The Case for Suffering-Focused Ethics – Foundational Research Institute

• “creating happy beings is less morally pressing than making sure existing beings are well off.” ⤴️
• “preventing miserable beings from being added to the world seems just as important as preserving existing happiness. And it would be a no-brainer for most people that 1,000 existing beings going from happy to miserable is better than the 1,000 beings staying happy at the cost of 1,000,000 new, miserable beings being created.” ⤴️
• “we care about reducing suffering for existing and potential beings equally, whereas we prioritize the promotion of happiness in actual beings over the happiness in their merely potential peers.” ⤴️
• “Creating large numbers of beings while ensuring that all their preferences or goals are satisfied – which could be achieved by making provisions for the newly created beings to have easily satisfiable preferences, or preferences that correspond very closely with the most likely state of the world – may strike us as a pointless endeavor.” ⤴️
• “the Epicurean view that non-existence does not constitute a deplorable state.” ⤴️
• “non-existence is free of moral predicaments for any evaluating agent, given that by definition no such agent exists.” ⤴️
• “may seem unsettling to us, because from the perspective of existing beings, no-longer-existing is a daunting prospect. Importantly however, death or no-longer-existing differs fundamentally from never having been born” ⤴️
• “directly incorporated in so-called person-affecting views, where affairs can only be morally bad if they are bad for someone” ⤴️
• “it probably inspired the “moral ledger” view laid out by Peter Singer in his Practical Ethics,3 as well as in the “prior-existence” view he tentatively endorsed” ⤴️
• “Finally, egalitarianism and prioritarianism can incorporate the intuition by giving priority to suffering reduction as long as suffering is still around (or will foreseeably be around).5” ⤴️
• “extreme suffering is so bad that no other experience can counterbalance it.” ⤴️
• “A refusal to accept this tradeoff suggests that as far as an individual’s judgement of their experiences is concerned, torture-level suffering cannot – at least for some individuals – be counterbalanced by (much) larger amounts of happiness.” ⤴️
• “How are we to extrapolate from intrapersonal tradeoffs, where a person is their own arbiter, to interpersonal tradeoffs, where we consider decisions that affect the welfare of other individuals?” ⤴️
• “sufferers would (almost certainly) regret the decision made by the person moment that preceded them, and wish for it to be changed. Conversely, after a few years in the most sublime bliss of virtual reality, the newer, happy person moments might end up concluding that, in retrospect, the suffering was worth it after all.” ⤴️
• “With perspectives biased by temporal viewpoints, an objective answer on if or when to accept torture-level suffering cannot be obtained, and no matter which answers we choose, some people (or some person moments) will have ground for objecting.” ⤴️
• “People generally hold the belief that more recent experiential moments have epistemic authority over their elapsed peers.” ⤴️
• “the widespread belief that minor pains cannot be aggregated to become worse than an instance of torture.” ⤴️
• “A widespread view, especially in non-Western traditions, is that “happiness” consists of the absence of suffering. According to this view, not only pleasure, but also tranquillity or contentment are amongst the best experiences” ⤴️
• “cravings constitute a form of suffering or dissatisfaction, i.e. of consciously wanting the current experience to be different. If a state is entirely free of cravings, there is a sense in which it can be considered perfect.” ⤴️
• “there are also (contingently rare) mental states devoid of anything bothersome that are not intensely pleasurable, examples being flow states or states of meditative tranquillity. Felt from the inside, meditative tranquillity is perfect in that it is untroubled by any aversive components, untroubled by any cravings for more pleasure. Likewise, a state of flow – as it may be experienced during stimulating work, when listening to music or when playing video games – where tasks are being done on “auto­pilot,” with time flying and a low sense of self ­awareness, also has this same crucial quality of being experienced as completely non­problematic.” ⤴️
• “that turning slightly painful states into very painful states is at most of little disvalue – is impossible to even take seriously.13 This contrast strongly indicates that there is an asymmetry between how we value increasing happiness versus reducing suffering.” ⤴️
• “The intuition that happiness consists of the absence of suffering is common in non-Western traditions, especially in Buddhism.14 It is also a central part of Epicureanism.15 Finally, it may constitute part of the explanation why a lot of people reject versions of consequentialism where the happiness of the many can outweigh the suffering of a few.” ⤴️
• “Most people would say that no matter the size of a (finite) population of suffering beings, adding more suffering beings would always remain equally bad.” ⤴️
• “Ultimately, choosing values comes down to finding the intuitions and guiding principles we care about the most – and if that includes a number of different intuitions, or even some form of extrapolation procedure to defer to better-informed future versions of ourselves – then the solution may not necessarily look simple. This is completely fine” ⤴️