essays on reducing suffering

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4 Suffering, and the Promise of a World without Pain

• Published: August 2014
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Humans have increasingly endowed themselves with transformative powers, guided by a vision that is secular, progressive, and redemptive. In contrast to this utopian vision, this chapter looks further back, offering a narrative history of Western culture, from its Greco-Roman roots, through the biblical traditions, to modern and contemporary times. Throughout this history, the author thematically queries the place and value of suffering in human existence. In these more long-lived cultural traditions, suffering has given rise to pity, sorrow, lament, supplication, and pleasure; it has occasioned judgment, punishment, and war; and it has shown itself as a source of forgiveness and the grounds for mercy. Acknowledging the power of the post-Enlightenment quest to reduce suffering through medical, scientific, and technological means, the author repeatedly declares suffering’s power to affirm, value, and consecrate personal and communal life.

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Alleviating World Suffering pp 3–34 Cite as

A Worldview of the Alleviation of Suffering

• Ronald E. Anderson 3  
• First Online: 03 March 2017

776 Accesses

Part of the book series: Social Indicators Research Series ((SINS,volume 67))

After an overview of the concepts of suffering and social suffering, this chapter gives six common frames for thinking about suffering-alleviation. For example, one frame is suffering-alleviation as moral responsibility; another is suffering-alleviation as undesirable or harmful. Next the following four major societal sectors for suffering-alleviation are described: the humanitarian sector, the social policy sector, the caregiving sector, and the spiritual sector. Additional topics include philosophical approaches for suffering-alleviation priority setting; suggestions for how to alleviate extreme suffering; data on the global trend in rising suffering; and a final section overviewing each chapter. The reader will discover surprisingly wide diversity in approaches to alleviating suffering, which altogether reveal how important suffering-alleviation is to studying and understanding human quality of life.

• Alleviation
• Humanitarian
• Social policy
• Existential suffering
• Social suffering
• Global suffering

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Anderson, R.E. (2017). A Worldview of the Alleviation of Suffering. In: Anderson, R. (eds) Alleviating World Suffering. Social Indicators Research Series, vol 67. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51391-1_1

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How To Reduce Human Suffering: 3 Lessons From A Seminal Public Health Study

Nurith Aizenman

A seaside scene in Indonesia. As countries like Indonesia move up the income ladder, some health conditions improve — but new threats, like non-communicable diseases, loom large. Tommy Trenchard for NPR hide caption

A seaside scene in Indonesia. As countries like Indonesia move up the income ladder, some health conditions improve — but new threats, like non-communicable diseases, loom large.

What are the biggest drivers of human suffering?

Every year an international team of researchers aims to answer that question by assembling a mammoth data set called the " Global Burden of Disease ." It has become the go-to source for tracking and ranking the impact of virtually every disease or condition that is killing, sickening or otherwise disabling people in virtually every country on the planet.

But this year's report also points to some intriguing solutions — highlighted by the researchers in a piece published this week in the medical journal The Lancet that accompanies their latest data release .

To learn more, NPR spoke with the scientist who leads the project, Christopher Murray of the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Here are three takeaways:

1. The key to health is ... wealth. (And education ... and women's rights).

The Global Burden of Disease doesn't just comprise data on health. The researchers also pull together and analyze measures of economic and social wellbeing over time — including each country's per capita income, average educational attainment and status of women (as reflected by the typical number of children a woman there gives birth to).

And on these socioeconomic fronts, the researchers find that since 2000 the worst-off countries have made enormous strides. "The bottom 20% of countries are catching up. They are now developing at a faster rate than the countries at the top," says Murray.

Over this same period the poorest countries also saw major gains on what's called "healthy life expectancy" — or as Murray puts it "how many years you can expect to live in full health."

And here's the kicker: Through statistical analysis, Murray and his collaborators were able to show that nearly all of this rise in healthy life expectancy was the direct result of the gains in income, education and women's status.

For instance, between 2000 and 2019, for countries on the absolute lowest end of the socio-economic scale, healthy life expectancy increased by 9 years. And nearly 80 percent of that increase could be explained by their socioeconomic progress during that same time frame.

One caveat is that the link was far less pronounced for countries on the higher end of the socioeconomic scale. But for poor ones the lesson seems clear, says Murray: One of the most effective ways to boost people's health is to focus on advancing their social and economic development.

2. We need to pay more attention to "non-communicable" diseases.

As impressive and laudable as the health gains in poor countries have been, one downside is that they are concentrated in just four types of diseases: communicable, maternal, neonatal and nutritional.

This is not surprising, says Murray. The problematic conditions that enable these diseases to thrive tend to fade as a country gets richer and more educated and affords its women higher status.

For instance, says Murray, "as soon as people and societies have more resources they tend to deal with water supply and sanitation. Also basic malnutrition starts to go away." Both factors play a key role in how many of a country's children contract infectious diseases that kill them before the age of 5.

Indeed, one of the best outcomes of the last 20 years has been that the annual number of deaths among children below age 5 dropped from 9.6 million in 2000 to about 5 million in 2019.

Unfortunately, says Murray, many of the drivers of different category of illness — known as "non-communicable diseases" — actually tend to get worse as countries start to move up the socio-economic scale.

Take air pollution — which is linked to lung cancer and other respiratory ailments. "You know, if you're in a preindustrial society, there's not a lot of air pollution," says Murray. "As societies industrialize it tends to get worse."

Other risk factors that worsen as countries develop include the incidence of obesity, high blood sugar and high blood pressure — which are variously linked to diabetes and heart disease.

The result is that the gains that poor countries have made against that first category of diseases — communicable, maternal, neonatal and nutritional — over the last 20 years has not been matched by progress in addressing non-communicable diseases. So now, non-communicable disease cause a far greater share of the health burden that low- to middle-income countries face. Specifically, between 1990 and 2019 non-communicable diseases went from contributing about 40% of the health burden to 66%. (The Global Burden of Disease project measures health burden as the number of healthy years of life that a country loses to disease each year.)

Unfortunately, many countries and health systems are still set up as if the biggest source of poor health are communicable diseases. "Because of the way people are trained, governments are very often focusing on the problems of the last generation and not the current one," says Murray.

"Take a place like Indonesia," he adds. "It's really just dramatic. Now more than 80% of the health burden there is non-communicable diseases. But [those] are not the main focus of policy formulation. They're still worrying about the previous problems."

India is another example, says Murray. "They have a huge problem with high blood pressure, and there should be a national strategy for getting more people into primary care and getting their blood pressure treated," he says. And yet, "they don't really have a national blood pressure strategy."

3. Preparing for the next pandemic ... could mean taxing soda pop.

Any national strategy aimed at non-communicable diseases would need to address behaviors by both individuals and corporations, says Murray. That's because many of the risk factors involved are related to decisions by corporations — what do they put in our food — and our own choices regarding what (and how much) we consume and how much we exercise.

Murray suggests taking lessons from the one success story governments can point to when it comes to curbing a risk factor for non-communicable disease: smoking. "We found that regulatory and taxation strategies have made sustained progress [on smoking] over the last decades," says Murray. After all, the more inaccessible and expensive tobacco is, the less people are likely to use it.

It can be hard to build support for regulatory approaches — just look at the pushback against taxes on sugary beverages in many countries. But Murray says it may help to consider these strategies not only as efforts to address non-communicable diseases but as a vital element of the world's strategy for preparing for the next pandemic.

Before COVID-19, he says, the health experts who specialized in infectious disease and pandemic readiness "lived in separate universes." Then, he says, "suddenly COVID-19 comes along and we find out that obesity and blood pressure are key determinants of what your risk of death from COVID is. And it highlights how we have older populations and more of these risk factors and we are creating far greater vulnerability."

As worrisome as those risk factors may sound says Murray of this year's report: "I think these are an empowering set of findings. There's plenty of things that we identify where governments and individuals can take action."

• communicable diseases
• global burden of disease
• non-communicable diseases

The Horror of Suffering

By Brian Tomasik

First written: 16 Aug 2013. Last nontrivial update: 17 Aug 2017.

I think extreme suffering is more serious than is commonly realized. My drive to prevent suffering is very strong, and I would feel I was failing my values if I took a more relaxed stance on the matter.

Translations: French

Two examples

Suffering is not just an intellectual game, emotions as incomparable, level 1: how bad are various kinds of suffering, example: fear of death, level 3: how much weight should we place on a particular moral system rather than another, the moral urgency of suffering is widely recognized.

There are many occasions when I've felt overwhelmed by the horror of suffering in the world. Following are just two of many examples.

On one afternoon, while walking outside, I saw many winged ants on the sidewalk, some of which had been stepped on. I wondered whether I should try to move them out of the way of pedestrians, but there were too many . The sheer number of ants was such that I felt awful thinking about the pain of each of their deaths, multiplied by how many there were. Of course, this is a drop in the bucket relative to nature as a whole, but seeing it up close made the horror sink in.

Soon thereafter, I read about patients being conscious and screaming during surgery. Apparently 0.01% of the US population wakes up during surgery every year :

Some just have fleeting memories of things they heard, but others describe "white-hot pain" and terror, triggering long-term emotional problems. Carol Weihrer of Reston, Va., said that 11 years after awakening during surgery to remove a diseased eye that caused severe pain, she still has post-traumatic stress disorder, can sleep for just short periods and suffers mood swings and panic attacks. Weihrer, who founded the group Anesthesia Awareness Campaign Inc., said she heard the doctor give instructions: "Cut deeper, pull harder." "I actually saw them cut the optic nerve when everything went black," she said. "While you're laying there on the table," she recalled, "you are thinking, praying, cursing, plotting, pleading, trying to crawl off the gurney, trying to kick, scream, move any part of your body to let them know you're awake. In effect, you are entombed in a corpse."

Even the routine preventive procedure of colonoscopy can be agonizing for some patients. Colonoscopies are recommended for all adults every 10 years starting at age 50. Alarmingly, patients may not realize how painful the procedure was because amnesic drugs like Versed prevent memories from being retained. The paper " Midazolam-pain, but one cannot remember it: a survey among Southern German endoscopists " discusses endoscopy, but similar findings may apply for colonoscopy:

Ninety-eight percent of the questioned physicians felt that patients have pain during endoscopy with midazolam+/-opioid, but do not remember later. Ninety-two percent reported that it happens that patients moan aloud because of pain and almost half of the endoscopists (48%) reported of screaming. The majority of the endoscopists (91%) reported fierce defense movements with midazolam or the need to hold the patient down on the examination couch because of fierce movements, respectively (75%). Seventy percent of the endoscopists wished to have the rooms for endoscopy preferably soundproof away from the waiting room [...].

Here's the account of one particular colonoscopy patient:

When I awoke, I was back in the curtained room and my boyfriend was there waiting for me. I felt exhausted and numb. I really didn't remember the things that happened to me, and wasn't really aware of my surroundings for quite some time. My limited speech was slurred. I was told that my examination was fine, but apparently kept asking over and over. Eventually, the drugs wore off completely, I dressed and went to lunch before returning home. It was a good result, and that's what mattered, right? Maybe. Here's what really happened. When I was wheeled into the nearby procedure room, my boyfriend was not allowed to stay in the empty curtained room; he inexplicably had to return to the reception area. When he asked the nurse why he had to move, the nurse would only say that, "Well, when the patients have the procedure, they are sometimes, well......ya know." He didn't question the "ya know," and went to the reception area. But after 35 minutes, he became anxious and walked back to the curtained room. I wasn't there, but he thought he could hear my panicked voice coming from the procedure room. The nurse immediately rushed over to him and told him the colonoscopy was still in progress. He was immediately asked to leave and he did so reluctantly. Unlike I remember it, my boyfriend was brought to the room after I was already there. He said I looked stunned, and that it appeared I had been crying—basically, my eyes and nose were red and watery. The nurse anesthetist was there (again, I don't remember anyone there but my boyfriend), and told him that I was quite groggy because I had "a little difficulty" with the procedure and required more drugs. He was assured I would come out of it soon. He told me I had trouble talking coherently, and that he couldn't understand what I was saying. The nurse told both of us that the procedure "was fine - nothing was wrong," but I don't remember it, and asked about twice later. [...] I now remember waking up and being in great pain. I remember screaming for them to stop, to take it out. I remember being told it was almost over, but screaming that it hurt too much. I am guessing at that point I got more drugs, because I don't recall the end of the procedure—just waking up in the curtained room. [...] I have given birth to two children, so I am no stranger to pain. For me to have cried or screamed means that it was excruciating.

