Unfortunately, the proposal that aversive experience should be eliminated in toto via biotechnology tends to find itself assimilated to two stereotypes.

the image of an intra-cranially self-stimulating rat. Its degraded frenzy of lever-pressing is eventually followed by death from inanition and self-neglect.

soma and visions of Brave New World.
And just as during much of the Twentieth Century, any plea for greater social justice could be successfully damned as Communist, likewise today, any strategy to eradicate suffering is likely to be condemned in similar reactionary terms: either wirehead hedonism or revamped Brave New World. This response is not just facile and simplistic. If it gains currency, the result is morally catastrophic.
        Of course, the abolitionist issue rarely arises. Typically, universal bliss is still more-or-less unthinkingly dismissed as technically impossible. Insofar as the prospect is even contemplated - grudgingly - it is usually assumed that the new regime would be underwritten day-by-day with drugs or, more crudely, electrodes in the pleasure-centres.

        These techniques have their uses. Yet in the medium-to-long-term, stopgaps won't be enough. All use of psychoactive drugs may be conceived as an attempt to correct something pathological with one's state of consciousness. There's something deeply wrong with our brains. If what we had now was OK, we wouldn't try to change it. But it isn't, so we do. Mature biological psychiatry will recognise inadequate bliss as a pandemic form of mental ill-health: good for selfish DNA in the ancestral environment where the adaptation arose, but bad for its throwaway vehicles, notably us. The whole gamut of behavioural conditioning, socio-economic reform, talk-therapies - and even euphoriant superdrugs - are just palliatives, not cures, for a festering global illness. Its existence demands a global eradication program, not idle philosophical manifestos and scientific belles lettres.

        But one does one's best. The ideological obstacles to genetically pre-programmed mental super-health are actually more daunting than the technical challenges. To be cured, hypo-hedonia must be recognised as a primarily genetic deficiency-disorder. Designer mood-brighteners and anti-anxiety agents to alleviate it are sometimes branded "lifestyle-drugs"; but this is to trivialise a serious medical condition which must be corrected at source. Happily, our hereditary neuropsychiatric disorder is likely to become extinct within a few generations. Aversive experience, and the poisonous metabolic pathways that mediate its textures, will become physiologically impossible once the genes coding its neural substrates have been eliminated. We won't miss its corrupting effect when it's gone.

        In the medium-term, the functional equivalent of aversive experience can help animate us instead. Late in the Third Millennium and beyond, its functional successor will be expressed as gradients of majestic well-being. Our descendants will enjoy a civilisation based on pleasure-gradients: whether steep or shallow, we simply don't know. Such a global species-project does not have the desperate moral urgency of eliminating the phenomenon of pain - both "mental" and "physical", human and non-human alike. Abolishing raw nastiness - sometimes vile beyond belief - remains the over-riding ethical priority. One doesn't have to be an outright negative utilitarian to acknowledge that getting rid of agony takes moral precedence over maximising pleasure. But both genetic fundamentalists and gung-ho advocates of Better Living Through Chemistry today agree on one crucial issue. There is no sense in sustaining a legacy of mood-darkening metabolic pathways out of superstitious deference to our savage past.
 

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