“Thomas Jefferson and George Washington owned slaves; Albert Einstein and Mohandas Gandhi were imperfect husbands and fathers. The list goes on indefinitely. We are all flawed and creatures of our times. Is it fair to judge us by the unknown standards of the future? Some of the habits of our age will doubtless be considered barbaric by later generations – perhaps for insisting that small children and even infants sleep alone instead of with their parents; or exciting nationalist passions as a means of gaining popular approval and achieving high political office; or allowing bribery and corruption as a way of life; or keeping pets; or eating animals and jailing chimpanzees; or criminalizing the use of euphoriants by adults; or allowing our children to grow up ignorant.”

— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995), p. 247

“[W]e can appeal to rights when moral matters have been settled. In other words, our appeals to rights may serve as shields, protecting our moral progress from the threats that remain. Likewise, there are times when it makes sense to use “rights” as weapons, as rhetorical tools for making moral progress when arguments have failed.”

— Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them (2013), p. 308

“Do we value ‘life’ even if unconscious, or do we value life only as a vehicle for consciousness? Our attitude to the doctrine of the sanctity of life very much depends on our answer to this question.”

— Jonathan Glover, Causing Death and Saving Lives (1990)

“Perhaps, as Kant thought, making transgressors suffer is a truly worthy goal, just for its own sake. But if that’s right, it’s a remarkable coincidence. How strange if the true principles of justice just happen to coincide with the feelings produced by our punishment gizmos, installed in our brains by natural selection to help us stabilize cooperation and thus make more copies of our genes. Knowing how our brains work and how they got here, it’s more reasonable to suppose that our taste for justice is a useful illusion.”

— Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them (2013), p. 274

“It is not human life only, not human life as such, that ought to be sacred to us, but human feelings. The human capacity of suffering is what we should cause to be respected, not the mere capacity of existing.”

— John Stuart Mill, Capital Punishment (April 21, 1868)

“[John Rawls] nowhere suggests that wealthy nations ought to try to assist poor nations to meet the basic needs of their citizens, except in so far as this is part of a much broader project of helping those peoples to attain liberal or decent institutions. The probability that, in the real world in which we live, tens of millions will starve or die from easily preventable illnesses before such institutions are attained, is not something to which Rawls directs his attention.”

— Peter Singer, Outsiders: Our Obligations to those beyond Our Borders (The Ethics of Assistance: Morality and the Distant Needy, 2004, p. 26)

“One way to see the unacceptability of welfare-independent rights is to ask the question ‘why Right X?’ to a very ultimate level. If the answer is ‘Right X because Y’, then one should ask ‘Why Y?’ For example, if the answer to ‘why free speech?’ is that people enjoy free speech, it is already not welfare-independent. If the answer is free speech deters dictatorship’, then we should ask, ‘Why is it desirable to deter dictatorship?’ If one presses hard enough with such questions, most people will eventually come up with a welfare-related answer.”

— Yew-Kwang Ng, Welfarism and Utilitarianism: A Rehabilitation (1990), p. 180

“Somebody has to and no one else will.”

— The Comet King, Unsong

“Any sane moral theory is bound, it seems to me, to incorporate a welfarist element: other things being equal, it should be regarded as morally preferable to confer greater aggregate benefit than less.”

— Michael Lockwood, Quality of Life and Resource Allocation (1988), p. 41

“Interestingly, it is not even clear that animal liberationists are motivated by ultimate concern about welfare. Consider animals in the wild, as Ng also mentions. Theirs may not be happy lives. Certainly Darwin was sufficiently persuaded by his conception of evolution that no good God could have created the scheme of things he, Darwin, discerned in nature. Perhaps animals much prefer living in domestic conditions. But this seems beside the point to hard-core animal liberationists.”

— Joel Marks, End-state welfarism (Animal Sentience, 2016)

“Many believers in animal rights and the relevance of animal welfare do not critically examine their basic assumptions. [T]ypically these individuals hold two conflicting views. The first view is that animal welfare counts, and that people should treat animals as decently as possible. The second view is a presumption of human non-interference with nature, as much as possible. [T]he two views are less compatible than is commonly supposed. If we care about the welfare and rights of individual animals, we may be led to interfere with nature whenever the costs of doing so are sufficiently low.”

— Tyler Cowen, Policing Nature (2003)

“[I]t is difficult to believe that the way in which an agent is instrumental in the occurrence of an outcome could be more important than the nature of the outcome itself. Consider the value of an entire human life – of all the good that the life contains. Now suppose that one must choose between killing one person to save two and allowing the two to die. Is it really credible to suppose that how one acts on that single occasion matters more in moral terms than the whole of the life that will be lost if one lets the two die rather than killing the one?”

— Jeff McMahan, Killing, Letting Die, and Withdrawing Aid (January, 1993), p. 279

“If you think it’s murder, act like it.”