In general, the prospective horror of suffering toward the end of life due to any number of medical complications, culminating in the process of dying, has haunted me ever since I watched videos about it in high school, though usually I put it at the back of my mind. Unlike more speculative fears, pain near the end of life has probability near 1, so I can't just brush it off as irrational.

When I get older, I plan to research how to minimize pain during surgery, what options for euthanasia I can pursue, and so, but there's also the unavoidable risk of some accident or illness happening in the near term, putting me in a situation of immense pain and needing to make medical choices before I've done my homework. Or, worse, being incapacitated and unable to make such choices—and given the pro-life and suffering-isn't-so-bad impulses of most people, this possibility is truly frightening.

Most people ignore worries about medical pain because it's far away . Several of my friends think I'm weird to be so parochial about reducing suffering and not take a more far-sighted view of my idealized moral values. They tend to shrug off pain, saying it's not so bad. They think it's extremely peculiar that I don't want to be open to changing my moral perspective and coming to realize that suffering isn't so important and that other things matter comparably.

Perhaps others don't understand what it's like to be me. Morality is not an abstract, intellectual game, where I pick a viewpoint that seems comely and elegant to my sensibilities. Morality for me is about crying out at the horrors of the universe and pleading for them to stop. Sure, I enjoy intellectual debates, interesting ideas, and harmonious resolutions of conflicting intuitions, and I realize that if you're serious about reducing suffering, you do need to get into a lot of deep, recondite topics. But fundamentally it has to come back to suffering or else it's just brain masturbation while others are being tortured. Of course, I'm guilty of plenty of that, and to some extent it's necessary for sustainability. (Rob Wiblin said something like, "Altruism is a marathon, not a sprint .") But basing your whole moral outlook on pleasant abstractions does not seem tenable to a brain wired the way mine is.

In a Facebook comment , I said:

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. Consider an example that was floated around recently— live sushi in Japan . That people can take delight in a dining fad without giving a second thought to the (potential) massive suffering they're causing illustrates the wide range of potential human motivational impulses. 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. That future self would be failing to live up to what I care about now, and I don't want that to happen. It's the feeling other altruists would have if they started using all their money to buy expensive cars and mansions. Now, there are plenty of fuzzy moral sub-questions when defining what "reducing as much expected suffering as possible" looks like: What computations are conscious? Do you weight by brain size? How do you handle infinities? Etc. These questions have to be answered to make the suffering-reduction program specific. But they don't involve trading suffering reduction against some other value that tempts euthymic minds, like complexity or knowledge or life or whatever else.

Matt Ball is someone else who understands my perspective :

The single most important lesson I've learned in the past 20 years is that the irreducible heart of what matters is suffering. Back then, although I was sure I knew everything, I really didn't know anything about suffering. Since then, though, I've developed a chronic disease, and experienced times when I thought I was going to die, times when I wished I would die. Back then, I worried about abstractions and words and principles; I argued about exploitation, oppression, liberation, etc. I didn't take suffering seriously. Now, knowing what suffering really is, and knowing how much there is in the world, all my previous concerns seem -well, to put it kindly, ridiculous.

One person suggests that past experience with suffering is "a reason to avoid fighting suffering. Your own experiences have biased you about how bad suffering is. It’s like someone who keeps a year of food in his basement because he had to go without food at times when he was a kid, or checking where your keys are 20 times a day because you once forgot your keys." I replied: "Some of the life experiences that make us unique we choose to keep as intrinsic moral values, while others we disregard. If we didn’t keep any of the 'biases' that our development instilled in us, we might be paperclip maximizers instead. My moral biases are what make me me ."

In 2006, I discussed the problem of trading off suffering against other emotions with a friend. He said that in his experience, different emotions can be not just strong or weak but even "incomparable" with one another; certain emotional states can seem incompatible with memories of other emotional states. I replied that we're forced to compare them, and whatever tradeoffs we make in our decisions imply some exchange rates among emotions. While this is true, I still find a certain wisdom in the view that my friend expressed.

Organisms routinely make welfare tradeoffs—e.g., enduring the cold outside your cave to find food. Being able to make these tradeoffs is even used as an indicator of non-reflex cognition in animals, such as when shocked crabs are more reluctant to give up higher-quality shells. But I think there's some point at which the brain's ability to make these tradeoffs caps out. If an emotion exceeds that threshold, all the organism's resources are channeled toward responding to the emotion. This is particularly true with pain. At some level of agony, there's no benefit that can outweigh the suffering an organism is enduring, and every fiber of its being tries to escape.

O'Brien said it well in 1984 (Part 3, Chapter 5):

But 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. It is the same with the rats. For you, they are unendurable. They are a form of pressure that you cannot withstand, even if you wished to. You will do what is required of you.

For an organism in the moment of such an experience, it is literally true that its suffering is worse than all the possible future pleasures in the universe. Call it irrational or scope-insensitive if you like, but there's an empathy gap between you and that organism. You and I right now do not realize how bad it feels, and we cannot internalize it without experiencing it.

For example :

Erich “Mancow” Muller, a Chicago-based conservative radio host, recently decided to silence critics of waterboarding once and for all. He would undergo the procedure himself, and then he would be able to confidently convince others that it is not, in fact, torture. Or so he thought. Instead, Muller came out convinced. “It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that’s no joke,” Mancow said.

Susan Sontag writes about those who have endured war:

“We”—this “we” is everyone who has never experienced anything like what [people in war] went through—don’t understand. We don’t get it. We truly can’t imagine what it was like. We can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is—and how normal it becomes. Can’t understand, can’t imagine.

It's important to remember this when we try to brush off extreme suffering as "an acceptable casualty when promoting greater happiness."

Of course, suffering reducers should remain practical and conciliatory. We need to compromise with those who feel differently rather than trying to push for radical changes that will almost certainly fail and may tarnish our cause. Rather, my aim with this essay was to explain where I'm coming from and encourage others to better appreciate why some people feel so passionately about this issue.

Epistemic modesty

From my perspective it seems obvious that reducing suffering is the highest priority. I think many people agree that this goal is really important, especially in the abstract, even if they don't have the physical or emotional resources directly to invest in it much themselves. I also think that people in comfortable conditions who do have the resources to work toward reducing suffering can become caught up in entertaining distractions, and because they don't feel the extent of suffering in the world on a daily basis, they assume it has lower priority than they would if they had more direct access to it.

Even though I disagree with others to some extent on these issues, I agree there remains a place for epistemic modesty when assessing ethical tradeoffs, that is, giving weight to the views of others rather than relying solely on my own judgment calls. We can categorize the motivations for ethical epistemic modesty into three, ascending levels of breadth, discussed in the following subsections.

This level seems important even to the most parochial suffering reducer. His own experiences of suffering do not capture all kinds of suffering experienced by all kinds of people and animals. For instance, even if he thinks an hour of enduring upset stomach is less bad than vomiting and feeling better afterward, it may not be appropriate to impose the same comparison on others. Some prefer to vomit and be done than endure prolonged nausea. There are many more tradeoffs of this type among more diverse forms of suffering. Of course, we shouldn't blindly assume that whatever choice a person makes encapsulates his idealized tradeoff. The pain of avoiding sex when you don't have a condom on hand is less than the expected pain of contracting an STI, but people sometimes have risky unprotected sex anyway.

Level 2: How much does suffering matter compared with other experiences?

In this case, a pure suffering reducer might disregard others' assessments, while someone taking a slightly broader view might indeed count them to a degree. If a person experiences a painful event and concludes, even during that event, that it was worth it for some greater good, it's plausible to agree with this person that it was net good to allow that suffering. I'm more skeptical when people

• make these assessments in the abstract, without actually experiencing the events in question—e.g., blithely assuming "torture wouldn't be that bad" because "torture" is just a word they throw around rather than an experience they can recollect and whose seriousness they can internalize, or
• make these assessments after the fact —for instance, "Yeah, that was awful, but it was worth it in the end because it paid off." It's easy enough to hold this view now that the pain is over and the fruits are being enjoyed, but your opinion during the agony might have been very different.

One instance where I may need adjustment to my own subjective assessment of different values that people hold is trading off suffering vs. death. Personally I don't understand the drive to avoid death. To me death sounds like a peaceful conclusion to a fulfilling life, and I don't regret it. Of course, I have an obligation to stay alive as long as possible to do as much good for others as I can, but when the inevitable comes, so be it. I agree with the following quote, probably apocryphally attributed to Mark Twain: "I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it."

Yet others seem to feel differently. Fear of death is a major component of religious, cultural, and personal life for many people across the globe. There's even a psychological theory based around the premise that people act in certain ways to cope with death anxiety. It's not just a religious thing; even many atheists I know are deathly afraid of mortality.

More generally, organisms seem to have a will to live even potentially in spite of hedonic self-interest. We see this in the case of terminally ill people who cling to life even when they're in extreme pain. My subjective sense of the value of suffering vs. the value of life is not calibrated to account for this. One approach is to say these people are irrational, but another possibility is that my personal psychology is peculiar, and I'm failing to recognize a genuine feeling that many other people would continue to hold even on reflection.

This level of abstraction considers not just an organism's assessment of value to himself, for aggregation within a given consequentialist framework, but his assessment of the moral framework itself. Placing epistemic weight on the views of others here is quite controversial. For instance, are you willing to lend some weight to Hitler's moral system? In general, for almost any moral sentiment, one could potentially construct a mind that holds the opposite sentiment.

There are intrinsic, compromise-motivated reasons to place weight on the views of others, but even from an intrinsic perspective, I feel some motivation in this regard. If your moral views imply a conclusion that many other people would regard as atrocious, not just naively but even on reflection, this should at least give you pause. Certain psychopaths may do ghastly acts without seeing what the problem is. If we likewise find a certain moral perspective plausible, even though it strikes horror into the hearts of almost everyone else, aren't we in a potentially similar position?

Of course, there are exceptions. If you lived in a world full of passionate Nazis, your views would contradict those of almost everyone else. In our multiverse, worlds full of passionate Nazis do exist. But as a general principle, it seems that when you go up against overwhelming moral opposition that doesn't budge even after hearing your arguments, it's more likely that you're doing something wrong rather than the opposite. a (Here by "wrong" I'm speaking poetically, in the sense of "something that further reflection would plausibly motivate you not to do" rather than something literally wrong in a confused moral-realist sense.)

So I think suffering reducers should remain sane. They generally shouldn't advocate policies that most smart people continue to regard as evil even after thoroughly understanding the arguments. By all means we should push the envelope of exploration, like moral equivalents of Copernicus and Galileo. But on a practical level, when people fanatically fight for fringe views, they generally make things worse, and this same intuition should moderate our own feelings of the absolute rightness of our cause. (Thanks to Nick Beckstead and others for emphasizing this point.)

Of course, it's tough to make the assessment of when to push a new moral stance and when to defer to majority judgment. Fifty years ago, majority judgment would have asserted that gay marriage is wrong, and animal suffering doesn't matter. That doesn't mean people in the past should have remained content with the status quo. But we should challenge majority judgment first in the realm of ideas. Then if it gains traction, we can move to the realm of practice. In general, there are bad consequences when fringe groups take matters into their own hands; they should start by trying to win hearts and minds.

