The Tango of Ethics: Intuition, Rationality and the Prevention of Suffering

by Jonathan Leighton

Despite existing for thousands of years, the field of ethics remains strongly influenced by several largely unquestioned assumptions and cognitive biases that can dramatically affect our priorities. The Tango of Ethics: Intuition, Rationality and the Prevention of Suffering proposes a deep, rigorous reassessment of how we think about ethics. Eschewing the traditional language of morality, it places a central emphasis on phenomenological experience and the unique urgency of suffering wherever it occurs, challenges our existence bias and examines the consequences of a metaphysically accurate understanding of personal identity.

A key paradigm in The Tango of Ethics is the conflict and interplay between two fundamentally different ways of seeing and being in the world ― that of the intuitive human being who wants to lead a meaningful life and thrive, and that of the detached, rational agent who wants to prevent unbearable suffering from occurring. Leighton aims to reconcile these two stances or motivations within a more holistic framework he labels 'xNU+' that places them at distinct ethical levels. This approach avoids some of the flaws of classical utilitarianism, including the notion that extreme suffering can be formally balanced out by enough bliss, while maintaining a focus on impact. He also identifies some of the limits of rationality and our dependence on intuitions to make ethical decisions.

The book explores the implications of this way of thinking for real-world ethical dilemmas and how we might incorporate it into governance. With societal collapse, increasing totalitarianism and artificial general intelligence all very real threats in the coming years, Leighton argues that it is as important as ever to promote these ethics and their implementation while there is still an opportunity for some convergence around what matters.

Genres: Philosophy

240 pages, Paperback

Published January 3, 2023

About the author

Jonathan Leighton is an ethics strategist, social change advocate and public speaker. Since 2016 he is the Executive Director of the Organisation for the Prevention of Intense Suffering (OPIS), a Swiss think-and-do tank he founded to promote the application of compassionate ethics to societal decision-making. OPIS has been advocating for better access to effective medications for people in severe pain, including patients with terminal cancer or cluster headaches, and more generally, for governments to prioritise the prevention of intense suffering of all sentient beings. Originally from Montreal, Canada, Leighton trained as a research molecular biologist, obtaining an AB from Harvard University and a PhD from the University of Basel. He is one of the leading proponents of a contemporary approach to ethics that focuses explicitly on the prevention and alleviation of suffering.

Reviews

[Daniel Hageman · Rating 5 out of 5]

One cannot help but have the utmost respect for Jonathan Leighton and all the work (not just books but career achievements) that he has put into what I consider (ethically) the *most important mission* one could take on, and that is to reduce/prevent the most extreme forms of suffering, as summed up nicely in the quote below.

"The xNU+ framework acknowledges that we have deep moral intuitions, and also a desire for continuity, and respects them as integral to being human, without placing them on the same level as the urgent elimination of intense suffering. It recasts the debate about the "correct" ethical framework as a search for a practical, sustainable inner balance in the tango between the agent aiming to act on the world and the romantic human with strong drives and intuitions that require attention." p.134

The first half of this book, largely focused on Leighton's grounding of xNU+, did not fail to frustrate me on a handful of occasions, poking almost deliberately at a few of my points of disagreement I have when it comes to grounding a general form of NU. I had similar qualms with his first work, 'The Battle for Compassion: Ethics in an Apathetic Universe'. Nonetheless, the topics discussed in the former half of this work, i.e. grounding from a moral realist vs non-realist perspective, the possibility of sufficiently metricizing hedonic states in principle and practice, how to manage issues of hedonic aggregation, etc are all extremely thorny topics, and ones for which I myself am far from sufficiently confident in m views. Hence, my frustrations with his approach rather made me cognizant of just how wonderful it was to have all of these majorly important topics in one place, in book-form, for an interested reader to grapple with, and likely catalyze my further investigation into them.

