I’m not a philosopher, but to the extent I have opinions on such things they are about the same as Moss’s, i.e. classical hedonistic utilitarianism with quite a lot of moral uncertainty. I have somewhat suffering-focused intuitions but (a) I’ve never seen a remotely convincing argument for a suffering-focused ethic, and (b) I think my intuitions – and, I suspect, those of many people who identify as suffering-focused – can be explained by other factors. In particular, I think there are problems with the scales people use to measure valence/wellbeing/value of lives, both in reality and in thought experiments, e.g. it seems common for philosophers to assume a symmetrical scale like −10 to +10, whereas it seems pretty obvious to me that the worst lives – or even, say, the 5th percentile of lives – are many times more bad then the best lives are good. So if the best few percent of lives are 10⁄10 and 0 is equivalent to being dead, the bottom few percent of any large population are probably somewhere between −100 and −100,000. (It is not widely appreciated just how awful things are for so many people.) If true, classical utilitarianism may have policy implications similar to prioritarianism and related theories, e.g. more resources for the worst off (assuming tractability). But I haven’t seen much literature on these scale issues so I’m not confident this is correct. If you know of any relevant research, preferably peer-reviewed, I’d be very interested.
I’m not a philosopher, but to the extent I have opinions on such things they are about the same as Moss’s, i.e. classical hedonistic utilitarianism with quite a lot of moral uncertainty. I have somewhat suffering-focused intuitions but (a) I’ve never seen a remotely convincing argument for a suffering-focused ethic, and (b) I think my intuitions – and, I suspect, those of many people who identify as suffering-focused – can be explained by other factors. In particular, I think there are problems with the scales people use to measure valence/wellbeing/value of lives, both in reality and in thought experiments, e.g. it seems common for philosophers to assume a symmetrical scale like −10 to +10, whereas it seems pretty obvious to me that the worst lives – or even, say, the 5th percentile of lives – are many times more bad then the best lives are good. So if the best few percent of lives are 10⁄10 and 0 is equivalent to being dead, the bottom few percent of any large population are probably somewhere between −100 and −100,000. (It is not widely appreciated just how awful things are for so many people.) If true, classical utilitarianism may have policy implications similar to prioritarianism and related theories, e.g. more resources for the worst off (assuming tractability). But I haven’t seen much literature on these scale issues so I’m not confident this is correct. If you know of any relevant research, preferably peer-reviewed, I’d be very interested.