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. [...] 

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 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. [...] 

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). [...]