Sometimes it's claimed that placing special weight on reducing suffering relative to other values is abnormal. I agree that in practice, most people's actions don't align with a foremost emphasis on suffering reduction. That said, there is a long history of ethical intuitions consistent with giving special priority to preventing suffering. For example:

• Buddhism : Life is suffering, and our goal is to escape from the pain of worldly existence. b Buddhism has 350-550 million followers. Some similar ideas can be found in Hinduism, which has about 1 billion followers.
• Pessimism : Various strands of philosophical pessimism emphasize the enormity of the world's suffering. Arthur Schopenhauer is a classic example.
• Asymmetry between creating suffering vs. happiness : My experience is that most people agree with what Jeff McMahan calls "the Asymmetry": that it's wrong to create suffering but not wrong to fail to create happiness. Melinda A. Roberts and others have defended this asymmetry. David Benatar highlights this argument.
• Asymmetry of fulfilled vs. thwarted preferences : In "A Pareto principle for possible people", Christoph Fehige defends "anti-frustrationism", according to which it's good to avoid frustrated preferences, not to create fulfilled preferences. He says: "we have obligations to make preferrers satisfied, but no obligations to make satisfied preferrers" (p. 518). See also " Is God Our Benefactor? " by Dagfinn Sjaastad Karlsen.
• Antinatalism : Many thinkers throughout history have expressed antinatalist sentiments.
• Omelas-type intuitions : The story of the fictional city of Omelas showcases the principle that it's wrong for some to suffer in order to create greater pleasure by others. Ursula K. Le Guin's idea for the story came from William James, who in turn was inspired by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The theme appears in countless other places as well, such as this passage from The Plague by Albert Camus: "For who would dare to assert that eternal happiness can compensate for a single moment's human suffering?"
• Suffering-focused consequentialisms : Negative utilitarianism , negative consequentialism , prioritarianism , maximin ethics , and related principles put extra weight on extreme suffering compared with happiness.
• Richard Ryder's painism ( more details )
• David Pearce 's abolitionism
• Bruno Contestabile
• Jonathan Leighton 's " negative utilitarianism plus " (suffering reduction but with value for existence too)
• Clark Wolf's " Misery Principle " ("If people are badly off, suffering, or otherwise remediably miserable, it is not appropriate to address their ill-being by bringing more happy people into the world to counterbalance their disadvantage.") Wolf has also proposed "negative critical level utilitarianism".
• Dan Geinster's " anti-hurt "
• ...and many more.
• Reducing suffering as the foremost principle of ethics : Thomas Metzinger : "Whatever else our ethical commitments and specific constraints are, we can and should certainly all agree that, in principle, the overall amount of conscious suffering in all beings capable of conscious suffering should be minimized." It seems to be a widespread intuition that there's something particularly morally urgent about suffering.

The Foundational Research Institute has a more complete bibliography of works that defend various flavors of suffering-focused ethics.

As a senior citizen was driving down the freeway, his car phone rang. Answering, he heard his wife's voice urgently warning him, "Herman, I just heard on the news that there's a car going the wrong way on Interstate 280. Please be careful!" Herman said, "It's not just one car. There's hundreds of them!"

• Consequences of Compassion: An Interpretation and Defense of Buddhist Ethics argues that Shantideva "might agree with a negative utilitarian on goals, even if he would disagree about means" (p. 101). This piece , citing The Nature of Buddhist Ethics , says "Keown is convinced that the nearest to Buddhist ethics is Negative Utilitarianism (NU). NU is a version of utilitarianism which prioritizes the exemption from pain before the increase of pleasure, in other words, for negation of suffering instead of maximizing happiness. This resonates with Buddhist soteriology in that both target at reduction of suffering as central to the system (176)."   (back)

The Purpose and Problem of Suffering

While suffering is part of life, much of it is exaggerated and unnecessary..

Posted January 25, 2022 | Reviewed by Abigail Fagan

• Suffering serves a purpose and has roots in our evolutionary heritage.
• There are two types of suffering. The first level of suffering is part of our human condition, and we can't do much to change it.
• The second level of suffering is more insidious, pervasive, and harmful than the first. We can take action to reduce this type of suffering.

"Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional." —Quote of unknown origin

We have suffered quite a bit over the past few years. Some people in this world, sadly, have suffered more than their fair share, and our hearts should go out to those folks. The unfortunate truth of life is that it is not fair. While I'm not a Buddhist, there is much to be appreciated and learned about how to deal with suffering from Buddhist philosophy and psychology. Perhaps you've run across the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism somewhere:

• Life is suffering
• The cause of suffering is desire
• The cause of desire must be overcome
• When desire is overcome, there is no more suffering.

( You can listen to a podcast version of this post at The Reasonably Good Life here ).

It seems pessimistic to start with a foundational tenant that "Life is suffering." Why not, "Life is beautiful"? Certainly, life can be beautiful, and we should practice gratitude for the many miracles and wonders that life has to offer. That said, another truth is that whether one is a pauper or a king, everyone suffers. Thus, we must learn to skillfully deal with the challenge of suffering, or it will undermine our ability to enjoy life.

Perhaps the Buddha was keenly interested in helping people with suffering because, when Buddhism originated around 2,500 years ago in India, there was much more suffering on the whole in the world than there is now. Although there is still tremendous suffering today and much room for improvement, the magnitude of suffering throughout most of human history is beyond reckoning. Deaths from war, disease, plagues, famine, and homicide were all much worse throughout the world than they are now. As but one example, throughout most of recorded history, about one-third of babies born didn't live to see their first birthday and almost half didn't live to see their 15th birthday.

At its core, Buddhism is a discipline for understanding the nature of suffering and transcending it (or at least much of it). In Why Buddhism Is True, journalist and Princeton professor Robert Wright makes a case for why a better translation of the First Noble Truth of Buddhism, "Life is suffering," might be "Life is unsatisfactoriness." Put another way, as Mick Jagger sang, we "can't get no satisfaction." At least, we cannot obtain and sustain satisfaction in any lasting way, but that would be a horrible song title.

From this Buddhist perspective, we suffer because we get caught in a perpetual state of pursuing wants and desires. When we don't obtain that which we desire, we suffer dissatisfaction. However, and this is key , even when we obtain that which we want and desire, we quickly adapt to whatever it is and return to baseline levels of happiness (or unhappiness). Thus, we return to searching for something else that will really make and keep us satisfied this next time around. In this way, we suffer for not getting what we want and from getting what we want. Constantly pursuing desires in order to achieve lasting happiness is a psychological dead end. It's as if we are trying to fill our buckets with the waters of happiness but we have holes in our buckets. Put another way, pursuing happiness is too often like chasing rainbows.

We can search within ourselves to see the truth of this. Take a few moments and think about your past wants and desires. Whether it is a new car, job, handbag, gadget, milestone for Instagram followers, etc. How long did your happiness last? We are happy for a short while, and then we return to our baseline level of happiness. Within Western psychology, this cycle of unsatisfactoriness can be viewed as the hedonic treadmill .

The Purpose of Suffering and Dissatisfaction

We could split hairs over the definitions of pain and suffering and how they differ, but this takes us down a rabbit hole. Let's just agree that there are some types of suffering that we must endure as part of being living creatures of this planet. It is part of the human condition. "Sh*t happens," as they say. This is as it must be.

Tapping into famed psychologist Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs , we suffer when we don't get our basic needs met for air, food, water, and shelter from the elements. We also suffer when we get injured, sick, fired from our jobs, and we experience deep pain and loss when loved ones die. Let's call this type of inevitable suffering Level 1 Suffering . In the quote at the beginning of this article, Level 1 Suffering is the "Pain is inevitable" portion.

On a very fundamental level, we need to experience various types of suffering. Suffering is not only functional, it serves the greater good! The roots of suffering are grounded in our evolutionary heritage. Suffering motivates us to move away from things which can cause us harm whereas pleasure and happiness help us move toward things that are good for us.

As a simple example, we feel ill when we eat rotten food because it could kill us. In contrast, a ripe apple tastes good to us, and we take pleasure in eating it, because they are a healthy source of energy that can help us survive. Similarly, healthy relationships tend to make us happy because strong social bonds are necessary for our survival. In contrast, rejection and bullying are painful to us, in part, because they motivate us to try not to let those things happen. Historically, rejection by our tribe could mean death so the pain of relationships going wrong motivates us to avoid or fix those problems when we can.

When we experience various types of happiness or suffering, we tend to return back to our baseline levels of happiness rather quickly. This is that hedonic treadmill. However, when we reflect upon this, this makes perfect sense and, once again, is rooted in our evolutionary heritage. If the dinner that we ate last Friday gave us long-lasting happiness, we wouldn't have a good reference point for evaluating whether our current lunch is good or bad. Similarly, if the stomach bug we had a year ago continued to make us feel bad after we had recovered, it would be difficult to know what our current health status is.

The Problem of Suffering

We are fortunate to live in a world in which we benefit from the miracles of modernity. These include indoor plumbing and flushing toilets, easy access to clean water, electricity, air conditioning and heating, antibiotics, vaccines, an abundance of food, democracy, civil rights, women's rights, and so on. In this way, we endure fewer pains of life (Level 1 Suffering) than any previous generation in the history of the world.

Often we can do little about Level 1 Suffering because this type of suffering is part of the human condition and evolutionarily necessary for our survival. Yet, there is another level of suffering that, especially in today's world, is perhaps more pernicious and pervasive than Level 1 Suffering. We can call this Level 2 Suffering, and it relates to the "Suffering is optional" from the above quote. While Level 2 Suffering is often related to Level 1 Suffering, there is much we can do to reduce it. This is the topic of my next post, so I hope that you will join me for that exploration!

Mike Brooks, Ph.D. , is a psychologist who specializes in helping parents and families find greater balance in an increasingly hyper-connected world.

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Is it OK to make art?

If you express your creativity while other people go hungry, you’re probably not making the world a better place.

by Rhys Southan   + BIO

With less than a week to finish my screenplay for the last round of a big screenwriting competition, I stepped on a train with two members of a growing activism movement called Effective Altruism. Holly Morgan was the managing director for The Life You Can Save, an organisation that encourages privileged Westerners to help reduce global poverty. Sam Hilton had organised the London pub meet-up where I’d first heard about the movement (known as ‘EA’ for short; its members are EAs). The pair of them were heading to East Devon with a few others for a cottage retreat, where they were going to relax among sheep and alpacas, visit a ruined abbey, and get some altruism-related writing done. I decided to join them because I liked the idea of finishing my script (a very dark comedy) in the idyllic English countryside, and because I wanted to learn more about the EA goal of doing as much good as you possibly can with your life. We were already halfway there when my second reason for going threatened to undermine my first.

Around Basingstoke, I asked Hilton what EAs thought about using art to improve the world. In the back of my mind I had my own screenplay, and possibly also Steven Soderbergh’s 2001 Oscar acceptance speech for best director, which I’d once found inspiring:

I want to thank anyone who spends a part of their day creating. I don’t care if it’s a book, a film, a painting, a dance, a piece of theater, a piece of music. Anybody who spends part of their day sharing their experience with us. I think this world would be unlivable without art.

It turns out that this is not a speech that would have resonated with many Effective Altruists. The idea that someone’s book, film, painting, or dance could be their way to reduce the world’s suffering struck Hilton as bizarre, almost to the point of incoherence. As I watched his furrowing brow struggle to make sense of my question, I started to doubt whether this retreat was an appropriate venue for my screenwriting ambitions after all.

In 1972, the Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer published an essay called ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’, which contained the following thought experiment. Suppose you saw a child drowning in a pond: would you jump in and rescue her, even if you hadn’t pushed her in? Even if it meant ruining your clothes? It would be highly controversial to say ‘no’ – and yet most of us manage to ignore those dying of poverty and preventable disease all over the world, though we could easily help them. Singer argues that this inconsistency is unjustifiable. The EAs agree, and have dedicated their lives to living out the radical implications of this philosophy. If distance is morally irrelevant, then devastating poverty and preventable disease surround us. Any break we take from working to reduce suffering throughout the world is like having a leisurely nap beside a lake where thousands of children are screaming for our help.

The EA movement started coalescing in Oxford in 2009 when the philosophers Toby Ord and William MacAskill came together with around 20 others to work out how to make radical altruism mainstream. MacAskill told me that they went by the jokey moniker ‘Super Hardcore Do-Gooders’, until they came up with ‘Effective Altruism’ in 2011. Along with various other EA-affiliated organisations, Ord and MacAskill co-founded Giving What We Can, which suggests a baseline donation of 10 per cent of your income to effective charities.

