Hi!
I'm Tobias Baumann, co-founder of the Center for Reducing Suffering, a new longtermist research organisation focused on figuring out how we can best reduce severe suffering, taking into account all sentient beings. Ask me anything!
A little bit about me:
I’m interested in a broad range of research topics related to cause prioritisation from a suffering-focused perspective. I’ve written about risk factors for s-risks, different types of s-risks, as well as crucial questions on longtermism and artificial intelligence. My most-upvoted EA Forum post (together with David Althaus from the Center on Long-Term Risk) examines how we can best reduce long-term risks from malevolent actors. I’ve also explored various other topics, including space governance, electoral reform, improving our political system, and political representation of future generations. Most recently, I’ve been thinking about patient philanthropy and the optimal timing of efforts to reduce suffering.
Although I'm most interested in questions related to those areas, feel free to ask me anything. Apologies in advance if there are any questions which, for any of many possible reasons, I’m not able to respond to.
Concerning how EA views on this compare to the views of the general population, I suspect they aren’t all that different. Two bits of weak evidence:
I.
Brian Tomasik did a small, admittedly unrepresentative and imperfect Mechanical Turk survey in which he asked people the following:
More than 40 percent said that they would not accept it “regardless of how many extra years of life” they would get (see the link for some discussion of possible problems with the survey).
II.
The Future of Life Institute did a Superintelligence survey in which they asked, “What should a future civilization strive for?” A clear plurality (roughly a third) answered “minimize suffering” — a rather different question, to be sure, but it does suggest that a strong emphasis on reducing suffering is very common.
I’ve tried to defend such views in chapter 4 and 5 here (with replies to some objections in chapter 8). Brian Tomasik has outlined such a view here and here.
But many authors have in fact defended such views about extreme suffering. Among them are Ingemar Hedenius (see Knutsson, 2019); Ohlsson, 1979 (review); Mendola, 1990; 2006; Mayerfeld, 1999, p. 148, p. 178; Ryder, 2001; Leighton, 2011, ch. 9; Gloor, 2016, II.
And many more have defended views according to which happiness and suffering are, as it were, morally orthogonal.
As Tobias said: No. Many other views can support such a priority. Some of them are reviewed in chapter 1, 6, and 14 here.
I say a bit on this in footnote 23 in chapter 1 and in section 4.5 here.
Many things to say on this. First, as Tobias hinted, acceptable intrapersonal tradeoffs cannot necessarily be generalized to moral interpersonal ones (cf. sections 3.2 and 6.4 here). Second, there is the point Jonas made, which is discussed a bit in section 2.4 in ibid. Third, tradeoffs concerning mild forms of suffering that a person agrees to undergo do not necessarily say much about tradeoffs concerning states of extreme suffering that the sufferer finds unbearable and is unable to consent to (e.g. one may endorse lexicality between very mild and very intense suffering, cf. Klocksiem, 2016, or think that voluntarily endured suffering occupies a different moral dimension than does suffering that is unbearable and which cannot be voluntarily endured). More considerations of this sort are reviewed in section 14.3, “The Astronomical Atrocity Problem”, here.