Magnus Vinding

"[I]f suffering warrants special moral concern, the truth is that we should never forget about its existence. For even if we had abolished suffering throughout the living world, there would still be a risk that it might reemerge, and this risk would always be worth reducing."

"The point of the term “suffering-focused ethics” is ... not to be a novel or impressive contribution to ethical theorizing, but instead to serve as a pragmatic concept that can unite as effective a coalition as possible toward the shared aim of making a real-world difference — to reduce suffering for sentient beings."

"If humanity is to minimize suffering in the future, it must engage with the world, not opt out of it."

"[C]onsider the practical implications of the following two moral principles: 1) we will not allow the creation of a single instance of the worst forms of suffering [for] any amount of happiness, and 2) we will allow one day of such suffering for ten years of the most sublime happiness. What kind of future would we accept with these respective principles? Imagine a future in which we colonize space and maximize the number of sentient beings that the accessible universe can sustain over the entire course of the future, which is probably more than 1030. Given this number of beings, and assuming these beings each live a hundred years, principle 2) above would appear to permit a space colonization that all in all creates more than 1028 years of [extreme suffering], provided that the other states of experience are sublimely happy. This is how extreme the difference can be between principles like 1) and 2); between whether we consider suffering irredeemable or not. And notice that even if we altered the exchange rate by orders of magnitude — say, by requiring 1015 times more sublime happiness per unit of extreme suffering than we did in principle 2) above — we would still allow an enormous amount of extreme suffering to be created; in the concrete case of requiring 1015 times more happiness, we would allow more than 10,000 billion years of [the worst forms of suffering]."

"Being forced to endure torture rather than dreamless sleep, or an otherwise neutral state, would be a tragedy of a fundamentally different kind than being forced to “endure” a neutral state instead of a state of maximal bliss."

"The bias against small beings seems closely related to another bias we have, namely the bias to believe what is most convenient. For it would no doubt be much more convenient if small beings such as insects are not sentient. If they are, and if they can feel pain, the world suddenly becomes very complex and messy, and not least full of suffering beyond what we have imagined thus far. Therefore, it seems reasonable to suspect that our reasoning is somewhat motivated to jump to the conclusion that insects are not sentient."

"... we rarely think from first principles, even first principles we ourselves sincerely endorse, but rather from sentiments instilled in us by our culture. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the case of humanity’s moral attitudes toward non-human animals. Even most utilitarians, who by their own ideals ought to consider the suffering of all beings important, are still in fact exceptionally anthropocentric in their attitudes. The insights of Darwin have not yet trickled fully into our moral consciousness, not even among those whose moral views demand it. Such is the heavy momentum of culture, which is reflected in every facet of modern politics and political thought. The anthropocentrism of most political philosophy is, to put it mildly, a massive failure."

"We should give equal priority to equal interests in general, and to equal suffering in particular. Indeed, it is the rejection of the principle of equal consideration of equal interests that requires justification, since such a rejection faces the burden of identifying a morally relevant criterion that can justify this discrimination."

"... this is, I believe, the great blindspot of most vegans: the absence of a perpetrator leads them to neglect the suffering of the majority of the beings they claim to care about."

"There is, to be sure, a risk that interventions to help wild animals will end up making things worse, which highlights the importance of a well-informed and cautious approach to compassionate intervention. Yet this is very different from a stance of moral defeatism that simply dismisses the issue out of hand."

"... wild animals suffer from a wide range of harms regardless of their reproductive strategies, including hunger, disease, parasitism, and natural disasters. These harms often cause intense suffering, and we should not disregard this suffering merely because the sufferers happen to live in the wild, or because they happen to have non-human bodies. We rightly acknowledge a moral duty to relieve intense suffering experienced by humans, including when it is due to natural causes, and there is no justification for restricting this moral duty to humans only ... ."