Suffering-focused ethics

In 2023, I wrote a forum post about extreme pain and suffering. I wrote this post in my own time and mostly to satisfy my own curiosity, but this is the single piece of work about which I have receive the most comments and feedback: Reminding myself just how awful pain can get (plus, an experiment on myself). Some relevant passages:

[after my self experiment] It now seems completely crazy to worry about anything other than preventing extreme suffering as much as possible. […] If preventing suffering is indeed the most important thing, this does give us a very useful strategy for animal advocacy. We may not necessarily need to mount a moral revolution, political revolution, or social transition, despite these having been a large part of the animal advocacy movement’s strategy to date. What we need (if this is correct) is to prevent suffering. This is very actionable, especially compared to those more challenging strategies - it’s easier to install humane slaughter equipment or to ban fast-growing chicken breeds than to overthrow a state or transform a food system. […] Suffering is so urgent that it demands our immediate, unrelenting attention - but I need to maintain that attention for my whole career. There is an emergency, but it’s long and drawn-out. The building is burning, but it will continue to burn for a long time. This is a weird position to be in.

Taking the hard line

There’s a quote from philosophy and ethics writer Brian Tomasik that I think about a lot. In an article called The Horror of Suffering, Brian does an excellent job of conveying the absolute urgency of preventing extreme suffering as the fundamental moral cause:

I take a hard line because concern for suffering is just one of many causes a person can be entrained by. It’s easy for organisms to let their value systems shift around until what was yesterday’s overriding principle is today’s lost cause. […] It’s easy for us, in our comfortable houses and with full stomachs, to muse about various moral abstractions that catch our interest. I say no. When you let other things displace the importance of suffering, that’s not an improvement but a failure of goal preservation.

So Brian and I both subscribe to “suffering-focused ethics”. In particular, you could call us both “extreme suffering-focused”. We’re both committed to doing everything in our power to preventing as much extreme suffering as we can.

Moreover, my current belief is that anybody who experiences extreme suffering will also predictably endorse suffering-focused ethics. Brian explores some examples of this happening in his many excellent articles. I also believe that there is not an analogous situation for pleasure; that is to say, I currently believe that there is no amount of pleasure that can make somebody endorse a different ethical system (e.g. classical utilitarianism, which balances both pleasure and suffering). I would be delighted to test this hypothesis, if there were a way that I could experience extreme pleasure and see what happens to my moral views—but nobody has yet suggested a way for me to do so.

Ethical minimalism is empowering

Now, of course, a hard-line position can justify a lot of evil. Obviously, you should avoid being a dick if you can help it (and I know, all too well, that I haven’t always been successful at that!). And when philosophies are taken too far, at the expense of caution and self-reflection, we end up with unambiguously evil situations like the far-right fundamentalist regimes of Germany and Spain or the far-left fundamentalist regime of the Soviet Union (or the 21st century fundamentalist regime by which animals are systematically tortured and killed for profit and pleasure). We know comparatively little about moral philosophy and about empirical reality, and humans have a bias towards being overconfident about their knowledge, so caution is always, always, always warranted.

But with that caveat in mind, the hard line of suffering-focused ethics is wonderfully clarifying. As members of a human society, we are presented with many unstated and underlying ethical beliefs, such as:

  • Don’t steal
  • Don’t insult people
  • Help others
  • Support democracy
  • Don’t buy things from Amazon
  • Don’t get fat
  • Wait for the pedestrian light to turn green before crossing the road
  • Don’t spend too much time playing video games
  • Keep a clean and presentable house for guests
  • Don’t damage other people’s property
  • Don’t commit fraud

Obviously, while these are common beliefs at least in the country I live in, not all of these beliefs are worth endorsing—some of these beliefs are downright harmful. At the very least, these are all very interesting topics for critical reflection and moral philosophy.

But none of them are important when compared to preventing as much extreme suffering as we can.

If damaging other people’s property is necessary for preventing extreme suffering, then you are morally obligated to damage other people’s property—I have done this on a couple of occasions to assist injured animals). If insulting a person is necessary for preventing extreme suffering, then you are morally obligated to insult that person—I have also done this once or twice, and I didn’t enjoy it, but it was necessary.

Reality has a screw loose

One of my favourite novels is Killing Commendatore by the famous writer Haruki Murakami. At one point in the novel, the main character says to his friend:

It seems to me that reality itself has a screw loose somewhere. That’s why I try to keep at least myself in line as much as possible.

It is not difficult to look around and notice that reality certainly does have a screw loose. The universe is 13.79 billion years old, and we only get to experience 4,000 weeks—if we’re lucky. The sun causes skin cancer. Due to no merit of my own, I live in a house with a lifestyle that is modest by middle-class standards but impossibly luxurious for 99% of humans who have ever lived. So many people go without basic healthcare, even in a country as unimaginably wealthy as Australia, but I can order every conceivable consumer good to my doorstep in exchange for a negligible amount of my own resources. We ascribe high status to white men who wear suits and ties and who work 60-hour weeks, for some reason. As Alex the Astronaut sings: “There’s billionaires for president, and parking fines at hospitals”.

For sure, the world has improved in a lot of ways, but the world also has many aspects that are fundamentally absurd.

There is a human tendency to want to feel valued. This desire can be very constructive and can lead to many deeply rewarding aspects of life, like personal relationships and meaningful pursuits. But the desire to feel valued can also lead to a craving for status.

To me, this is not a society in which I want to have a high status. If a society is absurd, then having status in that society is also plainly absurd.

This is deeply liberating, as it means I can simply get on with the one thing that I find actually important: preventing extreme suffering to the best of my ability, particuarly among beings who cannot advocate for themselves.