Over the last century, a welfare state for humans was introduced in Western European societies so that the most vulnerable members of our own species wouldn't suffer avoidable hardship. Even in affluent Western nations, coverage can be woefully inadequate, notably in the USA. Provision in Third World nations ranges from the excellent to patchy to almost non-existent. And by the standards of posterity, all contemporary healthcare will presumably seem rudimentary. But a commitment to the underlying principle, at least, is well-established: no one should literally starve or suffer death or debility from preventable illness.

Likewise, universal education is designed to maximise life opportunities for all. Universal healthcare aims to ensure everyone gets medical treatment. Child-support agencies intervene when vulnerable children are at risk of abuse or neglect. Initially, Social Darwinists decried the introduction of such safeguards; eugenicists fretted that a welfare state would allow the "unfit" to breed and propagate "bad" genes; free-market fundamentalists worried that a safety-net would sap habits of manly self-reliance; and so forth. Yet the need for at least basic welfare guarantees now seems obvious, though controversy persists over their nature and optimal extent - and financing.



Social Darwinism in its rawest form now has few defenders beyond devotees of Ayn Rand. The problem is not just that existing welfare provision is inadequate: it's also arbitrarily species-specific. In common with the plight of vulnerable humans before its introduction, the welfare of vulnerable non-human animals mostly depends on private charity. No universal guarantees of non-human well-being exist. Vivisection, the abomination of factory-farming, and the industrialized mass-killing of nonhuman animals persists unchecked. Beyond our closest cousins the great apes, the systematic extension of state-enforced welfare guarantees to other species "in the wild", sounds too far-fetched an option to generate sustained critical analysis. Proverbially, charity begins at home; let's worry about "our" species first. No great ideological debate has erupted on the case for compassionate ecosystem redesign because the case for preserving the ecological status quo is perceived as too obvious to need defending; and the transformative potential of biotech, infotech and nanotech is still barely glimpsed. Traditionally, of course, Nature has just seemed too Big. Insofar as any justification at all has been felt necessary for wild animal suffering, the narrative told to rationalize the cruelties of Nature has claimed that predation of the sick and the weak is for "the good of the species". This fable is no longer scientifically tenable. Natural selection doesn't operate on that level. Further, it is equally unDarwinian to suppose there is some fundamental ontological and ethical gulf between "us" and "them", between primates of the genus Homo and nonhuman animals. On any universal ethic, the inclusive rather than contrastive use of "we" must extend to all sentient beings.

However, the most formidable obstacle to reprogramming predators and designing compassionate ecosystems isn't ideology but simple status quo bias. Most of the arguments elaborated against abolishing suffering in humans don't even get off the ground in nonhumans. The anguish of members of others species will not inspire its victims to create great works of art or literature, build their characters, afford interesting contrasts, allow opportunities for personal growth, and so on. It's just nasty and inherently pointless. On the face of it, reprogramming the source code of the rest of the living world is orders of magnitude computationally harder than re-engineering humans. But the immensity of task shouldn't be overstated. For the technical challenges of reprogramming nonhuman animals are in some respects easier to overcome than in humans.

Thus one of the most formidable stumbling-blocks to sustainable mood-enrichment in humans isn't engineering raw pleasure - wireheading or speedballing could do that now. What's hard is reprogramming our reward circuitry in ways than don't compromise our social responsibility and cognitive performance - not just on gross measures of the sorts of cleverness scored by IQ tests, but subtler abilities involving creativity, empathetic understanding, introspective self-insight - and perhaps too the capacity for fundamental self-doubt from which future intellectual revolutions may spring. In short, the challenge lies in preventing the superhappy from becoming either "opiated" or manic. Similar constraints on the future happiness of nonhuman animals either don't apply to the same degree or don't apply at all. The prospect of "lions on Soma" may be surreal; but it's difficult to see how its introduction could be judged reckless or immoral.



Clearly as it stands, the abolitionist project is more of a sketch than a blueprint. So one urgent priority is the creation of academic research programs so that abolitionist scholarship can become a rigorous scientific discipline. Such a discipline will not be value-free; but nor will it be any more normative than conservation biology - or scientific medicine. A critical aspect of advanced ecosystem redesign will be prior computational modelling - the exhaustive hunt for previously unanticipated side-effects of interventions at different tropic levels in the "food chain". Philosophical manifestos can gloss over technical difficulties; wildlife park management teams will need to confront them. Either way, abolitionism needs to enter the academic and political mainstream, with organizational structures and advocacy groups to match. A cruelty-free world will entail coordinated national, intergovernmental and United Nations action on an unprecedented scale.

Understandably, sceptics can dismiss such scenarios as sheer technofantasy. The sociological, ethico-religious and ideological obstacles to the design of a cruelty-free planetary ecosystem can seem insurmountable even if its ultimate technical feasibility is acknowledged. But predicting the growth of a global anti-speciesist ethic to complement an anti-racist ethic isn't as unreasonable as it first sounds. Consider the central dogmas of the world's major religions. To what extent is the abolitionist project a disguised implication of some of our core principles? Ahimsa, the Sanskrit term meaning to do no harm (literally: the avoidance of violence - himsa) is central to the family of religions originating in ancient India: Hinduism, Buddhism and especially Jainism. Ahimsa is a rule of conduct that bars the killing or injuring of living beings. The ecosystem redesign advocated here is essentially the scientific expression of ahimsa on a global scale, shorn of its karmic metaphysics.

It's true that Judeao-Christian and Islamic religion have been less sympathetic historically to the interests of nonhuman animals than the non-Abrahamic traditions of the Indian subcontinent. Throughout much of the Christian era, vegetarianism in Western Europe was regarded as a heresy. God's Biblical promise of "dominion" over the rest of the animal kingdom has standardly been interpreted as divine license for domination and exploitation. Yet "dominion" can also be (re)interpreted as responsibility for stewardship. What if Isaiah 66:3 ["He that slayeth an ox is as he that slayeth a man"] is correct and the lion really can lie down with the lamb? Would a compassionate God want us to preserve the biology of suffering when its perpetuation becomes optional? Recall too that (with one exception) each of the 114 suers of the Islamic Qur'an begins, "Allah is merciful and compassionate." The name of God used most often in the Qur'an is "al-Rahim", meaning literally "the All-Compassionate." Any implication that God's compassion is stunted compared to the moral imagination of mere mortals might seem blasphemous. Muhammad the Prophet speaks of the need for "universal mercy". According to one tradition (Hadith Mishkat 3:1392) Muhammad taught that "all creatures are like a family of God; and He loves the most those who are the most beneficent to His family."

As infotech, nanorobotics and biotechnology mature - or accelerate - perhaps religious and secular ethicists alike will treat the maximal relief of suffering as the default assumption from which departures need to be justified, not a radical new ethic in need of justification itself. On almost every future scenario, we're destined to "play God". So let's aim to be compassionate gods and replace the cruelty of Darwinian life with something better.