This is often what EA comes down to: working hard to earn money and then giving as much of it as you can to the needy. Good deeds come in many forms, of course, and there are other ways of making a difference. But the gauntlet that EA throws down is simply this: does your preferred good deed make as much of a difference as simply handing over the money? If not, how good a deed is it really?

O nce we’d settled in at the cottage, Hilton and I stepped out for a walk through the bits of forest that hadn’t been razed for pasture, and he asked if my script would be one of the best scripts ever written. At the time I thought he was trolling me. I obviously couldn’t say ‘yes’, but ‘no’ would somehow feel like an admission of failure. It was only after talking to other EAs that I came to understand what he was getting at. As EAs see it, writing scripts and making movies demands resources that, in the right hands, could have saved lives. If the movie in question is clearly frivolous, this seems impossible to justify ethically. If, on the other hand, you’re making the best movie of all time… well, it could almost start to be worthwhile. But I told Hilton ‘no’, and felt a lingering sense of futility as we tramped on through the stinging nettles around the cottage.

I did manage to finish the script that weekend, despite Hilton’s crushing anti-pep talk. I felt good about it – but something about the movement had captured my interest, and over the following weeks I kept talking to EAs. Like Hilton, most of them seemed doubtful that art had much power to alter the world for the better. And somewhere between submitting my script in September and receiving the regret-to-inform in December, I started to feel like they might have a point.

The central premise of Effective Altruism is alluringly intuitive. Simply put, EAs want to reduce suffering and increase lifespan and happiness. That’s it; nothing else matters. As Morgan explained in an email to me:

I find that most of us seem to ultimately care about something close to the concept of ‘wellbeing’ – we want everyone to be happy and fulfilled, and we promote anything that leads to humans and animals feeling happy and fulfilled. I rarely meet Effective Altruists who care about, say, beauty, knowledge, life or the environment for their own sake – rather, they tend to find that they care about these things only insofar as they contribute to wellbeing.

From this point of view, the importance of most individual works of art would have to be negligible compared with, say, deworming 1,000 children. An idea often paraphrased in EA circles is that it doesn’t matter who does something – what matters is that it gets done. And though artists often pride themselves on the uniqueness of their individuality, it doesn’t follow that they have something uniquely valuable to offer society. On the contrary, says Diego Caleiro, director of the Brazil-based Institute for Ethics, Rationality and the Future of Humanity, most of them are ‘counterfactually replaceable’: one artist is as pretty much as useful as the next. And of course, the supply is plentiful.

Replaceability is a core concept in EA. The idea is that the only good that counts is what you accomplish over and above what the next person would have done in your place. In equation form, Your Apparent Good Achieved minus the Good Your Counterfactual Replacement Would Have Achieved equals Your Actual Good Achieved. This is a disconcerting calculation, because even if you think you’ve been doing great work, your final score could be small or negative. While it might seem as though working for a charity makes a major positive impact, you have to remember the other eager applicants who would have worked just as hard if they’d been hired instead. Is the world in which you got the job really better than the world in which the other person did? Maybe not.

Artists paint the beautiful landscape in front of them while the rest of the world burns

It is in the interests of becoming irreplaceable that a lot of EAs promote ‘earning to give’ – getting a well-paid job and donating carefully. If you score a lucrative programming job and then give away half your income, most of your competition probably wouldn’t have donated as much money. As far as the great universal calculation of utility is concerned, you have made yourself hard to replace. Artists, meanwhile, paint the beautiful landscape in front of them while the rest of the world burns.

Ozzie Gooen, a programmer for the UK-based ethical careers website 80,000 Hours, told me about a satirical superhero he invented to spoof creative people in rich countries who care more about making cool art than helping needy people, yet feel good about themselves because it’s better than nothing. ‘I make the joke of “Net-Positive Man,”’ Gooen said. ‘He has all the resources and advantages and money, and he goes around the world doing net-positive things. Like he’ll see someone drowning in a well, and he’s like, “But don’t worry, I’m here. Net positive! Here’s a YouTube Video! It’s net positive!”’

I f, despite all this, you remain committed to a career in the arts, is there any hope for you? In fact, yes: two routes to the praiseworthy life remain open. If you happen to be successful already, you can always earn to give. And if you aren’t, perhaps you can use your talent to attract new EA recruits and spread altruistic ideas.

‘We’re actually very stacked out with people who have good mathematic skills, good philosophy skills,’ Robert Wiblin, executive director of the Centre for Effective Altruism, told me. ‘I would really love to have some artists. We really need visual designers. It would be great to have people think about how Effective Altruism could be promoted through art.’ Aesthetic mavericks who anticipate long wilderness years of rejection and struggle, however, would seem to have little to contribute to the cause. Perhaps they should think about ditching their dreams for what Caleiro calls ‘an area with higher expected returns’.

For an aspiring screenwriter like me, this is a disappointing message. Brian Tomasik, the American writer of the website Essays on Reducing Suffering, told me that artists who abandon their craft to help others should take solace in the theory that all possible artwork already exists somewhere in the quantum multiverse. As he put it: ‘With reducing suffering, we care about decreasing the quantity that exists, but with artwork, it seems you’d only care about existence or not in a binary fashion. So if all art already exists within some measure, isn’t that good enough?’

I actually do find that mildly comforting, if it’s true, but I’m not convinced that it will win many supporters to the EA cause. The problem, ironically, might actually be an aesthetic one.

Effective Altruism is part subversive, part conformist: subversive in its radical egalitarianism and its critique of complacent privilege; conformist in that it’s another force channeling us towards the traditional success model. The altruistic Übermensch is a hard-working money mover, a clean-cut advocate or a brilliant innovator of utility-improving devices or ideas. As usual, creative types are ignored if their ideas aren’t lucrative or if they don’t support a favoured ideology. Crass materialism and ethical anti-materialism now seem to share identical means: earning money or rephrasing the ideas of others. But there are plenty of people drawn to the media and the arts who care about making the world better. For them to accept the EA position will often require that they give up what they love to do most. What do EAs say to that? For the most part, they say ‘tough’.

‘Effective Altruism would sometimes say that the thing you most enjoy isn’t the most moral thing to do’

‘What’s implied by utilitarianism,’ explained Michael Bitton, a once-aspiring Canadian filmmaker turned EA, ‘is that nothing is sacred. Everything that exists is subject to utilitarian calculations. So there’s no such thing as, “Oh, this is art, or, oh, this is my religion, therefore it’s exempt from ethical considerations.”’ Wiblin has a similar view. ‘It is true that Effective Altruism would sometimes say that the thing you most enjoy isn’t the most moral thing to do,’ he told me. ‘And yeah, some people wanted to be writers, but actually instead they should go into development aid or go into activism or something else.’

Still, disappointed arts types might be able to console themselves with the thought that not even science is exempt from EA’s remorseless logic. ‘I myself was extremely interested in evolutionary biology,’ Wiblin said, ‘and I would have liked to become an academic in that area. But I couldn’t really justify it on the effects that it has on helping other people, even though I found it fascinating.’

T he iron logic of replaceability leaves many dreams dead on the ground, to be sure. But is this a problem with EA as an ideology, or a problem with reality? It would be great if the arts and humanities were hugely beneficial to the world, because they tend to be personally satisfying. Still, if they’re not in fact helping much, artists might be operating on some questionable values. Is your self-expression more important than human lives and suffering? Would you rather contribute to the culture of rich societies than work to reduce the suffering of the poor, or of future generations? Is it not arbitrary to fill the world with your own personal spin on things, simply because it’s yours?

Here’s a simple test to determine if you’re creating art for yourself or for the world. If you discovered that someone else had independently come up with a project idea that you’d also had, but they produced and distributed their work first, would you be upset? Or would you be thrilled that this vitally important stuff was out there, altering perspectives and making everything better in a real, quantifiable way – even though it wouldn’t increase your social status?

‘I think that there’s sort of a mass delusion among artists and writers that just because there’s almost nothing that confers more privilege and prestige and symbolic capital than art, just because it’s high-status, people think it’s of a high importance,’ said the Australian writer Chris Rodley. ‘And I think that’s wrong. Which is probably a weird, contradictory position for someone who wants to do art to take.’

Rodley is one of the two EAs I talked to with a media and arts background. The other was Michael Bitton, who is a postgraduate in media production in Toronto. ‘I wanted to be a filmmaker, and then I thought, “Well what good does this do?”’ he told me. ‘So I kind of stopped wanting to be a filmmaker.’

Despite their reservations, both Rodley and Bitton are investigating the kinds of creative projects with potential to do the most good, on the assumption that it could sometimes make sense for EAs to influence culture through arts and media. For Bitton, this means questioning whether ‘the traditional criteria of artistic greatness, like the profundity of ideas, or the emotional impact, or originality or timelessness or popularity’, automatically translates into good consequences. ‘The concept of artistic integrity is inherently in opposition to the concept of Effective Altruism,’ he told me. ‘I don’t think you could go all the way Effective Altruist as an artist without compromising your “artistic integrity”.’ In theory, Bitton suggests, ‘you could have an artist who’s making stuff that he or she has no interest in whatsoever, doesn’t like, doesn’t find interesting or funny, doesn’t know the point of, but that’s the optimal work of art according to our magic consequences calculator…’

‘what greater utilitarian deed could you accomplish than averting infinite suffering?’

Rodley suggests that EA artists could have something to learn from the medieval period, when social value and impact were the goals of art, before the ‘art for art’s sake mythology’ shifted the focus to intrinsic merit. Take the Christian mystery plays: ‘They were proto-utilitarian art works. A lot of them were trying to save the audience’s souls. And what greater utilitarian deed could you accomplish than averting infinite suffering?’

Of course, most EAs don’t believe in souls, much less eternal damnation, so a return to passion plays and Last Supper paintings isn’t what they’re suggesting. They’re more interested in how we could use art to reduce the suffering of humans, animals, and future beings – including AI computers and emulated minds. I talked to Bitton and Rodley separately, but they converged on some general guidelines for the utilitarian-minded artist.

Firstly, the entertainment value of a project is fleeting, so what really matters is how it influences political or social behaviour. That’s why narrative, or at least some way of expressing concrete ideas, is essential. ‘It’s hard to see how a vase or something would really impact culture in any one way, because what does it teach you about life?’ Bitton said. He suggests that it might be useful to sneak good memes such as ‘racism is bad’ or ‘sexism is bad’ into mainstream fictional works, especially if you can avoid the heavy-handed ‘very special episode’ feel.

Rodley, meanwhile, pointed to experimental sound design as an anti-utilitarian dead end. In general, the avant-garde is suspect because art’s impact grows by reaching larger audiences, which gives the advantage to books, films, lyrical songs, video games and smartphone apps that make altruistic ideas palatable. ‘Look at Singer’s shallow-pond analogy,’ Rodley said. ‘In a way, that’s sort of an artistic, fictional parable. It’s quite striking and has many of the features of a creative work.’

Still, if we were to consult our magic utilitarian consequences calculator, how often would it tell us to bother making art at all? Persuasive, progressive art might be better than nothing, but that doesn’t make it an optimal use of time and resources. Even if a socially minded piece of media gets enough attention to make a positive impact (rare enough in itself), its noticeable effects are often mixed.

Rodley pointed out that the US TV series Will and Grace might have made some Americans more accepting of gay people, but it also arguably imposed ‘homonormative’ expectations on how gay people are supposed to act. Similarly, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) apparently turned many white Americans against slavery while also perpetuating damaging stereotypes. The US documentary Searching for Sugar Man (2012) claims that the music of Sixto Rodriguez helped to inspire anti-apartheid protestors in South Africa, but presents this as an accidental and serendipitous side-effect rather than something Rodriguez could have consciously set out to do. Famous artists have a lot of influence and money to give away to good causes. But, said Rodley: ‘By definition, most artists are mediocre, and their art doesn’t really please many people, if any.’

