The Case for Suffering-Focused Ethics

First published: Aug. 2016


“Suffering-focused ethics” is an umbrella term for moral views that place primary or particular importance on the prevention of suffering. Most views that fall into this category are pluralistic in that they hold that other things besides reducing suffering also matter morally. To illustrate the diversity within suffering-focused ethics as well as to present a convincing case for it, this article will introduce four separate motivating intuitions.1 Not all of these intuitions may ring true or appeal to everyone, but each of them grounds concern for suffering as a moral priority. Providing a complete summary of why certain versions of suffering-focused ethics are endorsed is beyond the article’s scope. The aim is to survey the most common intuitions together with their most frequent supportive arguments.

I. Making people happy, not happy people

A common intuition is that creating happy beings is less morally pressing than making sure existing beings are well off. This intuition is epitomised in Jan Narveson’s (1973) statement, “We are in favor of making people happy, but neutral about making happy people.” Narveson’s principle highlights a putative2  asymmetry between suffering and happiness in the context of (not) adding new beings to the world. As an illustration, consider the following thought experiment:

Two planets


Even though one could bring about 1,000 times as many happy beings as there are existing unhappy ones, many people’s moral intuition would have us help the unhappy beings instead. To them, taking care of suffering appears to be of greater moral importance than creating new, happy beings.


Narveson’s principle closely resembles preference-based axiologies, where what matters is preference (dis)satisfaction. In Christoph Fehige’s words:

Creating large numbers of beings while ensuring that all their preferences are satisfied – which could be achieved by making provisions for the newly created preference bundles to be easily satisfiable, or even by aligning preferences so as to correspond very closely with the most likely state of the world – may strike us as somewhat of a pointless endeavor. Fehige’s plausible claim that an extra preference in itself is of little value, so that “Maximizers of preference satisfaction should instead call themselves minimizers of preference frustration.” (Fehige, ibid.) is the gist of his anti-frustrationism.

Intuitions like “Making people happy rather than making happy people” are linked to the view that non-existence does not constitute a deplorable state. Proponents of this view reason as follows: The suffering and/or frustrated preferences of a being constitute a real, tangible problem for that being. By contrast, non-existence is free of moral predicaments for any evaluating agent, given that per definitionem no such agent exists. Why, then, might we be tempted to consider non-existence a problem? Non-existence may seem unsettling to us, because from the perspective of existing beings, no-longer-existing is a daunting prospect. Importantly however, death or no-longer-existing differs fundamentally from never having been born, in that it is typically preceded and accompanied by suffering and/or frustrated preferences. Ultimately, any uneasiness about never having been born can only be explained by attitudes of those who do already live.


Views that incorporate this intuition: The intuition “Making people happy rather than making happy people” is directly incorporated in so-called person-affecting views, where affairs can only be morally bad if they are bad for someone, i.e. if there is a being to point to for whom something poses a problem. It is central to anti-natalist positions (e.g. David Benatar, “Better never to have been”, 2008). The intuition is also present in preference-based approaches such as Fehige’s antifrustrationism that we mentioned before. Others include the “moral ledger” view laid out by Peter Singer in his Practical Ethics,3 as well as in the “prior-existence” view he tentatively endorsed in the same book.4 Finally, egalitarianism and prioritarianism can incorporate the intuition by giving priority to suffering reduction as long as suffering is still around.5

II. Torture-level suffering cannot be counterbalanced

There is something particularly terrible when it comes to torture-level suffering. For many people, extreme suffering is so bad that no other experience can counterbalance it. While some people may think about morality in terms of what is awesome and exciting, others think of it as the most serious business there is. We tend to shy away from truly imagining how horrible suffering can be. After episodes of extreme suffering, we may gradually forget just how bad it was in the moment. At times, circumstances can exacerbate to a point where we are willing to give up everything we care about. As Orwell pointed out in his book 1984: “[...] for everyone there is something unendurable – something that cannot be contemplated. Courage and cowardice are not involved. If you are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope. If you have come up from deep water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It is merely an instinct which cannot be destroyed. [...] They are a form of pressure that you cannot withstand, even if you wished to. You will do what is required of you."

