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 them to a large extent. Institutions structure incentives, constrain behavior, allocate authority, and determine which problems receive sustained attention.

Unlike isolated actions, institutional changes tend to be durable. They persist across political cycles and leadership turnover, shaping outcomes long after reformers have exited the scene. At their best, institutions encode moral progress, embedding concern for welfare into procedures and norms. At their worst, they entrench neglect, conflict, and systemic harm. Either way, their effects compound over time.

Institutions also shape broader patterns of human behavior. Many large-scale problems arise from failures of coordination, information-sharing, and trust. Poorly designed institutions fuel conflict and dysfunction, exacerbating these failures. Well-functioning institutions give us a fighting chance to reduce suffering by enabling coordination, truth-seeking, and cooperation.

Under deep uncertainty, the case for improving institutions becomes even more compelling. We cannot reliably predict which technologies will emerge or how geopolitical dynamics will shift. Because of this, specific interventions, like particular policies, are hard to plan. But healthier, wiser, more moral institutions seem robust to many possible futures.

How to Improve Our Institutions

There is no silver bullet. For long-term suffering reduction, what is most likely to work are reforms that are incremental and acceptable to a wide range of people. That gives them a chance of being implemented and reduces the risk of harmful unintended consequences — for instance, by triggering conflict. Below are some of the strategies we think are most promising.

1. Strengthen Democracy and Representation

Despite their flaws, democratic systems remain among the most reliable mechanisms for reducing suffering over time. Democratic countries outperform nondemocratic ones across many core indicators relevant to reducing suffering: they better protect civil liberties, achieve better health outcomes, show greater respect for human rights, experience lower levels of political violence and repression, and tend to enforce higher animal-welfare standards.

The structural reason is responsiveness. Democracies institutionalize feedback loops. Citizens can organize, vote, litigate, criticize, and publicize grievances. Elections create incentives for leaders to respond to public concerns; independent courts provide legal recourse; a free press exposes policy failure and corruption. This design mitigates the risk of sustained neglect and enables peaceful error correction.

But current democracies are deeply imperfect. They reward short-term wins over long-run welfare. Polarization distorts incentives further, hampering cooperation and compromise. Severe harms that are diffuse, delayed, or politically inconvenient are deprioritized. Representation gaps exacerbate this: marginalized groups, nonhuman animals, and future generations lack effective voice, weakening democracy’s ability to reduce suffering.

Potential reforms to strengthen democracy and representation include:

• Encouraging peaceful democratic transitions, such as through independent election monitoring, and guarding against backsliding
• Reinforcing checks and balances to prevent extreme power concentration
• Shifting toward greater levels of proportional representation and parliamentarism
• Creating formal mechanisms to consider the interests of future generations and nonhuman beings
• Experimenting with voting reform and citizens’ assemblies to reduce polarization

2. Improve Values and Epistemics

As our technological and institutional power increases, the quality of judgment guiding it becomes more important. If we want to effectively reduce suffering, our capacity for moral reflection and truth-seeking must grow alongside our capacity to act. In short, wisdom must keep pace with our technological power.

Modern societies invest heavily in technological progress but far less in moral reasoning and epistemic discipline — the practices governing how beliefs are formed, evidence is evaluated, uncertainty is tracked, and views are updated. Too often, partisan signaling and motivated reasoning distort public discourse, resulting in worse policy.

Improving moral and epistemic competence means raising the baseline: distinguishing facts from values, reasoning under uncertainty, weighing trade-offs across time and populations, and updating in light of evidence. The aim is disciplined learning, iteratively testing ideas and policies and letting small improvements compound over time.

Potential reforms to improve values and epistemics include:

• Integrate training in ethics, economics, and decision-theory into education and civil service preparation
• Separate empirical assumptions and normative commitments in policy proposals
• Include long-term impact assessments with uncertainty ranges for major policies
• Explore structured forecasting tools (expert panels, prediction markets, scenario analysis)
• Institutionalize pilot programs and regulatory sandboxes before implementing policies
• Embed sunset clauses and mandatory review periods to prevent locking in bad policies

3. Fortify Institutions Against Worst Case Outcomes

Healthy institutions aren’t enough on their own. They must also be robust to worst-case outcomes. Most institutions are not built with genuine catastrophe in mind. That is troubling. If we hope to stay as far away from the danger zone as possible, we need institutions that reliably keep us safe — institutions that reduce the likelihood of worst cases by addressing structural risk factors such as conflict and malevolence, and that can respond effectively to crises so that they do not escalate into catastrophes. This is a crucial part of building a fortress against suffering that is robust to many different kinds of threats, not just the ones we happen to face today.

Potential reforms to fortify institutions against the worst include:

• Strengthening the rule of law and enforcing prohibitions against violence and threats
• ​​Strengthening international coordination, especially with the aim of preventing and mitigating conflict
• Institutionalizing worst-case scenario planning and policies aimed at preventing a radical increase of suffering

Conclusion

Improving our institutions — in particular by strengthening democratic accountability, improving public reasoning, and building societal safeguards against worst-case outcomes — seems to be a promising way to reduce suffering over time.

These reforms focus on the underlying rules and incentives that shape long-term decision-making. They also offer common ground with other altruists. Focusing on institutional quality provides a practical, cooperative path forward that remains robust across different normative commitments and empirical views about the future. Overall, it strengthens our shared capacity to navigate uncertainty and use our growing power responsibly.