If what you want to do is make the world better, the impact of paying to treat many people with curable diseases might seem a little humdrum compared with the revolution in human consciousness that will surely come when you publish your novel. But if donating to charity feels a bit generic, the lives it saves are not. All of which to is to say, when I thought that writing a movie was the best way for me to contribute to the world, I was almost certainly kidding myself. Then again, to some extent, we all do.

‘If you accept the shallow-pond analogy, everyone is morally horrific,’ said Rodley. ‘Even Peter Singer himself. Everyone can be doing more than they currently are.’

For now, that will have to be my justification. I’m not ready to give up writing. I’m not ready to take up some high-paid job that I’d hate in order to reduce the world’s suffering. Maybe that will change. For now, call me Net-Positive Man.

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Brian tomasik.

Brian Tomasik (born 15 March 1987) is an American researcher.

Tomasik's website, Essays on Reducing Suffering (originally called Utilitarian Essays ), features over 130 articles on a wide range of topics, including animal suffering , future suffering , consciousness , and ethics . His essay 'Why activists should consider making lots of money' [1]   is the first explicit articulation of the argument for earning to give . [2]   Perhaps more than any other individual, Tomasik is responsible for establishing the field of wild animal welfare .

Tomasik studied computer science, mathematics and statistics at Swarthmore College. Between 2009 and 2013, he worked at Microsoft as a software development engineer. He was an active contributor to Felicifia for most of that forum's history, and served on the board of Animal Charity Evaluators between 2012 and 2015. He co-founded the Foundational Research Institute in 2013 (renamed to the Center on Long-Term Risk in 2020), and remains one of that institute's advisors. He is also an advisor at the Center for Reducing Suffering .

(Read more)

Posts tagged Brian Tomasik

How To Reduce Human Suffering: 3 Lessons From A Seminal Public Health Study

What are the biggest drivers of human suffering?

Every year an international team of researchers aims to answer that question by assembling a mammoth data set called the " Global Burden of Disease ." It has become the go-to source for tracking and ranking the impact of virtually every disease or condition that is killing, sickening or otherwise disabling people in virtually every country on the planet.

But this year's report also points to some intriguing solutions — highlighted by the researchers in a piece published this week in the medical journal The Lancet that accompanies their latest data release .

To learn more, NPR spoke with the scientist who leads the project, Christopher Murray of the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Here are three takeaways:

1. The key to health is ... wealth. (And education ... and women's rights).

The Global Burden of Disease doesn't just comprise data on health. The researchers also pull together and analyze measures of economic and social wellbeing over time — including each country's per capita income, average educational attainment and status of women (as reflected by the typical number of children a woman there gives birth to).

And on these socioeconomic fronts, the researchers find that since 2000 the worst-off countries have made enormous strides. "The bottom 20% of countries are catching up. They are now developing at a faster rate than the countries at the top," says Murray.

Over this same period the poorest countries also saw major gains on what's called "healthy life expectancy" — or as Murray puts it "how many years you can expect to live in full health."

And here's the kicker: Through statistical analysis, Murray and his collaborators were able to show that nearly all of this rise in healthy life expectancy was the direct result of the gains in income, education and women's status.

For instance, between 2000 and 2019, for countries on the absolute lowest end of the socio-economic scale, healthy life expectancy increased by 9 years. And nearly 80 percent of that increase could be explained by their socioeconomic progress during that same time frame.

One caveat is that the link was far less pronounced for countries on the higher end of the socioeconomic scale. But for poor ones the lesson seems clear, says Murray: One of the most effective ways to boost people's health is to focus on advancing their social and economic development.

2. We need to pay more attention to "non-communicable" diseases.

As impressive and laudable as the health gains in poor countries have been, one downside is that they are concentrated in just four types of diseases: communicable, maternal, neonatal and nutritional.

This is not surprising, says Murray. The problematic conditions that enable these diseases to thrive tend to fade as a country gets richer and more educated and affords its women higher status.

For instance, says Murray, "as soon as people and societies have more resources they tend to deal with water supply and sanitation. Also basic malnutrition starts to go away." Both factors play a key role in how many of a country's children contract infectious diseases that kill them before the age of 5.

Indeed, one of the best outcomes of the last 20 years has been that the annual number of deaths among children below age 5 dropped from 9.6 million in 2000 to about 5 million in 2019.

Unfortunately, says Murray, many of the drivers of different category of illness — known as "non-communicable diseases" — actually tend to get worse as countries start to move up the socio-economic scale.

Take air pollution — which is linked to lung cancer and other respiratory ailments. "You know, if you're in a preindustrial society, there's not a lot of air pollution," says Murray. "As societies industrialize it tends to get worse."

Other risk factors that worsen as countries develop include the incidence of obesity, high blood sugar and high blood pressure — which are variously linked to diabetes and heart disease.

The result is that the gains that poor countries have made against that first category of diseases — communicable, maternal, neonatal and nutritional — over the last 20 years has not been matched by progress in addressing non-communicable diseases. So now, non-communicable disease cause a far greater share of the health burden that low- to middle-income countries face. Specifically, between 1990 and 2019 non-communicable diseases went from contributing about 40% of the health burden to 66%. (The Global Burden of Disease project measures health burden as the number of healthy years of life that a country loses to disease each year.)

Unfortunately, many countries and health systems are still set up as if the biggest source of poor health are communicable diseases. "Because of the way people are trained, governments are very often focusing on the problems of the last generation and not the current one," says Murray.

"Take a place like Indonesia," he adds. "It's really just dramatic. Now more than 80% of the health burden there is non-communicable diseases. But [those] are not the main focus of policy formulation. They're still worrying about the previous problems."

India is another example, says Murray. "They have a huge problem with high blood pressure, and there should be a national strategy for getting more people into primary care and getting their blood pressure treated," he says. And yet, "they don't really have a national blood pressure strategy."

3. Preparing for the next pandemic ... could mean taxing soda pop.

Any national strategy aimed at non-communicable diseases would need to address behaviors by both individuals and corporations, says Murray. That's because many of the risk factors involved are related to decisions by corporations — what do they put in our food — and our own choices regarding what (and how much) we consume and how much we exercise.

Murray suggests taking lessons from the one success story governments can point to when it comes to curbing a risk factor for non-communicable disease: smoking. "We found that regulatory and taxation strategies have made sustained progress [on smoking] over the last decades," says Murray. After all, the more inaccessible and expensive tobacco is, the less people are likely to use it.

It can be hard to build support for regulatory approaches — just look at the pushback against taxes on sugary beverages in many countries. But Murray says it may help to consider these strategies not only as efforts to address non-communicable diseases but as a vital element of the world's strategy for preparing for the next pandemic.

Before COVID-19, he says, the health experts who specialized in infectious disease and pandemic readiness "lived in separate universes." Then, he says, "suddenly COVID-19 comes along and we find out that obesity and blood pressure are key determinants of what your risk of death from COVID is. And it highlights how we have older populations and more of these risk factors and we are creating far greater vulnerability."

As worrisome as those risk factors may sound says Murray of this year's report: "I think these are an empowering set of findings. There's plenty of things that we identify where governments and individuals can take action."

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Description:   “This site contains writings on the topic of reducing suffering, including the suffering of non-human animals and far-future beings. Most content is by Brian Tomasik, though a few pieces are written by others.”

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• Summary of why suffering probably dominates happiness

Introduction

Numbers of wild animals, death by other means, a hard life, short lifespans, more offspring than survive, when do babies become sentient, misjudging levels of well-being.

• If Life in Nature is so Bad, Why Don’t Wild Animals Kill Themselves?

Humans Already Impact Nature

A research agenda, advanced technologies, inadvertently multiplying suffering, activists should focus on outreach, the importance of wild-animal suffering.

First written: July 2009; Last edited: 24 May 2020

The number of wild animals vastly exceeds that of animals on factory farms, in laboratories, or kept as pets. Therefore, animal advocates should consider focusing their efforts to raise concern about the suffering that occurs in the natural environment. While in theory this could involve trying directly to engineer more humane ecological systems, in practice I think activists should concentrate on promoting the meme of caring about wild animals to other activists, academics, and other sympathetic groups. The massive amount of suffering occurring now in nature is indeed tragic, but it pales by comparison to the scale of good or harm that our descendants -- with advanced technological capability -- might effect. I fear, for instance, that future humans may undertake terraforming , directed panspermia , or sentient simulations without giving much thought to the consequences for wild animals. Our #1 priority should be to ensure that future human intelligence is used to prevent wild-animal suffering, rather than to multiply it.

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Summary by Faunalytics

However, this belief of mine is somewhat controversial. I think the claim of net expected suffering in nature needs only a weaker assertion: namely, that almost all of the expected happiness and suffering in nature come from small animals (e.g., minnows and insects). The adults of these species live at most a few years, often just a few months or weeks, so it's even harder in these cases for the happiness of life to outweigh the pain of death. Moreover, almost all the babies of these species die (possibly painfully) after just a few days or weeks of being born, because most of these species are "r-selected" -- see Type III in this chart .

• Reducing wild-animal suffering group on Facebook; feel free to join.
• Wild animal suffering  on Animal Charity Evaluators.
• I have an earlier, slightly different version of this essay in pdf format: " The Predominance of Wild-Animal Suffering over Happiness: An Open Problem " ( .tex ).
• Oscar Horta has a bibliography of papers on wild-animal suffering.
• There's a nice piece on " Utility and Pain in Biology " at Socrethics.com .
• " Wild animals " entry on the Utilitarianism Wiki

If Life in Nature is so Bad, Why Don't Wild Animals Kill Themselves?

"The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease." -- Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden [Dawkins]

"Many humans look at nature from an aesthetic perspective and think in terms of biodiversity and the health of ecosystems, but forget that the animals that inhabit these ecosystems are individuals and have their own needs. Disease, starvation, predation, ostracism, and sexual frustration are endemic in so-called healthy ecosystems. The great taboo in the animal rights movement is that most suffering is due to natural causes." -- Albert, a fictional dog in philosopher Nick Bostrom's "Golden" [Bostrom-Alfred]

"The moralistic fallacy is that what is good is found in nature. It lies behind the bad science in nature-documentary voiceovers: lions are mercy-killers of the weak and sick, mice feel no pain when cats eat them, dung beetles recycle dung to benefit the ecosystem and so on." -- Steven Pinker [Pinker]

"People who accuse us of putting in too much violence, [should see] what we leave on the cutting-room floor." -- David Attenborough, speaking about his nature documentaries [Attenborough]

"In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are nature's every day performances. [...] The phrases which ascribe perfection to the course of nature can only be considered as the exaggerations of poetic or devotional feeling, not intended to stand the test of a sober examination. No one, either religious or irreligious, believes that the hurtful agencies of nature, considered as a whole, promote good purposes, in any other way than by inciting human rational creatures to rise up and struggle against them." -- John Stuart Mill, "On Nature" [Mill]

Animal activists typically focus their efforts on areas where humans directly interact with members of other species, such as on "factory farms," in laboratory experiments, and, to a much lesser degree, in zoos, circuses, rodeos, and the like.

The scale of animal suffering at human hands is vast, and animal advocates are right to be appalled by its magnitude. However, the numbers of animals that live in the wild are staggeringly larger. For rough population estimates, see my " How Many Wild Animals Are There? " [Tomasik-numbers]

How Wild Animals Suffer

Like their domestic counterparts, animals in the wild have rich emotional lives. [emotions] Unfortunately, many of these emotions are intensely painful, often needlessly so. And while "Nature, red in tooth and claw" is widely known as a platitude, its visceral meaning can often be overlooked. Below I review some details of wild-animal suffering, perhaps in a manner similar to the way in which animal advocates decry acts of cruelty by humans.

