(Minor point: “preventing suffering as a priority” seems quite different from “downside-focused”. Maybe you meant “as the priority”?)
I think my way of thinking about this is very consistent with what I believe are the “canonical” works on “suffering-focused ethics” and “downside-focused views”. (I think these may have even been the works that introduced those terms, though the basic ideas preceded the works.) Namely:
Suffering-focused ethics is an umbrella term for moral views that place primary or particular importance on the prevention of suffering. Most views that fall into this category arepluralistic in that they hold that other things besides reducing suffering also matter morally [emphasis added]
And the latter says:
Whether a normative view qualifies as downside-focused or upside-focused is not always easy to determine, as the answer can depend on difficult empirical questions such as how much disvalue we can expect to be able to reduce versus how much value we can expect to be able to create.[...] The following commitments may lead to a downside-focused prioritization:
(Non-welfarist) views that include considerations about suffering prevention or the prevention of rights violations as a prior or as (central) part of an objective list of what constitutes goodness [emphasis added]
(Minor point: “preventing suffering as a priority” seems quite different from “downside-focused”. Maybe you meant “as the priority”?)
I think my way of thinking about this is very consistent with what I believe are the “canonical” works on “suffering-focused ethics” and “downside-focused views”. (I think these may have even been the works that introduced those terms, though the basic ideas preceded the works.) Namely:
https://longtermrisk.org/the-case-for-suffering-focused-ethics/
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/225Aq4P4jFPoWBrb5/cause-prioritization-for-downside-focused-value-systems
The former opens with:
And the latter says:
I think another good post on this is Descriptive Population Ethics and Its Relevance for Cause Prioritization, and that that again supports the way I’m thinking about this. (But to save time / be lazy, I won’t mine it for useful excepts to share here.)