It seems confusing for a view that’s suffering-focused not to commit you (or at least the part of your credence that’s suffering-focused, which may compromise with other parts) to preventing suffering as a priority. I guess people include weak NU/negative-leaning utilitarianism/prioritarianism in (weakly) suffering-focused views.
What would count as weakly suffering-focused to you? Giving 2x more weight to suffering than you would want to in your personal tradeoffs? 2x more weight to suffering than pleasure at the same “objective intensity”? Even less than 2x?
FWIW, I think a factor of 2 is probably within the normal variance of judgements about classical utilitarian pleasure-suffering tradeoffs, and there probably isn’t any objective intensity or at least it isn’t discoverable, so such a weakly suffering-focused view wouldn’t really be distinguishable from classical utilitarianism (or a symmetric total view with the same goods and bads).
It sounds like part of what you’re saying is that it’s hard to say what counts as a “suffering-focused ethical view” if we include views that are pluralistic (rather than only caring about suffering), and that part of the reason for this is that it’s hard to know what “common unit” we could use for both suffering and other things.
I agree with those things. But I still think the concept of “suffering-focused ethics” is useful. See the posts cited in my other reply for some discussion of these points (I imagine you’ve already read them and just think that they don’t fully resolve the issue, and I think you’d be right about that).
What would count as weakly suffering-focused to you? Giving 2x more weight to suffering than you would want to in your personal tradeoffs? 2x more weight to suffering than pleasure at the same “objective intensity”? Even less than 2x?
I think this question isn’t quite framed right—it seems to assume that the only suffering-focused view we have in mind is some form of negative utilitarianism, and seems to ignore population ethics issues. (I’m not saying you actually think that SFE is just about NU or that population ethics isn’t relevant, just that that text seems to imply that.)
E.g., an SFE view might prioritise suffering-reduction not exactly because it gives more weight to suffering than pleasure in normal decision situations, but rather because it endorses “the asymmetry”.
But basically, I guess I’d count a view as weakly suffering-focused if, in a substantial number of decision situations I care a lot about (e.g., career choice), it places noticeably “more” importance on reducing suffering by some amount than on achieving other goals “to a similar amount”. (Maybe “to a similar amount” could be defined from the perspective of classical utilitarianism.) This is of course vague, and that definition is just one I’ve written now rather than this being something I’ve focused a lot of time on. But it still seems a useful concept to have.
(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]
It seems confusing for a view that’s suffering-focused not to commit you (or at least the part of your credence that’s suffering-focused, which may compromise with other parts) to preventing suffering as a priority. I guess people include weak NU/negative-leaning utilitarianism/prioritarianism in (weakly) suffering-focused views.
What would count as weakly suffering-focused to you? Giving 2x more weight to suffering than you would want to in your personal tradeoffs? 2x more weight to suffering than pleasure at the same “objective intensity”? Even less than 2x?
FWIW, I think a factor of 2 is probably within the normal variance of judgements about classical utilitarian pleasure-suffering tradeoffs, and there probably isn’t any objective intensity or at least it isn’t discoverable, so such a weakly suffering-focused view wouldn’t really be distinguishable from classical utilitarianism (or a symmetric total view with the same goods and bads).
It sounds like part of what you’re saying is that it’s hard to say what counts as a “suffering-focused ethical view” if we include views that are pluralistic (rather than only caring about suffering), and that part of the reason for this is that it’s hard to know what “common unit” we could use for both suffering and other things.
I agree with those things. But I still think the concept of “suffering-focused ethics” is useful. See the posts cited in my other reply for some discussion of these points (I imagine you’ve already read them and just think that they don’t fully resolve the issue, and I think you’d be right about that).
I think this question isn’t quite framed right—it seems to assume that the only suffering-focused view we have in mind is some form of negative utilitarianism, and seems to ignore population ethics issues. (I’m not saying you actually think that SFE is just about NU or that population ethics isn’t relevant, just that that text seems to imply that.)
E.g., an SFE view might prioritise suffering-reduction not exactly because it gives more weight to suffering than pleasure in normal decision situations, but rather because it endorses “the asymmetry”.
But basically, I guess I’d count a view as weakly suffering-focused if, in a substantial number of decision situations I care a lot about (e.g., career choice), it places noticeably “more” importance on reducing suffering by some amount than on achieving other goals “to a similar amount”. (Maybe “to a similar amount” could be defined from the perspective of classical utilitarianism.) This is of course vague, and that definition is just one I’ve written now rather than this being something I’ve focused a lot of time on. But it still seems a useful concept to have.
(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.)