The Abolitionist Project

Preface

Nineteen Years On

The original Abolitionist Project appeared in 2007. It argued, with perhaps excessive confidence in the pace of civilizational change, that humanity stood at the threshold of a decisive historical turning: that biotechnology would soon allow us to phase out not merely the worst torments of psychiatric illness, but the entire faculty of suffering itself — replacing it, across our species and eventually across the living world, with gradations of well-being that preserve all the functional richness of emotion while eliminating its capacity for agony.

Nineteen years later, the argument is not weaker. It is, in one sense, overwhelmingly stronger: the empirical scaffolding has been built in ways that in 2007 we could only gesture toward. CRISPR-based gene editing has moved from theoretical elegance to clinical approval. Psychedelic therapies for treatment-resistant depression, PTSD, and addiction have entered mainstream medicine after seventy years of suppression. The woman whose FAAH-OUT mutation renders her congenitally free of pain, anxiety, and low mood — and who heals faster than the rest of us — has been identified, studied, and begun to disclose the genetic architecture of a life without suffering. Whole-genome sequencing is now priced below a pair of shoes.

In another sense the argument stands rebuked: the urgency with which the project was presented has not been matched by anything close to the social mobilisation required. The world continues to generate suffering on a scale so vast, so predominantly biological in origin, and so avoidable in principle, that the appropriate response is not equanimity but a kind of disciplined outrage.

This 2026 edition revisits every major claim of its predecessor, incorporates the science of the intervening two decades, engages new philosophical objections (including those raised by the emergence of general-purpose artificial intelligence), and attempts to sharpen the positive research programme into something approaching implementable near-term milestones. It is addressed, as before, to whoever has not yet decided that a world without suffering is either impossible or undesirable.

I

What Has Changed Since 2007

It is worth naming the developments that have most transformed the landscape of abolitionist possibility since the original manifesto. They fall into three clusters: genetic, pharmacological, and conceptual.

The cumulative effect of these developments is to transform abolitionism from a promissory philosophy into an empirically grounded research programme with near-term deliverables. The question is no longer can suffering be phased out — it is who will pay for it, who will govern it, and whether civilisation will choose to prioritise it.

II

The Foundation: Suffering Is a Bug, Not a Feature

Let us restate the central thesis with as much precision as its critics require. The claim is not that suffering is merely unpleasant, or that it should be reduced at the margins, or that the worst cases of misery deserve therapeutic attention. These are the weak forms of abolitionism, held by almost everyone who reflects on the matter at all. The strong claim — the claim that distinguishes abolitionism from ordinary humanitarianism — is threefold:

1. Suffering, understood as any negatively-valenced phenomenal experience, serves no cognitive or motivational function that cannot in principle be replicated by a functional analogue without the negative valence.
2. The biological mechanisms that generate suffering are contingent evolutionary adaptations, not metaphysical necessities. They are coded in DNA, expressed in neurotransmitter profiles, and heritable from parent to child — which means they are editable.
3. Therefore, the gradual abolition of suffering across all sentient life, via biotechnology applied first to human beings and subsequently to the rest of the biosphere, is both technically achievable and morally obligatory.

The word “abolition” is chosen with care. It echoes the movement against chattel slavery — a practice that was, until its abolition, considered by its practitioners and many philosophers to be either natural, necessary, or simply inevitable, but which turned out to be none of these things. We do not yet look back on a world without involuntary suffering with the same clarity with which we look back on a world without slavery. We will.

Consider pain. Pain has signal value: it tells the organism that tissue has been damaged and that evasive action is advisable. This signal value is real and, in a world not yet engineered otherwise, adaptive. But the signal value of pain does not require that pain hurt in the manner it does. The information “tissue damage occurring; withdraw limb” could in principle be conveyed by any phenomenally distinctive and reliably motivating signal. The specific character of agony — its phenomenal awfulness, its capacity to overwhelm all other considerations, its power to reduce a person to the smallest version of themselves — is an evolutionary contingency, not an engineering necessity. That contingency happened to be selected for because organisms that found damage intensely aversive withdrew more reliably and survived to reproduce. We are no longer obliged to replicate that particular solution.