The second half of the book goes on to touch upon a variety of related topics, many of which have been a keen interest of mine for some time (marginal impact vs group coordination, anti-natalism, wild animal suffering, the benefits/costs of preserving the environment, etc.), but again almost no where are said topics brought together all in one place. The complexities at both the philosophical and practical levels amplify the importance of a book like this, and hopefully make it only the beginning of a burgeoning conversation and philosophical/political movement. One quote towards the end seems to sum it up well :)

"The metaphor of a tango may seem intentionally and frustratingly vague--a reluctance to commit to a clear ethical position. But there is actually a clear underlying commitment that is far from trivial: to the idea that existence does not justify extreme suffering. Yet once we exist, we are condemned to dance, and even indulge in some of the beauty that existence thrusts upon us." p.187


A few bonus quotes, amongst many, that really resonated with me..

"To claim, for example, not only that positive hedonic states have intrinsic value, but that we have a "moral obligation" to bring them into existence--by brining new people into the world who are happy and value their own existence--because morality is about increasing value, is, I believe, unfounded." p.63

"An essential driving motivation behind ethics is an awareness or at least approximate imagination of what intense suffering actually 'feels' like. Without compassionate, sentient being maintaining ultimate control, there is a risk that compassion can be lost as a driver. It's the intuitive sentient mind that screams moral outrage about cruelty towards sentient beings. Even a calculating mind needs to viscerally understand suffering in order to truly care." p.201

[Teo · Rating 5 out of 5]

2023.01.15–2023.01.31

Contents

Leighton J (2023) Tango of Ethics, The - Intuition, Rationality and the Prevention of Suffering

Epigraph
Acknowledgements

01. Ethics as an Authentic Dance
• The path of truth and compassion
• Post-Battle assessment
• Can ethics help us improve the world?
• Rethinking ethics
• The tango of ethics
• Can one be too transparent about ethics?
• Adjusting priorities

02. Intuition and Rationality
• Intuition and its roots
• The role of rationality
• Managing expectations: the limits of rationality

03. Ethics: What is the Question?
• Understanding oughtism
• Consequentialism: impact matters
• Utilitarianism: impact on wellbeing matters
• Deontology: follow the rules
• Virtue ethics: be good
• Can any one theory be correct?

04. Ethics and Subjective Experience
• Hedonic states and wellbeing
• Preference satisfaction
• Interests
• Suffering
• The notion of urgency
• The significance of extreme and unbearable suffering
• Buddhism and craving
• Voluntary suffering
• Happiness and wellbeing
• Capturing the dynamics of hedonic states
• Absence of suffering: from hedonic zero to bliss

05. Evaluating Value
• The confusion about value and the compulsion to create it
• The fundamental ethical asymmetry between suffering and happiness
• Negative utilitarianism

06. The Map and the Territory
• The mathematics of suffering
• Measuring suffering
• The hedonic delusion
• Lost in aggregation

07. Determining Priorities
• Intensity vs. instances: the essence of uncertainty
• Comparing physical pain and psychological suffering
• Unbearable suffering as an ethical tipping point
• Expected value and cause prioritisation

08. Suffering and the Illusion of Separateness
• The true nature of personal identity
• The Golden Rule
• Rawls’s veil of ignorance
• Anti-speciesism
• Awakening awareness

09. Our Complex Relationship with Suffering
• The fleetingness of momentary decisions
• Voluntary personal sacrifices don’t justify imposing suffering on others
• Tolerating the intolerable
• The need for systems that are more rational and compassionate than we are
• The intuition towards fairness and against the concentration of suffering

10. Existence
• A life worth living
• Escaping the Repugnant Conclusion
• Why non-existence isn’t a bad thing
• Reducing existential risk: an intuition with conditions
• Preserving consciousness

11. A Holistic Ethical Framework
• Key principles
• xNU+
• How xNU+ compares to prioritarianism
• How xNU+ responds to common objections to negative utilitarianism
• Consistency: being truthful and rational
• How everything is connected by utilitarianism
• How obsessive utilitarianism can be self-defeating

