"... our descendants may recognize that we are the sociopathic emotional primitives in the grip of an affective psychosis. Jealousy, envy, resentment, ridicule, hate, anger, disgust, spite, contempt, schadenfreude and a whole gamut of nameless but mean-spirited states we undergo each day are a toxic legacy of our Darwinian past. More commonly, perhaps, our genetic make-up ensures we simply feel indifference to the plight of all but a handful of significant others in our lives. Right now, for instance, one knows dimly at some level that there is frightful and preventable suffering in the world. Yet most of us feel no overpowering moral urgency to do anything about it."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Essayists from EnglandPhilosophers from EnglandActivists from the United KingdomTranshumanistsUtilitarians
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
"Utopian Pharmacology: Mental Health in the Third Millennium MDMA and Beyond", BLTC Research, last updated 2020
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/David_Pearce_(philosopher)
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
David Pearce (philosopher)
81 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by David Pearce (philosopher) →
Related Quotes
"All that matters is the pleasure-pain axis. Pain and pleasure disclose the world's inbuilt metric of (dis)value. Our …"
"[U]nlike positive utilitarianism or so-called preference utilitarianism - neither of which can ever be wholly fulfill…"
"Nature documentaries are mostly travesties of real life. They entertain and edify us with evocative mood-music and tr…"
"By far my greatest dread in life […] is that (some variant of) the Everett interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is true."
"I argue that what breathes fire into the QM equations is field-theoretic what-it's-likeness: "microqualia" to use a p…"
"As the neurobiological basis of feeling and emotion is unravelled, and the human genome decoded and rewritten, it wil…"
"When Bernard Marx tells the Savage he will try to secure permission for him and his mother to visit the Other Place, …"
"[T]here is no fundamental biological reason why the human genome can't be rewritten to allow everyone to be "in" love…"
"[I]n the wake of the growth of the animal-rights movement, there has recently arisen a hitherto unfelt need to demoni…"
"The negative utilitarian might reply that this formulation of the problem is misleading. We do not live in a notional…"