David Pearce

The Hedonistic Imperative

Gavin

Atrocious, agonising things are happening to people like you, me and our loved ones right now. The full horror of some sorts of suffering is literally unspeakable and unimaginably dreadful. Under a Darwinian regime of natural reproduction, truly horrible experiences - as well as endemic low-grade malaise - are both commonplace and inevitable. Chapter Two argues the moral case for stopping this nastiness. Since 'ought' implies 'can', however, it must first be established that scrapping unpleasant experience really is a biologically feasible option... from an information-theoretic perspective, what counts is not our absolute location on the pleasure-pain axis, but that we are "informationally sensitive" to fitness-relevant changes in our internal and external environment. Gradients of bliss can suffice both to motivate us and offer a rich network of feedback mechanisms; so alas today do gradients of Darwinian discontent.


On what science is for, on the very most we could aim for.

Late one evening, early one morning, I realised that I was not reading a crank on the internet. I'm not sure what exactly tipped me off: the page was called The Abolition of Suffering; the Naturalisation of Heaven. Maybe the extensive and thoughtful series of responses to objections. Not as late as the heart-stopping 
  Alone Amongst the Zombies
. Or the mixture of staggering ambition with modesty: 

  
 As hedonic engineering develops into a mature biomedical discipline, the generic modes of paradise we opt for can be genetically pre-coded... The innovative, high-specification bio-heavens beyond will be far richer. We lack the semantic competence to talk about them sensibly. Yet however inelegantly our goal may be accomplished at first, the ultimate strategic objective should be the neurochemical precision-engineering of happiness for every sentient organism on the planet.

 Sounds flaky? Yes, but then so, originally, has almost every radical reform movement in history (including, of course, the genuinely flaky ones.) 
  


and philosophy with biochemistry. It is difficult to return to what you were studying - mealy-mouthed, apologist, naturalistic-fallacious bioconservative bioethics - after that.

I hadn't considered wild-animal suffering before, the giant and at-best-ignored horror it is. People are at last starting to work on this, but Pearce was there decades ago. We have a long way to go before people stop making it worse even.

More than {Singer, Ord, LessWrong}, Pearce set me on my way with an ideal ethics, which led quickly to effective altruism and AI safety. I'm not a negative utilitarian like him, but unlike almost everyone else I take that challenge seriously. 

I've met half a dozen people whose lives he affected this strongly, but the nonacademic setting limits his status.

(The published collection 
  Can Biotechnology Abolish Suffering?
 is better, newer, covering more ground. I would have called it "The Molecular Biology of Paradise", a site header used elsewhere. Or "Better Living Through Chemistry".)

 
  

  

   
Galef type: 
Data 2 - What does it imply about the world, that X could happen?, &
 Theory 1 - models of how a phenomenon works, &
 Theory 3 - pointing out a problem, &
 Theory 4 - making predictions, &
 Values 1 - an explicit argument about values, &
 Style 3 - tickles your aesthetic sense in a way that obliquely makes you a more generative thinker. 
  

  

 


[Free! here]

The Hedonistic Imperative

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