Great questions. Let me see whether I can do them justice.
If you could change peoples’ minds on one thing, what would it be? I.e. what do you find the most frustrating/pernicious/widespread mistake on this topic?
Three important things come to mind:
1. There seems to be this common misconception that if you hold a suffering-focused view, then you will, or at least you should, endorse forms of violence that seem abhorrent to common sense. For example, you should consider it good when people get killed (because it prevents future suffering for them), and you should try to destroy the world. This doesn’t follow. For many reasons.
First, one may hold a pluralist view according to which we have a prima facie obligation to reduce suffering, but also, for example, prima facie obligations not to kill and to respect the autonomy of other individuals. Indeed, academics such as Clark Wolf and Jamie Mayerfeld defend suffering-focused views of this kind. See:
Beyond that, even on purely welfarist (suffering-focused) views, there are many strong reasons to consider it bad when individuals die, and to oppose world destruction (see sections 8.1 and 8.2). In fact, the objections commonly raised against suffering-focused views are often more objections against purely welfarist views than they are against the moral asymmetry between happiness and suffering, as you for any welfarist view can construct an argument to the effect that one should be willing to kill for trivial reasons. For example, naively interpreted, a classical utilitarian should also be willing to kill a person, and indeed destroy the world, to prevent the smallest amount of suffering if the “sum” of happiness and suffering is exactly zero otherwise (a point often made by David Pearce). Likewise, a classical utilitarian should endorse what is arguably an even more repugnant world-destruction conclusion than the negative utilitarian: if we could push a button that first unleashes ceaseless torture upon every sentient individual for decades, and then destroys our world to in turn give rise to a “greater” amount of pleasure in some new world, then classical utilitarianism would oblige us to press this button.
But these arguments obviously don’t come close to showing that classical utilitarians should endorse violence of this sort in practice; they obviously shouldn’t. The same holds true when similar arguments are applied to suffering-focused views.
2. Another belief I would want to challenge is that suffering-focused EAs make the world a more dangerous place from the perspective of other value systems. I would suggest the opposite is the case, and I think what’s dangerous is that people don’t appreciate this.
Among people who hold suffering-focused views, suffering-focused EAs fall toward the high tail in terms of being cooperative, measured, and prudent. It’s a group that does, and to an even greater extent has the potential to, move other suffering-focused people in less naive and more cooperative directions, which is very positive on all value systems. Marginalizing people with suffering-focused views within EA is really not helpful to this end.
3. A third misunderstanding is that people who hold suffering-focused views are much more concerned about mild suffering than, say, the average ethically concerned person. This need not be the case. One can hold suffering-focused views that are primarily concerned with extreme suffering, and which give overriding weight to extreme suffering without giving commensurable weight to mild suffering. I defend such views in chapters 4-5.
‘if you were given 10 billion dollars and 10 years to move your field forward, how precisely would you allocate it, and what do you think you could achieve at the end?’
I think I would devote it mostly to research — to building a research field. The field of “effective suffering reduction” is very young and unexplored at this point, and much of the discussion that has taken place so far has been tied to the idiosyncratic and speculative views of a few people (unavoidably so, given that so few people have done research on these issues so far). This means that there is likely a lot of low-hanging fruit here. Building such a research project is in large part the goal of the new organization that I have recently co-founded with Tobias Baumann: Center for Reducing Suffering ( https://centerforreducingsuffering.org/ ).
I think this can give us better insights into which risks we should be most concerned about and more clarity about how we can best reduce them. There’s much more to be said here, but I’ll let this suffice for now.
Thanks, Mike!
Great questions. Let me see whether I can do them justice.
Three important things come to mind:
1. There seems to be this common misconception that if you hold a suffering-focused view, then you will, or at least you should, endorse forms of violence that seem abhorrent to common sense. For example, you should consider it good when people get killed (because it prevents future suffering for them), and you should try to destroy the world. This doesn’t follow. For many reasons.
First, one may hold a pluralist view according to which we have a prima facie obligation to reduce suffering, but also, for example, prima facie obligations not to kill and to respect the autonomy of other individuals. Indeed, academics such as Clark Wolf and Jamie Mayerfeld defend suffering-focused views of this kind. See:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190410204154/https://jwcwolf.public.iastate.edu/Papers/JUPE.HTM https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.2041-6962.1996.tb00795.x https://www.amazon.com/Suffering-Moral-Responsibility-Oxford-Ethics/dp/0195115996
Beyond that, even on purely welfarist (suffering-focused) views, there are many strong reasons to consider it bad when individuals die, and to oppose world destruction (see sections 8.1 and 8.2). In fact, the objections commonly raised against suffering-focused views are often more objections against purely welfarist views than they are against the moral asymmetry between happiness and suffering, as you for any welfarist view can construct an argument to the effect that one should be willing to kill for trivial reasons. For example, naively interpreted, a classical utilitarian should also be willing to kill a person, and indeed destroy the world, to prevent the smallest amount of suffering if the “sum” of happiness and suffering is exactly zero otherwise (a point often made by David Pearce). Likewise, a classical utilitarian should endorse what is arguably an even more repugnant world-destruction conclusion than the negative utilitarian: if we could push a button that first unleashes ceaseless torture upon every sentient individual for decades, and then destroys our world to in turn give rise to a “greater” amount of pleasure in some new world, then classical utilitarianism would oblige us to press this button.
But these arguments obviously don’t come close to showing that classical utilitarians should endorse violence of this sort in practice; they obviously shouldn’t. The same holds true when similar arguments are applied to suffering-focused views.
2. Another belief I would want to challenge is that suffering-focused EAs make the world a more dangerous place from the perspective of other value systems. I would suggest the opposite is the case, and I think what’s dangerous is that people don’t appreciate this.
Among people who hold suffering-focused views, suffering-focused EAs fall toward the high tail in terms of being cooperative, measured, and prudent. It’s a group that does, and to an even greater extent has the potential to, move other suffering-focused people in less naive and more cooperative directions, which is very positive on all value systems. Marginalizing people with suffering-focused views within EA is really not helpful to this end.
3. A third misunderstanding is that people who hold suffering-focused views are much more concerned about mild suffering than, say, the average ethically concerned person. This need not be the case. One can hold suffering-focused views that are primarily concerned with extreme suffering, and which give overriding weight to extreme suffering without giving commensurable weight to mild suffering. I defend such views in chapters 4-5.
I think I would devote it mostly to research — to building a research field. The field of “effective suffering reduction” is very young and unexplored at this point, and much of the discussion that has taken place so far has been tied to the idiosyncratic and speculative views of a few people (unavoidably so, given that so few people have done research on these issues so far). This means that there is likely a lot of low-hanging fruit here. Building such a research project is in large part the goal of the new organization that I have recently co-founded with Tobias Baumann: Center for Reducing Suffering ( https://centerforreducingsuffering.org/ ).
I think this can give us better insights into which risks we should be most concerned about and more clarity about how we can best reduce them. There’s much more to be said here, but I’ll let this suffice for now.