Abolitionism (bioethics)
Encyclopedia
Abolitionism is a bioethical school and movement which proposes the use of biotechnology
to maximize happiness
and minimize suffering
while working towards the abolition of involuntary suffering. “Abolition” is used for the name of this movement, in the context of “the abolition of suffering".
The Abolitionist Society is a non-profit foundation and forum, founded in 2002, dedicated to the advancement of this philosophy.
of the same name) is inspired by Jeremy Bentham
’s utilitarian ethic
, but goes a step further in that it is more principally inspired by the tenets of negative utilitarianism. Some Abolitionists consider the elimination of genetic discrimination to be a vital component of Abolitionism in the larger sense: eliminating all involuntary sentient suffering, which is believed to stem from Darwinian design. Most abolitionists would be classified as negative utilitarian, believing that suffering of any kind, no matter how small, should be prevented. Philosopher David Pearce
’s abolitionist manifesto, “The Hedonistic Imperative”, serves as both an inspiration for the group’s theories and as a demonstration of how the world can convert Abolitionist philosophy into reality.
To many people surveyed, achieving the highest level of happiness
possible is the most important aspect and primary goal of their lives. Many people think that money
or love
will make them happier, but this has not been found to be the case in scientific studies. Happiness exists, but sometimes not for long, and people experience negative consequences from emotions and events to a greater extent than they experience the opposite effect from positive emotions — it is easy to make someone unhappy and much less easy to make that person happy again. Humans have been found in studies to achieve a “baseline happiness,” sometimes called the hedonic treadmill
, a pre-determined happiness level that a person will return to throughout their entire lives no matter what happens to him or her, regardless of income, and regardless of the occurrence of events that most people theorize would make a person permanently happy or permanently sad, such as a lottery win or the death of a close relative.
According to evolutionary theory, humans evolved through natural selection and follow genetic imperatives that seek to maximize reproduction, not happiness
. As a result of these selection pressures, the extent of human happiness is limited biologically. Through advanced scientific research, especially in the fields of neuroscience
, biotechnology
, nanotechnology
, genetic engineering
, and psychopharmacology
, Pearce theorizes in his manifesto that humans can overcome their genetic propensity for depression
and suffering. Abolitionists see depression as a physical, not mental, deficiency, that can therefore be solved just as anesthesia
can prevent pain and just as medication can often make one feel better or worse. A depressed person can usually feel better only by attacking the physical root of the depression (e.g. by taking an antidepressant
that changes serotonin re-uptake levels in the brain). By similarly re-engineering the brain, abolitionists believe that humans could become a new kind of being with invincible, lifelong super-happiness. Some hope that this could be accomplished not only through technology
already in the pipeline, such as genetic engineering, but also through techniques that have not yet been realized such as mind uploading.
Abolitionists promote the idea that emotions have a physically manipulable, not spiritual, source - and that therefore we have the ability to fundamentally change the way that human brains operate and the way that humans experience life. Abolitionists believe that where biological evolution has failed to create happiness for all people, technology can take over and eventually create a new type of posthuman
which feels only happiness and never suffers involuntarily while retaining and enhancing observable functionality. The Abolitionist Society is dedicated to bringing this idea to fruition.
In 2006, Guillaume Lucas of McGill University
and his colleagues published results indicating that depression may become treatable or preventable through gene manipulation. Mice born without a gene coding for the expression of a potassium channel found in depression-related neurons have resistance to depression (as tested by standard behavioral measures in the rodent model) comparable to that of naive mice treated with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs).
An important discovery that boosts the case for the potential to abolish suffering is the example of deep brain stimulation
of the brain's pleasure centers. The direct electrical stimulation does not create tolerance proving that there is a potential to overcome the brain's anhedonic homeostatic mechanisms. Pacemaker-type neurostimulators have been shown to reliably increase observed happiness without causing detriments to functionality: these interventions have proven to actually increase various cognitive and social aspects of human functionality.
Neuroscientist R.J. Davidson has developed reliable means to objectively quantify subjective affective status using fMRI and EEG - demonstrating that happiness can be measured. Davidson's technological innovations also provide a more accurate means of assessing happiness than that provided by subjective questionnaires.
