Publications

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Suffering-Focused Ethics

Minimalist views of wellbeing

Teo Ajantaival

This essay explores the variety of minimalist alternatives to “good minus bad” views of wellbeing.

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Varieties of minimalist moral views: Against absurd acts

Teo Ajantaival

Minimalist moral views, which prioritize reducing harms like suffering, are sometimes alleged to recommend absurd acts in practice, such as unprovoked violence or ignoring opportunities to save lives. This essay argues that the most reasonable interpretations of minimalist views do not recommend such acts.

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Minimalist axiologies and positive lives

Teo Ajantaival

Minimalist views of value (axiologies) are evaluative views that essentially say: “The less this, the better.” This essay looks at minimalist axiologies that are impartial and welfarist (i.e. concerned with the welfare of all sentient beings), with a focus on their theoretical and practical implications.

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Minimalist extended very repugnant conclusions are the least repugnant

Teo Ajantaival

Population axiology matters greatly for our priorities. Recently, it has been claimed that all plausible axiological views imply certain “very repugnant conclusions”. In this response, I argue that minimalist views avoid these “very repugnant conclusions”, and that minimalist views face less repugnant conclusions than do offsetting (“good minus bad”) views.

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Peacefulness, nonviolence, and experientialist minimalism

Teo Ajantaival

For purely experience-focused and consequentialist versions of minimalist views, an ideal world would be any perfectly peaceful world, including an empty world. When it comes to theoretical implications about the cessation and replacement of worlds, one can reasonably argue that offsetting views have worse implications than do minimalist views. Zooming out from unrealistic thought experiments, it’s crucial to be mindful of the gap between theory and practice, of the pitfalls of misconceived consequentialism, and of how minimalist consequentialists have strong practical reasons to pursue a nonviolent approach and to cooperate with people who hold different values.

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Positive roles of life and experience in suffering-focused ethics

Teo Ajantaival

A common objection to suffering-focused ethics is that it contradicts our practically prioritizing other pursuits, such as seeking enjoyable and enriching experiences. To respond, this essay aims to show that even if we assume a purely suffering-focused view, it would still be wise to recognize the highly positive and often necessary roles that other things may have for reducing suffering.

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My moral view: Reducing suffering, ‘how to be’ as fundamental to morality, no positive value, cons of grand theory, and more

Simon Knutsson

Simon Knutsson outlines his moral view as a whole. He argues that one should focus on reducing severe suffering and on behaving well, and that these basics get us pretty far in terms of how to act in real life.

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Answers in population ethics were published long ago

Simon Knutsson

Knutsson argues that good answers in population ethics already exist. He proceeds to question common narratives about population ethics.

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On purported positive goods “outweighing” suffering

Magnus Vinding

Many moral views hold that purported positive goods, such as pleasure, can morally “outweigh” or “cancel out” suffering. Yet this notion of outweighing is more problematic than is commonly recognized, since it is not obvious in what sense such outweighing is supposed to obtain, nor what justifies it. Clarifying and justifying this notion of “outweighing” is thus a problem facing the moral views that rely on it. In contrast, strongly suffering-focused views, and harm-focused views more generally, do not face this problem.

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Suffering and happiness: Morally symmetric or orthogonal?

Magnus Vinding

The purported value symmetry between suffering and happiness ought to be questioned and contrasted with alternative views. I here present two asymmetric pictures that collectively cover a broad range of axiological and ethical views. These pictures merit serious consideration.

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A phenomenological argument against a positive counterpart to suffering

Magnus Vinding

This essay argues that purportedly positive experiences do not possess any property that renders them genuine opposites of painful and uncomfortable experiences, neither in phenomenological nor axiological terms.

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Other Publications

On value lexicality

• • Lexical views without abrupt breaks
  • Clarifying lexical thresholds
  • Lexicality between mild discomfort and unbearable suffering: A variety of possible views
  • Lexical priority to extreme suffering — in practice
  • Reply to the scope neglect objection against value lexicality

Replies to critiques of suffering-focused views

• • Note on Pummer’s “Worseness of nonexistence”
  • Comparing repugnant conclusions: Response to the “near-perfect paradise vs. small hell” objection
  • Point-by-point critique of Ord’s “Why I’m Not a Negative Utilitarian”
  • Reply to Gustafsson’s “Against Negative Utilitarianism”
  • Reply to Chappell’s “Rethinking the Asymmetry”
  • Comments on Mogensen’s “The weight of suffering”
  • Critique of MacAskill’s “Is It Good to Make Happy People?”
  • A thought experiment that questions the moral importance of creating happy lives
  • Reply to the “evolutionary asymmetry objection” against suffering-focused ethics

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S-Risks

S-risks: An introduction

Tobias Baumann

Future technology will likely endow humanity with unprecedented power, potentially allowing us to shape the entire universe. But if this newfound power is used irresponsibly, it may lead to suffering on an astronomical scale. Such risks of astronomical suffering are also called suffering risks or s-risks for short. While such scenarios may seem far-fetched at first, we have good reasons to believe that their probability is not negligible. People who want to help others as effectively as possible should, therefore, consider reducing s-risks a top priority – especially if they perceive them to be important on moral grounds or neglected in practice.

