what kind of life you can choose.”

Under long-term oppression or poverty, people may lower their expectations and accept the situation. This is what is called an adaptive preference. Saying, “I’m happy with what I have” can mask structural disadvantage. This criticism is hard to dismiss.

The society in “Harmony” shows a variant of this problem. Citizens care for each other’s health, maintain social harmony, and are generally “satisfied.” However, Miach Mihie continues to ask whether this satisfaction is the result of choice, or whether it is an adaptation that occurs when the room for choice has been structurally reduced. The citizens in “Harmony” do not suffer from poverty. Medical care is highly developed and capabilities are guaranteed. Nevertheless, expressions of contentment can become a form of adaptive preference when ways of life other than “being healthy and caring for one another” are virtually eliminated, and even the body is managed as a public resource. Guaranteed capabilities and a unified evaluation framework go hand in hand. Issues at this level are outside the scope of Sen’s capabilities approach.

I accept the point that subjective satisfaction alone is not sufficient and that guarantees of ability are necessary.

Institutions have a responsibility to redress capability gaps and structural disadvantages. Basic conditions such as education, health care, legal rights, and minimal economic security are justified independently of subjective satisfaction. Expanding capabilities expands the possibilities of choice, and is not itself an imposition of value standards. Rather, I think of it as a prerequisite for establishing internal sovereignty.

However, a line needs to be drawn here.

Securing capabilities is not the same as defining the content of happiness. If a system normatively determines that “this kind of life is happier” and effectively fixes that standard, it goes beyond guaranteeing ability. In this process, the evaluation framework is fixed rather than the range of possibilities expanded.

The capabilities approach is an important complementary framework. But it is not the ultimate principle that replaces internal sovereignty.

Subjective evaluation has meaning only under conditions where capability is guaranteed. In the end, it is the individual, not the system, who decides what constitutes happiness.

5. Future self and temporal perspective

Examining the issue of capability has made it clear that determining happiness requires conditions that go beyond subjective satisfaction. However, apart from capability, there is another axis to consider: time. The self is continuous across time, but to what extent should we bring that continuity into present judgment?

For example, imagine a person who is contemplating suicide. People around them often say things like this to someone who wants to end their life in severe pain: “Maybe you will be happier in the future.” “This is temporary.” Such statements are likely based on good intentions. However, structurally, they are attempts to revise present self-evaluation based on future possibilities.

The question here is to what extent future possibilities can constrain present judgment.

The latent criminal system in “PSYCHO-PASS” depicts the institutional extreme of this question. People whose crime coefficient, as measured by the Sibyl System, exceeds a certain value are subject to isolation or exclusion as “latent criminals” even if they have not yet committed any crimes. What is at work here is the denial of one’s present personality based on predictions of the future. Even if the person in question claims that they are not a criminal, the numbers override that self-evaluation. Far from merely constraining present judgment, future possibilities nullify present subjectivity itself. This is not a resolution of the tension between the future self and the present self, but an institutional abolition of the present self.

Future happiness has not yet been experienced by the person in question. It is only a prediction and a hypothesis. Nevertheless, if we invalidate present judgment on the premise that we know a “better future,” a structure emerges that erodes internal sovereignty.

However, this does not mean denying all interventions. Allowing time for deliberation and providing information may be justified when judgment is severely impaired or when irreversible decisions are about to be made on short-term impulses. Expanding one’s perspective through dialogue does not mean taking away the agency of decision-making, but rather can be interpreted as an attempt to restore it.

But the distinction remains. Presenting future predictions as “information” is not the same as permanently depriving people of the right to make final decisions based on that information. The former increases the material for judgment. The latter replaces the subject of judgment.

Future possibilities are not irrelevant to present judgment. However, they are not decisive criteria. Even though the self is continuous across time, from the perspective of system design, the final subject of evaluation should not be an abstract vision of the future, but the present subject who is actually making the judgment.

This temporal tension cannot be easily resolved. The question of how much weight we should place on the future is closely tied to the question of how far we should protect our internal sovereignty.

6. Thought framework and language structure

Earlier, I placed the final judge of happiness in the “current person.” However, to what extent is the individual’s decision autonomous?

What is referred to here is the so-called Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which originates from Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. There is no need to adopt a strong linguistic determinism that language completely determines thought. However, language relativity in the weak sense that language directs the framework of thought may be useful for this discussion.

