"The Hedonistic Imperative" outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life. The abolitionist project is hugely ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and morally urgent. The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved because they served the fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment. They will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture - a motivational system based on heritable gradients of bliss. States of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health. It is predicted that the world's last unpleasant experience will be a precisely dateable event. Two hundred years ago, powerful synthetic pain-killers and surgical anesthetics were unknown. The notion that physical pain could be banished from most people's lives would have seemed absurd. Today most of us in the technically advanced nations take its routine absence for granted. The prospect that what we describe as psychological pain, too, could ever be banished is equally counter-intuitive. The feasibility of its abolition turns its deliberate retention into an issue of social policy and ethical choice.
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David Pearce
David Pearce is a British vegan philosopher who promotes the abolition of suffering in all sentient life. Dave’s views are most prominently presented in <i>The Hedonistic Imperative</i> (1995), a manifesto in which he outlines how technologies such as genetic engineering, nanotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and neurosurgery could potentially eliminate all forms of unpleasant experience. He predicts that our descendants will enjoy genetically preprogrammed bliss that is orders of magnitude richer than anything accessible today. In 1998, he cofounded — with Swedish polymath Nick Bostrom — the World Transhumanist Association (WTA). He also cofounded the Abolitionist Society in 2002 with Pablo Stafforini, Sean Henderson, and Jaime Savage, and serves as its honorary president. He is currently the director of BLTC Research. Dave serves on the editorial review board of Medical Hypotheses. He also runs a web hosting company which aims to help compassionate technophobes develop an online presence as painlessly as possible. But his main interest lies in the potential use of science to eradicate cruelty and suffering wherever they are found — and eventually, perhaps, the birth of true “paradise-engineering”. fonte: http://lifeboat.com/ex/bios.david.pearce
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