David Pearce (philosopher)

Currently, Pearce is a fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and sits on the futurist advisory board of the Lifeboat Foundation. He is also the director of bioethics of Invincible Wellbeing and is on the advisory boards of the Center on Long-Term Risk, the Organisation for the Prevention of Intense Suffering and since 2021 the Qualia Research Institute.

Until 2013, Pearce was on the editorial advisory board of the controversial and non-peer reviewed journal Medical Hypotheses. He has been interviewed by Vanity Fair (Germany) and on BBC Radio 4's The Moral Maze, among others.

In 1998, Pearce co-founded the World Transhumanist Association, known from 2008 as Humanity+, with Nick Bostrom. Pearce is a member of the board of advisors.

Based in Brighton, England, Pearce maintains a series of websites devoted to transhumanist topics and what he calls the "hedonistic imperative", a moral obligation to work towards the abolition of suffering in all sentient life. His self-published internet manifesto, The Hedonistic Imperative (1995), outlines how pharmacology, genetic engineering, nanotechnology and neurosurgery could converge to eliminate all forms of unpleasant experience from human and non-human life, replacing suffering with "information-sensitive gradients of bliss". Pearce calls this the "abolitionist project".

In 1995, Pearce set up BLTC Research, a network of websites publishing texts about transhumanism and related topics in pharmacology and biopsychiatry. He published The Hedonistic Imperative that year, arguing that "[o]ur post-human successors will rewrite the vertebrate genome, redesign the global ecosystem, and abolish suffering throughout the living world."

David Pearce (born April 1959) is a British transhumanist philosopher. He is the co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association, currently rebranded and incorporated as Humanity+. Pearce approaches ethical issues from a lexical negative utilitarian perspective.