— David Pearce, The Post-Darwinian Transition

“I doubt [t]hat any fundamental ethical dispute between consequentialists and deontologists can be resolved by appeal to the idea of respect for persons. The deontologist has his notion of respect – e.g., that we not use people in certain ways – and the consequentialist has his – e.g., that the good of every person has an equal claim upon us, a claim unmediated by any notion of right or contract, so that we should do the most possible to bring about outcomes that actually advance the good of persons. For every consequentially justified act of manipulation to which the deontologist can point with alarm there is a deontologically justified act that fails to promote the well-being of some person(s) as fully as possible to which the consequentialist can point, appalled.”

— Peter Railton, Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality

“All ethical doctrines worth our attention take consequences into account in judging rightness. One which did not would simply be irrational, crazy.”

— John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971), p. 26

“The rule-bound or superstitious person may adhere to the rule for its own sake, but the rational person would not.”

— Conrad Johnson, The Authority of the Moral Agent (Consequentialism and its Critics, 1988, p. 262

“[There is a] genuine dilemma in the sense that [any decision] could result in undue harm… Seeing that there is no escaping this problem, and no magic test that can eliminate it, the only thing that can be done is try to minimise as much as possible the harmful consequences likely to follow from [our] decisions. [S]o we should balance the magnitude of the evil against the chances of its occurrence.”

— Alan S. Zuckerman, Zuckerman on Civil Procedure: Principles of Practice (3rd Revised edition)

“The purpose of voting is not to express your fidelity to a worldview. It’s not to wave a flag or paint your face in team colors; it’s to produce outcomes[.]”

— Jason Brennan, Ethicists say voting with your heart, without a care about the consequences, is actually immoral (June 26, 2016)

“[I]’m not going to let my principles condemn other people to suffering.”

— Michael LaBossiere, Ethicists say voting with your heart, without a care about the consequences, is actually immoral (June 26, 2016)

“I don’t want to be Thomas Jefferson. I don’t want to be “that guy who was totally kind and smart enough to do the right thing, but lacked the will to part ways with the norms of his time even when plenty of friends and arguments were successfully showing him the way.””

— Rob Bensinger, Revenge of the Meat People

“As a citizen, I have a duty to others because it’s not just me and my principles, but everybody. [I] have to consider how what I do will impact other people.”

— Michael LaBossiere, Ethicists say voting with your heart, without a care about the consequences, is actually immoral (Quartz, June 26, 2016)

“I myself regard enjoyment and suffering (defined more broadly to include milder pain and discomfort) as not only the most important, but ultimately the only important things. Freedom, knowledge, and so on are all important but only because they ultimately promote net welfare (enjoyment minus suffering). Even if they do not completely agree with this strong view regarding enjoyment and suffering, most people will accept that enjoyment and suffering are the most important considerations. Given their importance, the amount of scientific research devoted to them is dismally inadequate. The neglect is partly due to the methodological blunder, which prevents the publication of important results on things that are difficult to measure precisely.”

— Yew-Kwang Ng, The Case for and Difficulties in Using “Demand Areas” to Measure Changes in Well-Being (1991)

“I’m becoming less convinced that I should try and optimise for rights above and beyond how it relates to wellbeing. If it came down to me choosing (all else being equal including flow-on effects, which doesn’t really happen in reality of course) between an animal being happy and an animal being miserable but slightly less exploited, I don’t think I could justify the latter. It seems almost forceful and exploitative itself to choose to consign some animal to misery just so they can be a bit less exploited. Surely what animals fundamentally value themselves is wellbeing, not a lack of exploitation. Humans value not being exploited because it feels bad. Non-human animals only feel bad in factory farmed conditions because such conditions objectively suck for animals. They are abused and are kept in awful conditions. I’m not convinced that ‘humane’ slaughter is possible in reality, and so I still won’t advocate for it, but I won’t pretend that there is some other thing that animals value called ‘rights’.”

— Michael Dello-Iacovo, From utilitarian to abolitionist and back in a month (August 4, 2016)

“If the end doesn’t justify the means, you’re working on the wrong problem!”

— Miracleman

“[sic] Imagine a tool was invented to help a researcher to improve by just 1%. The gain would hardly be noticeable in a single individual. But if the 10 million scientists in the world all benefited from the tool the inventor would increase the rate of scientific progress by roughly the same amount as adding 100,000 new scientists. Each year the invention would amount to an indirect contribution equal to 100,000 times what the average scientist contributes.”

— Nick Bostrom

“Think of a “discovery” as an act that moves the arrival of information from a later point in time to an earlier time. The discovery’s value does not equal the value of the information discovered but rather the value of having the information available earlier than it otherwise would have been. A scientist or a mathematician may show great skill by being the first to find a solution that has eluded many others; yet if the problem would soon have been solved anyway, then the work probably has not much benefited the world [unless having a solution even slightly sooner is immensely valuable or enables further important and urgent work].”

— Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, Chapter 15: Crunch Time (2014)

“There are many ways to get involved in the task of reducing suffering. It’s helpful to focus more on those that appeal to your interests and skills. Following are some broad categories:

• Earning to give: Rather than working at an altruistic charity yourself, it can be more effective to make money elsewhere and donate large portions of it to charity. This approach works well if you especially enjoy technology, finance, or other high-earning fields and if you think there’s a low risk that peer pressure in such industries would reduce your altruistic ambitions.

