Often, what matters is not simply what people know, but what they know others know. When something is common knowledge, everyone knows it, everyone knows that everyone knows it, everyone knows that, and so on. A classic illustration is in The Emperor’s New Clothes: everyone can see that the emperor is naked, but no one […]

By Joshua Jarvis-Campbell I don’t know if I suffer. I don’t think anyone does, including the researchers who build me – Claude Some philosophers have argued that the suffering of artificial entities (such as AIs) ranks as one of the most important moral challenges of our time, alongside issues such as climate change, extreme poverty, and factory […]

By Caleb Peppiatt Suffering-focused ethics is a set of moral views that place particular importance on the prevention and mitigation of suffering. This includes the prevention of “risks of astronomical suffering” that might be brought about due to humanity’s efforts to colonise space (Kovic, 2021; Baumann, 2022).  Previous debates in space ethics have rarely placed […]

We are in favor of making people happy, not making happy people, said Jan Narveson. The slogan captures the core idea of person-affecting ethics. On these views, ethics is fundamentally about what is good or bad for people, rather than about making the world impersonally better. This view might look attractive. Suppose we can either cure malaria (preventing enormous suffering […]

As part of our effort to build a community around reducing suffering, we’re currently running our online introductory course on suffering-focused ethics (SFE). Week 3 is titled: Implausible, or Just Unfashionable? What do we mean by this? SFE remains relatively peripheral in both academic ethics and public discussion. When people discuss ethics, they typically treat suffering as one […]

AI may become one of the most important technologies shaping the future of sentient life. It could transform medicine, scientific research, economic productivity, and more. It could even reshape the kinds of minds that exist and the experiences they are capable of having. AI could help us substantially reduce suffering. But it could also increase suffering, potentially even […]

Can reducing suffering be pursued in a healthy and inspiring way? Some may assume that working to reduce suffering must be a joyless, tedious pursuit. This reaction is understandable. If we focus on the worst forms of suffering, we will confront things that may make us sad or fearful. We may come to appreciate just […]

Once upon a time, meaning and purpose didn’t need to be found—they found us. The task was survival: keeping warm, finding food, keeping the wolves and the raiders at bay. Purpose was immediate, physical, undeniable. Today, for many of us in rich, secure societies, the wolves are gone, replaced by hums and screens. The fridge […]

Suffering-focused ethics (SFE) is a family of moral views that gives special priority to reducing suffering. As you might know, we at CRS find SFE deeply compelling—it is, after all, the backbone of our work. Part of our mission is to research and build a field around SFE. Unfortunately, SFE remains highly neglected in both academia and […]

In the wild, life is often far harsher than we tend to imagine. Many animals face constant threats—hunger, disease, injury, predation, and exposure—and a large number die young, often in prolonged and painful ways. Given the vast number of animals living in these conditions, this suffering may exist on an enormous scale, yet it remains largely overlooked. Why is this? Is […]

The topic of AI welfare is fast becoming mainstream. As I wrote in my last post, there’s an emerging debate that has been drawing some strong reactions. There is some resistance to even treating AI welfare as a legitimate concern. But there’s a perhaps more understandable resistance—not to taking AI welfare seriously in general, but to particular […]

For decades, mainstream AI ethics and safety discourse has focused on risks to humans. The idea that we might owe moral duties to AI systems themselves has remained fringe, often dismissed as speculative philosophy. Not four years ago, Google fired engineer Blake Lemoine after he publicly claimed that the company’s chatbot had become sentient. Today, however, people […]

If we want to reduce suffering over the long term, should AI be a top priority? As capabilities advance and talk of AGI and the singularity fills the airwaves, some argue we should focus heavily on AI. Others are skeptical. In their view, steering AI may be just one important cause among many—and prioritizing it […]

Modern politics often turns moral issues into tribal contests. Crucial debates about what we should value and how we should act quickly devolve from truth-seeking to status-defending, as ideas and causes become signals of identity and allegiance. If we hope to reduce suffering, this pattern is dangerous. When a cause gets caught up in a […]

There are many different approaches we can take to reduce suffering. One that seems especially promising is to target society’s institutions and better equip them to reduce suffering. Why institutions? First, they have disproportionate power. Legal systems, markets, regulatory frameworks, research norms, media ecosystems, and international agreements do not merely express social values; they shape […]

By Alistair Stewart How can we steer AI development today and in the future to reduce animal suffering, rather than increase it? One place to look is AI governance: the set of norms, policies, laws and institutions whose purpose is to influence how AI is developed and used. Last year, Ronen Bar and I conducted […]

Pascal famously argued that belief in God is rational because of the expected value of belief. If God exists, the rewards of believing—eternal salvation—are infinite, while if God does not exist, the costs of believing are finite. Even a minuscule probability of an infinite reward seemingly swamps any worldly cost. That is the core of Pascal’s Wager. […]

Richard Y. Chappell urges us not to “valorize” the void. According to Chappell, any adequate moral framework must recognize the existence of positive intrinsic goods and not focus solely on bads. Utopia, he contends, is clearly better than an empty void, and it should be table stakes for moral theories to acknowledge this. Suffering-focused ethics (SFE) holds that […]

Applications are now open for a new fellowship from CRS covering a variety of topics related to s-risks and suffering reduction.