When people imagine suffering in nature, perhaps the first image that comes to mind is that of a lioness hunting her prey. Christopher McGowan, for instance, vividly describes the death of a zebra:

The lioness sinks her scimitar talons into the zebra's rump. They rip through the tough hide and anchor deep into the muscle. The startled animal lets out a loud bellow as its body hits the ground. An instant later the lioness releases her claws from its buttocks and sinks her teeth into the zebra's throat, choking off the sound of terror. Her canine teeth are long and sharp, but an animal as large as a zebra has a massive neck, with a thick layer of muscle beneath the skin, so although the teeth puncture the hide they are too short to reach any major blood vessels. She must therefore kill the zebra by asphyxiation, clamping her powerful jaws around its trachea (windpipe), cutting off the air to its lungs. It is a slow death. If this had been a small animal, say a Thomson's gazelle ( Gazella thomsoni ) the size of a large dog, she would have bitten it through the nape of the neck; her canine teeth would then have probably crushed the vertebrae or the base of the skull, causing instant death. As it is, the zebra's death throes will last five or six minutes. [McGowan, pp. 12-13]

One snake owner's guide explains, "Live mice will fight for their lives when they are seized, and will bite, kick and scratch for as long as they can." [Flank] Once captured, "The snake drenches the prey with saliva and eventually pulls it into the esophagus. From there, it uses its muscles to simultaneously crush the food and push it deeper into the digestive tract, where it is broken down for nutrients." [Perry]

Prey may not die immediately after being swallowed, as is illustrated by the fact that some poisonous newts, after ingestion by a snake, excrete toxins to kill their captor so that they can crawl back out of its mouth. [McGowan, pp. 59] And regarding housecats, Bob Sallinger of the Audubon Society of Portland remarked, "People who are appalled by the indiscriminate killing of wildlife by mechanisms such as leg-hold traps should recognize that the pain and suffering caused by cat predation is not dissimilar and the impacts of cat predation dwarf the impacts of trapping." [Sallinger]

It's possible that some animals don't suffer intensely from predation in cases where endorphins kick in strongly enough. Similarly, humans sometimes don't feel pain immediately upon severe injury. [Wall] But in many instances of predation, prey continue struggling violently against their aggressors. For instance, in this video , the warthog screams for ~2.5 minutes as it's suffocated. Moreover, insofar as endorphins do sometimes reduce the painfulness of death, the same argument should apply for brutal slaughter of farm animals by humans, yet most animal-welfare scientists consider bad slaughter methods to be extremely painful.

Fear of predators produces not only immediate distress, but it may also cause long-term psychological trauma. In one study of anxiolytics, researchers exposed mice to a cat for five minutes and observed subsequent reactions. They found "that this animal model of exposure of mice to unavoidable predatory stimuli produces early cognitive changes analogous to those seen in patients with acute stress disorder (ASD)." [ElHagePeronnyGriebelBelzung] A follow-up study found long-term impacts on the mice's brains: "predatory exposure induced significant learning disabilities in the radial maze (16 to 22 days poststressor) and in the spatial configuration of objects recognition test (26 to 28 days poststressor). These findings indicate that memory impairments may persist for extended periods beyond a predatory stress." [ElHageGriebelBelzung] Similarly, Phillip R. Zoladz exposed rats to unavoidable predators and other anxiety-causing conditions to "produce changes in rat physiology and behavior that are comparable to the symptoms observed in PTSD patients." [Zoladz] And in a review article, Rianne Stam explained:

Animal models that are characterised by long-lasting conditioned fear responses as well as generalised behavioural sensitisation to novel stimuli following short-lasting but intense stress have a phenomenology that resembles that of PTSD in humans. [...] Weeks to months after the trauma, treated animals on average also show a sensitisation to novel stressful stimuli of neuroendocrine, cardiovascular and gastrointestinal motility responses as well as altered pain sensitivity and immune function. [Stam]

Even for those prey that haven't had a traumatic run-in with a predator, the "ecology of fear" that predators create can be very distressing: "In studies with elk, scientists have found that the presence of wolves alters their behavior almost constantly, as they try to avoid encounters, leave room for escape and are constantly vigilant." [Stauth]

One can advance some argument that evolution should avoid making animal lives excessively horrifying for extended periods prior to death because doing so might, at least in more complex species, induce PTSD, depression, or other debilitating side-effects. Of course, we see empirically that evolution does induce such disorders when traumatic incidents happen, like exposure to a predator. But there's probably some kind of reasonable bound on how bad these can be most of the time if animals are to remain functional. Death itself is a different matter because, once it reaches the point of inevitability, evolutionary pressures don't constrain the emotional experience. Death can be as good as painless (for a few lucky animals) or as bad as torture (for many others). Evolution has no reason to prevent death from feeling unbearably awful. [Dawkins]

Of course, predation is not the only way in which organisms die painfully.

Signs range from sudden death to gradual onset of depression over 1 to 3 days, accompanied by huddling of the birds, fluffed-up feathers, unsteadiness, shivering, loss of appetite, markedly increased or absence of thirst, rapid loss of weight, accelerated respiration and watery yellow, green or blood-tinged droppings. The vent feathers become matted with excreta, the eyes begin to close and, immediately before death, some birds show apparent blindness, incoordination, staggering, tremors, convulsions or other nervous signs. [Salmonellosis]

Still other animals die of accidents, dehydration during a summer drought, or lack of food during the winter. For instance, 2006 was a harsh year on bats in Placerville, California:

"You can see their ribs, their backbones, and (the area) where the intestine and the stomach are is completely sunk through to the back," said Dharma Webber, founder of the California Native Bat Conservancy. [...] She said emerging mosquitoes aren't enough to feed the creatures. "It would be like us eating a little piece of popcorn here or there," she said. [bats]

(Of course, when the bats do have food, this isn't good news for their prey....)

Even ice storms can be fatal: "Birds unable to find a sheltered perch during the storm may have their feet frozen to a branch or their wings covered in ice making them unable to fly. Grouse buried in snow drifts are often encased by the ice layer and suffocate." [Heidorn]

While death may often constitute the peak of suffering during an animal's life, day-to-day existence isn't necessarily pleasant either. Unlike most humans in the industrialized world, wild animals don't have immediate access to food whenever they become hungry. They must constantly seek out water and shelter while remaining on the lookout for predators. Unlike us, most animals can't go inside when it rains or turn on the heat when winter temperatures drop far below their usual levels. In summary:

It is often assumed that wild animals live in a kind of natural paradise and that it is only the appearance and intervention of human agencies that bring about suffering. This essentially Rousseauian view is at odds with the wealth of information derived from field studies of animal populations. Scarcity of food and water, predation, disease and intraspecific aggression are some of the factors which have been identified as normal parts of a wild environment which cause suffering in wild animals on a regular basis. [UCLA, p. 24]

Based on studies of stress-hormone levels in domestic and wild animals, Christie Wilcox [Wilcox] concluded that "if we follow the guidelines of care that provide food, water, comfort, and necessary items for behavioral expression, domesticated animals are not only likely to be as happy as their wild relatives, they're probably happier." She also observed:

So the real question becomes whether a domesticated or captive animal is more, less, or as happy in the moment as its wild counterpart. There are a few key conditions that are classically thought to lead to a "happy" animal by reducing undue stress. These are the basis for most animal cruelty regulations, including those in the US and UK. They include that animals have the 'rights' to: - Enough food and water - Comfortable conditions (temperature, etc) - Expression of normal behavior When it comes to wild animals, though, only the last is guaranteed. They have to struggle to survive on a daily basis, from finding food and water to another individual to mate with. They don't have the right to comfort, stability, or good health. [...] By the standards our governments have set, the life of a wild animal is cruelty.

In nature, the most populous animals are probably the ones that are generally worst off. Small mammals and birds have adult lifespans at most one or three years before they face a painful death. And many insects count their time on Earth in weeks rather than years -- for instance, just 2-4 weeks for the horn fly. [Cumming] I personally would prefer not to exist than to find myself born as an insect, struggle to navigate the world for a few weeks, and then die of dehydration or be caught in a spider's web. Worse still might be finding myself entangled in an Amazonian-ant "torture rack" trap for 12 hours, [BBC] or being eaten alive over the course of weeks by an Ichneumon wasp. [Gould, pp. 32-44] (That said, whether caterpillars eaten by Ichneumon wasps feel pain during the experience is unclear.)

It's true that scientists remain uncertain whether insects experience pain in a form that we would consider conscious suffering. [insect-pain] However, the fact that there remains serious debate on the issue suggests that we should not rule out the possibility. And seeing as insects number 10 18 , [Williams] with the number of copepods in the ocean of a similar magnitude, [SchubelButman] the mathematical "expected value" (probability times amount) of their suffering is vast. I should note that the force of this point would be lessened if, as may be the case, an animal's "intensity" or "degree" of emotional experience depends to some rough extent on the amount of neural tissue it has devoted to pain signals.

Tables of animal lifespans typically show durations of survival by adult members of a species. However, most individuals die much sooner , before reaching maturity. This is a simple consequence of the fact that females give birth to far more offspring than can survive to reproduce in a stable population. For instance, while humans can produce only one child per reproductive season (excepting twins), the number is 1-22 offspring for dogs ( Canis familiaris ), 4-6 eggs for the starling ( Sturmus vulgaris ), 6,000-20,000 eggs for the bullfrog ( Rana catesbeiana ), and 2 million eggs for the scallop ( Argopecten irradians ). [SolbrigSolbrig, p. 37] Take a look at this figure from Thomas J. Herbert's article [Herbert] on r and K selection illustrating extremely high infant mortality for "r strategists." Most small animals like minnows and insects are r strategists.

This strategy of "making lots of copies and hoping a few come out" may be perfectly sensible from the standpoint of evolution, but the cost to the individual organisms is tremendous. Matthew Clarke and Yew-Kwang Ng conclude from an analysis of the welfare implications of population dynamics that "The number of offspring of a species that maximizes fitness may lead to suffering and is different from the number that maximizes welfare (average or total)." [ClarkeNg, sec. 4]

In a related paper, "Towards Welfare Biology: Evolutionary Economics of Animal Consciousness and Suffering," Ng concludes from the excess of offspring over adult survivors: "Under the assumptions of concave and symmetrical functions relating costs to enjoyment and suffering, evolutionary economizing results in the excess of total suffering over total enjoyment." [Ng, p. 272] (Update: In 2019, Zach Groff and Ng showed that this theorem contains a mathematical error, and a stronger starting premise is needed to conclude that suffering predominates. [Groff and Ng] I haven't looked into this issue in depth, but you can see some initial thoughts of mine here and here .)

In his famous paper, "Animal liberation and environmental ethics: Bad marriage, quick divorce," [Sagoff] Mark Sagoff quotes the following passage from Fred Hapgood: [Hapgood]

All species reproduce in excess, way past the carrying capacity of their niche. In her lifetime a lioness might have 20 cubs; a pigeon, 150 chicks; a mouse, 1000 kits; a trout, 20,000 fry, a tuna or cod, a million fry or more; [...] and an oyster, perhaps a hundred million spat. If one assumes that the population of each of these species is, from generation to generation, roughly equal, then on average only one offspring will survive to replace each parent. All the other thousands and millions will die, one way or another. 1

Sagoff goes on to say: "The misery of animals in nature--which humans can do much to relieve--makes every other form of suffering pale in comparison. Mother Nature is so cruel to her children she makes Frank Perdue look like a saint."

The previous section explained that in r-selected species , parents may have hundreds or even tens of thousands of offspring, and almost all of these die shortly after birth.

EFSA's "Aspects of the biology and welfare of animals used for experimental and other scientific purposes" (pp. 37-42) explores when fetuses of various species begin to feel conscious pain. [EFSA] The paper notes that the age of onset of consciousness varies based on whether a species is precocial (well developed at birth, such as horses) or altricial (still developing at birth, such as marsupials). Precocial animals are more likely to feel pain at earlier ages. Also relevant is whether the species is viviparous (having live birth) or oviparous (giving birth through eggs). Viviparous animals have greater need to inhibit fetal consciousness during development in order to prevent injury to the mother and siblings. Oviparous animals that are constrained by shells have less need for inhibition of awareness before birth. (p. 38)

For this reason, the report suggests: "If awareness is the criterion for protection, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish and cephalopods may, therefore, be more obviously in need of protection pre-hatching than mammals are in need of protection pre-partum." (p. 38) For example: "Sensory and neural development in a precocial bird such as the domestic chick is very well advanced several days before hatching. Controlled movements and coordinated behavioural and electrophysiological evoked responses to tactile, auditory and visual stimuli appear three or four days before hatching occurs after 21 days of incubation (Broom, 1981)." (p. 39) In contrast: "Even though the mammalian fetus can show physical responses to external stimuli, the weight of present evidence suggests that consciousness does not occur in the fetus until it is delivered and starts to breathe air." (p. 42)

Thus, it seems clear that many animals are able to suffer by the time of birth if not before.