• Research: There remain many crucial questions whose answers will influence where altruists focused on reducing suffering donate their money and time. Progress on these topics not only improves your own wisdom about where to focus but can also improve the priorities of many others.

• Movement building: Generating interest in reducing suffering effectively can multiply your impact by bringing in more minds who can contribute.

One of the most important questions to consider is what career you should pursue, since you’ll spend a lot of your waking life at work.”

— Brian Tomasik, A Short Introduction to Reducing Suffering (Essays on Reducing Suffering)

“Suffering is suffering, [r]egardless of the being who is suffering or the source of the suffering. [I]f humans should end the needless harms they inflict upon nonhuman animals because they are harmful to the animals themselves, then we should also be concerned about other harms that nonhuman animals suffer that could be prevented, such as the many ways they are harmed in nature.”

— Animal Ethics, Wild Animal Suffering

\\ “[W]hen we ask how we can effectively do good in our careers, the key question is not how much scientific research on the whole has made the world better: it is “how do I expect the world to be different if I take up this career, rather than another one?” If Norman Borlaug had never lived his discoveries would eventually have been made by others. [W]e should think of achievements like Borlaug’s as bringing about technologies faster, rather than making them possible at all.”

— Carl Shulman, High Impact Science

“When the objective self contemplates pain, it has to do so through the perspective of the sufferer, and the sufferer’s reaction is very clear. Of course he wants to be rid of this pain unreflectively – not because he thinks it would be good to reduce the amount of pain in the world. But at the same time his awareness of how bad it is doesn’t essentially involve the thought of it as his. The desire to be rid of pain has only the pain as its object. This is shown by the fact that it doesn’t even require the idea of oneself in order to make sense: if I lacked or lost the conception of myself as distinct from other possible or actual persons, I could still apprehend the badness of pain, immediately. So when I consider it from an objective standpoint, the ego doesn’t get between the pain and the objective self. My objective attitude toward pain is rightly taken over from the immediate attitude of the subject, and naturally takes the form of an evaluation of the pain itself, rather than merely a judgment of what would be reasonable for its victim to want: “This experience ought not to go on, whoever is having it.” To regard pain as impersonally bad from the objective standpoint does not involve the illegitimate suppression of an essential reference to the identity of its victim. In its most primitive form, the fact that it is mine – the concept of myself – doesn’t come into my perception of the badness of my pain.”

— Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (1986), p. 161

\\ “[T]remendous impacts are possible through speeding the pace of progress, even slightly. According to the WHO, malaria killed over 781,000 people in 2009. If current trends continue, advances in vaccines, bednets, mosquito control, and increased deployment efforts will likely eventually drive down fatalities to zero. But leaping ahead in this process by a single year could save 781,000 lives. A single day’s speedup would save 2,139 lives. Advancing the process by even 40 seconds would save a life. Then the question becomes: how many seconds can you expect to advance your field over your career?”

— Carl Shulman, High Impact Science

“Ethics is founded on evidence that can’t be shared. My experience of severe pain gives me reason to believe that nihilism is false. In other words, when I am in severe pain, that pain, as it’s presented to me, gives me evidence that it’s bad in some way. I can’t share this evidence with you; you can’t feel my pain. Even if you could peer inside my head and see it, you wouldn’t be presented with it in a way that gave you evidence of its badness. But you, of course, are in the same position regarding your pain: when you are in severe pain, that pain, as it’s presented to you, provides you with evidence that it’s bad in some way. So, each of us has evidence for his or her severe pain being bad in some way. In the case of infants and nonhuman animals, the evidence is there, but the creature is too unsophisticated to recognize it as such.”

— Stuart Rachels, Hedonic Value (PhD dissertation, University of Syracuse, 1998), p. 35

“My students often ask me if I think their parents did wrong to pay the $44,000 per year that it costs to send them to Princeton. I respond that paying that much for a place at an elite university is not justified unless it is seen as an investment in the future that will benefit not only one’s child, but others as well. An outstanding education provides students with the skills, qualifications, and understanding to do more for the world than would otherwise be the case. It is good for the world as a whole if there are more people with these qualities. Even if going to Princeton does no more than open doors to jobs with higher salaries, that, too, is a benefit that can be spread to others, as long as after graduating you remain firm in the resolve to contribute a percentage of that salary to organizations working for the poor, and spread this idea among your highly paid colleagues. The danger, of course, is that your colleagues will instead persuade you that you can’t possibly drive anything less expensive than a BMW and that you absolutely must live in an impressively large apartment in one of the most expensive parts of town.”

— Peter Singer, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty (2009), pp. 138-139

“[I]t is true that ‘I seem to see a table’ does not entail ‘I see a table’; but ‘I seem to feel a pain’ does entail ‘I feel a pain’. So scepticism loses its force – cannot open up its characteristic gap – with regard to that which ultimately most concerns us, pleasure and pain.”