We understand the world within the given vocabulary, stories, and arrangement of evaluation words. If a word that refers to a certain concept does not exist, it may be difficult to be conscious of the distinction in a stable manner. Language is not a cage that confines thought, but it shapes the terrain on which thought moves.

Newspeak, which we saw in Chapter 1, can be read as the institutional design of this terrain. If the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the observation that “language directs thinking,” Newspeak derives the practical conclusion that “by designing language, we can design thinking.” Reducing vocabulary not only narrows the range of expression, but also dismantles the very conditions under which questions can be asked. If the word “freedom” can only be used in a physical sense, it becomes difficult to formulate the absence of political freedom as a dissatisfaction. As the Newspeak appendix states, it is a language “designed to contract rather than expand the scope of thought.”

The perspective that language shapes the topography of thought also has implications for the problem posed by Julian Jaynes in “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.” According to Jaynes’s bicameral hypothesis, ancient humans did not have subjective consciousness in the modern sense of the word, and their inner thoughts were experienced as the “voices of the gods.” This hypothesis itself has not been empirically confirmed. However, what is important is the perspective that abilities such as consciousness and introspection can be established under historical and cultural conditions. The inner world is not a naturally fixed entity. If language shapes the topography of thought, and if that topography itself has changed over the course of history, then the “inside” of internal sovereignty also needs to be seen as something formed, rather than something given.

Let me give you a concrete example.

Suppose that a society assumes a vocabulary system in which “self-actualization is happiness.” In such a society, terms such as career advancement, self-growth, and achieving goals may be placed in a positive light, while “maintaining the status quo” and “a quiet life” may be discussed negatively. Here, the vocabulary system itself takes on an evaluative structure rather than simply describing facts.

Here, the problem of the future self discussed in Chapter 5 intersects with the problem of language. In such a situation, if the present choice is denied because there is a possibility of obtaining higher status or income in the future, this is not just a prediction of the future. The premise that “happiness is upward movement” is already shared.

As long as thinking is directed by a linguistic framework, presenting a future image such as a “successful self” or “a more adaptive self” as the only valid standard comes close to supplying the evaluation function itself from the outside. What is being done here is not an adjustment of behavior, but a transplantation of the definition of “what happiness is.”

However, the impact itself cannot be the issue. It is not realistic to imagine a subject that is completely independent of culture and language. The problem is that access to alternative vocabularies and different life stories is institutionally closed off, and a single value framework is fixed as the de facto sole standard.

Internal sovereignty, as defined in Chapter 2, is not complete freedom from influence. This refers to a state in which there is institutional room for people to reflect on and revise their own evaluation frameworks.

Therefore, the question we should ask is not “which values are correct,” but “which values can be fixed as the only legitimate standard.”

7. Cognitive load and bounded rationality

The discussion so far has assumed that subjects can maintain their own value standards to some extent. However, let’s examine how realistic that premise itself is. To what extent can humans make autonomous decisions?

The concept of bounded rationality, introduced by Herbert Simon, provides a starting point. Humans are not beings with perfect information and infinite computational power. Given the constraints of time, attention, and understanding, we choose a satisfactory solution rather than an optimal solution. This is what is called satisficing.

For example, when making decisions about areas outside one’s expertise, it is not uncommon for people to rely on articles and summaries at the top of search results rather than thoroughly scrutinizing primary sources. While recognizing that there may be simplifications or biases, they make tentative judgments within the range they can understand. What is at work here is not laziness, but bounded rationality.

At this stage, it cannot be said that freedom is immediately lost. This is because people are aware that they are relying on incomplete information, and the possibility remains that they will reconsider the conditions of their judgment. As long as the capacity for reflection is maintained, the sovereignty of value standards is formally maintained.

But the problem lies beyond that.

Consider a case where the mechanism for presenting information is persistently biased in a particular direction. When this is combined with algorithmic filtering, personalized information environments, and the allocation of visibility based on metrics, choices may exist in form, but the actual cognitive environment is narrowed. Assumptions about what to encounter and what to regard as a problem are laid out invisibly.

This deliberate design of the process is exactly what John Paul does in “Genocidal Organ.” John Paul, a former MIT linguist, discovers the so-called “grammar of genocide,” a deep language pattern that activates the innate “genocide organ” in the human brain, and embeds it through the media of the target country. The grammar of genocide cannot be detected at first glance. It eats away at society like a slow-acting poison, causing people to perceive violence as acceptable behavior without even knowing that their linguistic environments are being manipulated.

There is no external coercion. However, the cognitive terrain that is the prerequisite for judgment is tilted in a specific direction in advance. For humans who have no choice but to make tentative decisions based on bounded rationality, invisible biases in the cognitive environment are the most efficient route to eroding internal sovereignty while formally preserving freedom of choice.

There are two things to distinguish here.

One is self-selection based on bounded rationality. This is an inevitable human condition, and is not in itself a denial of freedom.

The other is invisible internal formation by external structures. Opportunities for reflection and reconsideration are systematically reduced, and people are continually guided toward specific values. In this case, even if the subject seems to have made the choice, the process of forming the evaluation framework is not transparent.

The problem lies in the latter. Freedom does not mean perfect rationality. Being omniscient is not a condition. Rather, it is much more important that we accept our own cognitive limitations and do not close ourselves off to opportunities to question those limitations.

The main point is the same here. Internal sovereignty does not mean being an all-powerful subject. It means a state in which the possibility of reflection is institutionally secured.

8. The technological temptation of measuring happiness

In Chapter 3, we distinguished between restriction of conduct and modification of personality. Here, we will consider how that boundary can become blurred.

In modern society, there is a growing tendency to measure, visualize, and optimize happiness and risk. Numbers enable comparisons, make evaluations transparent, and reduce arbitrariness. There is a rationality to this.

The question is how far that rationality can be extended.

The Sibyl System in “PSYCHO-PASS” is a typical example. Personality tendencies, not actions, are converted into a numerical value called the “crime coefficient,” and this value determines whether a person can participate in society. Numbers make predictions possible, and those predictions become the basis for governance.

Evaluation moves from the consequences to the inner world. So what happens when the movement progresses further?

Philip K. Dick’s “Ubik” is not a direct depiction of social institutions. However, it shows in an extreme form what it means when the standards for judging reality are held by an outsider. In the story, the characters are forced to doubt the very reality they are experiencing. Through the collapse of time and matter, the standards of “what is considered reality” are fundamentally shaken. People placed in a state of suspended animation called “half-life” continue to live in a state of consciousness maintained from outside. However, the reality within consciousness gradually collapses, time recedes, and matter deteriorates. They have no way of ascertaining whether what they are experiencing is “real reality” or an externally supplied imitation. When the standards for self-evaluation themselves depend on external sources, judgments such as “I’m normal” and “I’m happy” can only be established within the framework provided by the outside.

If happiness or sanity is presented as a numerical value and functions as the only standard of reality, then the subject structurally approaches Ubik’s half-life state. You can only evaluate yourself through those numbers. What is happening here is more than measurement. The very standards for judging reality have been moved outside the subject.

At this point, internal sovereignty weakens while retaining its form. Even if you are the one making the decisions, what counts as reality is determined by an outsider.

Consider a more realistic situation. If society’s goal was to maximize average happiness, it would encourage personality traits that are statistically more likely to be happy. If extraversion and assertiveness are correlated with higher levels of happiness, this trend will be reflected in education and evaluation systems. There is no compulsion. However, certain personality tendencies are structurally given preferential treatment.

At this stage, no personality modification is declared. Still, personality comes close to being optimized. The goal of maximizing happiness effectively establishes the contours of the desired personality.

The Harmony program in “Harmony” depicts the end point of this trajectory. This plan, set in motion by Miach Mihie, erases human consciousness itself through WatchMe, creating a world where only optimal behavior without will remains. Pain is completely eliminated. However, this is not done by restricting the subject of internal sovereignty, but by abolishing the subject itself. The maximization of happiness goes through the design of personality and ultimately leads to the erasure of personality. This is the limit that the logic of measurement and optimization can reach.

The problem is not the measurement itself. The problem is that personality is treated as a calculable variable and a particular value structure is fixed as the only standard.

Visualizing happiness should not be rejected outright. However, if it moves the very standard of reality judgment outside the subject, internal sovereignty must function as a constraint. Institutions can adjust consequences. However, they do not have the authority to finalize value standards.

9. Conclusion

Freedom and a social system that pursues happiness are not contradictory in principle. I think it is possible to achieve both. However, this is possible only if we can clearly state what range of restrictions the system should be allowed to impose, and what range the system must not touch.

