I sometimes think of this idea and haven’t found anyone mentioning it with a quick AI search: a tax on suffering.
EDIT: there’s a paper on this but specific to animal welfare that was shared on the forum earlier this year.
A suffering tax would function as a Pigouvian tax on negative externalities—specifically, the suffering imposed on sentient beings. The core logic: activities that cause suffering create costs not borne by the actor, so taxation internalizes these costs and incentivizes reduction.
This differs from existing approaches (animal welfare regulations, meat taxes) by:
Making suffering itself the tax base rather than proxies like carbon emissions or product type
Creating a unified framework across different contexts (factory farming, research, entertainment, etc.)
Explicitly quantifying and pricing suffering
The main problems are measurement & administration. I would imagine an institute would be tasked with guidelines/a calculation model, which could become pretty complex. Actually administrating it would also be very hard, and there should be a threshold beneath which no tax is required because it wouldn’t be worth the overhead. I would imagine that an initial version wouldn’t right away be “full EA” taking into account invertebrates. It should start with a narrow scope, but with the infrastructure for moral circle expansion.
It’s obviously more a theoretical exercise than practical near-term, but here’s a couple of considerations:
it’s hard to oppose: it’s easier to say that carbon isn’t important or animals don’t suffer. It’s harder to oppose direct taxation of suffering
it’s relatively robust in the long-term: it can incorporate new scientific and philosophical insights on wild animal welfare, non-vertebrate sentience, digital sentience, etc.
it’s scale sensitive
it focuses the discussion on what matters: who suffers how much?
It incentivizes the private sector to find out ways to reduce suffering
I think this is great. I designed an entire market structure/operating system for society, which tries to generalize this principle to all externalities, positive and negative. Happy to share it if you’re interested.
I sometimes think of this idea and haven’t found anyone mentioning it with a quick AI search: a tax on suffering.
EDIT: there’s a paper on this but specific to animal welfare that was shared on the forum earlier this year.
A suffering tax would function as a Pigouvian tax on negative externalities—specifically, the suffering imposed on sentient beings. The core logic: activities that cause suffering create costs not borne by the actor, so taxation internalizes these costs and incentivizes reduction.
This differs from existing approaches (animal welfare regulations, meat taxes) by:
Making suffering itself the tax base rather than proxies like carbon emissions or product type
Creating a unified framework across different contexts (factory farming, research, entertainment, etc.)
Explicitly quantifying and pricing suffering
The main problems are measurement & administration. I would imagine an institute would be tasked with guidelines/a calculation model, which could become pretty complex. Actually administrating it would also be very hard, and there should be a threshold beneath which no tax is required because it wouldn’t be worth the overhead. I would imagine that an initial version wouldn’t right away be “full EA” taking into account invertebrates. It should start with a narrow scope, but with the infrastructure for moral circle expansion.
It’s obviously more a theoretical exercise than practical near-term, but here’s a couple of considerations:
it’s hard to oppose: it’s easier to say that carbon isn’t important or animals don’t suffer. It’s harder to oppose direct taxation of suffering
it’s relatively robust in the long-term: it can incorporate new scientific and philosophical insights on wild animal welfare, non-vertebrate sentience, digital sentience, etc.
it’s scale sensitive
it focuses the discussion on what matters: who suffers how much?
It incentivizes the private sector to find out ways to reduce suffering
I think this is great. I designed an entire market structure/operating system for society, which tries to generalize this principle to all externalities, positive and negative. Happy to share it if you’re interested.