“... 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.” HappinessSufferingEthicsUtilitarianismPrioritization Book:Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications Source: 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.” HappinessSufferingEthicsUtilitarianism Book:Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications Source: 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.” HappinessSufferingEthicsVeganismPlanetSuffering Focused Ethics Book:Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications Source: Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications
“I am not suggesting we should be skeptical of the notion that life can get a lot better. Yet this should not be confused with the question of whether any better state we can reasonably expect to bring about — such as a much happier state — can ever morally outweigh all the suffering its creation would entail, including the (risk of) extreme suffering.” HappinessSufferingProgressEthicsVeganismSuffering Focused Ethics Author:Magnus Vinding