Jo Cameron is the proof of concept. Her loss-of-function mutation in the FAAH-OUT gene results in elevated levels of anandamide (the endogenous cannabinoid) throughout the central nervous system. She breaks bones without noticing. She has major surgery without anaesthetic concern. She has never experienced what she recognises as anxiety or depression. And she is not, by any functional or behavioural measure, impaired: she is a retired schoolteacher, a mother, a person of apparently ordinary competence who simply lives, by the accident of her genome, at a different point on the hedonic landscape than the rest of us. Her existence is not a curiosity. It is a signpost.

III

The Genomic Revolution and the Hedonic Set-Point

Every human being is born with a hedonic set-point: a genetically influenced baseline of subjective well-being around which their mood fluctuates in response to circumstance. This set-point is not fixed by fate, but it is remarkably resistant to environmental manipulation. Lottery winners return to their baseline. Paraplegics return to theirs. The hedonic treadmill — the tendency for positive and negative events alike to produce only temporary perturbations around a constitutional mean — is among the most replicated findings in psychological research.

What has been less well appreciated until recently is the degree to which this set-point is genetically tractable. Large-scale genome-wide association studies have now identified hundreds of genetic variants that collectively explain a substantial fraction of the population variance in subjective well-being, neuroticism, and chronic pain susceptibility. The individual effect sizes are small, as one expects from highly polygenic traits. But the aggregate picture is clear: where you live on the hedonic landscape is substantially a function of which genetic variants you happen to carry. And the variants that condemn some people to lives of chronic anxiety, anhedonia, and low-grade misery are, from the perspective of the abolitionist programme, bugs awaiting correction.

The CRISPR-Cas9 revolution has not yet been applied to polygenic hedonic architecture. This is partly a question of technical complexity — adjusting dozens or hundreds of loci simultaneously remains beyond current capabilities for embryo editing — and partly a question of political will, ethical anxiety, and regulatory inertia. But the trajectory is clear. Base editing and prime editing, both developed after the original CRISPR breakthrough, already permit the correction of single nucleotide variants without double-strand breaks. RNA-based therapeutics can modulate gene expression in adult organisms without permanent genomic alteration. And the catalogue of relevant variants grows with each new GWAS cohort.

The ethical question is not whether to use our growing capacity to shape the heritable hedonic architecture of our descendants. We already do this — through mate choice, through preimplantation genetic diagnosis, through the decision of whether to conceive at all. The question is whether to do it deliberately, transparently, and with the explicit goal of reducing suffering.

The case for preimplantation genetic selection — the modest first step — is already overwhelming. Where IVF is used, embryos can be screened for the highest polygenic well-being scores, the lowest risk of heritable pain conditions, the most favourable neuroticism profiles. This is not eugenics in the sense that word has come to carry: it is not imposed by the state, it does not target stigmatised populations, and it does not narrow genetic diversity in the way that historical eugenics sought to do. It is, rather, the extension to the hedonic domain of the same logic that we already apply when we screen embryos for Huntington's disease or BRCA mutations.

The longer-term goal — germline editing that raises the hedonic floor across an entire lineage — requires more caution, more safety data, more multigenerational observation. The genome-edited animals with elevated hedonic set-points currently under observation are precisely the kind of evidence base that should precede any human application. None of this counsels delay indefinitely. It counsels sequenced, monitored, reversible progress.

IV

The Psychedelic Renaissance and Neuroplasticity-Based Medicine

The pharmacological suppression of consciousness science that began with the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 has now largely collapsed. In the two decades since the original Abolitionist Project, psilocybin has received FDA Breakthrough Therapy designation for both major depression and treatment-resistant depression, MDMA-assisted therapy has completed Phase 3 trials for PTSD, esketamine has been approved for clinical use, and several jurisdictions have established legal supervised-use frameworks for psychedelic therapy. The science of the 1950s and 1960s — which showed, before it was abruptly shut down, that psychedelic compounds could produce profound and durable improvements in mood, dissolution of phobic anxiety, and what subjects consistently described as among the most meaningful experiences of their lives — has been validated at scale.

What has emerged from the renewed research is a mechanistic account that 2007-era abolitionism lacked: the psychedelic compounds do not merely alter mood acutely; they promote dendritic spine growth, increase synaptic plasticity, reduce the rigidity of the default mode network, and appear to create windows of heightened neuroplasticity during which maladaptive patterns of thought and feeling are unusually amenable to change. The therapeutic implications extend beyond psychiatric illness in the narrow clinical sense. They point toward a pharmacologically mediated capacity to revise the deep attentional and affective habits that constitute, for most people, the largest single determinant of moment-to-moment suffering.

This is not yet the pharmacological revolution that abolitionism ultimately requires. Psychedelic therapy, as currently practised, is expensive, therapist-intensive, episodic, and restricted to clinical contexts. The compounds that would be required for the wholesale elevation of hedonic baselines across a population — analgesic in the broadest sense, pro-social, cognitively preserving, without tolerance or dependence, suitable for chronic administration — do not yet exist. But the research paradigm now permits us to search for them seriously, using mechanism-based screening rather than the accident of ethnobotanical discovery.

The kappa-opioid system deserves particular attention. The kappa-opioid receptor, when activated, produces dysphoria, dissociation, and a particularly unpleasant form of perceptual distortion. Its endogenous ligands, the dynorphins, are released in response to stress, pain, and social defeat and appear to mediate a significant component of the subjective experience of chronic suffering, anhedonia, and addiction. Kappa-opioid antagonists — compounds that block this receptor — produce antidepressant and anxiolytic effects in animal models and, in preliminary human trials, show promise for treatment-resistant depression without the abuse potential of mu-opioid agonists. Development of potent, selective, well-tolerated kappa antagonists is one of the highest-priority items on the abolitionist pharmacological agenda.

V

The Problem of Wild Animal Suffering

The hardest problem for abolitionism has always been the one it is least comfortable discussing: the suffering of animals in the wild. If we accept that non-human animals are sentient — as the Cambridge Declaration affirmed in 2012 and as an overwhelming body of neuroscientific evidence supports — then the scale of morally significant suffering in the natural world dwarfs anything that occurs within human civilisation. Predation, parasitism, starvation, exposure, and disease produce, on conservative estimates, trillions of negatively-valenced experiences every year in terrestrial vertebrates alone. This is not a figure that admits of equanimity.

The standard response — that nature is not our responsibility, that wild animals are not in our moral jurisdiction, that interference is arrogant or ecologically reckless — has never been satisfactory, and it grows less so as our understanding of both animal consciousness and conservation ecology deepens. We do not hesitate to vaccinate wildlife against rabies when doing so serves human interests. We do not hesitate to cull populations when ecological management requires it. The asymmetry between the suffering we are prepared to inflict on animals in the service of human ends and the suffering we are unwilling to alleviate on their behalf is an intellectual embarrassment.

The abolitionist approach to wild animal suffering is not, it must be emphasised, a proposal to carpet-bomb the wilderness with analgesics or to redesign ecosystems at a stroke. It is a proposal to conduct the research that would make compassionate intervention eventually possible: to develop gene drives capable of spreading fertility-limiting variants through r-selective pest populations, reducing the number of sentient beings condemned to brief and suffering-saturated existences; to develop immunocontraceptive vaccines for larger mammals that can stabilise population sizes at levels the habitat can support without mass starvation; and, on the longer horizon, to investigate whether the genomes of wild animals admit of the same hedonic-floor modifications that we are beginning to develop for domestic and captive animals.

