David Pearce
BLTC Research
dave@bltc.com

This manifesto outlines a global strategy to get rid of suffering in all sentient life. The post-Darwinian agenda is ambitious, wildly implausible, but technically feasible. It is defended here on ethical utilitarian grounds. Nanotechnology, designer-drugs and genetic engineering will help us transcend the legacy-wetware of our genetic past. Applied biomedical research will eliminate the atrocious kinds of suffering which our genetic constitution routinely entails.

        The neurochemistry of pain and malaise evolved only because it served the fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment. Its metabolic pathways will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture. Lifetime happiness of an intensity now physiologically unimaginable is likely to become the new norm of mental health. A sketch is offered of when and why this major transition in the evolution of life on earth is likely to occur. Possible objections, both practical and moral, are raised and then rebutted.

        Images of opiate-addled junkies, and the lever-pressing frenzies of intra-cranially self-stimulating rats, are deceptive. They tend to stigmatise, and unjustly discredit, the only solution to the world's horrors and everyday discontents alike that is biologically realistic. For it is misleading to contrast social and intellectual development with perpetual happiness. There need be no such trade-off. Exalted states of "dopamine-overdrive" can actually enhance goal-directed activity. Hyper-dopaminergic also increase the range of actions an organism finds rewarding. So our descendants may live in a civilisation of well-motivated "high-achievers". Their formidable productivity is likely far to eclipse our own. It is possible, too, that a more informed age will view any fear and suspicion of the biological panacea to the ills of the world as a mood-congruent cognitive pathology. Tragically, a knee-jerk resistance to the prospect of genetically-enriched psychological well-being is common among emotional primitives of our era.

        Two hundred years ago, before the development of potent analgesics and surgical anaesthetics, the notion that physical pain could be banished from most people's lives would have seemed bizarre. Most of us in the urban-industrial western nations now take its daily absence for granted. The prospect that what we describe as mental pain, too, could be discarded is equally counter-intuitive. The technical option of its abolition turns its deliberate retention into an issue of political policy and ethical choice.

CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5

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