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Suffer­ing-fo­cused ethics

TagLast edit: Mar 16, 2023, 3:43 AM by Michael St Jules 🔸

Suffering-focused ethics is a family of views in normative ethics that assign primary moral importance to the alleviation of suffering. Negative utilitarianism is one example of a suffering-focused ethical view, though other views in this family also assign intrinsic value to things besides suffering, including positive hedonic states as well as non-hedonic values.

Further reading

Aird, Michael (2020) Collection of evidence about views on longtermism, time discounting, population ethics, significance of suffering vs happiness, etc. among non-EAs, Effective Altruism Forum, May 10.
Many additional resources with some relevance to this topic.

Gloor, Lukas (2016) The case for suffering-focused ethics, Center on Long-Term Risk, August 26.

Vinding, Magnus (2020) Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications, Copenhagen: Ratio Ethica.

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