What has become clear from the discussion so far is that conflicts do not arise simply because restrictions exist, but because of what the system intends to manipulate. Far from being inherently wrong, it is often desirable for institutions to restrict behavior. Restrictions intended to prevent harm to others, such as prohibitions on violence and fraud, can be justified in light of John Stuart Mill’s harm principle. Furthermore, policies that expand capabilities, as emphasized by Amartya Sen, such as guaranteeing education, medical care, legal rights, and a minimum level of economic security, prepare the preconditions for freedom by expanding the possibility of choice.

In other words, protecting freedom does not mean that the system does not intervene. Freedom can be compatible with certain restrictions and support from institutions. In that sense, freedom and the pursuit of happiness are not inherently antagonistic.

Problems arise when institutional rationality crosses boundaries. What “1984” and “Genocidal Organ” suggest is the danger that freedom is not only taken away from the outside, but also diminished from the inside. Even if options remain in form, when the very framework of value judgment is narrowed and access to alternative perspectives is closed off, freedom appears to be preserved but loses substance.

In other words, this crossing of boundaries is a conflation between restriction of behavior and modification of personality, or the design of the evaluation function. Restricting behavior can be an intervention that reduces damage and suffering based on existing value standards. However, changing or fixing personality brings us closer to determining the very definitions of “what we should desire” and “what we should call happiness” from outside. In a world where inner states become the standard of governance, as in “PSYCHO-PASS,” and aptitude virtually fixes life, as in the Destiny Plan, personality becomes a variable in the name of happiness and stability, and the core of freedom can be eroded. This does not mean that the pursuit of happiness is necessarily bad, but it does mean that the pursuit of happiness can easily slip toward “designing personality.”

Furthermore, given that human judgment is based on bounded rationality, cognitive load, and heuristic dependence, freedom does not require “perfect information” or “perfect rationality.” What is important is that opportunities for reflection and reexamination are not institutionally closed off. If the information environment or evaluation system fixes bias in an invisible way and deprives us of the possibility of updating our value framework, then freedom is quietly lost.

Based on the above, the boundary line can be drawn as follows.

  1. The system may restrict activities or guarantee abilities to reduce serious suffering. This is compatible with freedom.
  2. The system must not fix the definition of happiness or the ideal image of character as the only standard, and must not manipulate character or value standards themselves. Here lies the limit of freedom.

The position I called “constrained negative utilitarianism” in Chapter 3 is a formulation of this boundary line. Both freedom and happiness can be achieved when institutions do not confuse “adjustment of behavior” with “design of personality,” and when the updatability, or variability, of value standards is institutionally maintained. Institutions can adjust consequences. However, they do not have the authority to finalize value standards.

Boundary crossings do not occur dramatically. Numbers and rationality seem neutral. But when standards are fixed externally, sovereignty quietly shifts. That is why boundaries need to be made explicit not just intuitively, but in language.

10. Addendum - Transparency and internal asymmetry (2026/04/21)

The main argument ended with Chapter 9. However, when I reexamined the argument after finishing it, I realized that many of its principles actually run along a single axis: transparency. This axis does not apply to everything. It applies to the outside. It does not apply to the inner world. I will clarify this asymmetry as a postscript.

10.1 The axis of transparency

The problems discussed in this article all had the same structure.

The problem with the Sibyl System is not that external judgment exists. The problem is that the process of calculating crime coefficients is a black box, and citizens cannot inspect or contest the criteria for judgment. Newspeak is problematic because the very operation of vocabulary reduction is made invisible to citizens. The problem with the society in “Harmony” is that WatchMe is presented as “good intentions,” and its institutional design is not brought up for reexamination. The Destiny Plan is problematic not because it refers to genetic suitability, but because its judgment is fixed as an irrefutable standard for citizens.

In each case, the problem was not the existence of external judgment itself, but the opacity and incontestability of that judgment.

However, as long as the process is public, citizens can challenge it, and judgments can be revised, there is no conflict with internal sovereignty. External judgment is compatible with internal sovereignty only when it is accompanied by transparency and contestability.

Both the possibility of reflection emphasized in Chapter 7 and access to alternative values discussed in Chapter 6 are actually other manifestations of transparency. Unless the process of forming an evaluation framework is transparent, reflection cannot take place. If the criteria for judgment are not visible, the act of reselecting alternative values has no meaning. The capacity for reflection operates only to the extent that information asymmetry is eliminated.

