This post is based on Part I, Chapter 1 of Suffering-Focused Ethics by Magnus Vinding.
What does it mean to suffer? Is the term suffering reserved for extremely bad scenarios, such as torture, or can any negative feeling be seen as suffering?
In this publication, suffering is defined as an overall bad state of consciousness. It's a state of consciousness that the sufferer wants to escape from when she experiences it. That means you can have negative feelings without suffering: for example, you can think of bad things — like war, hunger and illness — and feel sad about them, but this doesn't mean your overall state of consciousness is bad. You might even want to have this feeling of sadness, as it is compassionate — and by our definition, suffering is something you don't want.
By contrast, happiness is an overall good state of consciousness. There are several forms (or degrees) of happiness, from merely "being okay" to being very much in love — but in any case, the state of consciousness is at least acceptable to the person.
Having defined our terms, we can say with confidence that suffering is bad, and happiness is good; it therefore makes sense to say moral acts should either decrease suffering or increase happiness (or a combination of both). But which one of these should have our priority?
To investigate this, let's first dive into suffering and happiness a bit more. We might be tempted to visualize suffering and happiness like this:
But that might not be very useful. For one thing, it would be more like this…
… or, actually, more like this:
That is, suffering can be much worse than happiness can be good. To illustrate this, imagine you were offered 10 years of maximal happiness, for which you'd have to experience — for some amount of time — the most horrible form of suffering. You can think of the pain of e.g. getting eaten alive or getting burned all over your body, perhaps made worse by seeing your loved ones suffer the same fate, etc.
How much of such suffering would you be willing to endure?
One hour? One day? No more, right? The fact that (probably) nobody would accept anything close to 10 years (or even 1 year) of maximal suffering for 10 years of maximal happiness suggests the disvalue of 1 day of the most horrible suffering is much, much greater than the value of 1 day of maximal happiness. That's a big asymmetry between suffering and happiness, and it brings up another question:
Is the disvalue of all suffering in the World greater than the value of all happiness?
Unfortunately, there are strong indicators that the answer to this question is yes. To start, the earlier mentioned pain and suffering of being eaten alive is a horror that is experienced by many wild animals every day. And in general, most wild animals don't live happy lives: for many species, very large numbers of animals are born while only a few can survive to adulthood. Add to this the horror of (factory) farming: farm animals often live in small spaces, often have body parts removed and often suffer a lot when slaughtered. The many, many fish that are killed for food suffer extremely as well: for a start, they suffocate when being pulled out of the water. All in all, humanity kills more animals each day than the total amount of humans killed in all wars in the twentieth century (White, 2010). Many of these deaths involve extreme suffering. There is a lot of real happiness in the world, but can it really outweigh this amount of suffering?
If we acknowledge that there is more disvalue in suffering than value in happiness and that suffering (unfortunately) prevails in the world, we already have strong reasons to prioritize the reduction of suffering over the the promotion of happiness. But there's more. A simple but very strong third reason can be found in ease of realization. It's much easier to cause extreme suffering than to cause extreme happiness: for example, a single car accident can cause intense pain — in multiple individuals — and this pain can last a lifetime. A push of a button can cause millions to die in a nuclear attack. And of course, various illnesses can cause a lot of suffering as well. What single event could cause extreme happiness that lasts this long? It seems there is no such event, as this is just not how happiness works. The fact that suffering can be brought about so easily also means we can relatively easily prevent suffering — more easily than we can bring about happiness: we can vaccinate people against illnesses, for example. If you think about it, it's just much harder to make people who are already quite well even happier — and even if we do, this increased happiness usually doesn't last that long.
And even if it did last long, it seems increasing happiness is just qualitatively less valuable than decreasing suffering. Suffering is an inherent cry for betterment: we feel a strong moral urgency to help someone who is suffering, whereas no such urgency exists to make a person who is already well off even happier.
Add to this the fact that it's often much easier to know how to prevent suffering than how to make a well off person even happier. People often have difficulty knowing exactly what will make them happy or happier, but bad things are easy to think of: getting ill, getting in a car accident, getting shot, etc. In other words, it's easier to know what to avoid than what to pursue.
Finally, consider the following thought experiment (Gloor & Manino, 2016).
Imagine two planets, one empty and one inhabited by 1,000 beings suffering a miserable existence. Flying to the empty planet, you could bring 1,000,000 beings into existence that will live a happy life. Flying to the inhabited planet instead, you could help the 1,000 miserable beings and give them the means to live happily. If there is time to do both, where would you go first? If there is only time to fly to one planet, which one should it be?
I suspect the reader will agree that one should fly to the inhabited planet and help the miserable beings, even though you could fly to the other planet and bring into existence 1,000 times as many happy beings. This suggests the suffering of 1 being cannot be compensated by bringing into existence 1,000 happy ones!
And that's the final asymmetry we'll discuss. To summarize, suffering and happiness are asymmetrical in quantity (suffering can be much more extreme than happiness, and suffering outweighs happiness in our World), ease of realization (suffering is easier to bring about than happiness), quality (suffering is an inherent cry for betterment), knowledge (it's easier to know what to avoid than what to pursue) and population ethics (the thought experiment with the two planets). Together, these asymmetries strongly suggest we should focus our moral efforts on the prevention of suffering over the promotion of happiness.
References
- Gloor, L., & Mannino, A. (2016). The case for suffering-focused ethics. Foundational Research Institute, https://foundational-research. org/the-case-for-suffering-focusedethics.
- Vinding, M. (2020). Suffering-Focused Ethics. Defense and Implications. Copenhagen: Ratio Ethica.
- White, M. Necrometrics: Estimated totals for the entire 20th century. Necrometrics. 2010.