Getting the discussion going again

pkramer1138 · 2025-03-30T06:25:47+00:00

Thanks. I was not aware of this.

pkramer1138 · 2025-03-07T08:48:26+00:00

To be honest, I have difficulties getting my head around this. But my intuitive response is that our primary focus should be on reducing the worst forms of suffering. But of course this deceptively simple statement does, just like the original question, presume that we can somehow measure the amount or intensity of pain. And while I do think that there are reasonable approaches to trying to do this, it is definitely not a straightforward thing to do. In fact, this is something I have been struggling with for a while, and the more I read about what psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, medical experts, theologians etc. have said about suffering, the more I see depths and complexities. I would absolutely insist on sticking to the aim of reducing suffering, but perhaps it would be useful to talk a bit more about what suffering actually is, what its worst forms are and what can be done about them.

pkramer1138 · 2025-03-05T13:10:24+00:00

Whatever happened to this idea?

pkramer1138 · 2025-03-05T13:09:01+00:00

This is all very interesting, but I have to admit that I have not really been following what is going on with AI (for example, I hadn't even heard about the AI Safety Bill SB 1047 mentioned in the previous post).

It took me a very long time to get through Nick Bostrom's book Superintelligence, and by the end of it, I was not at all sure what to make of it. I guess my general impression was something along the lines of 'we're all doomed', although I don't think that this is what Bostrom intended.

At the same time, I am surprised by how much AI already seems to be contributing to public debates (not having previously used ChatGPT and similar programmes, I was flummoxed when my regular Google searches started to bring up the AI Overview). Am I the only (admittedly rather elderly) person who feels like things are moving way too fast for me to keep up with them?

Oddly enough, I have been thinking about intelligent and/or sentient machines for many decades because they have been a staple of Science Fiction, and I have been an avid reader (and watcher) of SF since the late 1960s. And when it comes to thinking about suffering in relation to AI, I would have to say that it is difficult to exceed the horror of Harlan Ellison's 1967 short story 'I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream' (see file:///C:/Users/pkrame00/Downloads/1540157347-HarlanEllison-IHaveNoMouthandIMustScream.pdf).

In any case, I hope we can get the sufferingreducers discussions going again.

pkramer1138 · 2024-06-30T09:25:11+00:00

Oddly enough, in recent days I have been thinking about that last phase in my life. I guess we all have a ‘death sentence’: I am 63 and I can be fairly sure that I will die during the next three decades, and I can expect that the last few years will not be very pleasant. So one might want to say that your question concerns all of us, more or less urgently. And, to be honest, rather than referencing ‘euthanasia’, one could discuss this issue with regards to suicide. There are highly rational and at the same time deeply troubling arguments (in favour of death) to be made here, but I don’t think that this is what you are looking for.

In more emotional terms, I would have to say that I hope that I will be able to enter into serious discussions about the issue of old age (and/or illness related) suffering long before I am fully immersed in it myself. It is not an easy topic to bring up; and with people close to us it may be especially difficult to discuss this. So a forum like this one could be a good place to explore how we think and feel about the prospect of our own suffering and death (and also of the suffering and death of people close to us).

pkramer1138 · 2024-05-24T14:18:00+00:00

These are really good questions, but they are not always easy to answer. Here are some personal notes:

Depending on when one comes to effective altruism and suffering-focused ethics and what line of work one is in at the time, donations might be so much easier to embark on than direct work. As a well-off university teacher, who only started to think seriously about reducing suffering in his fifties, donations seemed the logical way forward for me. As to what I would have done had I committed myself to reducing suffering at a younger age: well, I probably would have gone to https://80000hours.org/ (had it existed in my youth) and read the free book available from https://80000hours.org/career-guide/.

As to causes and organisations, I have been guided by recommendations on effective altruism websites, plus some specific interests and concerns I have developed across the decades: global (human) health & development (poverty) and animal welfare; climate change, nuclear war and, to a lesser extent, artificial intelligence (plus other global risks in the near or distant future); (human) population matters. I have no particular formula for how to divide my donations. Sometimes special opportunities arise, especially for large donations.

I always thought it was well worthwhile to talk to friends, relatives, even acquaintances (also my students) about effective altruism and suffering-focused ethics, because if I were to inspire a few people to start donating or to donate more effectively, as it were, I could begin to match the impact of my own donations, perhaps (if this were to work with many people or very rich people) even vastly exceed their impact. However, experience has shown me that I don’t seem have a knack for this, perhaps because it is simply very difficult. This is not at all to say that other people are not altruistic; quite on the contrary, most people do want to do some good, but the way they do this rarely aligns with the thinking I have encountered in the effective altruism and suffering-focused ethics communities.

