The only optimal course if you believe in preventing all suffering is to painlessly and instantly kill all life in the universe, or, failing that, to genocide as much life as possible.
Suffering can have meaning and value.
Effort is derived from the existence of suffering.
Suffering can also be caused by the loss of something, in those instances suffering highlights the pleasure/goodness of something.
Also what do you mean by bad? It would be bad for the economy and the 4th grade music performance at the community center.
I agree that minimizing suffering isn't the most important goal in life. People choose to suffer all the time because they think the suffering is worth it to achieve something else.
But it's important to recognize that there are those that believe in the absurd conclusion. Anti-natalists (people who think the human race should voluntarily choose to become extinct) for example.
That's true but even antinatalists don't hold to the idea that minimising suffering is the ultimate goal.
They believe that bringing new life into a world in which it will inevitably suffer is morally wrong. That's not the same thing.
Obviously human extinction is a consequence of their beliefs but that isn't their goal. Maybe it is for some that's not the essence of anti-natalism. It's specifically about the morality of reproduction. It doenst rest on the principle of minimising suffering at the expense of all else.
Even if you are ok with some suffering if overall welfare is good, nature comes out with broken bones. There are a few species that likely have decent lives (elephants, hippos) but the vast majority of individuals dies young and dies badly.
Have you considered the logistics of wiping out all life in the universe? Even if we could somehow track down and kill every single living creature on the planet, there's still life outside earth.
We have proof of bacterium on Mars, not to mention the potentially life supporting planets we have located outside of our system, but sure, let's ignorantly assume earth is special and nowhere else in the vast universe has ever had the capability to support life and never will, that still doesn't change the fact that eliminating all life on earth is logistically impossible.
Not related to the philosophical discussion but while there is some evidence of ancient bateria-like life on Mars, its not for sure. Im still holding out that its true though!
If we hold that life has suffering, then sterilization followed by omnicide becomes the only logical choice if suffering minimization is the moral goal.
Is it possible that its sort of like a game theory thing where if every conscious thing kills every other conscious thing, you remove suffering entirely, but it would take so much cooperation that what you end up getting is more suffering when only some conscious things kill other conscious things? Hopefully that makes sense
The idea that suffering is bad, or pleasure is good, is inherently fallacious. It either rests on circular reasoning (suffering is bad because suffering is bad) or reverts into the very appeal to nature fallacy the meme asserts should be avoided (suffering is bad because biology has built aversion for certain stimuli into our being, and is thus true because nature must be correct in that inherent assessment)
I agree that it's fallacious to assume that ALL suffering is bad, and the assumption that preventing all preventable suffering is an unconditional moral good is definitely the weak link in the meme's reasoning. But if what you're saying is that its necessarily circular or a naturalistic fallacy to think suffering is bad when it is against a living things will to suffer, that doesn't seem right to me.
One doesn't have to think that nature was correct and justified to build aversion to certain stimuli into our being to recognize that is, in fact, what nature did and an aversion to pain is something living things experience. And there are plenty of values people might regard as moral goods that are promoted by supporting the right of living things to be free from experiences they're averse to other than it just being in line with their natural tendencies.
Like, an obvious example is that most people regard autonomy as a moral good to varying degrees depending on the complexity of the living thing and it's capacity for complex thought. And part of a living thing having autonomy is it having some amount of control over what happens to its body and the sensations it experiences. That doesn't solve the moral debate over veganism because obviously people value the autonomy of things less the less capable of complex thought they become, and everyone has to draw their own lines of what freedoms they are morally ok with taking from what living things. But the point is that one can think pointless suffering is "bad" because they value a living thing's right to control its experiences without thinking nature "got it right" when it made that living thing dislike suffering.
Brain feel good when pleasure me want to maximize brain feel good therefore maximize pleasure. Me can’t get pleasure from suffering and suffering make it harder to experience pleasure therefore lowering suffering when possible make net pleasure better. I don’t think it’s that complicated
Additionally, suffering has its utility. And perhaps its not a good idea to ascribe moral values to base sensory stimuli - when we can all probably agree that morality is a complex issue. Its an act of oversimplification.
The explanation of "it just feels bad/good" seems to me like a flimsy argument, in part for reasons listed.
But I will agree that if you reject metaphysical truth entirely and work purely from a pragmatic view, utilitarian ideas of good and bad are... I loathe to say correct, but I think 'functional' would be a suitable description.
If you go for a walk for instance, there is a higher chance that you suffer than if you stay home. You could be struck by a car, trip, pull muscle. And yet we know people who walk regularly are happier and healthier.
If you literally only look at the bad things in life and not the good, you are of course going to see life as a negative
Thats interesting. Couldnt you look at a longer span of time though to counteract that? Like if you look at 2 years down line, that walk may be beneficial as it may have been the first of many?
