The Suffering Focused Utilitarians Are Mostly Right

Even though their axiology is wrong

CW: Vivid discussion of extreme suffering. This is extremely disturbing, because extreme suffering is disturbing. Reading about some of this stuff left a lasting impact on me, and has made weeks of my life far less good. But it’s really important to talk about this stuff—if everyone ignores extreme suffering, then it will continue.

I've previously defended the conclusion that there are some number of dust specks that are worse than a torture. This conclusion strikes a lot of people as controversial, but I think that it ends up being undeniable. But despite them being fundamentally wrong about their axiological claim, that no amount of pleasure—especially not trivial pleasures—can ever outweigh the most serious suffering, they are mostly right. Suffering is far more serious than we give it credit for—the seriousness of suffering is hard to overstate. Extreme suffering may dwarf all the harms of death, for example, by orders of magnitude.

Sure, some number of dust specks are as bad as a torture. But the number is really damn high. The horror of torture is hard to fathom, hard to grasp it’s mind-boggling undesirability. A few tortures may counterbalance all of the pleasure that anyone has ever had from spending time at the beach.

Most of us go through our lives without ever considering the seriousness of suffering. We occasionally hear a news story about really extreme suffering, someone being killed in a brutal way, and it shocks us, maybe bothers us for a while, but ultimately, we ignore it.

I remember the first time I’d ever heard about extreme suffering—even thinking about what I heard brings me chills and troubles me deeply. I was in 7th grade, and I heard a story about North Korean dissidents. One of them told a truly appalling tale. A family member of theirs, or maybe it was a friend, criticized the North Korean government. They were publicly dragged, such that they were tied to the back of a truck, and their face dragged against the ground. The truck drove forward, with their face scraping against the ground, until their face was literally torn apart, producing their horrific death.

This still troubles me to this day. This scenario is so horrible, so breathtakingly awful, one wonders how people remain unconvinced of objective badness when they reflect on the hideous abundance of suffering here. How can one believe nothing is truly objectively bad when they consider something like this?

If you offered me an extra 100 years of life, but it would end by having my face scraped off, torn apart against the concrete, I would almost certainly not take it, even if those 100 years were filled with wonder and joy. Some fates are so horrific that 100 years is a meager compensation for them.

And this is very far from the worst experience ever. I really don’t know what the worst experience ever was—but I have a pretty good candidate. Warning: this is the most disturbing thing I’ve ever read.

One such example is the tragic fate of the Japanese girl Junko Furuta who was kidnapped in 1988, at the age of 16, by four teenage boys. According to their own trial statements, the boys raped her hundreds of times; “inserted foreign objects, such as iron bars, scissors and skewers into her vagina and anus, rendering her unable to defecate and urinate properly”; “beat her several times with golf clubs, bamboo sticks and iron rods”; “used her as a punching bag by hanging her body from the ceiling”; “dropped barbells onto her stomach several times”; “set fireworks into her anus, vagina, mouth and ear”; “burnt her vagina and clitoris with cigarettes and lighters”; “tore off her left nipple with pliers”; and more. Eventually, she was no longer able to move from the ground, and she repeatedly begged the boys to kill her, which they eventually did, after 44 days.[11]

An example of extreme suffering that is much more common, indeed something that happens countless times every single day, is being eaten alive, a process that can sometimes last several hours with the victim still fully conscious of being devoured, muscle by muscle, organ by organ. A harrowing example of such a death that was caught on camera (see the following note) involved a baboon tearing apart the hind legs of a baby gazelle and eating this poor individual who remained conscious for longer than one would have thought and hoped possible.[12] A few minutes of a much more protracted such painful and horrifying death can be seen via the link in the following note (lions eating a baby elephant alive).[13] And a similar, yet quicker death of a man can be seen via the link in the following note.[14] Tragically, the man’s wife and two children were sitting in a car next to him while it happened, yet they were unable to help him, and knowing this probably made the man’s experience even more horrible…

This is one of the reasons to be so concerned about factory farming—it’s quite conceivable that factory-farmed animals have far more extreme suffering every year than all humans ever have. Let’s just consider some of the examples of extreme suffering that go on in factory farms.

1. Factory-farmed animals burn alive and have their skin melted off by boiling water in droves.

2. Factory-farmed animals have their beak—with tons of nerve endings—cut off with no anesthetic. This is probably about as painful as having your nose cut off with a sharp knife, with no anesthetic. They also have their tails cut off, also with no anesthetic, and are castrated, also with no anesthetic. Those of us who are males will be accurately aware of the sheer horror of the idea of being castrated with no anesthetic—and yet this is just one of the horrific practices of factory farms.

3. Farmers use pliers to pull the skin off live fish. Just imagine having pliers tear your skin off. Really, seriously try to put yourself in their shoes, and it becomes quite apparent: what we’re doing is deeply evil.

4. Lots of animals are beat to death against concrete. Really, just imagine someone grabbing you by your hind legs and then smashing you against the concrete until you die. Such is the fate of a non-trivial number of pigs.

I could go on, of course. But the general picture is clear—factory farms inflict the most extreme suffering imaginable on lots of beings. Suffering so extreme that it plausibly, for each animal who suffers it, is bad enough to offset thousands of days of pleasure.

Wild animal suffering, though, is worse. Beings are eaten alive. Imagine that—imagine a lion eating you, it’s jaws rending you limb from limb. And yet we excuse it—we tolerate this breathtaking evil, because it’s natural. Quadrillions of beings starve or are eaten alive, two of the most horrible ways to die.

Suffering is unimaginable both in its intensity and its frequency. There have plausibly been quadrillions of years worth of extreme torture in the history of the earth, perhaps far more. This extreme suffering is so awful that we wouldn’t trade one year of it for many years of happy life.

When we imagine the horror of suffering, all other issues—perhaps except the magnitude of future transhumanist bliss—seem to dissipate in comparison. The culture war seems so trite, so trivial, so unimportant when we realize that the world we live in is a far worse Omelas—there are thousands of little girls being tormented somewhere in dark basements. Nothing else seems to matter compared to the horror of the fact that millions burn alive, and quadrillions starve or are eaten alive.

There are a few main takeaways. First, the organizations focused on combatting extreme suffering deserve more money. Our failure to focus on the horror of suffering is one of our greatest errors. Second, even though the negative utilitarians are wrong about axiology, they’re basically right about what we should do. While serious suffering may not be infinitely more serious than dust specks, it is still unfathomably serious. It would be an enormous mistake if we let quibbles over axiology distract us from the goal of preventing unfathomably, unimaginably awful suffering.