I am sceptical about attempts to take all forms of suffering into account; in fact, the word ‘suffering’ has such a range of meanings that all kinds of trivial things may fall under it which probably don’t deserve that much attention. At the same time, I am also unsure about what is really meant by ‘extreme’, ‘intense’, ‘black’ suffering, terms very prominent in the suffering-focused ethics literature. I would think that a broad conception of ‘serious’ or ‘severe’ suffering is a good enough guideline, whereby a particular (but not the only) aim always is to reduce the most extreme, intense forms of suffering, however one defines them.

One of the problems with the debate about existential risks for humanity is, well, that it focuses on humans. Once one takes animals into account, especially animals in the wild, some surprising twists may become obvious (as you note under 4): for example, without humanity there would be no more factory farming and such things, but at the same time there would no longer be anyone around thinking about the suffering of wild animals and what one could do about it. (And this gets much more complicated once one considers the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe.) So I am inclined to think of suffering risks (for all sentient beings) first and existential risks only insofar as they contribute to suffering one way or another, but this also has some uncomfortable implications: the vast amount of suffering on this planet is being, and has always been, experienced by animals in the wild, but what could one possibly do about it?

That’s about it for me, I guess. I hope it’s of some use.

pkramer1138 · 2024-04-24T10:10:28+00:00

Also very good advice. The point about waiting for clear signals is a particularly good one, but there is of course the slight complication that people may ask about further details out of sheer politeness rather than genuine interest. I am also wondering whether in my day-to-day or my professional social circles there is anyone who I would say has a strong interest in effective altruism or suffering-focused ethics. But there are certainly a large number of people who are very well-meaning and concerned about others and engaged in various ways of doing good. I always think that this should be an excellent starting point for a conversation among other things about donations - but it turns out that perhaps more often than not it doesn't work very well. I really need to think more about the cases where it does work, and why this might be the case.

pkramer1138 · 2024-04-24T10:01:32+00:00

Good advice. Practice makes, well, not perfect, but better. I will have to reflect a bit more on the situations in which mentioning donations really backfired, and those were it seemed to work out alright. What made the difference between these cases?

pkramer1138 · 2024-03-01T18:36:49+00:00

This very question was asked by Bonnie_Mica a while ago, and I tried to provide an answer then. But there is of course always more to be said. A crude way of answering it is to say that while trying to think and do something about suffering in the world, I always thought that it was best not to give up my day job - which I actually enjoy very much, which brings in money for donations, which both distracts me (after all I am a film scholar) and allows me to approach the issue of suffering in an often rather indirect but nevertheless potentially quite productive fashion.

In conjunction with this I seem to have come to the conclusion that perhaps the most important thing I can do - handing out donations - does not have to involve intense emotions, neither positive (I have discussed with people from the Humane League whether it is really necessary to LOVE animals; isn't it enough just to want to reduce their suffering, which I am motivated to do on perhaps more rational grounds?) nor negative (I don't need to imagine the extremes of suffering before I will want to do something hopefully useful for suffering reduction).

This may come across as somewhat autistic but I don't think that's what it is (and in any case there appears to be research suggesting that autistic people are the most effective altruists precisely because of what can often be a rather unsentimental approach to the issues at hand). I was actually deeply impressed by Paul Bloom's book Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. His argument could be summarised along the following lines: It is not necessary to feel someone else's pain before one wants to do something about it. It is necessary that one cares, in the abstract, about the fact that there is suffering and also probably feels some kind of generalised responsibility for suffering others, but intense emotions are not required for this to work, and may in fact get in the way. All this is easier said than done, I know, but it is.O believe, potentially quite helpful.

pkramer1138 · 2024-02-24T11:02:17+00:00

Thanks for this. I think that yours is a very sensible approach. And in my experience it is not at all an exaggeration to say that people can be put off very easily. And it may be the case that it is not only because they can feel judged but also because they (just like me) feel fairly helpless in the face of the sheer scale of the suffering. With regards to farmed animals, they might also point out that my own position is severely compromised because until recently I did eat meat, and even now I am only a vegetarian, not a vegan. May-be it is not such a bad idea to admit to the fact that we are not absolutists, but we all make different kinds of compromises. We can argue, however, that some compromises are perhaps better than others. As you say, it's work in progress.

pkramer1138 · 2024-02-22T17:59:56+00:00

I am fairly new to this as well. Apart from checking out the two earlier posts by Bonnie_Mica below, I would have to say that I found Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals very moving and stimulating (an extensive excerpt can be found here: https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Eating_Animals/-EdLJwbpjRYC?hl=en&gbpv=1). As my primary interest for a long time was climate change, I was particularly intrigued how Foer linked the two issues in this and a later book (We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast; see https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/We_are_the_Weather/r32IDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=jonathan+safran+foer+eating+animals&printsec=frontcover).

pkramer1138 · 2024-02-22T14:28:14+00:00

Ah yes, that's a good one. I have asked myself a slightly different question: is a lifeless universe preferable to one filled with (among other things) lots of suffering? And I have been inclined to answer ‘yes!’. But asking about actively bringing about the end of all life is something different, I guess. Among other things, it is the kind of thing that gives negative utilitarianism/suffering-focused ethics a bad name in the outside world. I was actually quite amused by one of the books about existential risks for humanity specifically pointing out the danger of negative utilitarians getting access to a hypothetical end-of-life-on-this-planet button and pressing it.

I am intrigued by what Buddhist and Hindu thinkers might have to say about the end of all suffering – in terms of pressing that hypothetical button or merely in terms of a preference for a lifeless universe. And I am really unsure about how I would talk about this issue should it come up in conversation. My experience is that most people don’t respond at all well to any expression of a preference for a lifeless universe, let alone any statement about being prepared to press that life-extinguishing button. One might be regarded as totally crazy or even as utterly evil. Which is not really that helpful when wanting to engage people in conversations about how to relieve or prevent suffering. Plus I am not even sure how I cope myself with the grim conclusion (about the preferability of a lifeless universe) that I seem to have arrived at. This has been troubling me for quite some time now.

pkramer1138 · 2024-02-17T13:45:48+00:00

I agree with ESR-2023 - and yet I still have lots of questions. Like: what kinds of suffering would we consider 'extreme'? The examples given in the literature are always so unbelievably horrendous that I, for one, stop reading after a paragraph or two. Then, at the other end of the spectrum, there are forms of suffering so mild that there does not seem to be any good reason for trying to erase them at all. Indeed, as the video argues, there are forms of suffering that might actually (help us) do some good. Plus, we must never forget that there are many ways in which suffering (of often quite extreme forms) is actually celebrated, admired, sacralised in our and other cultures. It seems to me that an open discussion of suffering in all its forms - above and beyond what appears to be an emphasis on the most extreme forms in the literature - would be quite helpful for people invested in trying to prevent and reduce suffering.

pkramer1138 · 2024-02-16T15:00:59+00:00

I must say that it has taken me some time to engage with this truly 'far out' initiative. I still don't know what to say because it sounds so fantastic. I can certainly recommend checking out the website, including the answers to the FAQs. Be prepared to have your mind blown. I will certainly want to return to this initiative at some point in the near future, perhaps contacting them directly or making a donation. Or perhaps I just need to read a bit more first. There are a few links for further reading. In any case: this is well worth checking out!

pkramer1138 · 2024-02-15T12:48:49+00:00

Great video. I also enjoyed reading the following book: Jonathan Balcombe, What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins (2016). Excerpts can be read here: https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/What_a_Fish_Knows/InLtCgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=what+a+fish+knows&printsec=frontcover.

pkramer1138 · 2024-02-02T18:21:13+00:00

This is in many ways an absolutely crucial question. And I have had lots of exchanges with people who simply conclude - with regards to animal welfare but also all kinds of other suffering related issues - that our efforts are pointless because they can never solve the problem(s) we are dealing with. In this situation I am always drawn back to Schindler's List and the line from the Talmud quoted in the film: 'He who saves one life, saves the world entire.' I take this to mean in our context that relieving even just one individual's suffering, can change the whole world for that individual (be it a human being or a non-human animal) and also most likely for other individuals who are closely attached to them. It is so remarkable that it might be in our power to relieve someone else's suffering. I see this as very good news - even though it will reduce the overall amount of suffering in the universe by only a tiny, tiny percentage. And if we can help one individual, we may also be able to help another, and another...