12. Current and Potential Causes of Intense Suffering
• Human suffering
• Abuse and torture of non-human animals
• Nature and wild animal suffering
• Insect and other invertebrate suffering
• Far future suffering
• Artificial/machine suffering

13. A Tangible Tango: Resolving Ethical Conflicts
• Helping those closest vs. helping strangers
• War
• Animal experimentation
• The grey zone of animal exploitation
• Veganism vs. reducing suffering: is eating animal products ever justifiable?
• Eating oysters and other brainless invertebrates
• Painlessly killing happy animals
• Euthanasia of suffering animals
• Euthanasia and assisted suicide in humans
• Saving lives vs. preventing suffering
• Anti-natalism
• The meat-eater problem
• Preserving the environment vs. reducing wild animal suffering

14. From Ethics to Action
• Reflections on the ethical tango
• Creating a new suffering metric for health economics
• Impacting the far future
• Designing compassionate blueprints for governance based on xNU+ ethics
• The last tango: embedding xNU+ ethics into AGI
• Balancing personal initiative and collective action
• Activism and the desire to see impact
• How much empathy do we need?
• The fractal-like nature of ethical action
• Spreading love, empathy, rationality and compassion

References

[Jacob Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

Leighton is arguing for an ethical framework he calls “xNU+”, a form of negative utilitarianism which aims to

…prevent as much suffering as possible, especially intense or extreme suffering, while also avoiding excessive conflict with our deepest intuitions, namely, to survive and thrive, and to avoid causing direct harm or concentrating suffering.

Surprisingly (to me), he claims to reject moral realism. In his view, statements about “right” or “wrong” or what we “ought” to do can only have meaning if we define those words in terms of other concepts. They may “connote a feeling of moral duty”, or “be used to persuade”, or “indicate whether an action complies with a specific ethical theory”, among other possibilities; but they cannot denote any fundamentally normative truths.

…the point of the [xNU+] framework is not to determine what actions are “right” and “wrong” in a moral sense—…I consider such a framing misleading or meaningless—but rather, to try to align our goals and actions with compassion and rationality while navigating with conflicting moral instruments.

Yet Leighton does seem to believe in some form of irreducible objective value:

“Good” and “bad”, while also open to debate about how to use them, are basic descriptors of situations and subjective experience that often map directly to happiness and suffering. As philosopher Jamie Mayerfeld (1999, p. 19) wrote, “We know what it means to ‘feel bad’ without breaking it down into simpler elements, and we know that ‘feeling bad overall’ means the same as ‘suffering.’ That may be as far as the search for a definition can take us.”

…

There is a huge difference between evaluating two situations and determining that one is objectively better than the other, and labelling someone’s actions as either “right” or “wrong” in a morally judgemental way—even if a situation was improved or made worse by their actions. We still need to explore what makes situations better or worse, but this is ultimately an exercise in description, not prescription in the moral realist sense I just described.

I don't have an airtight argument against it, but I’m not convinced that evaluation and prescription can be separated this neatly. Consider the terms "good" and "bad" when used as "basic descriptors of ... subjective experiences". I assume "good" refers to whatever property the feelings of (for example) contentment, excitement, and having-an-orgasm have in common. And "bad" refers to what the feelings of (for example) loneliness, boredom, and being-burned-alive have in common.

Now ask: why do we say the "good" experiences are better than the "bad" ones? It's not just an assertion of similarity—it's not like saying red objects are redder than green ones. I think this notion of "better" may be inseparable from the notion of preferability or desirability. If so, for X to be objectively better than Y, it would have to be objectively more desirable than Y—which would have to mean either that everyone does in fact prefer X over Y (which seems implausible for almost any X and Y), or that everyone ought to prefer X over Y. The latter puts us back in the realm of prescription, but it seems correct to me.

