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. [...]
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? [...]
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 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. [...]
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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 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. [...]
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 built to facilitate their mass exploitation and abuse. Beyond human civilisation, there are billions upon billions of wild animals who suffer serious harms.
But what about the possibility of a future moral catastrophe? What if such tragedies could potentially take place on an even larger scale? And what can we do now to prevent that from happening? [...]
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
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. [...]
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. [...]
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. [...]
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 and continued our work to create a future with less suffering. [...]
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.
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.
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.
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. [...]
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 explained what S-Risks are and discussed some of the challenges associated with reducing suffering now and in the far-future. [...]
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 and to briefly explore its relevance.
Asymmetric scope sensitivity
A recent study set out to investigate people’s intuitions on population ethics, exploring how people judge the value of different populations of happy and unhappy individuals (Caviola et al., 2022a). The study included a number of sub-studies, which generally found that people endorse a weak asymmetry in population ethics. That is, people tend to believe that miserable lives and suffering weigh somewhat stronger than do happy lives and happiness, even when the misery and happiness in question are claimed to be equally intense (Caviola et al., 2022a, p. 8). [...]
We believe that CRS’s open-ended research programme on how to best reduce suffering fills an important gap. To help donors make informed choices, we are fully transparent about our values and our strategy. For more details on why we do what we do, see our Strategic Plan. [...]
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 the community, and because a single, comprehensive introduction to s-risks did not yet exist. My hope is that a coherent introduction will help to strengthen interest in the topic and spark further work. [...]
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. My aim in this post is to reply to this objection.
Stating the “evolutionary asymmetry objection” in brief
The argument I will respond to goes roughly as follows: For biologically evolved creatures such as humans, the reproductive costs of losses (e.g. deadly injury) are typically greater than the reproductive gains of successes (e.g. sex). This asymmetry is plausibly reflected in our experiences such that we tend to feel and value suffering (as an intrinsic negative) more strongly than we feel and value pleasure (as an intrinsic positive). Yet we should not expect such an asymmetry to be found at the level of possible states of suffering and pleasure. Instead, we should expect the best possible pleasure and the worst possible suffering to be equally intense, and we should therefore expect there to be an axiological and moral symmetry between them. Or at least we should expect our better informed selves to endorse such an axiological and moral symmetry (e.g. if we were fully acquainted with the utmost extremes of pleasure and suffering). [...]
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 refine our strategic approach to outreach and communications. [...]
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 and thereby reject LTNU.
My aim in this post is to raise some critical points in response to this paper. As a preliminary note, I should say that I commend Mogensen for taking up this crucial issue regarding the weight of suffering, and for exploring it in an open-ended manner. [...]
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 equal).
“Awesome Lives”
To refute the Asymmetry, Chappell relies on the following claim as a core premise: [...]
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 merits of Classical and Negative Utilitarianism” (Gustafsson, 2022, p. 1).
The aim of Gustafsson’s paper is to present novel counterexamples against NU that have no analogues in the case of CU. My aim in this post is to show that CU does face such analogous counterexamples, and that these counterexamples are worse than those facing NU. I also argue that views that give overriding importance to the reduction of extreme suffering seem uniquely plausible in light of the counterexamples reviewed here. [...]
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 numberofcriticalreplies have already been written, I still think there are many problematic things in Ord’s essay that have not yet been properly criticized. For example, the essay does not only make misleading and problematic claims about negative utilitarianism, but also about the moral and political views of Karl Popper. Thus, I feel a thorough point-by-point reply is called for. Quotes from Ord’s essay are written in a blue font. [...]
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 term. Rather than focusing on any specific near-term issue, we are interested in improvements in governance and political norms that can plausibly result in a lasting impact on the long-term future. For instance, the intellectual originators of liberalism have arguably had outsized impact, and are perhaps among the most impactful people ever. [...]
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 artificial sentient beings in the future. [...]
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 against negative utilitarianism and similar minimalist views is that they would (supposedly) imply the wrong choice between the following populations: [...]
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, causeprioritization, and s-risks. In particular, Tobias explains what moral circle expansion is and presents arguments for and against prioritizing it. He then gives his take on longtermism, transformative AI, and whether we’re currently living at the hinge of history. Jamie and Tobias also consider the implications of accepting both longtermism and a focus on moral circle expansion, including what beings to advocate for and how to do it most effectively. Finally, Tobias argues that we should focus on reducing risks of astronomical suffering known as s-risks. [...]
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 that we should try to pursue interventions that are robust across both tails, and it tentatively suggests that, for a wide range of impartial value systems, it is safest to focus mostly on improving the quality of our future.
Introduction
What is the distribution of future expected suffering caused by human civilization? [...]
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–focusedethics, s-risks, and causeprioritisation. We are now raising money to consolidate our financial situation.
We believe that CRS’s open-ended research programme on how to best reduce suffering fills an important gap. To help donors make informed choices, we are fully transparent about our values and our strategy — for more details on why we do what we do, see our Strategic Plan. [...]
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 lot less obvious than it seems at first sight. Specifically, a fat-tailed distribution need not imply that a single or even a few sources of suffering account for most future suffering in expectation, let alone that we should mostly prioritize a single or a few sources of suffering.
Introduction
In his post Is most expected suffering due to worst-case outcomes?, Tobias Baumann explores how skewed the distribution of future sources of suffering might be. His conclusion, in short, is that worst-case outcomes may well dominate, but that it is unclear to what degree we should expect future suffering to be concentrated in worst-case outcomes. [...]
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 will go.
In this post, I will discuss whether animal advocacy – or, more generally, expanding the moral circle – should be a priority for longtermists, and outline implications of a longtermist perspective on animal advocacy. My starting point is a moral view that rejectsspeciesism and gives equalweight to the interests and well-being of future individuals. [...]
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 of Pummer’s argument
The primary aim of Pummer’s essay is to defend comparativism, the view that things can be better or worse for merely possible persons. I agree with Pummer that we should accept some version of comparativism — for example, it seems obvious to me that a state of affairs in which a single person is brought into existence only to be tortured for their entire life is worse than a state of affairs in which no individual is brought into existence (non-comparativists cannot say this, as they hold that the two states of affairs are not comparable). [...]
