Strategic Plan

The Center for Reducing Suffering (CRS) works towards a future with less (severe) suffering, taking all sentient beings into account. In the following, we describe our strategic thinking in more detail, and outline why we believe that our research programme is critical in achieving our mission.

Background

If you are not yet familiar with our philosophy, we recommend reading the following:

• Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications
• Avoiding the Worst: How to Prevent a Moral Catastrophe
• About us

We believe that the starting point for any attempt to do good should be clarity about one’s goals and values. CRS endorses the following values:

• Suffering focus: Our primary goal is to reduce suffering, with a focus on helping those who are worst-off. 
• Antispeciesism: We believe suffering matters equally regardless of who experiences it, which implies that we should consider the suffering of all sentient beings in our efforts. This includes wild animals, and possibly also invertebrates or even artificial beings.
• Long-term focus: We also believe suffering matters equally regardless of when it is experienced. Consequently, since we think the long-term future contains the vast majority of sentient beings in expectation, our focus is primarily on reducing suffering in the long-term future.

Challenges

Efforts to reduce suffering (in the long run, for all sentient beings) face serious and often underappreciated obstacles.

First, our society lacks sufficient moral concern for all sentient beings. While most would agree with avoiding suffering in principle, we routinely ignore the interests of those who lack political power or representation, such as nonhuman animals or future generations. This often makes it hard to get sufficient buy-in for suggested interventions to help such (currently) “voiceless” beings. (And of course, they are at much greater risk of being subjected to severe suffering, as farmed animals are today.)

Second, long-term influence is difficult in general. This is because of great uncertainty over what the future will look like, coupled with a lack of reliable feedback loops. Improving the long-term future therefore requires thoughtful reflection and evidence-based reasoning to avoid inadvertently causing harm, and to identify the most effective levers in a vast space of possible interventions. Consequently, not many people have pursued this so far.

Third, to the extent there is research on improving the long-term future (cf. longtermism), it is primarily focused on existential risk or AI safety.¹ While we are committed to a cooperative approach towards those who pursue other priorities, we believe that the suffering-focused perspective merits priority in its own right, and that it has often been neglected. 

Theory of change

We aim to fill this gap by developing a research programme on how to best reduce suffering. CRS will provide a platform to explore key questions relevant to reducing suffering in an open-ended manner, with contributions from people with diverse intellectual backgrounds. It isn’t vital, though, whether we at CRS do the relevant research ourselves — we would like to facilitate a larger ongoing research project on suffering reduction, spanning many academic disciplines. 

We will submit the results of our research to interested parties, such as the effective altruism movement and the animal advocacy movement, hopefully enabling them to do even more good. Ideally, others will take up suggestions and make them a priority of their own.²

Going hand in hand with this research project, we seek to foster a community interested in and knowledgeable about suffering reduction (as construed above). Given the currently insufficient degree of moral concern for suffering (of all sentient beings), we need to connect with a broader set of people, and to present to them what we consider compelling reasons to take such concerns seriously (whether or not they fully agree with our views).

Yet thinking purely in terms of the number of people involved would be misguided. Our goal is capacity building over long timescales: we wish to ensure that future suffering reducers will be in a better position to achieve their goals.³ This means ensuring the long-term stability of the movement, networking with relevant stakeholders, developing and refining our ideas, and establishing healthy social norms and culture. And of course, expanding our knowledge of how to best reduce suffering (given the above-mentioned obstacles) is another critical aspect of capacity building, which is an additional reason why we believe that a research project to this effect is sorely needed.

Research priorities

Our research is anchored around three pillars:

• Suffering-focused ethics: We explore and develop ethical views that give special priority to the reduction of suffering, and promote moral concern for all sentient beings. Our work on suffering-focused ethics contributes to moral reflection and greater clarity about our values and priorities, which we view as fundamental to any serious effort to do good.
• S-risks: We explore scenarios that might result in intense suffering on an astronomical scale (s-risks). It seems plausible that preventing worst-case futures is the most effective way to reduce suffering, so we seek to gain a better understanding of how such scenarios could come about, and what we can do to prevent them.
• Cause prioritisation: We research what our priorities should be at a practical level so as to reduce suffering in the most effective ways. This bridges the gap between abstract research and concrete interventions. In particular, we seek to translate our philosophical framework into specific policy recommendations.⁴

You can read more about our research priorities on our Open Research Questions page.

Generally, the significant uncertainty that faces us implies that our research project is subject to many pitfalls, including overconfidence about what we should ideally focus on. Psychological research also suggests that we are likely to prematurely narrow in on a single focus area to the irrational exclusion of others. This finding is highly relevant for the endeavor of reducing suffering, as we here find countless hypotheses (e.g. about optimal paths to impact) that deserve some weight. 

Specifically, we remain agnostic about how we could best influence the possible development of transformative AI, given our uncertainty about whether, when, and in what form powerful AI systems will emerge. We therefore seek to avoid an overly narrow focus on specific scenarios (e.g., a rapid takeover by a single AI system).

Given these pitfalls, it is crucial that we pursue a truly open-ended research programme that remains humble and honest about the extent of our uncertainty, while exploring a broad range of options. 

1. Exceptions include Brian Tomasik’s Essays on Reducing Suffering, Tobias Baumann’s website on s-risks, and some work by the Center on Long-Term Risk. 80000 hours has also explored many different priority areas.[↩]
2. An example is the idea of reducing risks from malevolent actors. Note, however, that this article was co-authored by David Althaus (from the Center on Long-Term Risk) and Tobias Baumann (from CRS), so it can only partially be attributed to CRS.[↩]
3. Our strategy is inspired by patient philanthropy, broadly construed. Patient philanthropy usually refers to investing money to spend later, but many of our activities can also be viewed as “investing” into an improved ability to reduce suffering later on.[↩]
4. Magnus Vinding’s book Reasoned Politics investigates political philosophy from a suffering-focused perspective. Specifically, the book argues for a two-step framework that distinguishes reflection on values from empirical beliefs, and outlines implications of a suffering-focused approach to politics.[↩]