Short Review on Part I
Fitting the name of the book, the first 8 chapter compose of an impressively long list of arguments and counter-arguments that support suffering-focused ethics. By Suffering-Focused Ethics, the author refers to the family of ethical theories that call for the reduction of suffering for sentient beings - they can differ in their approach to, e.g, the scale in which extreme suffering matters, how much weight should we put on other factors (such as well-being), whether we rely on moral realism, etc..
Deliberately, Magnus does not present a specific definition or characterisation of suffering but instead appeals to the reader's intuition and most examples of extreme suffering are those of extreme despair and pain. I didn't find that to be an issue when contemplating most aspects written in the first part of the book, but as I wrote below the book aims at breadth rather than depth.
In Chapter 5 Magnus explains his position regarding suffering, but throughout the first part he does not rely on that in order to make a case for suffering focused ethics. Instead, he loads philosophical ammunition from all over the suffering-focused ethics coalition and shoots them at every obstacle in sight. There are many different bullets and many different obstacles, which makes this task difficult. I think that he made a deliberate choice to focus on capturing a wide range of views and defenses instead of going deep into defending one view.
That has some problems. Many of the arguments are of the form "philosopher X thinks that Y is true", but without appropriate arguments for Y. Also, whenever there was a problem with an argument, Magnus can retreat to a less demanding version of Suffering-Focused Ethics, which makes it more difficult for the reader to follow the arguments.
My major issue with this book is that it feels heavily biased. I felt that I was being persuaded, not explained to. It feels that Magnus offers no major concessions, related to the point above that there is always a line of retreat. In chapter 7, there are a long list of possible biases that prevent us from accepting Suffering-Focused Ethics. Many of those were not persuasive, and some could have been symmetrically applied against Suffering-Focused Ethics, and really the biggest flaw for me was that there was mostly no analogous comparison with possible biases against Suffering-Based Ethics. Also, in Chapter 8 Magnus presents many arguments against his views, each about a couple of sentences, and spends the majority of the time on counterarguments and very little concessions. Instead of acknowledging reasonable ethical views that may oppose Suffering-Focused Ethics, there is an attempt at convincing the readers that there is still some way of reducing suffering that they should prefer.
Overall I am glad to have read this and look forward to reading the next part. After reading this book, it is clearer to me that I find extreme suffering very bad (so that it would still be very hard to outweigh it) but that in general I tend to think suffering can be outweighed. Also, I was worried before reading the book that there is an inherent difficulty in cooperation between suffering-focused ethical systems and aspirations for more (happy) people to exist. I still think that's somewhat the case but it is clearer that these differences can be overcome and that one can value both.
Disclaimer - I'm not an expert, and except for reading blog posts by Brian Tomasik and CLR I am not that familiar with the field
Congratulations on the book! I think long works are surprisingly difficult and valuable (both to author and reader) and I'm really happy to see this.
My intuition on why there's little discussion of core values is a combination of "a certain value system [is] tacitly assumed" and "we avoid discussing it because ... discussing values is considered uncooperative." To wit, most people in this sphere are computationalists, and the people here who have thought the most about this realize that computationalism inherently denies the possibility of any 'satisfyingly objective' definition of core values (and suffering). Thus it's seen as a bit of a faux pas to dig at this -- the tacit assumption is, the more digging that is done, the less ground for cooperation there will be. (I believe this stance is unnecessarily cynical about the possibility of a formalism.)
I look forward to digging into the book. From a skim, I would just say I strongly agree about the badness of extreme suffering; when times are good we often forget just how bad things can be. A couple quick questions in the meantime:
Thanks, Mike!
Great questions. Let me see whether I can do them justice.
Three important things come to mind:
1. There seems to be this common misconception that if you hold a suffering-focused view, then you will, or at least you should, endorse forms of violence that seem abhorrent to common sense. For example, you should consider it good when people get killed (because it prevents future suffering for them), and you should try to destroy the world. This doesn't follow. For many reasons.
First, one may hold a pluralist view according to which we have a prima facie obligation to reduce suffering, but also, for example, prima facie obligations not to kill and to respect the autonomy of other individuals. Indeed, academics such as Clark Wolf and Jamie Mayerfeld defend suffering-focused views of this kind. See:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190410204154/https://jwcwolf.public.iastate.edu/Papers/JUPE.HTM https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.2041-6962.1996.tb00795.x https://www.amazon.com/Suffering-Moral-Responsibility-Oxford-Ethics/dp/0195115996
Beyond that, even on purely welfarist (suffering-focused) views, there are many strong reasons to consider it bad when individuals die, and to oppose world destruction (see sections 8.1 and 8.2). In fact, the objections commonly raised against suffering-focused views are often more objections against purely welfarist views than they are against the moral asymmetry between happiness and suffering, as you for any welfarist view can construct an argument to the effect that one should be willing to kill for trivial reasons. For example, naively interpreted, a classical utilitarian should also be willing to kill a person, and indeed destroy the world, to prevent the smallest amount of suffering if the "sum" of happiness and suffering is exactly zero otherwise (a point often made by David Pearce). Likewise, a classical utilitarian should endorse what is arguably an even more repugnant world-destruction conclusion than the negative utilitarian: if we could push a button that first unleashes ceaseless torture upon every sentient individual for decades, and then destroys our world to in turn give rise to a "greater" amount of pleasure in some new world, then classical utilitarianism would oblige us to press this button.
But these arguments obviously don't come close to showing that classical utilitarians should endorse violence of this sort in practice; they obviously shouldn't. The same holds true when similar arguments are applied to suffering-focused views.
2. Another belief I would want to challenge is that suffering-focused EAs make the world a more dangerous place from the perspective of other value systems. I would suggest the opposite is the case, and I think what's dangerous is that people don't appreciate this.
Among people who hold suffering-focused views, suffering-focused EAs fall toward the high tail in terms of being cooperative, measured, and prudent. It's a group that does, and to an even greater extent has the potential to, move other suffering-focused people in less naive and more cooperative directions, which is very positive on all value systems. Marginalizing people with suffering-focused views within EA is really not helpful to this end.
3. A third misunderstanding is that people who hold suffering-focused views are much more concerned about mild suffering than, say, the average ethically concerned person. This need not be the case. One can hold suffering-focused views that are primarily concerned with extreme suffering, and which give overriding weight to extreme suffering without giving commensurable weight to mild suffering. I defend such views in chapters 4-5.
I think I would devote it mostly to research — to building a research field. The field of "effective suffering reduction" is very young and unexplored at this point, and much of the discussion that has taken place so far has been tied to the idiosyncratic and speculative views of a few people (unavoidably so, given that so few people have done research on these issues so far). This means that there is likely a lot of low-hanging fruit here. Building such a research project is in large part the goal of the new organization that I have recently co-founded with Tobias Baumann: Center for Reducing Suffering ( https://centerforreducingsuffering.org/ ).
I think this can give us better insights into which risks we should be most concerned about and more clarity about how we can best reduce them. There's much more to be said here, but I'll let this suffice for now.