Abolitionism makes no distinction among sentient creatures— all are deemed worthy of being saved from suffering by biotechnological intervention.
An ethical system that is similar to transhumanism
, Abolitionism deliberately defines its rationale and method of determining value according to a prime ethical directive with a focus on eliminating involuntary suffering, whereas Transhumanism promotes a collection of values including the well-being of all sentient beings without addressing the question of whether or not involuntary suffering should eventually be eliminated.
, author of ‘’The Hedonistic Imperative’’ and honorary president, founded the group with Pablo Stafforini, Sean Henderson, and Jaime Savage. The Abolitionist Society now serves as the focal point and prime community for this movement and philosophy. Pearce maintains a network of related websites on the abolitionist movement and associated subjects. The Abolitionist Society exists as a forum and ongoing initiative to critically evaluate and apply the ideals of Abolitionism through means of a nonprofit foundation.
Biotechnology
Biotechnology is a field of applied biology that involves the use of living organisms and bioprocesses in engineering, technology, medicine and other fields requiring bioproducts. Biotechnology also utilizes these products for manufacturing purpose...
to maximize happiness
Happiness
Happiness is a mental state of well-being characterized by positive emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy. A variety of biological, psychological, religious, and philosophical approaches have striven to define happiness and identify its sources....
and minimize suffering
Suffering
Suffering, or pain in a broad sense, is an individual's basic affective experience of unpleasantness and aversion associated with harm or threat of harm. Suffering may be qualified as physical or mental. It may come in all degrees of intensity, from mild to intolerable. Factors of duration and...
while working towards the abolition of involuntary suffering. “Abolition” is used for the name of this movement, in the context of “the abolition of suffering".
The Abolitionist Society is a non-profit foundation and forum, founded in 2002, dedicated to the advancement of this philosophy.
Philosophy
In this context, Abolitionism (in the context of abolishing many forms of suffering, not to be confused with the anti-slavery movement that sought to abolish slaveryAbolitionism
Abolitionism is a movement to end slavery.In western Europe and the Americas abolitionism was a movement to end the slave trade and set slaves free. At the behest of Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas who was shocked at the treatment of natives in the New World, Spain enacted the first...
of the same name) is inspired by Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham was an English jurist, philosopher, and legal and social reformer. He became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism...
’s utilitarian ethic
Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism is an ethical theory holding that the proper course of action is the one that maximizes the overall "happiness", by whatever means necessary. It is thus a form of consequentialism, meaning that the moral worth of an action is determined only by its resulting outcome, and that one can...
, but goes a step further in that it is more principally inspired by the tenets of negative utilitarianism. Some Abolitionists consider the elimination of genetic discrimination to be a vital component of Abolitionism in the larger sense: eliminating all involuntary sentient suffering, which is believed to stem from Darwinian design. Most abolitionists would be classified as negative utilitarian, believing that suffering of any kind, no matter how small, should be prevented. Philosopher David Pearce
David Pearce (philosopher)
David Pearce is a British utilitarian thinker. He believes and 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 details how he believes the...
’s abolitionist manifesto, “The Hedonistic Imperative”, serves as both an inspiration for the group’s theories and as a demonstration of how the world can convert Abolitionist philosophy into reality.
To many people surveyed, achieving the highest level of happiness
Happiness
Happiness is a mental state of well-being characterized by positive emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy. A variety of biological, psychological, religious, and philosophical approaches have striven to define happiness and identify its sources....
possible is the most important aspect and primary goal of their lives. Many people think that money
Money
Money is any object or record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts in a given country or socio-economic context. The main functions of money are distinguished as: a medium of exchange; a unit of account; a store of value; and, occasionally in the past,...
or love
Love
Love is an emotion of strong affection and personal attachment. In philosophical context, love is a virtue representing all of human kindness, compassion, and affection. Love is central to many religions, as in the Christian phrase, "God is love" or Agape in the Canonical gospels...
will make them happier, but this has not been found to be the case in scientific studies. Happiness exists, but sometimes not for long, and people experience negative consequences from emotions and events to a greater extent than they experience the opposite effect from positive emotions — it is easy to make someone unhappy and much less easy to make that person happy again. Humans have been found in studies to achieve a “baseline happiness,” sometimes called the hedonic treadmill
Hedonic treadmill
The hedonic treadmill, also known as hedonic adaptation, is the supposed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes....
