Suffering-Focused Ethics

There’s a cluster of ethical views that say the prevention of extreme suffering takes priority over all other goals. On some views, preference satisfaction, pleasure creation, and the like are still considered good, but suffering reduction takes lexical priority over them, or is at least so much more desirable that it crowds out these other goals in practice. Other suffering-focused views go further and deny that pleasure and preference satisfaction are good at all. On the most extreme view, events and locations matter only insofar as they contain extreme suffering. The more suffering they contain, the worse and more problematic they are, but there are no moral grounds for calling one suffering-free event or location better than another.

Is SFE bleak? #

Suffering-focused views may seem unappealingly gloomy. For one, most of us find it distressing to think about intense suffering even on an abstract level, yet acting on SFE requires us to think about suffering often so that we can better identify and relieve it. It also strikes me as bleak for strong negative utilitarianism to deny all value in positive hedonic experiences. Hearty laughter? Aesthetic rapture? Joy at being reunited with an old friend? Surely there is something good to be said for these experiences beyond the fact that they contain no suffering. A philosophy that says otherwise seems blind to most of what I like in life.

Whether we find SFE bleak needn’t have anything to do with whether the theories are correct. Assuming externalism about reasons, it could be that we have stronger reasons to reduce suffering than we have to pursue any other goal, yet we feel no motivation to adopt SFE. But even though dismal ethical theories can be true, it seems pragmatically better for us not to find true ethical theories dismal. If SFE is emotionally unappealing to us, we may act on it less effectively ourselves and have greater difficulty convincing others of its correctness.

So are there ways of presenting SFE that make it feel more hopeful and positive? Do suffering-focused theories have any implications that we should eagerly welcome? Here are two thoughts that make SFE a bit easier for me to accept. (1)These are both found in §2.5 of Vinding SFE

(1) As far as we know, the universe is almost entirely empty of sentient life. Most stars waste their light shining on uninhabitted planets, most matter will be gobbled up by black holes before it has the chance to instantiate consciousness, and most negentropy is squandered on processes with no positive value. Classical utilitarians think this is a moral disaster on a cosmic scale. According to them, all of these resources are stuck in a suboptimal state, and we have an urgent duty to turn them into satisfied persons as quickly as is physically possible. (2)See §II in “Astronomical Waste”

Suffering minimizers disagree. They think most of the world is already in its optimal suffering-free state, so there’s no need to improve it further. In other words, SFE doesn’t have to panic over emptiness the way upside-focused views do. It can look out into the uinverse with serenity and approval instead of stressing over what isn’t there. That doesn’t feel bleak to me.

(2) According to classical utilitarianism, there is no practical limit to the amount of value that our world could realize. There can always be more happy people—if not on Earth, then on other planets—and those people who already exist can always be made happier given enough effort and resources. (3)At some point, we might run up against physical limits on the number of happiness-producing operations that the matter available to us can support, but these limits are not binding in practice. Hence a happiness maximizing altruist’s work is never fully done, and even if you care only about the quality of your own life, upside-focused views still say your life can always be better. With a bit more striving and optimisation, you can always push a bit farther up the curve of diminishing marginal utility.

At first glance, this all might seem like good news. The CU view does imply that the consequences of our actions can in principle be unboundedly good. But you might also feel that there’s something Sisyphean about this view. It might feel demoralizing to devote your life to maximizing happiness when you know that maximum is in practice unattainable. If you feel this way, SFE should come as a relief. Strong suffering-focused views say there is no world better than a world without suffering, no life better than a life without suffering. Once we have reached that optimal state, there is no obligation to strive for further improvements. (4)Duncan McClements pointed out to me that panpsychism might make the optimal state practically unatainable if there’s suffering in fundamental physics. I don’t put much weight on panpsychism, but if one does, one might care less about this defense of SFE. Whereas happiness maximizers are stuck competing in an endless game of “name the biggest number,” suffering minimizers say the biggest number is zero, and some of them even have a plan for getting there.

SFE and religion #

Some theologians argue that suffering-focused views are incompatible with a triple-O God. (5)See “Is God Our Benefactor?” Thanks to Brandon Sayler for alerting me to this article. The argument runs rougly like this. (1) God chose to create (or to allow the creation of) many sentient beings that have experienced extreme suffering. (2) If God had not created these beings, they would never have experienced extreme suffering. (3) On most suffering-focused views, 1 & 2 imply that God has harmed many sentient beings by creating them. (4) An omnibenevolent god would not harm many sentient beings. (5) Therefore God is not omnibenevolent.

As far as it goes, I think this argument is valid. SFE really does torpedo most theodicies, but there are at least two possible dodges. One is to interpret omnibenevolence as minimizing aggreate suffering and then to claim that if God had refrained from creating the victims of extreme suffering, the suffering of other beings would have increased to wash out His merciful choice. I don’t like this response very much. It feels odd to me to call a being who freely chooses to create anguished souls “omnibenevolent” on the grounds that things would have been worse had He not created them. God can’t very benevolent toward His victims, now can He? I also think the empirical premise is dubious. If any given victim of torture and starvation had never been born, would the universe really have contorted itself to inflict more pain on some other poor soul? Why would we believe that? (6)FWIW, Alexander Pope wrote some nice rhymes baldly asserting that the world works this way. “All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee; All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see; All Discord, Harmony not understood; All partial Evil, universal Good.”

A sufficiently committed theist might also turn the argument around and treat it as a reductio of SFE. They might say “I know for sure there is an omnibenevolent creator, so even those beings who experience the worst possible suffering must also experience some compensating benefit that makes their lives good for them on net. Maybe existence is itself a benefit. Maybe small amounts of satisfaction matter more than great amounts of suffering. Either way SFE is wrong.” I don’t find this response so compelling, especially because it refutes ethical views that aren’t very suffering-focused at all. Even some versions of upside-focused hedonism probably imply that there have lived beings whose lives were net negative. Thus, accepting this reductio leads you to say that God’s ethics are quite insensitive to suffering, and setting aside theological voluntarism, I find this hard to swallow.

Reading List #

Last updated 2 October 2024