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Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications QUOTES

Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " … 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

3 " ... 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

4 " 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

5 " ... 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

6 " ... 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

7 " ... 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

8 " 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

9 " .. [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