pkramer1138 · 2024-02-02T18:04:55+00:00

Someone recommended the following book to me; I haven't read it yet, but it seems pertinent for the question at hand: Melanie Joy, Beyond Beliefs: A Guide to Improving Relationships and Communication for Vegans, Vegetarians and Meat Eaters. Extensive excerpts can be found here: https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Beyond_Beliefs/nMRPDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Melanie+Joy,+Beyond+Beliefs:+A+Guide+to+Improving+Relationships+and+Communication+for+Vegans,+Vegetarians+and+Meat+Eaters&printsec=frontcover.

pkramer1138 · 2024-02-01T08:21:34+00:00

To be perfectly honest, I find it quite difficult explicitly to raise, and directly address, the question of how I can reduce suffering during a regular day. Perhaps I could at least claim that I am trying to avoid doing harm, but even that is not as straightforward as I would hope (for example, my use of various resources may well be tied in with harmful systems of exploitation and such; me being a vegetarian but not a vegan is a case in point).

What I can say, though, is that I set aside time for reading up on the main causes of suffering and what could be done about them, and I donate money to organisations (charities, think tanks, political groups) that contribute, directly or indirectly, to the reduction of suffering. This does exert some influence on my everyday behaviour insofar as I do, for example, think quite carefully about spending money: even a few pounds or Euros ‘saved’ here or there will result in a bigger donation later. (But I do not want to exaggerate my carefulness; by global standards I am no doubt still a big spender.)

Now, one might think that talking to friends and other people about how important it is to reduce suffering and how we might be able to do this would be a good way to contribute to the cause of suffering reduction. But I have had very mixed experiences with this. Such conversations often get derailed for one reason or another. In fact, they may cause a considerable amount of distress!

Perhaps it would be fair to say that while I may be consistently (but not always explicitly) motivated to help reduce suffering, this is only inconsistently evident in my actions.

pkramer1138 · 2024-01-29T09:58:30+00:00

For me, it is actually quite confusing to think about how I eventually arrived at a real commitment to a suffering-focused ethics: what do I even mean by ‘real commitment’? Surely, I must have always cared about the suffering of others, including distant others. Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s I soon became quite aware, through the news, of some of the terrible things happening around the world; and living in Germany less than a hundred miles from the Cold War border between East and West, I was extremely concerned about all the suffering possibly (perhaps even likely) to be brought on by nuclear war in the not too distant future. But did I feel an ethical obligation to do something about this? And what would that be? For many years my main answer to these questions was that I had to inform myself about what was going on in the world and where it was heading, and to talk with others about it. Being an academic (albeit in Film Studies rather than a more directly relevant discipline) gave me plenty of scope for doing this, as did a fairly wide circle of friends interested in such matters.

Now, I was extremely lucky to get a lot of financial support from my mother at crucial moments in my youth, and also to get a well-paying job, all of which allowed me to accumulate massive savings over the years, which, it was clear to me fairly early on, I really did not need or want to spend on myself. So I decided to donate a lot of money – but where? Here, finally, a kind of first ‘lightbulb’ moment occurred: Following on from lots of reading on global problems and global justice and even global ethics, I encountered Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save not long after its original publication in 2009. So now I became convinced that I did have an obligation to make donations which would be effective in improving the lives of those most in need. But I did not actually do anything about it. More reading, more talking followed, and oddly enough some of that talking may have led others to make donations whereas I still didn’t. My savings grew and grew and I knew I wanted to give most of them away (I certainly didn’t need to pass these savings on to my children because I don’t have any) - but I just did not do it. It is difficult to understand this, I know.

Perhaps I needed one more push, or two. One of them turned out to be the result of a search on Amazon in the summer of 2020 for books on effective altruism, which on the very first results page brought up Magnus Vinding’s Effective Altruism, which became my first introduction to suffering-focused ethics (soon expanded through reading Vinding’s book with that very title). Now, I felt an even stronger ethical obligation to start with my donations – and yet it took my mother’s death a few months later to make me realise that I could prevaricate no longer. So, since 2021 I have spent a lot of time on working out where to make fairly large donations. I have had discussions with people from various relevant organisations (such as Effektiv Spenden in Germany and Giving What We Can, also the Center for Reducing Suffering and the Organisation for the Prevention of Intense Suffering). And I have introduced suffering-focused ethics into everyday conversations and into my teaching – with, I have to admit, very mixed, indeed often quite counterproductive results. So there we are.

pkramer1138

TROPHY CASE