, a pre-determined happiness level that a person will return to throughout their entire lives no matter what happens to him or her, regardless of income, and regardless of the occurrence of events that most people theorize would make a person permanently happy or permanently sad, such as a lottery win or the death of a close relative.
According to evolutionary theory, humans evolved through natural selection and follow genetic imperatives that seek to maximize reproduction, not happiness
Happiness
Happiness is a mental state of well-being characterized by positive emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy. A variety of biological, psychological, religious, and philosophical approaches have striven to define happiness and identify its sources....
. As a result of these selection pressures, the extent of human happiness is limited biologically. Through advanced scientific research, especially in the fields of neuroscience
Neuroscience
Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system. Traditionally, neuroscience has been seen as a branch of biology. However, it is currently an interdisciplinary science that collaborates with other fields such as chemistry, computer science, engineering, linguistics, mathematics,...
, biotechnology
Biotechnology
Biotechnology is a field of applied biology that involves the use of living organisms and bioprocesses in engineering, technology, medicine and other fields requiring bioproducts. Biotechnology also utilizes these products for manufacturing purpose...
, nanotechnology
Nanotechnology
Nanotechnology is the study of manipulating matter on an atomic and molecular scale. Generally, nanotechnology deals with developing materials, devices, or other structures possessing at least one dimension sized from 1 to 100 nanometres...
, genetic engineering
Genetic engineering
Genetic engineering, also called genetic modification, is the direct human manipulation of an organism's genome using modern DNA technology. It involves the introduction of foreign DNA or synthetic genes into the organism of interest...
, and psychopharmacology
Psychopharmacology
Psychopharmacology is the scientific study of the actions of drugs and their effects on mood, sensation, thinking, and behavior...
, Pearce theorizes in his manifesto that humans can overcome their genetic propensity for depression
Clinical depression
Major depressive disorder is a mental disorder characterized by an all-encompassing low mood accompanied by low self-esteem, and by loss of interest or pleasure in normally enjoyable activities...
and suffering. Abolitionists see depression as a physical, not mental, deficiency, that can therefore be solved just as anesthesia
Anesthesia
Anesthesia, or anaesthesia , traditionally meant the condition of having sensation blocked or temporarily taken away...
can prevent pain and just as medication can often make one feel better or worse. A depressed person can usually feel better only by attacking the physical root of the depression (e.g. by taking an antidepressant
Antidepressant
An antidepressant is a psychiatric medication used to alleviate mood disorders, such as major depression and dysthymia and anxiety disorders such as social anxiety disorder. According to Gelder, Mayou &*Geddes people with a depressive illness will experience a therapeutic effect to their mood;...
that changes serotonin re-uptake levels in the brain). By similarly re-engineering the brain, abolitionists believe that humans could become a new kind of being with invincible, lifelong super-happiness. Some hope that this could be accomplished not only through technology
Technology
Technology is the making, usage, and knowledge of tools, machines, techniques, crafts, systems or methods of organization in order to solve a problem or perform a specific function. It can also refer to the collection of such tools, machinery, and procedures. The word technology comes ;...
already in the pipeline, such as genetic engineering, but also through techniques that have not yet been realized such as mind uploading.
Abolitionists promote the idea that emotions have a physically manipulable, not spiritual, source - and that therefore we have the ability to fundamentally change the way that human brains operate and the way that humans experience life. Abolitionists believe that where biological evolution has failed to create happiness for all people, technology can take over and eventually create a new type of posthuman
Posthuman
Posthuman may refer to:*Posthuman, a hypothetical future being whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer human by our current standards...
which feels only happiness and never suffers involuntarily while retaining and enhancing observable functionality. The Abolitionist Society is dedicated to bringing this idea to fruition.
