David Pearce (philosopher)

For other people named David Pearce, see David Pearce (disambiguation).

David Pearce
File:David Pearce - Transhumanist Philosopher.jpg
Born	United Kingdom
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Analytic
Main interests	Ethics (Negative Utilitarianism) Metaphysics Philosophy of mind Transhumanism Psychedelics
Notable ideas	Abolitionism
Influences Jeremy Bentham Peter Singer Alexander Shulgin
Influenced Nick Bostrom

David Pearce is a British philosopher. He promotes the idea that there exists a strong ethical imperative for humans to work towards the abolition of suffering in all sentient life. His book-length internet manifesto The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how technologies such as genetic engineering, nanotechnology, pharmacology, and neurosurgery could potentially converge to eliminate all forms of unpleasant experience among human and non-human animals, replacing suffering with gradients of well-being, a project he refers to as "paradise engineering". A transhumanist and a vegan, Pearce believes that we (or future evolutions of humans) have a responsibility not only to avoid cruelty to animals within human society but also to redesign the global ecosystem so that animals do not suffer in the wild.

Pearce co-founded Humanity+, then known as the World Transhumanist Association, and is a prominent figure in the transhumanism movement, inspiring a strain of transhumanism based on paradise engineering and ending suffering.

The Hedonistic Imperative

Pearce is primarily known as the author of The Hedonistic Imperative, a 1995 book-length manifesto in which he theorises how to "eradicate suffering in all sentient life" through paradise engineering. In Pearce's view, suffering is not necessary for humans and only exists because humanity evolved through methods that emphasised survival, rather than happiness. He writes that mental suffering will someday be seen as a relic of the past, just as physical suffering during surgery was effectively eliminated with the advent of anaesthesia.

In his work, Pearce outlines how drugs and technologies, including genetic engineering and nanotechnology, could enable the end of suffering in all sentient life. In the short term, Pearce argues, well-being can be helped by designer drugs, especially since safer mood-brighteners are becoming more readily available. In the long-term, however, suffering could be abolished by genetic engineering through biotechnology.

Transhumanism

In 1998, Pearce co-founded Humanity+, the international transhumanism association, with fellow philosopher Nick Bostrom, now the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. The association, then known as the World Transhumanist Association (WTA), is a nonprofit organisation that advocates transhumanism – an international cultural and intellectual movement with an eventual goal of fundamentally transforming the human condition by developing and making widely available technologies to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.

Pearce's ideas have inspired a strain of transhumanism based on paradise engineering. Pearce is vegan, and the increasing number of vegans and vegetarians in the transhumanism movement has been attributed to his influence.

Pearce has suggested that we might eventually "reprogram predators" to limit predation, reducing the suffering of prey animals. Pearce argues that fertility regulation could maintain prey populations at sustainable levels, and this would be "a more civilised and compassionate policy option than famine, predation and disease."

BLTC Research

Pearce runs a web-hosting company and owns BLTC Research, a series of websites based in Kemptown, Brighton, UK, originally set up by Pearce in 1995 when he published The Hedonistic Imperative. According to the BLTC Research mission statement, the organisation publishes online texts in support of paradise engineering and abolishing sentient suffering for future generations.

Essays and articles on the BLTC network of websites feature information on many areas of science, including pharmacology, biopsychiatry, and quantum mechanics. The websites promote the end of suffering and "high-tech anti-ageing," among other topics, and have been cited in books written on a variety of subjects, ranging from addiction to ageing. The BLTC websites also feature biographies and information about people throughout history, including European physician Arnaldus de Villa Nova, Chilean psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo and Brave New World author Aldous Huxley, which have also been published as sources on these individuals in a variety of books by authors including Dava Sobel.

Affiliations and appearances

Pearce is co-editor of Singularity Hypotheses (Springer, 2012), is a fellow with the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and was, until 2012, a member of the editorial review board of Medical Hypotheses.

He has been a speaker at many conferences, including the Singularity Summit, and given talks at the University of Oxford, Lund University, Harvard University, and Stanford University. His work has been covered by Vanity Fair, The Economist, H+ Magazine, BBC Radio, and The Daily Telegraph.

External links

• David Pearce's The Hedonistic Imperative
• Vanity Fair interview with Pearce
• Russian magazine interview with Pearce
• A World Without Suffering? An interview with David Pearce – by Marcia Rosane Junges
• NanoAging interviews Pearce
• Bostrom and Pearce interviewed by Cronopis
• Critique of Brave New World
• The Genomic Bodhisattva (James Kent interviews David Pearce in Humanity+ magazine)
• Should we eliminate the human ability to feel pain?
• Video interview with David Pearce on the Hedonistic Imperative
• Video of David Pearce's talk on Prophetic Narratives at Humanity+ @San Francisco 2012