Imagine you traveled to a far-off galaxy and found a planet inhabited by intelligent creatures. They somehow have reverse-engineered their own genetic source-code and discovered how to tweak it so that they can experience life in gradients of bliss. No, that’s not wire-heading. Not uniform bliss. There are ups and downs. It’s just that, no down actually gets below *hedonic zero*. They experience bliss even at their lows… just less bliss than at their highs. That way they maintain the information signaling purpose of hedonic tone.

Would you want to convince them that they should inject some suffering into their society so that they embrace their dark side?

I think that people fetishize suffering as “natural” and somehow “good” or even “metaphysically part of the whole deal” simply because of status quo bias. If you weren’t brought up in a world in which suffering is commonplace, you’d have the (right) reaction of understanding it as inherently a problem that has to be minimized as much as possible, as fast as possible.

Animal suffering, including human’s, is not just “part of life.” It is an *ethical emergency*.