Confronting torture-level suffering

While people might be motivated to attempt to endure torture for loved ones or for the fulfillment of their dearest life goals, these confounders are eliminated in the thought experiment above, where the gains – paradise in the experience machine – also bring with them leaving behind loved ones or life goals directed at the (non-virtual) world. In essence, we are asking whether torture-level suffering can – all else equal – be counterbalanced by other experiences in one's personal case. Of course, we imagine the virtual reality on offer to feel completely authentic to the user with no disturbing memories, e.g. of the preceding torture, involved.


There are however people who would accept this bargain. This presents a challenge: How are we to extrapolate from intrapersonal tradeoffs, where a person herself is the arbiter, to interpersonal tradeoffs, where we consider decisions that affect the welfare levels of many individuals? For reasons that will be outlined in the following paragraphs, even people who would themselves accept torture-level suffering in the thought experiment above have reason to hesitate before concluding that torture-level suffering can be counterbalanced in the context of interpersonal tradeoffs. After all, this would entail fixing their own exchange rate for other individuals whose consent cannot be taken for granted. Even in the personal case, most of the person moments – treating a person's life as a temporal series of "person moments" – during the week of torture would not consent. That is, sufferers would (almost certainly) regret the decision made by the person moment that preceded them, and wish for it to be changed. Conversely, after a few years in the most sublime bliss of virtual reality, the newer, happy person moments might end up concluding that, in retrospect, the suffering was worth it after all. But if they were to get tortured again, the judgment might again revert. With perspectives biased by temporal viewpoints, an objective answer on if or when to accept torture-level suffering cannot be obtained.

Nevertheless, what we can do is to analyze the different reasons for choosing one way or the other. The personal case of accepting suffering for happiness is confounded by many factors: The intuition that the later happy moments might justify judging the prior suffering as “worth it” is founded upon the belief that more recent experience moments have epistemic authority over their elapsed peers. For instance, we are willing to grant that an old person looking back at various life choices is in a good epistemic position to determine the merit of these choices. In our scenario, the intuition can be challenged by reversing the order of our thought experiment: If torture comes last, the person moments during torture (or right thereafter) are more likely to regret the decision. Would this lend support to judging the option as not having been worth it?

Finally, another reason why the argument from epistemic authority does not suffice to establish that torture-level suffering can be counterbalanced is that epistemic authority cannot apply at the interpersonal level. It does seem plausible that people choose rationally when they decide to undergo such tradeoffs in their own lives (though there might also be a systemic error in gauging these sorts of tradeoffs). On the other hand, it strikes us as more controversial whether a measurement of the (dis)value of suffering and happiness respectively can be established from an outside, “impartial” perspective. The following thought experiment lends support to this intuition by highlighting an important difference between intrapersonal and interpersonal welfare tradeoffs:

Consciousness board


This suggests that even for people who might be inclined to accept the bargain described above for themselves, it remains elusive whether to apply the same exchange rate for the impartial or altruistic context. The two modes differ in interesting and potentially relevant respects.


III. Happiness as the absence of suffering

A widespread view, especially in non-Western traditions, is that “happiness” consists of the absence of suffering. According to this view, not only pleasure, but also tranquillity or contentment are amongst the best experiences (Gloor, 2016). We pursue pleasures because without them, we (usually) develop cravings for these pleasures. And these cravings constitute a form of suffering, i.e. of consciously wanting the current experience to be different. If a state is entirely free of cravings, there is a sense in which it can convincingly be considered perfect. Subjectively at least, the immediate, internal evaluation in such a state concludes that nothing needs to be changed. Accordingly, pleasure then carries “mere” instrumental importance, because flooding the mind with pleasure is one of several ways to (temporarily) get rid of cravings. As Gloor puts it in the upcoming paper Buddhist Axiology: A Normative Proposal (2016):


Critics may object that a world in which all pleasures were reduced to “mere” contentment – such as states of constant meditation, half-sleep or the playing of flow-inducing video games – would be unexciting and rather monotonous. All the heights of sensory and emotional  pleasures, such as eating one’s favorite foods, having sex or being in love would be lost. But it is worth pointing out that the loss of these experiences  only appears tragic when viewed from the outside, and in comparison to the world we would wish or crave for instead. Of course, experiences may not be the only thing to value; and to the extent that we also value having exciting lives, pursuing meaning, or reaching dreams or objectives, a world of “mere” contentment would indeed fall short. However, if we zoom in on all that is being experienced in this world, there would by definition never be a moment of boredom or unfulfilled longing; never would there be a moment where someone consciously wants to have something changed about their experience. To its inhabitants, such a world would appear perfect. For this reason alone, a strong case can be made that it should also be thought of as one version of “perfect” according to our altruistic aims – at least insofar as these aims are focused on conscious experiences rather than preferences or life goals.

