David Pearce is author of The Hedonistic Imperative (1995), which calls for the use of biotechnology to phase out suffering throughout the living world. In 1998, he co-founded with Nick Bostrom the World Transhumanist Association (H+). Transhumanists believe in using technology to overcome our biological limitations.


"May all that hath life be delivered from suffering", said Gautama Buddha. Abolitionist bioethics isn't new. What's changed is the technology to make it feasible. Until the biotech revolution, talk of "ending suffering" belonged to the realm of religious prophets and utopian dreamers. Natural selection didn't design living organisms to be happy. Discontent evolved because it's been hugely genetically adaptive. Human biology means that socio-economic reform and material abundance can't cheat the negative feedback mechanisms of the hedonic treadmill. Practising the Noble Eightfold Path won't recalibrate hedonic set-points or dismantle the cruelties of the food chain. By contrast, editing our genetic source code can potentially phase out the biology of suffering throughout the living world. Future life can be animated by information-sensitive gradients of well-being - a motivational architecture of gradients of intelligent bliss. Such scenarios for the future of the biosphere are clearly speculative; but what's in question is their sociological credibility, not technical feasibility.

Why does abolitionist bioethics matter? Well, if you are in agony or despair, then the answer is self-intimating. My pain and suffering is deeply important to me. On the face of it, nothing follows from this commonplace to any wider bioethical project. As La Rochefoucauld remarks, "We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others." Yet natural science gives none of us reason to believe that we are special, or to suppose that this space-time location is somehow unique or privileged. The egocentric illusion is a genetically adaptive lie. If suffering is self-evidently important for me, and if I'm not really special in the way evolution makes each of us feel, then suffering is bad for anyone, anywhere, anytime. For reasons that science still doesn't understand, the pain-pleasure axis discloses a natural metric of (un)importance: the world's intrinsic axis of (dis)value. Hence not just personal morality but also collective decision-theoretic rationality suggests that the scope of the abolitionist project should be global rather than parochial. In the post-genomic era, to confine the relief of suffering to a single person, race or species would express an arbitrary and self-serving bias.

My own values are secular and utilitarian. Yet it's not necessary to endorse secularism or utilitarian ethics to recognise that minimising suffering and promoting happiness is important - even if promoting subjective well-being is only one of your values among others. The reason for laying such stress on a strategy of genetic-biological intervention rather than older, environmental approaches is comparative long-term efficacy. Socio-political reforms, economic growth and personal self-help are important. But they aren't going to abolish the metabolic pathways of suffering. Six months after a quadriplegia-inducing accident or a mammoth lottery win, scientific studies suggest that most people will have reverted to their self-reported level of subjective well-being or ill-being before the accident or jackpot. Unless we tackle the genetic basis of suffering, the evolutionarily ancient cycle of misery and malaise will persist indefinitely. Or as Thoreau puts it, “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root”.

One of the biggest technical challenges ahead is to retain the computational-functional role of vital adaptations such as nociception, i.e. our biological capacity to avoid and respond to noxious stimuli, while simultaneously getting rid of their nasty "raw feels", i.e. mental and physical pain. I think the ideological challenges to biohappiness may prove more formidable.


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