Scientific advancements
The Abolitionist Society aims to achieve its goals through scientific research. Recent laboratory breakthroughs have bolstered the idea that happiness is physically based and can be influenced through scientific methods.In 2006, Guillaume Lucas of McGill University
McGill University
Mohammed Fathy is a public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The university bears the name of James McGill, a prominent Montreal merchant from Glasgow, Scotland, whose bequest formed the beginning of the university...
and his colleagues published results indicating that depression may become treatable or preventable through gene manipulation. Mice born without a gene coding for the expression of a potassium channel found in depression-related neurons have resistance to depression (as tested by standard behavioral measures in the rodent model) comparable to that of naive mice treated with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs).
An important discovery that boosts the case for the potential to abolish suffering is the example of deep brain stimulation
Deep brain stimulation
Deep brain stimulation is a surgical treatment involving the implantation of a medical device called a brain pacemaker, which sends electrical impulses to specific parts of the brain...
of the brain's pleasure centers. The direct electrical stimulation does not create tolerance proving that there is a potential to overcome the brain's anhedonic homeostatic mechanisms. Pacemaker-type neurostimulators have been shown to reliably increase observed happiness without causing detriments to functionality: these interventions have proven to actually increase various cognitive and social aspects of human functionality.
Neuroscientist R.J. Davidson has developed reliable means to objectively quantify subjective affective status using fMRI and EEG - demonstrating that happiness can be measured. Davidson's technological innovations also provide a more accurate means of assessing happiness than that provided by subjective questionnaires.
Abolitionism
The term “abolitionism,” used to describe the use of biotechnology to eliminate suffering, was first proposed by Lewis Mancini in 1986, in his articles for Medical Hypotheses Journal. Abolitionism is the use of science to maximize happiness and minimize suffering — not just in humans but in all sentient life. It is a philosophy inspired by utilitarian ethics: if happiness equals value, then the elimination of suffering or 'maximization of value' should be the prime objective of the human race.Abolitionism makes no distinction among sentient creatures— all are deemed worthy of being saved from suffering by biotechnological intervention.
An ethical system that is similar to transhumanism
Transhumanism
Transhumanism, often abbreviated as H+ or h+, is an international intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally transforming the human condition by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human...
, Abolitionism deliberately defines its rationale and method of determining value according to a prime ethical directive with a focus on eliminating involuntary suffering, whereas Transhumanism promotes a collection of values including the well-being of all sentient beings without addressing the question of whether or not involuntary suffering should eventually be eliminated.
Founders
David PearceDavid Pearce (philosopher)
David Pearce is a British utilitarian thinker. He believes and 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 details how he believes the...
, author of ‘’The Hedonistic Imperative’’ and honorary president, founded the group with Pablo Stafforini, Sean Henderson, and Jaime Savage. The Abolitionist Society now serves as the focal point and prime community for this movement and philosophy. Pearce maintains a network of related websites on the abolitionist movement and associated subjects. The Abolitionist Society exists as a forum and ongoing initiative to critically evaluate and apply the ideals of Abolitionism through means of a nonprofit foundation.
Activities
The Abolitionist Society focuses primarily on promoting discussion and debate through the society's website forums as well as in other prominent and related forums. Designing websites which serve to educate as well as gain critical attention for the movement are also integral to the society's mission. Other initiatives include collaborating with prominent thinkers in the field of ethics and philosophy to spread the Abolitionist meme as well as conducting interviews with various thinkers and activists. Many discussions with various leaders in the related fields of philosophy and ethics are undertaken covertly. The director of the society engages in open debate with any interested parties that would like to challenge the soundness of the Abolitionist directive.Quotes
Literature relating to the abolitionist project
- Responses to commonly raised objections about the abolitionist project
- The Hedonistic Imperative
- Buddhism and Abolitionism
- Critique of Huxley's Brave New World
- Utopian Surgery: Early Arguments Against Anaesthesia in Surgery, Dentistry and Childbirth
- Utopian Pharmacology: Mental Health in the Third Millennium, MDMA and Beyond
- Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer? (pdf)