Therefore, the argument had a two-tier structure: internal sovereignty was placed at the core, and transparency provided its institutional support. The first goal of system design is to minimize the serious suffering mentioned in Chapter 3, while also making the judgment process visible. The latter guarantees the legitimacy of the former.

10.2 Asymmetry between first and third person

But transparency doesn’t apply to everything. It applies to the outside. It does not apply to the inner world.

What I would like to refer to here is Liu Cixin’s Wallfacer Project in “The Dark Forest.” An invasion of Earth by Trisolaris is announced, and sophons make Earth’s science, technology, communications, and public discussions transparent to the enemy. Every strategy spoken aloud and every plan written down will be read. In this situation, Earth’s only defensive method is the Wallfacer Project. Only the four Wallfacers keep their true strategies to themselves and publicly lie, deceiving even their collaborators. This is because the moment a strategy is verbalized, it is communicated to the enemy. Only inside the Wallfacers’ minds does a sanctuary remain that the enemy cannot reach.

Although this setting is extreme in terms of science fiction, it shows a structure of inner life in its purest form. No matter how sophisticated the observational means that another person has, they cannot reach the inner self of the person in question. The Sibyl System of “PSYCHO-PASS” illuminates this point from the opposite side. Sibyl precisely measures citizens’ hues and crime coefficients, and uses those values as the standard for governing decisions. However, the story repeatedly shows that while the numerical value of the crime coefficient captures certain aspects of a person’s personality, it does not capture the person’s first-person experience itself. The existence of people like Shogo Makishima, who are capable of murder but whose crime coefficient does not rise, clearly shows that there is a fundamental discrepancy between the external measurement system and the internal state. What Sibyl assumes is “measurable” is actually just a measurable proxy indicator.

Behavior can be observed by the system. Speech can be recorded. Brain activity may be measured. However, interpreting measured data as “pain,” “satisfaction,” or “beliefs” is no more than an attempt to reconstruct the person’s first-person experience from the outside. The internal validity of that interpretation cannot be verified from outside.

This is not a problem with the precision of the measurement technique. Even with increased precision, the disconnect between first-person experience and third-person observation remains. For the Wallfacers, this disconnect is actively used as a means of defense. On Sibyl’s side, this disconnect appears as a blind spot in governance. Both refer to the same structure. The inner world is outside the range of external observation systems.

The danger of measurement and visualization discussed in Chapter 8, that is, the “transfer of standards for judging reality to external sources,” cannot actually be resolved in principle. No matter how much the system attempts to measure the inner world, only the person in question has the authority to decide whether the measurement results correspond to their inner experience.

This fact has two consequences. First, in principle, one’s inner self cannot be subject to judgment by others. It is not possible to determine from the outside whether a person’s preferences are adaptive preferences or whether a person’s satisfaction is genuine happiness. All that can be made is a presumption, and that presumption must be open to the person’s reconsideration. This is the reason why in Chapter 4, the final subject of subjective evaluation was placed on the individual rather than the system. Rather than being a matter of normative preference, it is rooted in a structural asymmetry between first and third person.

Second, transparency only applies to the outside. Systems, decision-making processes, information environments, and decision histories should be visualized. However, the inner world itself is not the object of visualization. Rather, by making the outside transparent, the inside is preserved as an area beyond the reach of others. Just as a Wallfacer can maintain a strategy internally while lying in public, a transparent outside and an opaque inside do not conflict. The former protects the latter.

10.3 Reformulation of the condition of freedom

In Chapter 2, we defined freedom as “a state in which one’s standards of value are not fixed by an external source and can be updated through reflection.” This definition will not be withdrawn. However, if we clarify the institutional conditions that make this possible, we can rephrase it as follows.

Freedom is the state of being transparent on the outside and opaque on the inside. The system’s criteria are public and contestable, and at the same time, the inner world of individuals is not subject to final decisions from outside. When institutions try to define the inside, or when they try to determine the inside from the outside, freedom retains its form but loses its substance. On the other hand, when a system operates without making its own judgments transparent, people lose the opportunity for internal self-reflection, and freedom loses substance. These two erosion paths are not separate problems, but two sides of the same structure.

The boundaries organized in Chapter 9 can be reread from this perspective. Institutions that restrict actions and guarantee abilities are compatible with freedom as long as they are done transparently. Freedom is lost when institutions seek to finalize personality and standards of worth. This boundary was supported by two asymmetries: the transparency of the outside and the inaccessibility of the inside.

References