The paradox of suffering

 
(I promise this will be the last corollary posting on the issue.)

The central premise of the McMahan/Singer/utilitarian argument whereby predators should be prevented from killing prey or eliminated from the living world is premised on the reduction of total suffering in the world.  This has distant roots in Bentham's arithmetic of suffering, though modern utilitarians make perhaps more sophisticated claims.

But I think there is a paradox here.  Suffering does not seem to me to be quantifiable in this way, so as to be reduced like (say) the deficit (which is hard also to quantify, I guess) or the birthrate.  This is not only because what counts as suffering for one sentient being does not count the same for another, and the same experience is not suffering in some conditions but is in others.  It's because suffering is can't be abstracted from the sufferer.  All suffering is unique and can only be experienced individually.

I first understood this paradox when I read George Bernard Shaw's response to a young woman who was working for peace or the alleviation of suffering in the world in some capacity, and wrote to Shaw that she was simply overwhelmed by what she experienced, how terribly vast the suffering she observed was, and how little her efforts meant:  she was ground down to hopelessness by her knowledge.  Shaw responded by pointing out to her that in fact the amount of human suffering in the world is not more than one human being can bear.  To an observer, it would seem that two persons tortured suffer twice as much suffering as one; but in fact your being tortured doesn't increase mine, or if it does it is only in a psychological sense, and only if I am in a realm of torture possibility, and know of it.  Work to relieve suffering, he told  her, because it is the human charge to do so; but don't suppose that there really is any such thing as ALL suffering.  

This paradox -- that the amount of suffering in the world is not greater than one sentient being can suffer -- is resolved, I suppose, for religious believers:  God can add up and experience the suffering of all in his own bosom.  For the non-religious, the paradox remains, and it IS a paradox:  it doesn't really relieve us of any duty, nor does it mitigate our anguish in perceiving mass suffering.  But it eases the heart.  Mine anyway.  Some days.