The determining factor of sentience is the capacity to experience feelings that can be divided into positive and negative valences (a fancy word for emotional ‘charge’). As such, sensations like pleasure and pain are foundational to consciousness. A world divided into carrots and sticks, reward and punishment – the throttle of life’s evolutionary motor.

However, it doesn’t take an astute observer to see that our sensory experiences may not be particularly fine-tuned for efficiency or wellbeing. Physical pain can sometimes seem wildly disproportionate to response mechanisms, or simply a result of bad luck. Consider the weeks of persistent, nagging pain of a toothache, or the mere existence of chronic pain (which 30% of people will suffer in their lifetime, according to the WHO). Likewise, psychological pains like depression, shame, and anxiety, seem to paralyse rather than catalyse.

The nature of suffering is something that has always puzzled us. One only needs to take a quick glance at the art, religions, and philosophies of human history to see we have long tried to make sense of it. Take Christianity, a religion that centres pain and sin. Suffering “produces perseverance”, according to the Bible. It’s also one of Buddhism’s four noble truths, translated as Dukkha, something which can only be alleviated by the repression of desire.

As the influence of religion has waned, so too has our satisfaction with the evolutionary cards we’ve been dealt. Philosophers have since tried to bridge the gap and provide us with peace of mind. Nietzsche, a metaphysical nihilist who has had one of the greatest influences on secular understandings of suffering, believed that it helps humans develop character and exert power over their environment. He also identified suffering with the tragicomic dramas of ancient Greece, framing it as an aesthetic representation of pain. Nietzsche attempted to construe suffering as something beautiful – a kind of life-affirming lie we must convince ourselves of in order to exist.

Psychologists also see the existence of pleasure and pain as built-in features of human life, with an extreme amount of either as something that our minds will naturally try to counteract. They refer to the ‘hedonic treadmill’, the notion that we are born with an individual set baseline of wellbeing, which we ultimately return to after experiencing positive or negative life events.

While we certainly can reduce instances of suffering, everyone seems to agree that it is innate to the human condition and something we should learn to accept. Well, not everyone. If you ask the philosopher David Pearce, we have barely scratched the surface of our understanding of suffering. Not only that, he believes its elimination is also within our reach. After having co-founded the World Transhumanist Association (later rebranded Humanity+) with fellow futurist Nick Bostrom, Pearce has become a leading advocate for what he refers to as the ‘abolitionist project’: the moral duty to eradicate all suffering via advanced biotechnology.

“Until very recently, the existence of suffering was as inevitable as the second law of thermodynamics. One couldn’t sensibly call suffering immoral because nothing could be done about it. But for the first time in history, we are now actually able to tackle the biological and genetic roots of suffering,” Pearce tells me on a video call from Portugal, where he currently resides.

Pearce’s project of bio-engineering paradise is often met with unease. It’s one thing to decrease the amount of suffering in the world to the best of our abilities, but to abolish pain entirely? Pearce is used to reactions of scepticism but is also slightly bemused by them.

“One of the reasons many seem to recoil at the idea of abolishing suffering is not so much because of ethical or ideological reasons, but rather status quo bias. I sometimes frame it as a thought-experiment: imagine if we were to encounter an alien civilisation that had abolished suffering in favour of information sensitive gradients of bliss. Would we urge them to restore their ancestral horrors? The aliens would think we were psychotic,” Pearce tells me.

So, what does ‘abolishing suffering’ mean in practice? Pearce thinks that, at its core, it’s about “civilizing the pleasure-pain axis and eventually turning it into a pleasure-’super pleasure’ axis.” In the immediate future this will be achieved by ratcheting up our baseline level of mood (or ‘hedonic set-point’), as well as our pain threshold so that ‘pain’ becomes an annoyance that still provides a useful signalling mechanism. In the long-term future, he hopes (and anticipates) that human behaviour will be guided only by varying degrees of pleasure.

