On the Inescapable Reality of Suffering

Are there limits to systematic doubt? Well, in the face of suffering, my ultra-scepticism falters. ["[I]t is true that ‘I seem to see a table’ does not entail ‘I see a table’; but ‘I seem to feel a pain’ does entail ‘I feel a pain’. So scepticism loses its force — cannot open up its characteristic gap — with regard to that which ultimately most concerns us, pleasure and pain." [Galen Strawson, Freedom and Belief, Oxford, 1986, p. 223, n. 29]. Insofar as I have substantive doubts about abolitionism, they revolve around a fatalistic sense that the world's entire structure exists as an unchanging four (or 11?)-dimensional "block" that one is impotent to change. The world just is. Or alternatively, if this fatalism is ill-conceived, there is the opposite worry: perhaps one might unwittingly be causing more suffering by promoting its incompetent abolition. One must hope that La Rochefoucauld is wrong: "Few men are sufficiently discerning to appreciate all the evil they do."

—David Pearce, DP Drug Regimen: Diary Update and Idle Musings