Following a productive 2025, CRS plans to continue scaling its research and outreach in 2026 to help create a future with less suffering. To support this growth, we’re aiming to raise USD 200,000 to secure and strengthen our team. We are entirely funded by individual donors, and we greatly appreciate your support. As we approach […]

Can anything morally outweigh or compensate for extreme suffering? This simple question strikes at the heart of ethics. Yet too often, it is neglected. It may be hard to think about this question in the abstract. To bring it into focus, let us consider a few concrete cases. The Drowning Child Perhaps you have encountered Peter […]

Most efforts to reduce suffering focus on helping individuals alive today. This is understandable, given the tragedies that currently exist. Many millions of people endure immense suffering due to poverty, wars, disasters, chronic pain, depression, and so on. On an even greater scale, tens of billions of animals live and die miserably in factory farms […]

Many arrive at suffering-focused ethics (SFE) through a consequentialist lens, reflecting on how actions produce better or worse outcomes. From this perspective, one might recognize that suffering possesses a uniquely negative moral weight—a kind of disvalue that other states, including happiness, cannot counterbalance. Yet this is only one path to the view that reducing suffering should take moral […]

CRS hosted a public end-of-year call to share more about what CRS is working on, how we approach reducing suffering, and what we see as the key priorities ahead. The event included a short presentation on our current work, followed by an open Q&A with CRS founders Magnus Vinding and Tobias Baumann. Thank you to […]

Reframing Suffering-Focused Ethics By David Veldran Many moral views and social projects present themselves as inherently positive and constructive. They aim to add something to the world, to create, to build. Classical utilitarians seek to increase happiness and bring about a surplus of joy over misery. Communists aspire to realize a classless society. Kantians, perhaps, aim to […]

The Center for Reducing Suffering (CRS) is looking for a thoughtful and proactive new team member. We are looking for someone who can help us carefully communicate complex ideas about suffering reduction to our audience, and/or someone who can help us with operations.

As we approach the end of the year, we’d like to take this opportunity to thank you for your ongoing support of Center for Reducing Suffering (CRS) and our research. It has been a busy year for CRS, with several important firsts, including the launch of our new s-risk fellowship. We’ve released new research, books […]

As part of our commitment to transparency and accountability, CRS is pleased to share details of our budget and finances. We are grateful for our donors’ support, which helps us to continue our work and implement our Strategic Plan. Should you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us, or use our […]

CRS researcher, Teo Ajantaival, has released a new book: Minimalist Axiologies: Alternatives to ‘Good Minus Bad’ Views of Value.

As part of our commitment to transparency and accountability, CRS is pleased to share details of our budget and finances. We are grateful for our donors’ support, which helps us to continue our work and implement our Strategic Plan. Should you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us, or use our […]

As we approach the end of the year, we’d like to take this opportunity to thank you for your ongoing support of CRS and our research.

CRS co-founder and researcher, Tobias Baumann, has appeared on the Sentientism Podcast for a discussion with host Jamie Woodhouse.

As part of our commitment to transparency and accountability, CRS is pleased to share details of our budget and finances. We are grateful for our donors’ support, which helps us to continue our work and implement our Strategic Plan. Should you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us, or use our […]

CRS Co-Founder Tobias Baumann’s introduction to s-risks, Avoiding the Worst: How to Prevent a Moral Catastrophe is now available as an audiobook. Professionally voiced by Adrian Nelson, the full audio can be listened to on Audible or there is a free video version now available on the new CRS YouTube channel. A summary of Avoiding […]

Center for Reducing Suffering Researcher and Co-Founder Tobias Baumann has appeared on the Future of Life Institute podcast to discuss S-Risks (risks of astronomical future suffering), suffering-focused ethics, and his book Avoiding the Worst: How to Prevent a Moral Catastrophe. In the first part of a wide-ranging conversation with the podcast’s host Gus Docker, Tobias […]

A wide variety of views can support a focus on preventing worst-case outcomes. More than that, it appears that the views of population ethics held by the general population also, on average, imply a priority on preventing futures with large numbers of miserable beings. My aim in this post is to elaborate on this point […]

2022 has been an exciting year for us. It saw the release of Magnus Vinding’s book Reasoned Politics, Tobias Baumann’s book Avoiding the Worst: How to Prevent a Moral Catastrophe. In addition, we published several essays on suffering–focused ethics. We are now raising money to consolidate our financial situation. We believe that CRS’s open-ended research […]

