Suffering-Focused Ethics Quotes

“... if suffering warrants special moral concern, the truth is that we should never forget about its existence. For even if we had abolished suffering throughout the living world, there would still be a risk that it might reemerge, and this risk would always be worth reducing.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“The point of the term “suffering-focused ethics” is ... not to be a novel or impressive contribution to ethical theorizing, but instead to serve as a pragmatic concept that can unite as effective a coalition as possible toward the shared aim of making a real-world difference — to reduce suffering for sentient beings.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“We can help others more effectively if we take good care of ourselves. This is just a psychological fact. [...] After all, whatever good one can do in a state of self-neglect, one can probably do much better in s healthy and happy state, implying that, even from a purely altruistic perspective, it is more than worth investing in one's own health and happiness.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“Being forced to endure torture rather than dreamless sleep, or an otherwise neutral state, would be a tragedy of a fundamentally different kind than being forced to “endure” a neutral state instead of a state of maximal bliss.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“... the notion that happiness and suffering are morally symmetric deserves our most meticulous scrutiny. It may, of course, seem intuitive to assume that some kind of symmetry must obtain, and to superimpose a certain interval of the real numbers onto the range of happiness and suffering we can experience — from minus ten to plus ten, say. Yet we have to be extremely cautious about such naively intuitive moves of conceptualization. … [I]t is especially true when our ethical priorities hinge on these conceptual models; when they can determine, for instance, whether we find it acceptable to allow astronomical amounts of suffering to occur in order to create “even greater” amounts of happiness.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“… a problematic feeling is indeed the exact opposite of an unproblematic feeling. Yet the fact that two states are each others’ opposites in this sense does not imply they are symmetric in the sense of being able to morally outweigh each other or meaningfully cancel each other out. Consider, by analogy, the states of being below and above water respectively. ... one can say that, in one sense, being 50 meters below water is the opposite of being 50 meters above water. But this does not mean, quite obviously, that a symmetry exists between these respective states in terms of their value and moral significance. Indeed, there is a sense in which it matters much more to have one’s head just above the water surface than it does to get it higher up still.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“Disaster on an unfathomable scale is always taking place on Earth. Countless instances of extreme suffering are occurring in this moment — right now. Yet because this suffering is so normal and ordinary, simply occurring every day, distributed rather evenly over time and space, it seems less evocative and urgent than the more unusual, more localized disasters, such as school shootings and earthquakes. Almost all the suffering that occurs on Earth can be considered baseline horror, which allows us to ignore it. We simply do not feel the ever-present emergency that surrounds us.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“At the personal level, we need to invest in our own health and well-being, as well as in our abilities, if we are to contribute competently to the cause. More than that, we also need to continually remind ourselves of the importance of suffering, in healthy and sustainable ways, as our minds otherwise tend to creep back into the homeostatic equilibrium they evolved to be caught up in relatively petty thoughts and pursuits.
We might here find inspiration in ancient traditions, such as Buddhism, in which practices aimed to remind us of the reality and importance of suffering have been cultivated over millennia. Such practices include "loving-kindness meditation" and "compassion meditation", in which one wishes others happiness and relief from suffering. Research suggests that these meditation practices not only increase compassionate responses to suffering, but that they also help to increase life satisfaction and reduce depressive symptoms for the practitioner, as well as to foster better coping mechanisms and increased positive affect in the face of suffering.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“Furthermore, we often do not even need rough measures of suffering (beyond those we intuitively make) to be able to navigate toward the reduction of suffering. For instance, no advanced measurement effort is really needed to conclude that atrocities like the Holocaust should be prevented in any endeavour to reduce suffering, and the same can be said of most other sources and cases of extreme suffering - factory farming, North Korean torture chambers, sadistic crime, etc.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“8.18 How can we consider the reduction of suffering a foremost priority when it is impossible to measure suffering in the first place?
