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.
Of course, popularity isn’t everything. We think moral views should ultimately stand or fall on the strength of their arguments, not on how widely they are accepted. Still, one might reasonably ask: If SFE is so plausible, where are its numbers? Why do relatively few philosophers defend it? Why don’t more thoughtful people at least take it seriously, even if they ultimately reject it?
One possible answer is that SFE’s relative unpopularity reflects its plausibility: it isn’t popular because it isn’t true. We don’t think that’s right. We believe there are strong arguments in favor of SFE. We also think it’s no accident that many moral theories seem to converge on prioritizing reducing suffering. We also think its major objections can be answered.
The Objections
Let’s go through those objections.
1. SFE has no room for the good. Good things are good, it seems, but SFE struggles to acknowledge this, one might think. Now, some views that fall under SFE do indeed deny that there are things with positive intrinsic value. They might hold, for instance, that happiness is not an independently positive good. It might seem that it is, but really it’s just the absence of negatives like suffering, disturbance, or craving. That is counterintuitive, but there are reasons to think that common intuitions about this are untrustworthy. For example, our assessments of the intrinsic value of purported goods, such as knowledge and uplifting experiences, might be confounded by their positive instrumental value in terms of reducing or preventing bads.
But many views under SFE don’t deny the existence of intrinsic goods. They fully grant the positive intrinsic value of (for instance) happiness, friendship, beauty, achievement, etc. They simply hold that we should generally prioritize reducing suffering over promoting those goods.
2. SFE rejects obviously worthwhile tradeoffs. Okay, perhaps some suffering-focused views can acknowledge the good. But, one might think, they give it so little weight! People routinely accept suffering in exchange for happiness and other goods. They exercise, study, and work hard so they can do interesting things and live happier lives. But SFE, focused as it is on suffering, would condemn these decisions, one might think.
But actually it isn’t so clear that these are cases of trading suffering for happiness and other goods. After all, exercising, studying, and working hard also prevent and reduce bad things, like suffering. Good things and bad things, and happiness and suffering, are often closely intertwined; cases involving a pure tradeoff between them can be hard to find. If we do find them, they might strike us as far less compelling. Consider, for example, volunteering to get sick merely to afford champagne instead of sparkling wine. I, for one, would not.
One might press the point. Imagine that we could create a large world with billions of wildly happy beings. The only problem is that this world also contains a single pinprick. But, you might think, that’s a small price to pay for all that happiness. Surely this world is worth creating over no world at all! Yet SFE may seem to disagree.
Some suffering-focused views would favor the non-creation of this world. Others, however, agree that the first world is worth creating. They may hold that suffering carries much greater moral weight than happiness, pound for pound. Even so, there is vastly more happiness than suffering in this hypothetical world, so the happiness outweighs the suffering overall.
They may also argue that a pinprick, while somewhat bad, falls below the threshold at which suffering deserves especially strong moral priority. It is merely mild suffering—or perhaps not even suffering—and so it can be outweighed. Once suffering reaches a certain intensity or amount, though, no amount of happiness elsewhere can redeem it. Perhaps you find that plausible: could enough orgasms really outweigh torture- or Holocaust-level suffering?
3. Lexical threshold SFE views require implausible discontinuities in value. A threshold at which suffering can no longer be outweighed may seem strange. As the intensity of suffering increases from a pinprick to torture, it may seem implausible that there is some point at which it suddenly becomes more urgent than anything else.
Discontinuities may seem strange, but perhaps they are the best view on offer. One might be confident that pinprick-level discomfort can be outweighed by happiness, and also confident that some suffering cannot be. One might be more confident in those judgments than in the claim that either all suffering or no suffering can be outweighed.
Perhaps this view is easier to swallow if we allow that the threshold is not perfectly sharp but rather vague, like baldness. It might also seem more plausible if we focus on experiences rather than, say, the number of pinpricks. Experiences are often very different from one another—we might say, qualitatively, not merely quantitatively, different. As suffering becomes more intense, it may become increasingly plausible that there is a point at which it becomes unbearable, or where one could no longer reasonably consent to enduring it.
4. SFE would license world destruction. Perhaps the most notorious objection to SFE is that it implies it is morally permissible, or even required, to painlessly destroy humanity or all sentient life to eliminate all suffering.
One might see this as an obvious reductio of SFE. Yet many forms of SFE reject this conclusion. They may hold that destroying the world would be impermissible for a variety of reasons—for example, because people have rights, because killing and destroying are wrong, or because humanity, sentient beings, or the natural world possess intrinsic value that should be preserved. They may also emphasize uncertainty and unintended consequences: in practice, attempts to bring about such an outcome could easily increase suffering.
Other SFE views, however, bite the bullet. They argue that if we could in theory prevent all future severe suffering, we should. Once we appreciate the badness of suffering, they insist, we may find this conclusion more plausible. They might also argue that competing moral theories face similarly surprising and even less plausible implications. For example, classical utilitarianism appears to imply that destroying the world, and even causing a lot of extreme suffering in the process, could be justified if doing so somehow produced even a tiny increase in overall happiness.
The Bias Hypothesis
Perhaps SFE is not implausible but simply unfashionable. After all, philosophers are not immune to social pressures and cognitive biases. Just as such biases may contribute to our neglect of animal suffering, they may also shape our attitudes toward SFE. Suffering is an unpleasant topic, and we may prefer not to dwell on it. The empathy gap also makes it difficult to appreciate the severity of suffering we are not currently experiencing, potentially leading us to underestimate its moral importance.
Other familiar biases may point in the same direction. Wishful thinking, conformity, status quo bias, just-world beliefs, optimism bias, and a pro-life or existence bias can keep us from appreciating the badness of suffering. Although biases can also cut the other way, it is plausible that, on balance, they discourage reflection on the role of suffering in ethics. SFE may also simply be unfamiliar to many. Because it is rarely taught or discussed alongside mainstream ethical theories, many people may never consider it as a serious option.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the question is not whether SFE is fashionable, but whether its arguments succeed. Many moral principles and ideas we now regard as obvious were once unpopular. Yet we might push back on the premise somewhat: SFE may be less isolated than it first appears. While the label is relatively new, closely related views have been defended by numerous contemporary philosophers, including Clark Wolf, Thomas Metzinger, Jamie Mayerfeld, David Pearce, Richard Ryder, Magnus Vinding, Simon Knutsson, Joseph Mendola, and others.
Nor is the underlying intuition new. Thinkers such as the Buddha, Epicurus, Schopenhauer, and Popper all placed special emphasis on reducing suffering, and concern with suffering has vexed philosophers for centuries. So while SFE may have been a minority view throughout history, it has had many serious defenders. That should give us greater confidence that it is worthy of careful consideration.