— Galen Strawson, Freedom and Belief (1986), p. 223

“A lot of people don’t think enough about choosing their career. [M]ost people spend 80,000 hours in their career, yet they don’t spend such a lot of time in their choice. You would think that it’s worth spending perhaps 1% of those hours to decide how you’re going to spend the other 99% of those 80,000 hours. 1% of 80,000 hours is 800. How many people do you think actually spend 800 hours thinking about which career they’re going to choose? That’s quite a lot of time really. So it suggests that we make this very important choice perhaps without enough reflection. People ought to reflect on which career would do the most good.”

— Peter Singer, How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas about Living Ethically (The Most You Can Do book tour at Monash University, May 24-25, 2015)

“A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff nature replaces it with.”

— Tennessee Williams

“Suppose that I do apply for a job as an aid worker. How much good will I do as an Oxfam employee? Certainly I’ll do some good. But in getting that job for Oxfam, the marginal difference that I will make not is all the good that I will do in that job at Oxfam. It’s all the good that I will do at that job at Oxfam minus all the good that the second best applicant for the job would’ve done. Because if I wasn’t in the field at all, Oxfam would have appointed the person they considered the best applicant, presumably the second best applicant. So that person would’ve done almost as much good as I would’ve.”

— Peter Singer, How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas about Living Ethically (The Most You Can Do book tour at Monash University, May 24-25, 2015)

“If animals are conscious, then they feel things, for example, pain, fear and hunger-which is intrinsically bad to feel. To inflict deliberately such experiences on an animal for no reason is either to treat the animal as a thing or else in some way to relish its suffering. And surely both those attitudes are immoral.”

— Roger Scruton, Animal Rights and Wrongs (1998), p. 21

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”

— Leo Tolstoy

“[O]ther things being equal it is worse to cause an animal pain than to cause an adult human being pain. An adult human being can, as it were, think his or her way around the pain to what lies beyond it in the future; an animal – like a human baby – cannot do this, so that there is nothing for the animal but the pain itself.”

— Judith Jarvis Thomson, The Realm of Rights (1990), pp. 292-293

“There is a term in poker called “pot odds”. Meaning you make a bet having a low chance on winning, but the pot is very large, larger than your bet divided by the chances of winning. This strategy is profitable for you. The same thing applies to longevity research. If we evaluate our life highly, then it makes sense to invest in fighting aging even if the chances of your particular bet are not that high. Let’s say, you estimate the value of your life as $10 million, and the chances for success of the given life extension research project are 1%. Then it makes sense to invest up to $100,000. I estimate the value of my life as something like 10 to the power of 100 dollars. In this case it makes sense to invest all the existing money and resources in life extension. Which I’ve been doing.”

— Maria Konovalenko

“There is a great deal of misery in the world, and many of us could easily spend our lives trying to eradicate it. [O]ne advantage of living in a world as bad as this one is that it offers the opportunity for many activities whose importance can’t be questioned. But how could the main point of human life be the elimination of evil? Misery, deprivation, and injustice prevent people from pursuing the positive goods which life is assumed to make possible. If all such goods were pointless and the only thing that really mattered was the elimination of misery, that really would be absurd.”

— Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (1986), p. 217

“[T]he primary moral goal for today’s bioethics can be summarized in a single sentence. Get out of the way.”

— Steven Pinker, The moral imperative for bioethics (The Boston Globe, August 1, 2015)

“Nozick’s “happiness machine” problem is a popular among academics, who generally fail to consider three things. First, who says that no one would want to be hooked up? The world is full of people who want happiness and don’t care one bit about whether it is “well deserved.” Second, those who claim that they would not agree to be hooked up may already be hooked up. After all, the deal is that you forget your previous decision. Third, no one can really answer this question because it requires them to imagine a future state in which they do not know the very thing they are currently contemplating.”

— Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (2005), p. 244

“As far as I’m concerned we can remove all slave owners/segregationists from currency, buildings, days of honour and so on. The past is a cesspool of cruelty, the ringleaders of which should be held in contempt. And yes, future generations will and should do the same to us. If you want to avoid the same fate, think through how you will be viewed in the future and act on it.”

— Robert Wiblin

“Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while. The principle of utility recognizes this subjection, and assumes it for the foundation of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and of law. Systems which attempt to question it, deal in sounds instead of sense, in caprice instead of reason, in darkness instead of light.”

— Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Chapter I (1789)

“Pain is an evil – all our morality implies that. Even if we have a right to forgive the universe our own pain–and I doubt if we have the right to do even this – we have certainly no right to forgive it the pain of others. We must either believe the pain inflicted for some good purpose, or condemn the universe in which it occurs.”

— John McTaggart, The Necessity of Dogma (1895)

“Consider the case of a poor young children who, rather than playing and going to school, must work in terrible conditions and for a miserable salary in order not to starve. These children may not be a slaves and may have the option to choose not to work for their survival, but we can’t really claim that they are free in any meaningful sense. They can’t really choose what to do or they will not survive, much like wild animals who must undergo continuous threats and have to suffer extreme situations that they have no choice over. This cannot be considered freedom. Animals who die shortly after being born can’t be said to be living free, because they have such little chance to live at all in the first place, and because they have almost no chance to exercise freedom at all in that short life.”

