Suffering-focused ethics

Suffering-focused ethics are those positions in ethics that give moral priority to the reduction of suffering. This means that they give greater weight to the reduction of suffering than to the promotion of pleasure, happiness, or to other things that one might consider valuable. According to some suffering-focused ethics, humans should concentrate exclusively on reducing preventable suffering. Other views can include additional features, such as the prevention of other disvalues or the promotion of other positive values, while giving priority to reducing preventable suffering over them. "Suffering-focused ethics" is an umbrella term that covers different normative positions which share the common element of giving priority to suffering. Even though all these doctrines share this common general aim, they make different claims regarding how we should act. An example of these views is negative consequentialism, which claims that we should minimize suffering because a situation becomes better when there is less suffering in it. A form of negative consequentialism is negative utilitarianism, the view that we should aim at bringing about the least possible amount of aggregate suffering, adding up everyone's suffering as having equal value (no matter whose such suffering is). Other suffering-focused views can be, however, deontological ethics, and claim, instead, that we have agent-relative reasons when reducing suffering. They will claim that reducing suffering has priority over other moral goals in all cases. This moral imperative would prevail in all cases, regardless of whether it caused a situation to be better or worse. Finally, it can also be claimed that we should have dispositions in our character to behave as suffering reducers. Suffering-focused ethics used to be named as "negative", as they consider that the reduction of what is negative is more important than the promotion of what has positive value. This term continues to be used in naming positions such as negative consequentialism, negative prioritarianism or negative utilitarianism.