We certainly can measure suffering. In fact, there are many ways to obtain information about others' suffering, such as self-reports (in the case of humans), seemingly pain-induced bodily movements and grimaces, self-harming and suicidal behavior, levels of stress hormones in the blood, and brain scans.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“7.7 Perpetrator Bias
Our tendency to overlook the baseline horror always occurring in the world is probably also in part explainable by a "perpetrator bias" of sorts. That is, we seem to care more about suffering when it is caused by a moral agent who has brought it about by intentional action compared to when it is not.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“A million deaths really is just a statistic at the level of our moral cognition. This dumbfounding-by-numbers blindspot of our minds is one we must make arduous efforts to control for if we are to have an accurate sense of the scope and moral importance of the suffering of the world.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“Being unable to express one's suffering is also the case for the vast majority of sentient beings on the planet: non-human animals. The most numerous of them, such as fish and invertebrates, cannot even scream. We do not even need to cover our ears to ignore their suffering.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“There is an irony here. We are tempted to dismiss and downplay the disvalue and moral importance of (intensely) bad feelings because acknowledging it might result in (mildly) bad feelings for ourselves. Yet I suspect this ironic dynamic is not uncommon.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“On my account, this is simply a fact about consciousness: the experience of suffering is inherently bad, and this badness carries normative force - it carries a property of this ought not occur that is all too clear, undeniable even, in the moment one experiences it. We do not derive this property. We experience it directly.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“Perpetrator bias is likewise important […]. At the level of humanity’s systematic exploitation and abuse of non-human animals, we find no single perpetrator we can point toward, rather many partly complicit agents – the farmer, the slaughterhouse worker, the customer. This division of maleficence blinds us to the atrocities committed by this institution as a whole.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“We should give equal priority to equal interests in general, and to equal suffering in particular. Indeed, if is the rejection of the principle of equal consideration of interests that requires justification, since such a rejection faces the burden of identifying a morally relevant criterion that can justify discrimination.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“The principle of sympathy for intense suffering defended here stems neither from depression nor resentment. Rather, as the name implies, it simply stems from a deep sympathy for intense suffering. It stems from a firm choice to side with the evaluations of those who are superlatively worst off. And while it is true that this principle has the implication that it would have been better if the world had never existed, I think the fault here is to be found in the world, not the principle.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“The implications of anti-hurt views are clear: creating more happiness for those who do not suffer is never of greater importance than the alleviation and prevention of suffering.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“Accepting the qualitative and moral asymmetry presented in this section implies that reducing suffering should always take priority over increasing happiness. Increasing happiness may be fine in itself, yet if it comes at the price of increasing (or not preventing) suffering, it is wrong.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“Our condition is rather like walking up a steep staircase, in that there are many more ways to fall down than there are to move upward, and most falls we can make are much easier to perform, and are much longer, than any step upward. And even if we refuse to take any steps, and instead choose to make no effort whatsoever, we will still gradually move down toward misery. We are not just on a staircase, but on a steep escalator moving downward.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“Another reason it is much easier to bring about suffering than happiness is that suffering is, in a sense, the default state that creeps in on us if we do not make an effort to avoid it. For example, if we do not make an effort to eat well and exercise, poor health and misery will ensue.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“[F]ailure is generally much easier than success.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“Beyond the asymmetry in quantity, there is so a strong asymmetry in the ease of realizing states of happiness and suffering respectively.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“It is worth noting that we are strongly biased to not appreciate the true horror of predation, since most victims of predation are non-human animals, and most of us do not feel remotely the same when seeing a non-human animal get eaten alive compared to when we see the same fate befall a human, even if the suffering is the same, or indeed greater, in the non-human case. Thus, to appreciate the true horror of predation, it may be necessary to see a human get eaten alive by predators, and then try to generalize the resulting feelings of horror to the non-human victims of predation (and it should be noted that human deaths due to predation are not, in fact, a rarity; for example, tigers alone are estimated to have killed more than 373,000 people between 1800 and 2009, Nyhus et al., 2010, pp. 132-135).”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“A short moment of the very worst forms of suffering can make an entire happy life seem of little value in comparison. Yet the same thing cannot be said in reverse - a short moment of the greatest happiness cannot make an entire miserable life seem of comparatively slight disvalue.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“... this is, I believe, the great blindspot of most vegans: the absence of a perpetrator leads them to neglect the suffering of the majority of the beings they claim to care about.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“.. [M]uch suffering serves absolutely no function and entails no silver lining whatsoever, such as the suffering endured by countless [non-human animals] every second who are eaten alive while fully conscious and unable to escape, or the suffering entailed by debilitating chronic pain. The world contains vast amounts of such useless suffering, and we should all be able to agree that this suffering is worth preventing.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“... when we take into account what we know about happiness and suffering in psychological and neuroscientific terms, we find reasons to doubt that (to use Popper’s phrase) we can treat degrees of pain as “negative degrees of pleasure”, and to doubt that pleasure can ethically “cancel out” pain — any more than putting people far above a water surface can cancel out or outweigh the bad of putting people far below it.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications