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Fall 2009...

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61 www.hplusmagazine.com extermination camps and industrialized mass-killing. Strip away our ingrained anthropocentric bias, and what we do to other sentient beings is barbaric. Combating great evil justifies heroic personal sacrifice; going vegan entails mild personal inconvenience. The non-human animals we factory-farm and kill are functionally akin to human babies and toddlers. Babies and toddlers need looking after, not liberating. As the master species we have a duty of care to lesser beings, just as we have a duty of care to vulnerable and handicapped humans. As our mastery of technology matures, I think we need to build a cross-species global analogue of the welfare state. Tentatively, I predict that next century and beyond "natural" meat will be reckoned no more legally or socially acceptable than a diet based on human flesh. Most people with a taste for the stuff may eat in vitro gourmet steaks and the like — cultured meat that will taste richer in flavor and texture than flesh from our butchered cousins. Genetically-engineered vatfood doesn't sound appetizing under that description. But when "vegetarian meat" is properly branded and marketed, who will deliberately choose the bloodstained option if cheaper and tastier cruelty-free products are available? Estimating timescales for any worldwide changeover to a civilized diet is obviously tricky. Currently tissue scientists can't culture anything tastier than mincemeat. Yet in theory mankind could make the transition to veganism mid-century or so as the switch to cheaper, healthier, mass-produced cultured meat gathers pace. I'm cynical enough to believe the cost issue will be critical, but I also believe (naively?) that moral awareness may play a small but significant role. Fortunately, the technology should prove scalable. In the meantime, anyone who wants to help accelerate the global transition to a cruelty-free diet might like to support New Harvest, the world's first nonprofit research organization working to develop cultured meat. h+: For some people, pain is their most intense form of pleasure, and in a world without suffering pain may become the ultimate taboo designer experience. By abolishing suffering, don't we risk accidentally rebranding it as something trendy and desirable? DP: Masochists don't enjoy the raw pain of getting their fingers caught in the door any more than you or me. However, certain ritualized forms of dominant and submissive behavior can trigger endogenous opioid release that is acutely pleasurable. In the future, masochists and others who relish such "painful" activities can enrich the quality of their experience by editing out the nasty bits and enhancing the most rewarding. Nothing valuable need be lost. I don't normally dwell on modes of post-human sensualism because I fear doing so risks undermining the moral seriousness of the abolitionist project. For what it's worth, I think future sexuality will make today's wildest eroticism seem like light foreplay. h+: You use MDMA consciousness as a benchmark for bliss and empathy. But like alcohol intoxication, I've seen people on MDMA being very dismissive to people with real problems while thinking they were being empathetic and compassionate. Couldn't being too happy in the face of real problems be considered a form of shallowness or self-delusion? DP: Taking MDMA (Ecstasy) may be little better than glue-sniffing compared to mental health in an era of mature postgenomic medicine. But "empathogens" like MDMA are a reminder that not all euphoriants promote selfish behavior. Ethically, it's (presumably) preferable to seek heightened empathy and sometimes fail rather than not bother to empathize at all. MDMA-induced intensity of emotional release also stands in contrast to the shallowness induced by "psychic anaesthetizers" like the ill-named SSRI antidepressants. Alas, you're right to point out how the rose-colored spectacles of Ecstasy users don't guarantee acuity of insight or accuracy of social perception. The "penicillin of the soul" is no magic bullet. Getting "loved up" is good for communing with other loved up users, but it's not a recipe for solving the deeper problems of non-users... or life on Monday morning. Even when safe and sustainable empathogens can be developed, pure compassion won't cure cancer, solve the AIDS crisis or reverse the ravages of aging. Such complex, multi-faceted medical problems need rigorous scientific research. To say this isn't to devalue the "magic" of MDMA. In a better world, the rose-colored spectacles induced by MDMA-like states may be as socially perceptive as the most hard-edged "depressive realism" of contemporary cynics. In the meantime, Darwinian consciousness is prudent for a Darwinian world. h+: Humans have violent predatory instincts wired into the pleasure/ reward center that civilization no longer finds useful. We repress these instincts through behavioral conditioning but they still present themselves as pathologies in mentally unstable people. Would you support proactive gene modification to abolish these predatory instincts to make humans more docile? DP: Proactive gene-modification to enrich our capacity for empathy strikes me as morally admirable. "Docile" is a loaded word; if you'd said "pacific" instead, I'd agree. In an era of weapons of mass destruction and bioterrorism, human survival may even depend on it. Until humans establish self-sustaining bases beyond the Earth on the Moon and Mars, the extinction of intelligent life itself is a non-negligible possibility. Britain's Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees, estimates the probability of human extinction before the year 2100 is around 50 percent! The world's predators aren't confined to violent criminals or the mentally ill: they include "statesmen" holding senior positions of political and military power. The genetic source of most human predatory behavior has been identified: the Y chromosome. However, this is one risk factor we're probably stuck with for a long time to come. Competitive alpha male dominance behavior is perhaps the greatest underlying threat to what we call civilization. Human history to date attests to the gruesome effects of testosterone-driven male behavior. Socialization — on its own — seems inadequate. Scenarios of pro-social genetic modification may or may not work; but they aren't purely hypothetical. Humanity is on the brink of a reproductive revolution. Within the next few decades, prospective parents will increasingly choose the genetic design-specifications of their future children via pre- implantation diagnosis. In the absence of a regulatory framework, one may hope most parents will choose genotypes for loving, empathetic children and decline to choose "sociopathic" alleles, e.g. the less active "warrior gene" variant of monoamine oxidase A, which is associated with anti-social and violent behavior. A lot of our nastier alleles/allelic combinations were genetically adaptive in the ancestral environment. They may exert a potentially catastrophic influence now. At the risk of sounding like some crude genetic determinist, it may eventually be possible to edit out some of our more sinister code and enhance the expression of the pro-social. One example here would be oxytocin, the "trust hormone," recently shown to be copiously released by taking MDMA. Enriching long-term oxytocin function could make us naturally more honest with each other — not just more trusting but more

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