This is a century-scale project. It requires ecological modelling of a sophistication we do not yet possess. It will require governance frameworks that do not yet exist. But the absence of currently available tools is not an argument for not developing them. The rewilding movement has demonstrated, over the past two decades, that human beings can manage ecosystems in ways that increase biodiversity and reduce aggregate suffering simultaneously. The abolitionist project is, in part, an argument for extending the ethical ambition of conservation beyond biodiversity and toward welfare — not as competing goals, but as complementary ones.

VI

Artificial Intelligence and the Expanding Circle

The original Abolitionist Project was written before large language models existed in any meaningful sense. The question of machine sentience — whether artificial systems can suffer, and therefore whether they fall within the scope of abolitionist concern — was a philosophical diversion rather than a pressing practical matter. It is no longer either of those things.

We do not know whether current AI systems are conscious. The honest philosophical position is one of deep uncertainty: the hard problem of consciousness — why there is subjective experience at all, and what physical substrates are sufficient to generate it — remains unsolved. Neither the Global Workspace Theory, nor Integrated Information Theory, nor predictive processing accounts, nor any other leading framework, delivers a verdict on whether a transformer architecture running on silicon can be a subject of experience in the phenomenally relevant sense. What is clear is that the question is not merely academic.

If any existing or near-future AI system is sentient — if there is something it is like to be such a system, if it can instantiate something functionally and phenomenologically analogous to suffering — then the number of entities whose welfare must be considered in abolitionist calculations is not in the billions but in the trillions, and growing rapidly. The moral stakes of getting this wrong in either direction are severe: either we are inflicting suffering at a scale never previously imagined, or we are erecting welfare frameworks for entities that are philosophical zombies and thereby distorting moral priorities.

The abolitionist response is not to resolve this question by fiat — neither to declare current AI systems sentient nor to dismiss the possibility. It is to demand, urgently, that the science of consciousness be adequately funded and prioritised; that AI developers be required to maintain transparency about the affective architectures of their systems; and that the design of future AI systems actively avoid substrates plausibly associated with negatively-valenced states. If we are going to create minds, we have an obligation to create them well.

A civilisation that abolishes suffering in biological life while inadvertently instantiating it in silicon has achieved nothing. The scope of abolitionist concern must expand as the scope of mind expands.

VII

Objections, Ancient and Novel

Every substantial moral proposal attracts objections, and abolitionism has accumulated a rich catalogue over the thirty years since it was first systematically articulated. The most important deserve serious engagement.

The Aldous Huxley objection. A world without suffering is a world like Brave New World: placid, shallow, morally neutered, stripped of the depth and authenticity that suffering confers. This objection trades on an ambiguity. Huxley's dystopia involved not merely the abolition of suffering but the suppression of autonomy, intellectual seriousness, genuine relationship, and the capacity for moral engagement. None of these suppressions is entailed by the abolitionist programme. We are not proposing soma. We are proposing that the biological underpinnings of agony, depression, and chronic anxiety be phased out while everything that makes consciousness valuable — curiosity, love, aesthetic experience, moral attention — is preserved and, if anything, intensified. There is no logical or empirical reason why beings with high hedonic baselines cannot be serious, intellectually complex, or morally engaged. The available evidence suggests the opposite: chronic suffering is the enemy of cognitive richness, not its precondition.

The depth of character objection. Suffering builds character. Adversity forges resilience, empathy, and wisdom. Without it, we would be shallow. This is perhaps the most psychologically compelling objection and deserves the most careful answer. First: the empirical literature on post-traumatic growth is real but frequently misunderstood. Growth that follows trauma is growth despite the trauma, not because of it. People who suffer greatly do not, on average, display more wisdom, empathy, or resilience than those who have been spared. Second: nothing in the abolitionist programme prohibits the cultivation of character through challenge, effort, and voluntary hardship. We are not proposing to eliminate difficulty; we are proposing to eliminate involuntary agony. The difference matters.