— Animal Ethics, Can animals in the wild be harmed in the same ways as domesticated animals and humans?

“[O]thers don’t understand what it’s like to be me. Morality is not an abstract, intellectual game, where I pick a viewpoint that seems comely and elegant to my sensibilities. Morality for me is about crying out at the horrors of the universe and pleading for them to stop. Sure, I enjoy intellectual debates, interesting ideas, and harmonious resolutions of conflicting intuitions, and I realize that if you’re serious about reducing suffering, you do need to get into a lot of deep, recondite topics. But fundamentally it has to come back to suffering or else it’s just brain masturbation while others are being tortured.”

— Brian Tomasik, The Horror of Suffering

“I didn’t know that freedom meant people doing stuff that sucks. I was thinking more of a ‘choose your own cell phone carrier’ thing.”

— Summer, Rick and Morty, Season 2 Episode 3

“Every human being has a right to freedom from pain to the extent that our knowledge permits health professionals to achieve this goal. [P]ain [i]s more than an intriguing puzzle. It is a terrible problem that faces all humanity and urgently demands a solution.”

— Ronald Melzack, Patrick Wall, The Challenge of Pain (1988)

“[C]ivilization means, above all, an unwillingness to inflict unnecessary pain.”

— Harold Laski, The Dangers of Obedience (1929)

“[Pain] is a bad thing in itself. It does not matter who experiences it, or where it comes in a life, or where in the course of a painful episode. Pain is bad; it should not happen. There should be as little pain as possible in the world, however it is distributed across people and across time.”

— John Broome, More Pain or Less? (April, 1996)

“Pain that is equally intense may be equally bad even in the absence of self-consciousness. It is not necessary to have the thought “I am in pain” in order for pain to be bad. As people who have experienced the more intense forms of pain are aware, pain can blot out self-consciousness altogether. Intense pain can dominate consciousness completely, filling it and crowding out all self-conscious thoughts.”

— Jeff McMahan, The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life (2002), p. 229

“I tell thee what; there is not an atom of life in this all-peopled world that does not suffer pain.”

— Mary Shelley, Valperga

“When you cut your finger and you feel that terrible excruciating pain, the world disappears. The world is gone. You’ve only cut your little pinky, and its a tiny, tiny little cut that in a matter of moments will be done. But for the moment that you feel that pain, the world is gone. All you feel is that terrible, terrible pain. It’s the only universe, the only world you have, and it’s all yours, and you’re locked in, and everybody else is gone. The problem is when you feel that type of pain endlessly, and you can’t escape it. It begins to transform who you are. You begin to lose whatever special thing there is within us that makes life worth living.”

— Keith Devries in Speciesism: The Movie (2013)

“I believe that there is, from the ethical point of view, no symmetry between suffering and happiness, or between pain and pleasure. Both the greatest happiness principle of the Utilitarians and Kant’s principle, “Promote other people’s happiness…”, seem to me (at least in their formulations) fundamentally wrong in this point, which is, however, not one for rational argument….In my opinion…human suffering makes a direct moral appeal for help, while there is no similar call to increase the happiness of a man who is doing well anyway.”

— Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1952)

“Pain is pain, whatever the species of being that experiences it.”

— Lori Gruen, Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A Graphic Guide (1987), p. 44

“Assume, provisionally at any rate, a utilitarian ethic. The abolitionist project follows naturally, in “our” parochial corner of Hilbert space at least. On its completion, if not before, we should aim to develop superintelligence to maximise the well-being of the fragment of the cosmos accessible to beneficent intervention. And when we are sure – absolutely sure – that we have done literally everything we can do to eradicate suffering elsewhere, perhaps we should forget about its very existence.”

— David Pearce, Quantum Ethics? Suffering in the Multiverse (2008)

“If people are badly off, suffering, or otherwise remediably miserable, it is not appropriate to address their ill-being by bringing more happy people into the world to counterbalance their disadvantage.”

— Clark Wolfe, O Repugnance, Where Is Thy Sting?

“As human beings, our only sensible scale of values is one based on lessening the agony of existence. That plan is most deserving of praise which most ably fosters the creation of the objects and conditions best adapted to diminish the pain of living for those most sensitive to its depressing ravages. To expect perfect adjustment and happiness is absurdly unscientific and unphilosophical. We can seek only a more or less trivial mitigation of suffering.”

— H. P. Lovecraft, Nietzscheism and Realism (1921)

“The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.”

— Aristotle

“I suffer great disaster because I have a body. When I have no body, what disaster can there be?”

