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Suffering-Focused Ethics

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There's a cluster of ethical views that say the prevention of extreme suffering takes priority over all other goals. On some views, preference satisfaction, pleasure creation, and the like are still considered good, but suffering reduction takes lexical priority over them, or is at least so much more desirable that it crowds out these other goals in practice. Other suffering-focused views go further and deny that pleasure and preference satisfaction are good at all. On the most extreme view, events and locations matter only insofar as they contain extreme suffering. The more suffering they contain, the worse and more problematic they are, but there are no moral grounds for calling one suffering-free event or location better than another. Suffering-focused views may seem unappealingly gloomy. For one, most of us find it distressing to think about intense suffering even on an abstract level, yet acting on SFE requires us to think about suffering often so that we can better identify and r

Suffering-Focused Ethics Home About Suffering-Focused Ethics There's a cluster of ethical views that say the prevention of extreme suffering takes priority over all other goals. On some views, preference satisfaction, pleasure creation, and the like are still considered good, but suffering reduction takes lexical priority over them, or is at least so much more desirable that it crowds out these other goals in practice. Other suffering-focused views go further and deny that pleasure and preference satisfaction are good at all. On the most extreme view, events and locations matter only insofar a

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