Buddhist monks

One reason to press the button is that it could cause the monks to believe that they have reached a religious state of enlightenment they were after their whole life. But let us suppose that we are dealing with secular monks: The drug-induced euphoria will change the quality of their experience, but it would not change their beliefs about enlightenment or their meditative accomplishments. Should we press the button?

It is tempting to feel roughly indifferent here: Pressing the button seems nice, and assuming it produces no harm or panic in the temple, it may be hard to imagine how it would be something bad.12 At the same time, it does not seem particularly important or morally pressing to push the button. As far as the monks in the temple are concerned, it seems that they will be totally fine (for the next ten minutes anyway) without the drug.



IV. Other values have diminishing returns


Repugnant Conclusion16




V. Concluding discussion

Above, we introduced four separate motivating intuitions for suffering-focused ethics. Endorsing one or several of these intuitions as a guiding principle can justify concern for suffering as the main focus of someone’s morality, while leaving room for other things to value. In addition to the intuitions discussed above, some people may also just hold a suffering-focused disposition or temperament when they contemplate the value of lives and outcomes in practice: Quantifying suffering and happiness can be done in several different ways, and people’s judgments may differ even if they use the same methods for their assessment. When doing rough, impressionistic aggregations, some people – who we can call “suffering-focused” – tend to conclude that various lives and outcomes are overall bad, while others tend to conclude that they are overall good.19



Given the difficulty of this task, it is especially important that we do not make it even more complicated by placing unreasonable formal demands on our values. Likewise, it is important that we do not hastily subscribe to some particular view without remaining open to reflection. It is totally fine for one’s values to be “messy” or complex. Ultimately, choosing values comes down to finding the intuitions and guiding principles we care about the most – and if that includes a number of different intuitions, or even some form of extrapolation procedure to defer to better-informed future versions of ourselves – then the solution may not look simple or elegant. This is completely fine, and it allows those who agree with (some of) the intuitions behind suffering-focused ethics to care about other things in addition.


3. Reducing Risks of Astronomical Suffering: A Neglected Priority

  1. Our Mission
  2. The Case for Suffering-Focused Ethics
  3. Reducing Risks of Astronomical Suffering: A Neglected Priority
  4. Altruists Should Prioritize Artificial Intelligence

VI. References


Gloor, L. (2016). Buddhist axiology: A normative proposal. Manuscript in preparation.








VII. Footnotes

  1. We speak of ‘intuitions’ in this article, but one could also use terms such as ‘principles,’ ‘ideas’ or ‘views.’ We mean intuitions in the sense of our considered judgments that we use as data points when constructing or evaluating more general moral theories. Intuitions in this sense are not just hunches or gut feelings, they are the central building blocks of our moral views.   (back)
  2. There are philosophers that have defended a symmetrical view, notably John McMahan in “Asymmetries in the morality of causing people to exist” (2009).  (back)
  6. When literary characters undergo struggles and great suffering for causes they believe in, we might think that this is worth it for them. But this belief is usually motivated by a belief in fulfilling life–goals or sacrificing oneself for “good causes,” i.e. it is something that is motivated more by a preference-driven perspective, rather than by a perspective that (just) looks at the (dis)value of different experiences.  (back)
  8. See here for a summary.   (back)
  13. Critics may object that the thought experiment is confounded by status quo bias or the act-omission distinction: What if the monks were already experiencing heights of euphoria, would it not be morally bad to deprive them of this by “sending them back to meditation?” While this framing might make it more likely that people consider the lack of euphoria a bad thing, it does not fully take away the force of the intuition that meditation is also really good, and that the monks are still perfectly fine even if they are now no longer euphoric. Not everyone might share this intuition, but assuming that the monks did not have an explicit wish for euphoria rather than meditation, and that their autonomy is not being violated at any point during the transition, the view that a course of events which changes the euphoria to “mere” meditation is not something that is bad for the monks, seems like an entirely plausible and defensible position to hold.   (back)
  15. In his Letter to Menoeceus (as quoted by Gloor (2016) ), Epicurus wrote:


  16. Inspired by Parfit (1984).  (back)

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