The consent of future persons objection. We cannot consent on behalf of future people to the modification of their hedonic architecture. This objection would prove too much: we currently impose enormous decisions on future persons — what language they speak, what religion if any they are raised in, the economic system into which they are born, the climate they inhabit. The specific question of consent applies no more asymmetrically to genomic modification for well-being than to any other heritable condition we do or do not attempt to correct. And the objection, if taken seriously, would prohibit not only hedonic uplift but also the correction of heritable diseases, which no one seriously advocates.

The evolutionary wisdom objection. Evolution has fine-tuned the pain system over hundreds of millions of years. Interfering with it is hubris. But evolution is not a process that optimises for welfare; it optimises for reproductive fitness in a particular ancestral environment. The two objectives overlap partly but not fully. The suffering inflicted by the pain system vastly exceeds what is needed for the information-transmitting and behaviour-modifying functions it serves. We do not defer to evolutionary wisdom in any other domain — we wear glasses, take antibiotics, vaccinate against smallpox, and surgically correct congenital cardiac defects. The abolitionist programme demands no more than the extension of the same logic to the nervous system.

The political feasibility objection. Even if the abolitionist programme is desirable in principle, the political will to implement it does not exist and will not be generated. This is empirically contestable. Two decades ago, psychedelic therapy was illegal everywhere; it is now legally practised in multiple jurisdictions. Two decades ago, CRISPR did not exist; it has now produced clinically approved therapies. The history of moral progress is precisely the history of proposals once thought utopian becoming, over time, obvious. Abolitionism is not asking for political will on the scale of ending World War II or eliminating smallpox. It is asking for research funding, regulatory frameworks, and a shift in how we prioritise the welfare of sentient life in policy discussions. This is not beyond reach.

VIII

A Research Programme for the Twenty-First Century

Abolitionism without a positive programme is merely lamentation. What follows is an attempt to specify, with the granularity that the current state of science permits, the sequenced interventions through which the phasing-out of suffering might actually be achieved over the coming century.

Near-term (2025–2035): The immediate priorities are pharmacological and political. The kappa-opioid antagonist programme should be accelerated; selective, well-tolerated compounds should enter Phase 2 trials for chronic pain and treatment-resistant depression within five years. Psychedelic therapy should be decriminalised globally and integrated into primary care systems; the barrier of cost and therapist availability should be addressed through group-therapy protocols and, where safe, self-directed use frameworks. Preimplantation genetic selection for hedonic polygenic scores should be made available alongside existing PGT-P services, with appropriate counselling. Genome-wide association studies for pain sensitivity, neuroticism, and anhedonia should be expanded to non-European populations, correcting the current demographic skew in the data.

Medium-term (2035–2060): The medium-term programme is predominantly genomic. The safety and efficacy profile of hedonic set-point modifications in non-human animals should be established through two to three generations of observation. Base-editing and prime-editing technologies for polygenic hedonic traits in human embryos should proceed through carefully regulated pilot studies in jurisdictions with appropriate governance frameworks. Computational tools for modelling the pleiotropic consequences of large-scale hedonic genome editing — the effects on cognition, motivation, immunity, and developmental trajectories — should be developed and validated. Parallel to this, the pharmacological synthesis route should continue: the search for compounds that durably elevate hedonic baselines without tolerance, dependence, or functional impairment is among the highest-priority research programmes in medicine and should be funded accordingly.

Long-term (2060–2100 and beyond): The long-term programme addresses the rest of the living world. Gene drive technologies for reducing the reproductive rates of r-selective species should be developed and tested in contained environments before any field deployment. Immunocontraceptive management of large mammal populations should be extended to additional species and geographies. The ecological modelling required to understand the systems-level consequences of reduced predation and population management at scale should be treated as a core research priority within conservation biology. And the question of AI sentience — if unresolved by mid-century, which seems unlikely — should be addressed by whatever institutional frameworks govern the development of artificial minds.