— Lao Tzu

*“A steady view of these matters shows us how to refer all moral choice and aversion to bodily health and imperturbability of mind, these being the twin goals of happy living. It is on this account that we do everything we do – to achieve freedom from pain and freedom from fear. When once we come by this, the tumult in the soul is calmed and the human being does not have to go about looking for something that is lacking or to search for something additional with which to supplement the welfare of soul and body. Accordingly, we have need of pleasure only when we feel pain because of the absence of pleasure, but whenever we do not feel pain, we no longer stand in need of pleasure.

And so we speak of pleasure as the starting point and the goal of the happy life, because we realize that it is our primary native good, because every act of choice and aversion originates with it, and because we come back to it when we judge every good by using the pleasure feeling as our criterion.

[T]hus when I say that pleasure is the goal of living, I do not mean the pleasures of libertines or the pleasures inherent in positive enjoyment, as is supposed by certain persons who are ignorant of our doctrine, or who are not in agreement with it or who interpret it perversely. I mean, on the contrary, the pleasure that consists in freedom from bodily pain and mental agitation.”

— Epicurus

*“For some, being free is good because it means that personal fulfillment can be achieved or that a person won’t be harmed by oppression. But what matters in not being oppressed is ultimately that your preferences are not thwarted and that you don’t suffer because you are oppressed. Being free is good because it can help you to achieve that. However, if there is no way in which you can live a life free from harm, there is no way in which being free can help you at all. If your freedom only allows you to die in pain, as is often the case for wild animals, then it is not going to help you much.”

— Animal Ethics, Wild Animal Suffering

“We can deserve many things, such as gratitude, praise, and the kind of blame that is merely moral dispraise. But no one could ever deserve to suffer. For similar reasons, I believe, no one could deserve to be less happy.

When people treat us or others wrongly, we can justifiably be indignant. And we can have reasons to want these people to understand the wrongness of their acts, even though that would make them feel very badly about what they have done. But these reasons are like our reasons to want people to grieve when those whom they love have died.

We cannot justifiably have ill will towards these wrong-doers, wishing things to go badly for them. Nor can we justifiably cease to have good will towards them, by ceasing to wish things to go well for them. We could at most be justified in ceasing to like these people, and trying, in morally acceptable ways, to have nothing to do with them.”

— Derek Parfit, On What Matters: Volume One (2011), p. 272

“When we consider human infants who die shortly after birth, we don’t talk about how much they benefited from the freedom to develop their capacities or fulfill their natures.”

— Animal Ethics, Wild Animal Suffering

“Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase of pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain.”

— George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

“It is sometimes argued that animals in the wild live good lives simply because they are free, as if freedom automatically entails a good life. This is not necessarily true. Theorists of liberty commonly point out that freedom does not simply mean that a being is not forced to do something. Beings need to be able to do what they want to do or what will be good for them. Most nonhuman animals do not have this level of freedom.”

— Animal Ethics, Wild Animal Suffering

“I have experienced pains no more severe than a broken wrist, torn ankle ligaments, or an abscess in a tooth. These were pretty bad, but I have no doubt that a skilled torturer could make me experience pains many times as bad.”

— Alastair Norcross, Comparing Harms: Headaches and Human Lives (1997)

“It is sometimes assumed that animals in the wild live great lives simply because they are free, as if freedom automatically entails a good life. This is not necessarily true. Theorists of liberty commonly point out that freedom does not simply mean that a being is not forced to do something. Beings need to be able to do what they want to do or what will be good for them. Most nonhuman animals do not have this level of freedom.”

— Animal Ethics, Can animals in the wild be harmed in the same ways as domesticated animals and humans?

“Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil. But I cannot, and I too suffer.”

— Bertrand Russell, Prologue: “What I Have Lived For” (written on 25 July 1956)

“I believe that most of us tend to underrate the evilness of suffering. The reason is that it is difficult for us, when not actually suffering, to recollect what suffering really is. We employ numerous psychological mechanisms to conceal from our consciousness the true nature or meaning of suffering, to falsify and deny it. We do this without renouncing the word, however. The word comes to designate, in our minds, only a faint copy or superficial image of the real thing; but having forgotten what the original is, we mistake it in the copy. We ascribe to “suffering” a certain gravity of evil; but it is slight compared to what we would ascribe to suffering itself, if we could only recall its true meaning. [T]he falsification of suffering is everywhere – in movies, in poetry, in novels, on the nightly news. Accounts of disaster routinely veer from a discussion of the agony and plight of the victims (which quickly becomes tiresome) to the description of some moving act of kindness or bravery. Often it is these descriptions that affect us the most and that provoke the greatest outburst of emotion. These are the images we often take away and that become our image of “suffering.” Suffering comes to be closely associated with stirring images of hope in adversity, acts of moral heroism and touching kindness, gestures of human dignity, sentiments of noble sympathy and tremulous concern, the comfort and consolation of tears. It turns into something beautiful. It becomes poetry. People begin to refer to “sublime suffering.” Suffering, in other words, becomes just exactly what it is not.”

— Jamie Mayerfeld, Suffering and Moral Responsibility

“If one goes for a long time without serious pain, one can more or less forget its distinctive nature. But then, when it comes, one is reminded only too well of what it is like, that is, of its reality as a distinctive quality of experience.”

