Can Biotechnology Abolish Suffering?

By: David Pearce

Narrated by: Brandon Woodall

Can Biotechnology Abolish Suffering? is a collection of essays by utilitarian philosopher David Pearce. The essays deal with a variety of subjects, including the abolition of suffering through biotechnology, negative utilitarianism, our obligations toward non-human animals, the nature of consciousness, and the future of intelligent life.

©2017 David Pearce (P)2019 David Pearce

If the title is a question…

The answer is probably no.

Indeed, most of the transhumanist/posthumanist literature of the 1980s onward (Drexler, Kurzweil, Bostrom, etc) is not reality-grounded, but faith-based.

Pearce’s core arguments rest upon some entirely unfounded assumptions (Moore’s Law forever! Recursive self improvement! X is theoretically possible, therefore practically inevitable! We’ll be able to surveil and manipulate every cubic meter of the planet, but not in a creepy way!), and a cursory (at best) comprehension of the technologies involved.

As a molecular biologist, I have done my fair share of work professionally on both gene editing and drug discovery, topics central to Pearce’s thesis. Hoo boy is this book full of hokum and wishful thinking. As one of my instructors used to stress, it’s just as important to understand HOW a technique works as it is to understand WHAT a technique can do. Pearce looks at what we can do in a laboratory setting, and forgets (or assumes away, or is entirely unaware of) the constraints imposed by how we do those things.

It doesn’t help that it’s poorly written. Pearce is a Philosopher, you see, and so every sentence is a grand edifice, constructed of clauses within clauses, buttressed by erudite circumlocutions—and the occasional witty aside, but that’s another story—so that the reader mistakes obscurantism for profundity. In short: it’s shite.

I’ll grant that it’s an essay collection, and so some repetition is inevitable, but Pearce could really benefit from a proper editor. To take but one example, he often refers to “human primates.” But humans are, by definition, primates! Why use one word, where two will do, I guess? Some passages were so egregiously overwritten that I tried editing them down, and found you could say the same thing in simpler terms, with half the words.

Pearce is very selective in how he explains things. In some places, he takes care to introduce the various concepts necessary for an argument. In others, he simply throws out some jargon, as though it should be taken on faith. I’ve found that if an author does the latter it’s because they want the reader to think “damn, this dude is smart.“

If you want to learn about the realistic applications of biotechnology, I would recommend Matthew Cobb’s “As Gods” instead of this piece of garbage.

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I will give the audio narration extra credit for appropriately the pompous, overblown tone of the prose.