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). [...]
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 among people alive today) or bring into existence arbitrarily many happy beings. You might think we should do the former. Maybe it would also be good to bring many happy beings into existence, but perhaps this seems far less important. After all, no one is harmed if we don’t bring many happy beings into existence, but many will continue to suffer if we don’t cure malaria. [...]
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 important value alongside others, such as happiness, justice, equality, and autonomy, rather than giving it special weight or priority. In academia, negative utilitarianism, one of the most prominent SFE views, is hardly a household name. If it is discussed at all, it is often dismissed—often far too quickly. [...]
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 on astronomical scales, by enabling new forms of misuse, intensifying conflict, amplifying harmful institutions, concentrating political or economic power, or accelerating dangerous technologies. [...]
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 how much suffering exists and how grim things are for far too many beings. And we may reflect on how difficult it often is to reduce suffering, making the task feel like an uphill battle. Thinking about this can be difficult, frustrating, and emotionally draining. [...]
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 is full, the house is warm, the algorithm knows our taste in movies. Comfort has triumphed over scarcity, security over danger, yet somehow many of us remain restless, anxious, and lost.
When purpose fades, the mind improvises. We are built to struggle, so we shrink our battles until they fit our circumstances. In the absence of famine, Wi-Fi outages become crises. Without invading armies, we wage moral wars on social media. Office politics turn into trench warfare. The human animal needs adversity to feel real, so when the old dragons die, we invent new ones—tiny, ridiculous, imaginary. [...]
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 broader moral discourse. We are hoping to fill this gap.
Discussions of ethics often focus on a range of concerns and moral traditions. The questions raised are both interesting and deeply important. Yet comparatively little attention is devoted to examining the moral significance of suffering itself and asking whether it deserves some kind of special priority. [...]
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 it justified? And what, if anything, should we do about wild animal suffering (WAS)? To help us answer this, let us turn to five questions that get at the heart of the issue. [...]
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 ways of doing so. Many may accept that we should grant some concern to AI welfare, but hold that granting rights to current or near-future AI systems is a bridge too far.
(“AI systems” here should be understood broadly, not limited to particular architectures, such as current digital systems). [...]
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 are increasingly taking AI welfare seriously.
That is precisely what Robert Long, Jeff Sebo, and coauthors urge us to do in their 2024 paper “Taking AI Welfare Seriously.” Their central claim is straightforward: given substantial uncertainty about whether some AI systems will deserve moral consideration, we should treat AI welfare as a real policy and research issue now. [...]
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 risks neglecting more reliable ways of reducing suffering. Who is right?
The strongest case for focusing on AI begins with the claim that it could be a genuine hinge-of-history technology—not just another tool, but something with imminent world-shaping potential. If we reach human-level or superhuman systems, the paradigm of “smart” humans controlling “dumb” tools would be over. If that happens, all bets are off, but it seems reasonable to expect tremendous impacts. [...]
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 political culture war, it invites backlash and shrinks the coalition of people willing to help. For that reason, there is great value in being nonpartisan in our efforts to reduce suffering. By nonpartisan, I don’t mean unprincipled, centrist, or reluctant to take strong stances. Rather, I mean not identifying with a pre-defined political tribe, like the Red or Blue (or Grey) tribe. Resisting the tribal logic of modern politics is difficult but important: it helps to keep the movement to reduce suffering healthy—with norms of cooperation and open inquiry—and focused. [...]
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. [...]
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. [...]
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. But then there is Pascal’s Mugging. A stranger approaches and insists that if Pascal hands over a mere 100 dollars, they will pay him back tomorrow with an infinite amount of money. It may seem absurd to accept this deal, but as long as the probability that the stranger is telling the truth is above zero, the expected financial gain of handing over the money still seems greater than keeping it. Yet this may seem irrational! [...]
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 reducing suffering is a foremost priority. It is primarily concerned with reducing bads rather than promoting goods. Given its focus on bads, one might wonder what suffering-focused ethicists think about empty voids. Might they “valorize” them? [...]
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.
Perhaps you have encountered Peter Singer’s drowning child thought experiment. You see a child struggling in a pond; you can save them easily, though it means you will ruin your expensive shoes. Plausibly, you ought to save the child. [...]
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 priority. Many other plausible, and popular, moral frameworks converge on this priority. (This essay draws on Chapter 6 of Suffering-Focused Ethics.)
The Golden Rule—“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”—is often described as the most elemental and universal moral principle ever expressed. Found in the teachings of Confucius, Jesus, and the Buddha, it encodes a simple moral symmetry. When applied to suffering, this symmetry takes on its most profound meaning. Imagining ourselves in the grip of intense pain—agonized, trapped, or despairing—we would strongly want others to set aside almost everything else and help us escape. To live by the Golden Rule, then, is to recognize that others’ suffering demands the same moral urgency as our own. [...]
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 bring about the Kingdom of Ends, a world governed by mutual respect and rational duty. Each of these visions looks outward and forward—toward what might be created. [...]