— Timothy Sprigge, Is the esse of Intrinsic Value percipi? (2000)

“Suffering is an evil in itself for whatever or whoever undergoes it[.]”

— Loren Lomasky, Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community (1987), p. 224

“The proper aim of giving is to put the recipients in a state where they no longer need our gifts.”

— C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (1960)

“I teach one thing and one thing only: suffering and the end of suffering.”

— Gautama Buddha (566-480 BC)

“A sacrifice which does not increase, or tend to increase, the sum total of happiness, it considers as wasted.”

— John Stuart Mill

“[S]uffering cries out for its own abolition[.]”

— Jamie Mayerfeld, Suffering and Moral Responsibility (2002), p. 111

“[D]eveloped states have been more willing to appeal to moral values and to use such appeals in justification of initiatives -such as the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia – that would have been unthinkable during the Cold War. But these appeals only heighten the puzzle. If it makes sense to spend billions to endanger thousands of lives in order to rescue a million people from Serb oppression, would it not make more sense to spend similar sums, without endangering any lives, on leading many millions out of life-threatening poverty?”

— Thomas Pogge, Priorities of Global Justice (2001)

“Suffering is bad primarily because of its intrinsic nature: it is bad in itself. Suffering of a certain intensity and duration is equally bad, or almost equally bad, wherever it occurs.”

— Jeff McMahan, Animals (A Companion to Applied Ethics, 2003, p. 529)

“The 4°C scenarios are devastating: the inundation of coastal cities; the increasing risks for food production potentially leading to higher malnutrition rates; many dry regions becoming dryer; wet regions becoming wetter; unprecedented heat waves in many regions, especially in the tropics; substantially exacerbated water scarcity in many regions; increased frequency of high-intensity tropical cyclones; and irreversible loss of biodiversity, including coral reef systems. And most importantly, a 4°C world is so different from the current one that comes with high uncertainty and new risks that threaten our ability to anticipate and plan for future adaptation needs.”

— World Bank, Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4°C Warmer Planet Must be Avoided

“When I am in pain, it is plain, as plain as anything is, that what I am experiencing is bad.”

— Guy Kahane, The Sovereignty of Suffering: Reflections on Pain’s Badness (2004), p. 2

“In some parts of the world, what you are doing is already apparent. According to the World Health Organization, the warming of the planet caused an additional 140,000 deaths in 2004, as compared with the number of deaths there would have been had average global temperatures remained as they were during the period 1961 to 1990. This means that climate change is already causing, every week, as many deaths as occurred in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.”

— Peter Singer, Practical Ethics: Third edition (2011)

“Pain [m]ay not be the only evil, but it cannot be denied to be evil.”

— John McTaggart, Some Dogmas of Religion (1906), p. 15

“Another moral philosopher Stephen Gardiner call [climate change] “a perfect moral storm,” based on the juxtaposition of a number of aspects, each contributed heavily to its difficulty. One is that the harm caused by greenhouse gas emissions does not hit mainly upon the individual emitter, but it is dispersed over the entire population of Earth. This means that an individual looking after his personal well-being has little incentive to contribute to the common good by cutting his emissions. Conditional on what everyone else does, then, no matter what their emission levels are, my own emissons make little difference, so if it is more convenient for me to take the car than to take the bus, that will be the best action from a prudential perspective (i.e., when optimizing what is best for me without regard to what is good for others). In other words, the problem is an instance of the social dilemma known as the tragedy of the commons. To this spatial dispersion of causes (greenhouse gas emissions) and effects (climate change), we must also add the temporal aspect: our emissions today affect not only people living today, but also future generations. This makes the problem even more difficult due to the asymmetry that our actions influence the well-being of future generations whereas theirs do not affect us. A further contribution to the perfect storm is our lack of adequate theoretical and institutional tools to handle issues involving the far future, intergenerational justice, scientific uncertainty and our actions effects’ on nature.”
— Olle Häggström, Here Be Dragons: Science, Technology and the Future of Humanity, Chapter “Our planet and its biosphere”, p. 34

“The proper way to prove that pain is bad is proof by induction: specifically, hook an electric wire to the testicles of the person who doesn’t think pain is bad, induce a current, and continue it until the person admits that pain is bad.”

— Scott Alexander, Less Wrong

“At least ten times as many people died from preventable, poverty-related diseases on September 11, 2011, as died in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on that black day. The terrorist attacks led to trillions of dollars being spent on the ‘war on terrorism’ and on security measures that have inconvenienced every air traveller since then. The deaths caused by poverty were ignored. So whereas very few people have died from terrorism since September 11, 2001, approximately 30,000 people died from poverty-related causes on September 12, 2001, and on every day between then and now, and will die tomorrow. Even when we consider larger events like the Asian tsunami of 2004, which killed approximately 230,000 people, or the 2010 earthquake in Haiti that killed up to 200,000, we are still talking about numbers that represent just one week’s toll for preventable, poverty-related deaths – and that happens fifty-two weeks in every year.”

