David Pearce (philosopher): Quotes about suffering

“A few centuries from now, if involuntary suffering still exists in the world, the explanation for its persistence won't be that we've run out of computational resources to phase out its biological signature, but rather that rational agents – for reasons unknown – will have chosen to preserve it.”

David Pearce (philosopher)

" The Radical Plan to Phase out Earth's Predatory Species https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-radical-plan-to-eliminate-earths-predatory-species-1613342963", io9, 30 Jul. 2014

World , Suffering

“I predict we will abolish suffering throughout the living world. Our descendants will be animated by gradients of genetically pre-programmed well-being that are orders of magnitude richer than today's peak experiences.”

David Pearce (philosopher)

Quoted in Ethics Matters (2012) by Peter and Charlotte Vardy, p. 114 ISBN 978-0334043911

World , Animals , Suffering

“Suffering exists only because it was good for our genes. Conditionally-activated negative emotions were fitness-enhancing in the ancestral environment. In the current era, apologists for mental pain are serving as the innocent mouthpieces of the nasty bits of code which spawned them.”

David Pearce (philosopher)

" The Good Drug Guide: The Responsible Parent's Guide to Healthy Mood-Boosters for All the Family https://www.hedweb.com/gooddrug.htm", BLTC Research, 2012

Pain , Suffering

“Many city-dwellers have a romanticized conception of the living world. From another perspective, some "conservation biologists" favour e.g. "Pleistocene rewilding". By contrast, I think any truly compassionate person should be horrified at the terrible suffering of Nature "red in tooth and claw."”

David Pearce (philosopher)

Why not aim for a cruelty-free world instead?

" Interview with Pensata Animal https://www.hedweb.com/hedethic/interviewoct2009.html", Pensata Animal, 25 Oct. 2009

Personality , Suffering , Nature , Thinking

“If we already lived in a cruelty-free world, the notion of re-introducing suffering, exploitation and creatures eating each other would seem not so much frightful as unimaginable – no more seriously conceivable than reverting to surgery without anaesthesia today.”

David Pearce (philosopher)

" Reprogramming Predators https://www.hedweb.com/abolitionist-project/reprogramming-predators.html", BLTC Research, 2009

World , Suffering

“No amount of happiness enjoyed by some organisms can notionally justify the indescribable horrors of Auschwitz. [...] Nor can the fun and games outweigh the sporadic frightfulness of pain and despair that occurs every second of every day. For there's nothing inherently wrong with non-sentience or [...] non-existence; whereas there is something frightfully and self-intimatingly wrong with suffering.”

David Pearce (philosopher)

2.7 Why Be Negative? https://www.hedweb.com/hedethic/hedon2.htm#negative*Negative-utilitarianism is only one particular denomination of a broad church to which the reader may well in any case not subscribe. Fortunately, the program can be defended on grounds that utilitarians of all stripes can agree on. So a defence will be mounted against critics of the theory and application of a utilitarian ethic in general. For in practice the most potent and effective means of curing unpleasantness is to ensure that a defining aspect of future states of mind is their permeation with the molecular chemistry of ecstasy: both genetically precoded and pharmacologically fine-tuned. Orthodox utilitarians will doubtless find the cornucopian abundance of bliss this strategy delivers is itself an extra source of moral value. Future generations of native ecstatics are unlikely to disagree.

2.7 Why Be Negative? https://www.hedweb.com/hedethic/hedon2.htm#negative
The Hedonistic Imperative https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/514875 (1995)

Despair , Pain , Game , Happiness

“The functional regions of the brain which subserve physical agony, the "pain centres", and the mainly limbic substrates of emotion, appear in phylogenetic terms to be remarkably constant in the vertebrate line. The neural pathways involving serotonin, the periaquaductal grey matter, bradykinin, dynorphin, ATP receptors, the major opioid families, substance P etc all existed long before hominids walked the earth. Not merely is the biochemistry of suffering disturbingly similar where not effectively type-identical across a wide spectrum of vertebrate (and even some invertebrate) species. It is at least possible that members of any species whose members have more pain cells exhibiting greater synaptic density than humans sometimes suffer more atrociously than we do, whatever their notional "intelligence."”

David Pearce (philosopher)

1.9 The Taste of Depravity https://www.hedweb.com/hedethic/hedon1.htm#taste
The Hedonistic Imperative https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/514875 (1995)

Family , Pain , Intelligence , Suffering

“Much more seriously, in those traditional eco-systems that we chose to retain, millions of non-human animals will continue periodically to starve, die horribly of thirst and disease, or even get eaten alive. This is commonly viewed as "natural" and hence basically OK. It would indeed be comforting to think that in some sense this ongoing animal holocaust doesn't matter too much. We often find it convenient to act as though the capacity to suffer were somehow inseparably bound up with linguistic ability or ratiocinative prowess. Yet there is absolutely no evidence that this is the case, and a great deal that it isn't.”

David Pearce (philosopher)

1.9 The Taste of Depravity https://www.hedweb.com/hedethic/hedon1.htm#taste
The Hedonistic Imperative https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/514875 (1995)

Suffering , Nature , Animals , Thinking