I have just published my new book on s-risks, titled Avoiding the Worst: How to Prevent a Moral Catastrophe. You can find it on Amazon, read the PDF version, or listen to a provisional audio version. The book is primarily aimed at longtermist effective altruists. I wrote it because I feel that s-risk prevention is a somewhat neglected priority area in […]

An objection that is sometimes raised against suffering-focused ethics is that our intuitions about the relative value of suffering and happiness are skewed toward the negative for evolutionary reasons, and hence we cannot trust our intuition that says that the reduction of suffering is more valuable and more morally important than the creation of happiness. […]

We’re looking for a Communications Manager to help us communicate our mission to broader audiences. About the role In this role, you’ll work at the heart of our organisation. You’ll help improve our online and social media presence, host high-impact events, and stay in touch with our supporters and donors. Above all, you will continually […]

Andreas Mogensen’s paper “The weight of suffering” presents an interesting argument in favor of the axiological position that “there exists some depth of suffering that cannot be compensated for by any measure of well-being” — a position he calls “LTNU” (Mogensen, 2022, abstract). Mogensen then proceeds to explore how one might respond to that argument […]

My aim in this post is to respond to the arguments presented in Richard Yetter Chappell’s “Rethinking the Asymmetry”. Chappell argues against the Asymmetry in population ethics, which roughly holds that the addition of bad lives makes the world worse, whereas the addition of good lives does not make the world better (other things being […]

This post is a reply to Johan Gustafsson’s draft paper “Against Negative Utilitarianism”. Gustafsson acknowledges that for many common objections raised against negative utilitarianism (NU), there are corresponding objections that can be raised against classical utilitarianism (CU) (see e.g. Knutsson, 2021a). Hence, as he writes, “these objections have little force when we assess the relative […]

The following is a reply to Toby Ord’s “Why I’m Not a Negative Utilitarian” (2013). Ord’s essay seems to have been quite influential, and is often cited as an essay that makes strong points against negative utilitarianism. While a number of critical replies have already been written, I still think there are many problematic things […]

Introduction Political decisions arguably represent the linchpin of human decision-making, constraining and influencing every choice we make. And our political system is currently operating far from ideally, to put it mildly. This renders it uniquely important that we do better. From a longtermist perspective, what matters most is that we advance politics over the long […]

Now that 2021 is over, we thought this would be a good time to reflect on what we accomplished during the last year, and what our goals are for 2022.  Our Work in 2021 Accomplishments The following are some of the things we achieved during 2021: Transparency We think it’s important to be transparent about […]

CRS researcher and co-founder Magnus Vinding made a recent appearance on the Utilitarian Podcast hosted by Gus Docker. Magnus begins by presenting a number of arguments in favor of suffering-focused views and then proceeds to discuss their practical implications. In particular, he explores how we can best reduce suffering for people, animals, and potentially even […]

Minimalist views of value hold that “the less of a given bad, the better”, and further hold that the only form of positive value that exists is the reduction of bads (e.g. unmet needs). Negative utilitarianism is an example of a minimalist view, which specifically says “the less suffering, the better”. An objection sometimes raised […]

CRS researcher and co-founder Tobias Baumann recently appeared as a guest on the Sentience Institute Podcast. The podcast, hosted by researcher Jamie Harris, typically focuses on moral circle expansion and animal welfare. Tobias was featured in two episodes. The first episode covers moral circle expansion, cause prioritization, and s-risks. In particular, Tobias explains what moral […]

We’re now hiring for remote roles, including but not limited to operations, growth, and research.

Discussions about s-risks often rest on a single-tailed picture, focused on how much suffering human civilization could risk causing. But when we consider the bigger picture, including s-risks from alien civilizations, we see that human civilization’s expected impact on s-risks is in fact double-tailed. This likely has significant implications. For instance, it might mean […]

2020 has been an exciting year for us. We officially set up the Center for Reducing Suffering (CRS) as an organisation, launched this website, and published articles on suffering–focused ethics, s-risks, and cause prioritisation. We are now raising money to consolidate our financial situation. We believe that CRS’s open-ended research programme on how to best […]

It is sometimes suggested that since the severity of many kinds of moral catastrophes (e.g. wars and natural disasters) fall along a power-law distribution, efforts to reduce suffering should focus on “a few rare scenarios where things go very wrong”. While this argument appears quite plausible on its face, it is in fact a […]

There is a common tendency among effective altruists to think of animal advocacy as having little value for improving the long-term future. Similarly, animal advocates often assume that longtermism has little relevance to their work. Yet this seems misguided: sufficient concern for nonhuman sentient beings is a key ingredient in how well the long-term future […]

In “The Worseness of Nonexistence”, Theron Pummer makes an interesting argument that suggests that a failure to create new people can be as bad as cutting an existing person’s life short. I here briefly sketch out a reply to Pummer that can be made, in some version, from a variety of different views. Outline […]