— Peter Singer, Practical Ethics: Third edition (2011)

“Knowing what it feels to be in pain, is exactly why we try to be kind to others.”

— Jiraiya, Naruto (anime)

“Ethics is inescapable. Everyday we act in ways that reflect our ethical judgements.”

— Peter Singer

“The word “acceptance” is widely used to denote an optimistic attitude toward illness that gets past the initial horror of it and enables you to proceed with life. No matter how philosophical you are, however, pain is never really “acceptable.””

— Cheri Register, Living with Chronic Illness (1987), p. 180

“Moral choices often involve hard thinking, diligent gathering of information about the situation at hand, careful consideration of immediate and future consequences, and weighing of alternatives.”

— Fred Edwords, The Humanist Philosophy in Perspective

“Objection might be taken to the claim that there could be a ‘bare sensation’ of pain which was not disliked. What, it might be asked, would such an experience be like? Can we imagine such an experience? I think that I can not only imagine it, but have had it; but I shall return to this question later. Here I shall just make the obvious point that we cannot conclude, from the fact that something surpasses our imagination, that it cannot happen. I cannot myself imagine what the electric torture would be like; but that does not take away the possibility that it might be inflicted on me. It would be more relevant if it could be established that no sense could be given to the expression ‘experience which is like pain except for not being disliked.’ But that is precisely the question at issue, and this whole paper is an attempt to see what sense can be given to such an expression.”

— R. M. Hare, Pain and Evil (1964)

“If I could trade some bafflement in factual matters for certitude about questions of ethics, would I do so? Which is more important: knowing the precise phylogenetic relationships between all the various branches of the evolutionary bush or knowing the meaning of life?”

— Robert Sawyer, Calculating God (2000), p. 197

“I just can’t bring myself to feel so lucky when there is so much suffering. Sure, ability to understand the universe is great, but what good is it when your life is spent in desperate isolation, or extreme pain, or eternal conflict? I say we keep what Richard Dawkins has said in mind, and also combat unnecessary suffering. That is what I am going to do. I cannot live with myself if I do not live both ways.”

— pseudonymous comment response to Richard Dawkins’ “Growing Up in the Universe”

“Since the notion of quality, as understood by [the Swedish Research Council], is supposed to ignore practical applicability, quality as the sole selection criterion means that we value the production of new knowledge and its own right, rather than just a means towards attaining other goals. I have long been – and still am – highly sympathetic to this romantic view of knowledge and intellectual achievements. To improve our understanding of the world we live in really is one of the most magnificent and worthy the goals of human activity one can think of. And yet, it is not the only worthy goal. A bright future for humanity, where everyone has the best possible prospects of leading a happy and prosperous life, and where such things as poverty, pain and misery are reduced to a minimum, seems like another goal worth striving for, at least as important as the quest for ever-increasing knowledge.”

— Olle Häggström, Here Be Dragons: Science, Technology and the Future of Humanity, Chapter “Science for good and science for bad”, p. 8

“[S]omeone who does not see that the remediable suffering of others creates obligations is simply not a moral agent.”

— John Harris, Organ Procurement: Dead Interests, Living Needs (2003)

“Unfortunately, giving to charity is often regarded in broader society merely as a generous use of our spare cash, and working for charities is seen as something someone does when they “feel a calling” to help others. Not participating in altruistic efforts is conceived of as a mere omission. But by not giving all we can, we are failing to help individuals whose suffering we could have prevented. Whether we harm them or neglect to help them, we have responsibility in their suffering either way. [U]ltimately, when we think about where to direct our resources, it is crucial that we consider all those whose suffering we have the ability to prevent.”

— Sentience Politics, Altruism, Numbers, and Factory Farms

“It’s easy for us, in our comfortable houses and with full stomachs, to muse about various moral abstractions that catch our interest. I say no. When you let other things displace the importance of suffering, that’s not an improvement but a failure of goal preservation. That future self would be failing to live up to what I care about now, and I don’t want that to happen. It’s the feeling other altruists would have if they started using all their money to buy expensive cars and mansions.”

— Brian Tomasik, The Horror of Suffering

“In a society in which the narrow pursuit of material self-interest is the norm, the shift to an ethical stance is more radical than many people realize. In comparison with the needs of people starving in Somalia, the desire to sample the wines of the leading French vineyards pales into insignificance. Judged against the suffering of immobilized rabbits having shampoos dripped into their eyes, a better shampoo becomes an unworthy goal. An ethical approach to life does not forbid having fun or enjoying food and wine, but it changes our sense of priorities. The effort and expense put into buying fashionable clothes, the endless search for more and more refined gastronomic pleasures, the astonishing additional expense that marks out the prestige car market in cars from the market in cars for people who just want a reliable means to getting from A to B – all these become disproportionate to people who can shift perspective long enough to take themselves, at least for a time, out of the spotlight. If a higher ethical consciousness spreads, it will utterly change the society in which we live.”

— Peter Singer, How Are We to Live?, Chapter “The Escalator of Reason” (1995)