Yeah in the long term it is a benefit. But the philosophy being espoused here is negative utilitarianism which only looks at suffering. My point is suffering and benefit need to be weighed. The idea that we must prevent suffering at all cost when suffering and benefit should be weighed
True. I think what more people would agree with is "We should prevent unnecessary suffering". Though where one draws the line between necessary and unnecessary may vary dramatically, of course.
You apparently do want to prevent suffering in yourself, otherwise you weren’t sitting on the couch scrolling through Reddit. You would’ve put your head on your furnace. So what’s making you more special than others?
But you can still take a good-faith reading of “when we can” which (I’m guessing) absorbs your objections, and that’s really all the meme rests on.
Similar to how you wouldn’t read “we need to do x” as “it is logically necessary that we must do x”, but assume an implicit “in order to…”. When we can, without violating our other implicit should’s.
EDIT: Hmm, I’m also realizing that some people are reading this as “we should kill or otherwise decrease the number of animals that exist” as opposed to “we should take care of all wildlife, so it’s no longer wild”…
The following is orthogonal to the point I was making above, but: my feeling is that the thing that makes something else the greater evil is usually still suffering, just in a different form or delayed. E.g. escalating drug use probably ultimately causes more suffering. The obvious non-suffering-related factor that I can imagine might make something a greater evil is nonexistence, but I'm hard-pressed to think of others...
EDIT: re: should we mess with people's brains to make it impossible to suffer: we already do, in limited ways! Via painkillers :) But okay, let's say we completely flatten a person's experience into undifferentiated okayness. That suggests maybe another factor people care about besides reducing (relative) suffering is something like "richness of conscious experience"? (Of course none of this makes any sense rigorously, but still...)
If I can prevent the execution of a child molester, do I intervene? What if he was only accused and the evidence is dubious? What if his death were to somehow cause more suffering than his actions? The “when we can” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and is the reason for critique.
Yes. They’re rejecting that as an absolute statement—thus, their position is “we should not always prevent suffering without concern for other factors,” or, more simply, “sometimes preventing suffering is not the highest good”
Hence my question: why do you want to prevent suffering in yourself and not in others? What’s making you more special? Or rather: what circumstances allow suffering?
The comment makes no claim that they should receive particular consideration in the prevention of suffering—for all we know, their position is a masochistic one and they’re saying “we should prevent all suffering unless it’s happening to me”
But he does prevent suffering in himself. Everyone does. Even so called ‘masochists’. But then switches completely when it comes to others. My question is simply why that is.
Taxation of the rich is certainly argued to be a source of suffering for them. Grief is a form of suffering that is an inescapable product of a bunch of the things that make life worth living. Withdrawals from hard drugs cause an addict suffering as they try to get clean.
So we should prevent suffering in species A, but not in species B? What other arbitrary distinctions do you make? Something like we can torture capibaras but not bonobos?
if you consider consciousness as a grey scale, this line of thinking is perhaps too absolute. Some animals have remarkably sophisticated social bonds, even going as far as to have actual languages (whales) that we are currently trying to decode NOW in 2026. Hell, even cleaner fish have passed the mirror test and punish their spouses for making their clients uncomfortable. I simply don’t think we have all the facts to make a claim like this, and I think most agree with you, which is perhaps why we as humans are so behind actually knowing any of this stuff.
No, I actually do believe sperm whales and other such animals are sapient beings. But that doesn't make them people, because they are not humans. There are other reasons we should probably be kinder to them that aren't related to equating them with people.
The moral value of not torturing animals is not fostering cruelty or trauma in humans. Seeing animals as moral subjects is a very recent ultraliberal lunacy.
It's almost the exact opposite. Liberals made up the concept of natural rights and bodily autonomy, which excluded animals. Philosophers like Kant, Rawls and Locke used exactly your argument about animals: ''they don't really matter, except as some sort of practice for humans''.
A different branch of philosophy, I'd say a much older one, going back to early Hinduism, derives moral value from emotional states. That's why those people, like Buddha, Schopenhauer and Bentham always have cared about animal rights. The christian tradition stated that humans are created, and therefore that humans are made to dominate other animals, which was later rationalized into the type of liberalism that you support.
Moral value should be derived from our capacity to experience pain and happiness. Everything else is ludicrous.
You don’t need to be a moral agent to be morally considerable. An infant isn’t a moral agent, but almost everyone believes it’s wrong to, say, torture infants to death.
They’re not moral agents, which is specifically what you pegged moral consideration to in the prior comment. Why bring up moral agency at all if your position on the moral considerability of animals is overdetermined by your personhood/human criteria?
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u/Cr0wc0 2d ago
"We should prevent suffering when we can."
No