It might sound like pseudoscience, but there is some degree of scientific grounding. “Consider how there’s an immense variability in people’s pain responses today,” Pearce says, pointing to those diagnosed with the rare condition of congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP). People with the condition have varying degrees of indifference to physical pain, alongside an absence of fear, anxiety, and depressive dispositions. Scientists believe the condition is caused by the rare genetic mutations of two genes in particular: FAAH-OUT (pronounced ‘far out’), and SCN9A. Pearce recounts the story of Jo Cameron, a Scottish woman who first discovered she had an extraordinarily high pain-threshold after doctors were shocked by her ability to wave away anaesthesia during an invasive operation. She has since described childbirth as being “quite enjoyable, really”.

“Her genome was analysed, and it transpires that she has a very rare dual mutation of the FAAH-OUT gene that regulates levels of anandamide [from the Sanskrit word for bliss, ananda, ed.] which is an endogenous endocannabinoid in the brain,” Pearce explains. “She goes through life mildly high, and is never depressed, anxious, or in pain. She is a responsible, retired vegan schoolteacher, working with handicapped children.”

Those who have heard of CIP will probably note that it can be an incredibly dangerous condition. Some with particularly high pain thresholds have mentioned instances of placing their hand on a hot stove, only realising after smelling their own burnt flesh. It’s a common argument against the abolitionist project – that pain is a necessary signalling mechanism to protect our bodies from harm.

Pearce thinks that this argument distracts us from how debilitating and disproportionate most pain seems to be. “In principle, it would be possible to use neuro-prostheses with a manual override such that your hand automatically withdraws from the stove. If we are serious about tackling the problem of physical pain, then it is now a potentially fixable problem.”

Regardless, he doesn’t seem too concerned with extreme cases of CIP. He considers the condition to be a useful example in explaining how only a few genes seem to determine our capacity to experience both psychological and physical suffering. “There’s a continuum of pain sensitivity,” he tells me. “It’s not just these rare cases of congenital insensitivity to pain and then the rest of us. There’s a great spectrum of people who are abnormally sensitive to noxious stimuli on the one end, and then people who are only mildly sensitive on the other.”

To illustrate his point, he invites me to consider what’s referred to as ‘dysthymia’ in psychiatry: those who have a chronically low mood without being clinically depressed. “‘Hyperthymic’ people aren’t clinically manic, but nonetheless temperamentally exceptionally cheerful and bounce throughout life,” he explains.

“If you talk of abolishing suffering in the abstract, people imagine ‘losing’ something important. But if you change the scenario to imagining waking up tomorrow morning in an extraordinarily good mood and a higher hedonic set-point, with your preference architecture, values, and relationships intact, then the prospect seems less threatening,” Pearce tells me.

It’s one thing for scientists to isolate and study the genes of individuals with high pain thresholds and hyperthymia; it’s another to tweak the genes of embryos themselves. In 2019, the Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui made global headlines when he applied CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology to human embryos for the first time in history, tweaking their DNA to confer a genetic resistance to HIV. Jiankui’s experiment was widely condemned in both China and abroad for being premature, and Chinese authorities eventually sentenced him to three years of prison.

Pearce believes that much of the public outcry about the He Jiankui affair was simply a result of status-quo bias; a nervousness that arose from seeing a glimpse of a world where designer-babies become reality rather than remaining a science-fiction fantasy. “Imagine instead of tweaking the embryo’s DNA for HIV resistance, it was for pain tolerance. China had a choice, were they going to be a world leader in designer babies? They decided not to be, and the scientists were penalised.”

It’s important to Pearce that his project is viewed as something that would follow the trajectory of other kinds of biotechnological development. “First we would start with some light genetic tweaking, and then move onto the heavy stuff,” he says. In the long-term future, he anticipates such a heavy level of genetic editing that we will not only have a life of pleasure gradients, but that these pleasures will be maximised beyond today’s comprehension.

Pearce is making both a normative and predictive claim: he not only wants this scenario to become reality but thinks it will happen. “Once we get to the point where one really can just twiddle the hedonic dials of an embryo at will, I think most people will choose to do so,” he says.

Several concerns can be raised about Pearce’s project, too. The first is concern itself: the creeping anxiety many experience when the idea is proposed. Perhaps this feeling is rooted in the belief that playing God or altering a law of nature is fundamentally wrong. Shouldn’t we give some credence to this notion?