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Arguments for and against a focus on s-risks

Tobias Baumann

Among the myriad ways to do good, should averting risks of astronomical suffering (s-risks) be our main priority? The case for a focus on s-risks rests on a combination of longtermism, a suffering focus, and a worst-case focus. In this article, I will outline key arguments for and against each of these premises.

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How can we reduce s-risks?

Tobias Baumann

Given the highly abstract and often speculative nature of such future scenarios, what can we actually do now to reduce s-risks? This post gives an overview of the priority areas that have been identified in suffering-focused cause prioritisation research to date.

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Other Publications

• Risk factors for s-risks
• A typology of s-risks
• FAQ on s-risks
• On fat-tailed distributions and s-risks
• S-risk impact distribution is double-tailed
• Popular views of population ethics imply a priority on preventing worst-case outcomes

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Cause Prioritization

Reducing long-term risks from malevolent actors

David Althaus and Tobias Baumann

Dictators who exhibited highly narcissistic, psychopathic, or sadistic traits were involved in some of the greatest catastrophes in human history. Malevolent humans with access to advanced technology—such as whole brain emulation or other forms of transformative AI—could cause serious existential risks and suffering risks. We therefore consider interventions to reduce the expected influence of malevolent humans on the long-term future. The development of manipulation-proof measures of malevolence seems valuable, since they could be used to screen for malevolent humans in high-impact settings, such as heads of government or CEOs. We also explore possible future technologies that may offer unprecedented leverage to mitigate against malevolent traits.

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Is most expected suffering due to worst-case outcomes?

Tobias Baumann

For those interested in reducing future suffering, a natural question to ask is: should we focus our efforts on preventing the worst outcomes? Or is (expected) future suffering distributed more broadly over a wide range of plausible futures? This is relevant because it determines the extent to which we accept “Pascalian” wagers about how the future could go very badly. If worst-case outcomes dominate, then it pays to think about specific scenarios and how to prevent them; if not, we should pursue robust strategies that are good over many or all scenarios. In this post, I will try to define the question more precisely, and give arguments for and against the hypothesis that extreme outcomes should dominate consequentialist calculations.

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Why altruists should be cooperative

Magnus Vinding

There are many reasons to adopt a cooperative approach to altruism. A cooperative approach can enable positive-sum compromises, make people more willing to join our efforts, and promote collaboration with others toward shared ends. Last but not least, greater cooperation can help reduce some of the main risk factors for s-risks.

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Other Publications

• Common ground for longtermists
• Longtermism and animal advocacy
• Reasons to include insects in animal advocacy
• Representing future generations in the political process
• Improving our political system: An overview
• Arguments for and against moral advocacy
• Beware frictions from altruistic value differences
• Distrusting salience: Keeping unseen urgencies in mind
• Two contrasting models of “intelligence” and future growth
• Research vs. non-research work to improve the world: In defense of more research and reflection

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Practical Recommendations

Career advice for reducing suffering

Tobias Baumann

In this post, we outline our thoughts on promising paths for those who wish to use their career to reduce suffering. What we do in our professional life is arguably our best opportunity to do good, far more so than other decisions such as consumption choices or voting (which is not to say that those are not also important). Choosing a high-impact career is therefore of critical importance for aspiring effective altruists.

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Reducing Extreme Suffering in Healthy Ways

Magnus Vinding

In this chapter for his forthcoming book, Magnus Vinding explores healthy ways to reduce extreme suffering. The chapter covers issues such as dealing with uncertainty, handling Weltschmerz, and cultivating hope for compassionate impact.

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Compassion for Others

Magnus Vinding

Magnus Vinding dives into the benefits of other-oriented compassion and explores ways to increase it in this draft chapter from his upcoming book, Compassionate Purpose: Personal Inspiration for a Better World.

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How the animal movement could do even more good

Tobias Baumann

The animal advocacy movement is doing a lot to help animals, and has enjoyed some level of success. Yet there is still substantial room for improvement to allow the movement to reach its full potential. To that end, we believe it is critical to be aware of biases that may distort our thinking, such as the tendency to keep doing what we have done so far simply because that’s what we are familiar with. In this post, we outline our suggestions for the animal movement and our vision of how it can develop to reduce animal suffering (even) more effectively. 

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Five recommendations for better political discourse

Tobias Baumann

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. In this post, we will focus on our broader political culture, drawing on the best science of today to outline recommendations for better political discourse.

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Other Resources

• The case for suffering-focused ethics (Center on Long-Term Risk)
• Reasons to Promote Suffering-Focused Ethics (Brian Tomasik)
• Effective Altruism: How Can We Best Help Others? (Magnus Vinding)
• Reducing risks of astronomical suffering (David Althaus & Lukas Gloor)
• Artificial intelligence and its implications for future suffering (Brian Tomasik)
• Online course introducing wild animal suffering (Animal Ethics)
• Reducing Suffering Amongst Invertebrates Such As Insects (Simon Knutsson)
• Sentience Politics philosophy sequence
• Brian Tomasik: Essays on Reducing Suffering
• Magnus Vinding’s blog
• Tobias Baumann: Reducing Risks of Future Suffering
• Simon Knutsson’s writings on ethics