I’d argue that you also need some assumptions around is-ought, whether to be a consequentialist or not, what else (if at all) you value and how this trades off against suffering, etc. And you also need to decide on some boundaries for which entities are capable of suffering in a meaningful way, which there’s wide spread disagreement on (in a way that imo goes beyond being empirical)
It’s enough to get you something like “if suffering can be averted costlessly then this is a good thing” but that’s pretty rarely practically relevant. Everything has a cost
I’d argue that you also need some assumptions around is-ought, whether to be a consequentialist or not, what else (if at all) you value and how this trades off against suffering, etc. And you also need to decide on some boundaries for which entities are capable of suffering in a meaningful way, which there’s wide spread disagreement on (in a way that imo goes beyond being empirical)
It’s enough to get you something like “if suffering can be averted costlessly then this is a good thing” but that’s pretty rarely practically relevant. Everything has a cost