The stage of development at which this risk [of suffering] is sufficient for protection to be necessary is that at which the normal locomotion and sensory functioning of an individual independent of the egg or mother can occur. For air-breathing animals this time will not generally be later than that at which the fetus could survive unassisted outside the uterus or egg. For most vertebrate animals, the stage of development at which there is a risk of poor welfare when a procedure is carried out on them is the beginning of the last third of development within the egg or mother. For a fish, amphibian, cephalopod, or decapod it is when it is capable of feeding independently rather than being dependent on the food supply from the egg. [...] (p. 3) Most amphibians and fish have larval forms which are not well developed at hatching but develop rapidly with experience of independent life[.] Those fish and amphibians that are well developed at hatching or viviparous birth and all cephalopods, since these are small but well developed at hatching, will have had a functioning nervous system and the potential for awareness for some time before hatching. (p. 38)

Another consideration suggestive of pain before birth is the fact that many oviparous vertebrates can hatch early in response to environmental stimuli, including vibrations that feel like a predator.

Young fish are already intelligent enough to be predators a few days after birth: "In the Sacramento-San Joaquin Estuary, young striped bass begin feeding on small crustacean zooplankton a few days after they hatch (Eldridge et al. 1982)." [StevensEtAl, pp. 21-22] Unfortunately, huge numbers of striped bass die young, given that "the average female striped bass produc[es] nearly a half million eggs". [StevensEtAl, p. 20]

These points suggest that a significant fraction of the large numbers of offspring born to r-selected species may very well be conscious during the pain of their deaths after a few short days, or even hours, of life.

There is a danger in extrapolating the welfare of wild animals from our own imagination of how we would feel in the situation. We can imagine immense discomfort were we to sleep through a cold winter night's storm with only a sweatshirt to keep us warm, but many animals have better fur coats and can often find some sort of shelter. More generally, it seems unlikely that species would gain an adaptive advantage by feeling constant hardship, since stress does entail a metabolic cost. [Ng] Also, r-selected animals might suffer less from a given injury than long-lived animals would because r-selected creatures have less to lose by taking big short-term risks. [Tomasik-short-lived]

That said, we should also be wary of underestimating the extent and severity of wild-animal suffering due to our own biases. You, the reader, are probably in the comfort of a climate-controlled building or vehicle, with a relatively full stomach, and without fear of attack. Most of us in the industrialized West go through life in a relatively euthymic state, and it's easy to assume that the general pleasantness with which life greets us is shared by most other people and animals. When we think about nature, we may picture chirping songbirds or frolicking gazelles, rather than deer having their flesh chewed off while conscious or immobilized raccoons afflicted by roundworms . And of course, all of the previous examples, insofar as they involve large land animals, reflect my human tendency toward the "availability heuristic": In fact, the most prevalent wild animals of all are small organisms, many ocean-dwelling. When we think "wild animals," we should (if we adopt the expected-value approach to uncertainty about sentience) picture ants, copepods, and tiny fish, rather than lions or gazelles.

People may not accurately assess at a single instant how they'll feel overall during a longer period of time. [KahnemanSugden] They often exhibit "rosy prospection" toward future events and "rosy retrospection" about the past, in which they assume that their previous and future levels of wellbeing were and will be better than what's reported at the time of the experiences. [MitchellThompson] Moreover, even when organisms do correctly judge their hedonic levels, they often show a "will to live" quite apart from pleasure or pain. Animals that, in the face of lives genuinely not worth living, decide to end their existence tend not to reproduce very successfully.

Ultimately, though, regardless of exactly how good or bad we assess life in the wild to be on balance, it remains undeniable that many animals in nature endure some dreadful experiences.

• Don't understand suicide : It may be that most animals (except the smartest mammals and birds?), while conscious emotionally, don't understand death. As an analogy, when I have a nightmare, I feel bad, but I don't fully realize I'm dreaming and am not sufficiently in control of the situation that I can end the nightmare at will. I guess non-dreaming animals do have more control over their physical state than I do when asleep, but the point is that you can have emotions without understanding life and death.
• Little to be gained when most suffering comes from death anyway : Animals don't have painless ways to kill themselves. For many animals, I think most of the total pain of their lives comes from dying. For example, many of the hundreds of offspring of a beetle mother will die within a few days or weeks of hatching. I think their lives up to the point of death might hover around being neutral between pain and happiness, so there's not much to be gained by early suicide.
• Temporal discounting : An animal often fails to act in its long-term hedonic interest due to short-sightedness. Even if suicide were optimal, the animal might not kill itself because doing so would be painful in the short run. (For example, when very nauseous, it may feel better to vomit immediately than to endure nausea for two hours going forward, but I can never muster up the courage to vomit.)
• Non-hedonic "will to live" : I think animals have a "will to live" that's partly separate from their hedonic well-being. Animal behaviors are integrations of huge numbers of signals and brain systems, so it's not surprising that some of these systems act contrary to the hedonic-welfare-maximization systems. If animals did not have a “will to live”, presumably they would not survive as effectively.
• Few suicides on factory farms : If animals do kill themselves when their lives are not worth living, why don't we see more suicides on factory farms? Perhaps at least battery-cage hens would be better off killing themselves? (That said, Howie Lempel pointed out to me that maybe caged animals are less able to hurt themselves than free animals.)
• Big animals may have decent lives : I think the animals that potentially could contemplate suicide ( chimpanzees ??) likely do have lives worth living a good amount of the time.

Finally, there are some claims that animals do commit suicide, though others are doubtful . I'm personally skeptical because there aren't lots of well documented cases of animal suicide, and it's easy to accumulate folklore about phenomena that aren't real. That said, I don't doubt that some animals act differently when suffering an emotional loss.

But Can Humans Reduce Wild-Animal Suffering?

Other philosophers agree with this but continue to defend human inaction by claiming that people are ultimately helpless to change the situation. When asked whether we should stop lions from eating gazelles, Peter Singer replied:

[...] for practical purposes I am fairly sure, judging from man's past record of attempts to mold nature to his own aims, that we would be more likely to increase the net amount of animal suffering if we interfered with wildlife, than to decrease it. Lions play a role in the ecology of their habitat, and we cannot be sure what the long-term consequences would be if we were to prevent them from killing gazelles. [...] So, in practice, I would definitely say that wildlife should be left alone. [Singer]

I would point out in response to Singer that most human interventions have not been designed to improve wild-animal welfare, and even so, I suspect that many of them have decreased wild-animal suffering on balance by reducing habitats.

In a similar vein as Singer, Jennifer Everett suggested that consequentialists may endorse evolutionary selection because it eliminates deleterious genetic traits:

[...] if propagation of the "fittest" genes contributes to the integrity of both predator and prey species, which is good for the predator/prey balance in the ecosystem, which in turn is good for the organisms living in it, and so on, then the very ecological relationships that holistic environmentalists regard as intrinsically valuable will be valued by animal welfarists because they conduce ultimately, albeit indirectly and via complex causal chains, to the well-being of individual animals. [Everett, p. 48]

These authors are right that consideration of long-range ecological side-effects is important. However, it does not follow that humans have no obligations regarding wild animals or that animal supporters should remain silent about nature's cruelty. The next few subsections elaborate on ways in which humans can indeed do something about wild-animal suffering.

I agree that we should be cautious about quick-fix intervention. Ecology is extremely complicated, and humans have a long track record of underestimating the number of unanticipated consequences they will encounter in trying to engineer improvements to nature. On the other hand, there are many instances in which we are already interfering with wildlife in some manner. As Tyler Cowen observed: [Cowen, p. 10]

In other cases we are interfering with nature, whether we like it or not. It is not a question of uncertainty holding us back from policing, but rather how to compare one form of policing to another. Humans change water levels, fertilize particular soils, influence climatic conditions, and do many other things that affect the balance of power in nature. These human activities will not go away any time soon, but in the meantime we need to evaluate their effects on carnivores and their victims.

One such evaluation was actually carried out regarding an Australian government decision to cull overpopulated and starving kangaroos at an Australian Defense Force army base. [ClarkeNg] While admittedly crude and theoretical, the analysis proves that the tools of welfare economics can be combined with the principles of population ecology to reach nontrivial conclusions about how human interference with wildlife affects aggregate animal well-being.

Human changes to the environment -- through agriculture, urbanization, deforestation, pollution, climate change, and so on -- have huge consequences, both negative and positive, for wild animals. For instance, "paving paradise [or, rather, hell?] to put up a parking lot" prevents the existence of animals that would otherwise have lived there. Even where habitats are not destroyed, humans may change the composition of species living in them. If, say, an invasive species has a shorter lifespan and more non-surviving offspring than the native counterpart, the result would be more total suffering. Of course, the opposite could just as easily be the case.

Caring about wild-animal suffering should not be mistaken as general support for environmental preservation; indeed, in some or even many cases, preventing existence may be the most humane option. Consequentialist vegetarians ought not find this line of reasoning unusual: The utilitarian argument against factory farming is precisely that, e.g., a broiler hen would be better off not existing than suffering in cramped conditions for 45 days before slaughter. Of course, even in the calculation of whether to adopt a vegetarian diet, the impacts on animals in the wild can be important and sometimes dominant over the direct effects on livestock themselves. [MathenyChan]

That said, before we become too gung ho about eliminating natural ecosystems, we should also remember that many other humans value wilderness, and it's good to avoid making enemies or tarnishing the suffering-reduction cause by pitting it in direct opposition to other things people care about. In addition, many forms of environmental preservation, especially reducing climate change, may be important to the far future, by improving prospects for compromise among the major world powers that develop artificial general intelligence.

Wild-animal suffering deserves a serious research program, devoted to questions like the following:

• What animals are sentient? What reasonable subjective probabilities should we use for the sentience of reptiles, amphibians, fish, and various invertebrates?
• What sorts of affective states do animals experience during the course of everyday life in the wild? How often do they feel hunger, cold, fear, happiness, satisfaction, boredom, and intense agony, and to what degrees? Pablo Stafforini has suggested that it may one day become possible to answer this question with high precision through wearable continuous measurement devices recording neural correlates of hedonic experience. But until then, we can also benefit greatly by applying standard tools for assessing animal welfare. [Broom]
• What is the overall balance of happiness versus suffering for various species? How does this depend on the animal's lifespan and whether it dies before maturity? Are certain species happier than others? Do certain types of ecosystems contain less total suffering than others? Which environmental-preservation efforts increase and which decrease aggregate animal welfare?
• Are there long-term technologies that could eventually enable humans successfully to reduce wild-animal suffering in a serious way?

Humans presently lack the knowledge and technical ability to seriously "solve" the problem of wild-animal suffering without potentially disastrous consequences. However, this may not be the case in the future, as people develop a deeper understanding of ecology and welfare assessment.

If sentience is not rare in the universe, then the problem of wild-animal suffering extends beyond our planet. If it's improbable that life will evolve the type of intelligence that humans have, [Drake] we might expect that most of the extraterrestrials in existence are at the level of the smallest, shortest-lived creatures on earth. Thus, if humans ever do send robotic probes into space, there might be great benefit in using them to help wild animals on other planets. (One hopes that objections by deep ecologists to intervening in extraterrestrial ecosystems would be overcome.)

However, I should note that faster technological progress in general is not necessarily desirable . Especially in fields like artificial intelligence and neuroscience, faster progress may accelerate risks of suffering of other kinds. As a general heuristic, I think it may be better to wait on developing technologies that unleash vast amounts of new power before humans have the social institutions and wisdom to constrain misuse of this power.