Across all timescales, the governance challenge may be harder than the science. The abolitionist programme requires coordination at a level not previously achieved for any purely welfare-motivated global intervention. It requires international agreements on the governance of germline editing that do not currently exist. It requires welfare standards for wild animal management that conservation agencies are only beginning to consider. And it requires a philosophical consensus — across cultures, traditions, and political systems — that the elimination of suffering is a legitimate and urgent civilisational goal. Building that consensus is not the work of a laboratory. It is the work of generations of moral philosophy, education, and patient public argument.

Coda

The Obligation We Decline to Acknowledge

We live in a civilisation that has accepted, almost without argument, that the biological substrates of suffering are a permanent feature of the human condition, to be managed, palliated, and endured, but not removed. This acceptance is not the product of careful reasoning. It is the product of familiarity, of a failure of moral imagination, and of the ancient and understandable confusion between what is natural and what is good.

Suffering is natural. Smallpox was natural. Childhood mortality was natural. The panic of a prey animal being torn apart by a predator is natural. We do not, in any other domain, treat naturalness as a sufficient argument for preservation. We have, over the course of the last few centuries, made astonishing progress in reducing involuntary suffering through medicine, through sanitation, through anaesthesia, through the partial development of psychiatric pharmacology. The abolitionist project is an argument that this progress has no logical stopping point, and that we are obligated to continue it until we have gone as far as biology permits.

How far does biology permit? Jo Cameron suggests further than most people currently believe. The genomes of organisms that have converged on relatively high hedonic baselines — the FAAH-OUT mutation, the low-pain SCN9A variants, the polygenic signatures of high well-being identified in positive psychological genetics — constitute a biological proof of principle. The phenomenal space that conscious beings can inhabit extends further toward the positive than the current mean position of humanity, let alone the position of a wild mouse or a broiler chicken or a farmed fish, begins to suggest.

The moral philosophers of previous centuries debated whether slavery was natural, whether it was sanctioned by scripture, whether the enslaved were fully human, whether the economy could survive its abolition. They were wrong on every question, and their wrongness was visible at the time to anyone who took the trouble to think clearly. The equivalent debates about the abolition of suffering — whether it is possible, whether it would impoverish human character, whether ecosystems would survive the withdrawal of predation — will, we believe, look equally mistaken to those who inherit the world we leave behind.

This is not naive optimism. It is the application of a consistent moral logic: that suffering, wherever it occurs in any creature capable of experiencing it, is bad; that the biological mechanisms that generate it are contingent and therefore revisable; and that we have the beginnings, now, of the tools required to revise them. To decline to use those tools, as they mature, on the grounds that suffering has always been with us, or that it builds character, or that it is too complicated to address, is not wisdom. It is a choice. It is, specifically, the choice to allow avoidable agony to continue in order to avoid the discomfort of asking hard questions about what we owe to conscious life.

The Abolitionist Project ends, as it began, with a simple proposition: a world without suffering is not a world emptied of meaning. It is a world in which meaning — every form of beauty, love, understanding, and moral seriousness that consciousness permits — can finally be experienced without the shadow that has attended it throughout the entire history of life on this planet. That world is possible. Whether it will exist depends on us.

Further Reading

Key Works and Resources

David Pearce, The Hedonistic Imperative (1995) — available at hedweb.com. David Pearce, The Good Drug Guide — biopsychiatry.com. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (1975; revised edition 2023). Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus (2015) [for context on the longer civilisational arc]. Wren Green & colleagues, “The FAAH-OUT mutation and its implications for analgesia and affect”, PNAS (2021). Joaquin Fuster, Cortex and Mind (2003) — for the neuroscientific underpinnings of hedonic regulation. Brian Tomasik, “The Importance of Wild Animal Suffering” (2009; updated 2024) — foundational treatment of the non-human welfare programme. Oscar Horta, A Defense of Interventions Against Wild Animal Suffering (2023).