Pearce recognises that it is tough to override these biases, but suggests we look at previous technologies which have minimised suffering and certainly been a net benefit to wellbeing. Take the invention of anaesthesia, which in 1847 was met by massive religious opposition by Christians for interfering with the primeval curse – “in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children” (Genesis 3:16). Whereas this caused uproar over 150 years ago, it would be absurd to think that we have lost something innately ‘human’ when going through surgery or childbirth with anaesthesia today.

I wonder whether the use of anaesthesia to milden some of the worst human pain is comparable to creating a future world where suffering cannot be experienced whatsoever. The latter removes something essential to being human, in my view. I express it to Pearce as the following thought-experiment: assuming the abolitionist project succeeds, what are our post-human descendants to make of the history of art? Art, after all, is something that is often either driven by suffering, intended to elicit suffering from the audience, or depicts suffering itself. Do we not have reason to lament a future where humanity finds Shakespeare’s tragedies incomprehensible?

It is fair to say that Pearce has a different understanding of art’s purpose from my own. He tangentially answers by speaking about the merits of AI art, something which shows that “it is possible to produce works of high aesthetic excellence without any pain, suffering, or nastiness at all.” Indeed, he surprises and makes me slightly question his judgement when telling me that with suitable prompt engineering, he routinely finds himself creating works of AI art that he considers more beautiful than anything in the Louvre.

But even if we were to lose something ‘human’ in the eradication of suffering, that’s entirely beside the point for Pearce. As a transhumanist, he sees no inherent value to the human condition. Without religion comes the realisation that “Darwinian life is so squalid and nasty most of the time,” Pearce says.

If eugenics is to be understood as aiming to improve the genetic quality of the human population, then the ‘abolitionist’, transhumanist project seems to fit the definition. When asked, Pearce answers somewhat reluctantly: “The term eugenics has such negative overtones and such an ugly history that one doesn’t use it unless prompted. I like to call myself a genome reformist. If someone put me on the spot: yes, I support liberal eugenics.”

That is, bettering the genetic quality of the human population through voluntary means – unlike the horrific, ideology-driven results of eugenic theory we have seen used in the last century. Still, concerns might prevail that ‘liberal eugenicists’, or ‘genome reformists’, make implicit assumptions about which individuals are more valuable than others in their contribution to global wellbeing.

Pearce acknowledges the worry some have of a “privileged elite of super happy techno-nerds and the impoverished masses.” We round off by discussing what decisions would theoretically be needed to ensure that the abolitionist project is equitable and swift. Pearce points towards our changing definition of health as an indicator that suffering is becoming a broad moral imperative:

“The abolitionist project is sadly a fringe ideal at the moment. It’s a paradox, because by virtue of being members of the United Nations, all nations in the world also must sign up to the WHO – which has the most spectacular transhumanist conception of health. “It’s more radical than gradients of superhuman bliss,” Pearce claims. “The WHO’s founding constitution, which was recently reaffirmed, defines health in terms of ‘complete physical, emotional, social wellbeing.’ Well, if that’s the case, then no sentient being in the history of life on earth has ever been healthy according to the WHO. And yet, this is all done in the language of health, not madcap transhumanism.”

In trying to dissect Pearce’s arguments, it’s striking how he seems to have an answer for every challenge, except one: death. “There’s a sense one wants to grieve when someone dies,” Pearce says. “All I’d say is that I’d want my death or misfortune to diminish the wellbeing of friends or family, but I wouldn’t want them to suffer.”

Setting aside the question of whether grief can be translated to a positive hedonic experience, a concluding thought emerges: in a genetically engineered world of super-happiness, why would we want death? One transhumanist goal – Pearce’s project – inevitably leads to another: life extension.

After exiting the Zoom call, I conclude that perhaps my earlier unease wasn’t as indescribable as I thought. Even if you don’t agree with everything Pearce has to say, or rather, with the end outcome of his project, it’s hard to argue that less suffering in the world isn’t a goal we all regularly commit to, even if it’s just the suffering in our own lives. As he says himself, “Another possibility is that I could be completely wrong. But if we don’t opt to edit our genetic source code, the pain and suffering will continue indefinitely. 500 or 5000 years from now, people will still be sitting around wondering why there is so much suffering in the world.”

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