While advanced future technologies could offer promise for helping wild animals, they also carry risks of multiplying the cruelty of the natural world. For instance, it's conceivable that humans could one day spread Earth-like environmental conditions to Mars in the process of "terraforming." [Burton] More speculatively, others have proposed "directed panspermia": dispatching probes into the galaxy to seed other planets with biological material. [Meot-NerMatloff] Post-human computer simulations may become sufficiently accurate that the wild-animal life they contain would consciously suffer. Already we see many simulation models of natural selection , and it's just a matter of time before these are augmented with AI capabilities such that the organisms involved become sentient and literally feel the pain of being injured and killed. Any of these possibilities would have prodigious ethical implications, and I do hope that before undertaking them, future humans consider seriously the consequences of such actions for the creatures involved.

What does all of this imply for the animal-advocacy movement? I think the best first step toward reducing wild-animal suffering that we can take now is to promote general concern for the issue. Causing more people to think and care about wild-animal suffering will hasten developments in research on wild-animal welfare and associated humane technologies, while at the same time helping to ensure that our advanced descendants think cautiously about actions that would create vastly more suffering organisms.

Perhaps finding supporters within the animal-advocacy community would be a good starting point. While some activists oppose all human intervention with the affairs of animals, occasionally even preferring that humans didn't exist, many people who feel humane sympathy for the suffering of members of other species should welcome efforts to prevent cruelty in the wild. It's important to ensure that the animal-rights movement doesn't end up increasing support for wilderness preservation and human non-interference of all kinds. Another potential source of supporters could be people interested in evolution, who recognize what Richard Dawkins has called the "blind, pitiless indifference" of natural selection. [Dawkins, p. 133]

Individuals can do much to raise the issue on their own, such as by

• posting on animal-rights forums and writing blog comments;
• participating in animal-rights meetups / events and asking attendees what they think;
• writing conference papers, journal articles, or books on the topic (perhaps co-authored with ecologists, ethologists, or other scientists, to ensure that the work is not entirely armchair philosophy).

There may be a danger here of raising the wild-animal issue before the general public is ready. Indeed, the cruelty of nature is often used as a reductio by meat-eaters against consequentialist vegetarianism. Suggesting that ethical consideration for animals could require us to expend resources toward long-term research aimed at helping wildlife might turn off entirely people who would otherwise have given some consideration to at least those animals that they affect through dietary choices. [Greger]

I think wild-animal outreach should begin within communities that are most receptive, such as philosophers, animal activists, transhumanists, and scientists. We can plant the seeds of the idea so that it can grow into a component of the animal-rights movement. I also think a "don't spread wild-animal suffering to space" message could appear even in venues like TED or Slate precisely because it's a controversial idea that people haven't heard before. For those audiences, the message would appear in " far mode ," wouldn't interfere with audience members' daily lives, and therefore could be entertained with less resistance.

It's true that most people are not in a position to endorse the moral urgency of reducing wild-animal suffering just yet. They may require earlier inferential steps first, such as caring about any non-human animals at all. The animal movement is like a worm: Each body part needs to slowly scooch its way forward to the next step. But the worm's head also needs to point in the right direction. Inspiring greater concern for wild animals among those who are ready for the message is like influencing where the worm's head points.

It's crucial that at some point the animal-rights movement moves beyond farm, laboratory, and companion animals. The scale of brutality in nature is too vast to ignore, and humans have an obligation to exercise their cosmically rare position as both intelligent and empathetic creatures to reduce suffering in the wild as much as they can.

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[exceptions] Examples include (1) Sapontzis, Steve F. "Predation." Ethics and Animals 5.2 (1984): 27-38. (2) Naess, Arne. "Should We Try To Relieve Clear Cases of Extreme Suffering in Nature?" Pan Ecology 6.1 (1991). (3) Fink, Charles K. " The Predation Argument ." Between the Species 5 (2005).

[Tomasik-numbers] Tomasik, Brian. " How Many Wild Animals Are There? " Essays on Reducing Suffering . 2009.

[emotions] See, for instance, (1) Balcombe, Jonathan. Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good . Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. (2) Bekoff, Marc, ed. The Smile of a Dolphin: Remarkable Accounts of Animal Emotions . Discovery Books, 2000.

[McGowan] McGowan, Christopher. The Raptor and the Lamb: Predators and Prey in the Living World . New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997.

[eaten-alive] Eaten Alive - The World of Predators . Questacon on Tour.

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[ElHagePeronnyGriebelBelzung] El Hage, Wissam, Sylvie Peronny, Guy Griebel, Catherine Belzung. "Impaired memory following predatory stress in mice is improved by fluoxetine." Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology & Biological Psychiatry 28 (2004) 123 - 128.

[ElHageGriebelBelzung] El Hage, Wissam, Guy Griebel, and Catherine Belzung. "Long-term impaired memory following predatory stress in mice." Physiology & Behavior 87 (2006) 45 - 50.

[Zoladz] Zoladz, Phillip R. " An ethologically relevant animal model of posttraumatic stress disorder: Physiological, pharmacological and behavioral sequelae in rats exposed to predator stress and social instability ." Graduate dissertation, University of South Florida. 2008.

[Stam] Stam, Rianne. " PTSD and stress sensitisation: A tale of brain and body Part 2: Animal models ." Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews Volume 31, Issue 4 (2007) 558 - 584.

[Stauth] Stauth, David. " Sharks, wolves and the 'ecology of fear' ." 10 Nov. 2010. Accessed 17 March 2013.

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[bats] "Continued Rain, Snowpack Leaves Animals Hungry." Associated Press 23 Apr. 2006. CBS 13/UPN 31.

[Heidorn] Heidorn, Keith C. " Ice Storms: Hazardous Beauty ." The Weather Doctor . 12 Jan. 1998, revised Dec. 2001.

[UCLA] UCLA Animal Care and Use Training Manual . UCLA Office for the Protection of Research Subjects.

[Nuffield] Nuffield Council on Bioethics. Ethics of Research Involving Animals . May 2005.

[BourneEtAl] Bourne, Debra C., Penny Cusdin, and Suzanne I. Boardman, eds. Pain Management in Ruminants . Wildlife Information Network. Mar. 2005.

[Cumming] Cumming, Jeffrey M. " Horn fly Haematobia irritans (L.) ." Diptera Associated with Livestock Dung . North American Dipterists Society. 18 May 2006.

[BBC] " Fierce Ants Build 'Torture Rack' ." BBC News 23 April 2005.

[Gould] Gould, Stephen Jay. " Nonmoral Nature ." Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History . New York: W. W. Norton, 1994.

[insect-pain] See, for instance, the following review articles: (1) Smith, Jane A. " A Question of Pain in Invertebrates ." ILAR Journal 33.1-2 (1991). (2) Tomasik, Brian. " Can Insects Feel Pain? " Essays on Reducing Suffering . 2009. [Bostrom-qualia] Bostrom, Nick. " Quantity of Experience: Brain-Duplication and Degrees of Consciousness ." Minds and Machines 16:2 (pp. 185-200), 2006. --> [Williams] Williams, C. B. Patterns in the Balance of Nature and Related Problems . London: Academic Press, 1964.

[SchubelButman] Schubel, J. R. and Butman, C. A. "Keeping a Finger on the Pulse of Marine Biodiversity: How Healthy Is It?" Pages 84-103 of Nature and Human Society: The Quest for a Sustainable World . Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1998.

[SolbrigSolbrig] Solbrig, O. T., and Solbrig, D. J. Introduction to Population Biology and Evolution . London: Addison-Wesley, 1979.

[Herbert] Herbert, Thomas J. " r and K selection ." Accessed 17 March 2013.

[ClarkeNg] Clarke, Matthew and Ng, Yew-Kwang. "Population Dynamics and Animal Welfare: Issues Raised by the Culling of Kangaroos in Puckapunyal." Social Choice and Welfare 27:2 (pp. 407-22), 2006.

[Ng] Ng, Yew-Kwang. "Towards Welfare Biology: Evolutionary Economics of Animal Consciousness and Suffering." Biology and Philosophy 10.3 (pp. 255-85), 1995.

[Groff and Ng] Groff, Zach and Ng, Yew-Kwang. " Does suffering dominate enjoyment in the animal kingdom? An update to welfare biology ". Biology and Philosophy , 2019.

[Sagoff] Sagoff, Mark. "Animal liberation and environmental ethics: Bad marriage, quick divorce." Osgoode Hall Law Journal 22, p. 297 (1984).

[Hapgood] Hapgood, Fred. Why males exist: an inquiry into the evolution of sex . Morrow (1979).

[EFSA] Animal and Welfare Scientific (AHAW) Panel. " Aspects of the biology and welfare of animals used for experimental and other scientific purposes ." EFSA Journal 292, 1-136 (2005).

[DoodyPaull] Doody, J. Sean and Paull, Phillip. "Hitting the Ground Running: Environmentally Cued Hatching in a Lizard." Copeia : March 2013, Vol. 2013, No. 1, pp. 160-165.

[StevensEtAl] Stevens, Donald E., David W. Kohlhorst, Lee W. Miller, and D. W. Kelley. " 2.0.CO;2">The Decline of Striped Bass in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Estuary, California ." Transactions of the American Fisheries Society 114.1 (pp. 12-30), 1985.

[Tomasik-short-lived] Tomasik, Brian. " Fitness Considerations Regarding the Suffering of Short-Lived Animals ." Essays on Reducing Suffering . First written: 30 June 2013; last updated: 9 Feb. 2015.

[KahnemanSugden] Kahneman, Daniel and Sugden, Robert. " Experienced Utility as a Standard of Policy Evaluation ." Environmental & Resource Economics 32: 161–81 (2005).

[MitchellThompson] Mitchell, T. and Thompson, L. (1994). "A Theory of Temporal Adjustments of the Evaluation of Events: Rosy Prospection and Rosy Retrospection." In C. Stubbart, J. Porac, and J. Meindl, eds., Advances in Managerial Cognition and Organizational Information-Processing , 5 (pp. 85-114). Greenwich, CT: JAI press.

[Singer] Singer, Peter. " Food for Thought ." [Reply to a letter by David Rosinger.] New York Review of Books 20.10 (1973).

[Everett] Everett, Jennifer. "Environmental Ethics, Animal Welfarism, and the Problem of Predation: A Bambi Lover's Respect for Nature." Ethics and the Environment 6.1 (2001): 42-67.

[Cowen] Cowen, Tyler. " Policing Nature ." 19 May 2001.

[Pimentel] Pimentel, David. " Pesticides and Pest Control ." In Peshin, Rajinder and Dhawan, Ashok K., eds. Integrated Pest Management: Innovation-Development Process . Netherlands: Springer, 2009.

[Tomasik-insecticides] Tomasik, Brian. " Humane Insecticides: A Cost-Effectiveness Calculation ." Essays on Reducing Suffering . 2009.

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[Broom] Broom, D. M. " Animal Welfare: Concepts and Measurement " Journal of Animal Science , 69:10 (pp. 4167-4175), 1991.

[Drake] Estimates of the fraction of planets with life that go on to produce intelligence can be found in the literature on the Drake equation .

[Burton] Burton, Kathleen. " NASA Presents Star-Studded Mars Debate ." 25 Mar. 2004.

[Meot-NerMatloff] Meot-Ner, M. and Matloff, G. L. " Directed Panspermia: A Technical and Ethical Evaluation of Seeding the Universe ." Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 32 (pp. 419-23), 1979.

[Greger] Greger, Michael. " Why Honey Is Vegan ." Satya Sept. 2005.

• Ed Gracely validly questions some of the numbers in Hapgood's passage, saying : "I doubt the quoted line that a pigeon can have 150 chicks or a mouse 1,000 kits is realistic. Even a mouse that bred every 3 weeks, had 10 pups each time, and lived two years would not attain half that. And pigeons have typically 2 eggs at a time, breed a few times a year, and live up to 10 years in the wild." Perhaps Hapgood was giving outliers rather than typical numbers of offspring per mother?   (back)

© 2024 Center on Long-Term Risk

• 1 Background
• 2 Challenges
• 3 Theory of change
• 4 Research priorities

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.

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

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 .

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. 

• 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 . [ ↩ ]
• 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. [ ↩ ]
• 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. [ ↩ ]
• 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. [ ↩ ]