Imagine someone who understands what suffering is like and who experiences suffering in exactly the same way you do, but whose brain is wired so that they always choose to act in whatever way they think will cause them the most suffering. Aren’t those choices mistakes? Isn't that what it means to recognize that suffering is intrinsically bad: that anyone who doesn't think it should be avoided is wrong?

In addition to disconnecting value ("good"/"bad") from normativity ("ought"), Leighton also downplays the moral significance of value. More important in his view is the notion of intrinsic urgency:

Someone with a mild skin irritation would obviously prefer it to be treated sooner rather than later, but it's not terribly urgent. Someone screaming in pain from terminal cancer needs pain relief urgently. The urgency is actually inherent to the suffering—a property intimately associated with it. With intense suffering there is literally an "urgent need".

Compare with Sharon Rawlette, the champion of my preferred meta-ethical view, who builds her ethical system on the felt qualities of goodness and badness. That leads her to classical utilitarianism: maximize good feelings minus bad feelings. Leighton instead builds his on the felt quality of urgency, leading him to a form of negative utilitarianism: minimize feelings that have an urgent need for relief.

Without ceding to the urge to use moral language by trying to bridge "is" to "ought", the concept of urgency creates a factual bridge between the passive—and incomplete—observation of a phenomenon and the associated need for active engagement. It is this need for action that makes urgency so relevant to ethics. If there's no urgency whatsoever—present or foreseeable—there's no need to change things.

I think the term “need” is pretty loaded here. What’s the difference between a need and a desire? In ordinary language, a “need” could indicate something you’d die without, or something you can’t complete a particular goal without, but those meanings obviously aren’t applicable here.

Instead, saying you “need” to do something could be another way of saying you “ought” to do it, or have a decisive reason to do it. But that’s just moral realism hidden behind a different vocabulary. Which is fine—I’m a moral realist, after all—but it’s not clear that “urgency” is the only thing which can give rise to a “need” in this sense of a decisive-reason-to-act. As discussed above, I think good experiences have an inherent desirability which also gives us a reason to want—and by extension, pursue—them. Say you have to choose between (a) a world of nothingness and (b) a world with many people where everyone is continuously experiencing happy moments of awe, triumph, intimacy, etc. It’s true that bringing (b) about doesn’t feel urgent; yet it still seems there is something about (b) that demands it be chosen. It’s hard for me to believe that someone could be indifferent between (a) and (b) and not be making some sort of mistake, just as someone who was indifferent between nonexistence and being burned alive would be making a mistake. Even if we change (b) to additionally include one person who has a really intense toothache for ten minutes, it still seems to me that choosing (a) would be a mistake. Suffering and happiness both provide reasons for action, and suffering doesn’t always provide the stronger reason.

To respect Leighton’s resistance to moral realism, we could instead interpret “need” as referring to an intense desire, or to a strong disposition to seek/avoid something, or to what it feels like to be aware that you have such a disposition. So to say that suffering involves an “urgent need” for relief would be to say: whenever someone suffers, the sufferer feels it’s very important to stop the suffering. But if we regard this as a mere descriptive fact, it’s unclear why it has more importance than feelings of intense desire for good experiences. Suppose at 10am I’m experiencing excruciating pain accompanied by absolute certainty that it would be better to die rather than continue living. Then, at 11am, I have a really uplifting conversation with friends during which I’m absolutely certain that it was worth living through the pain so that I could experience the joy of this interaction. Why should my disposition at 10am be given more weight than my disposition at 11am?

Though I remain skeptical, the discussion of urgency vs value did help me understand the appeal of negative utilitarianism better.

(Edited 2023-05-11: the sentence that begins "Even if we change (b)..." replaces another sentence that began "This remains true if we change (a)...". The old sentence was a misstatement; the new sentence is what I meant.)

(crosspost)

[Tobias Leenaert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once in a while you read a book you wish everyone would read. A book in which you underline passages on every page and put tons of exclamation marks in the margin, because you know you'll need to revisit it often.
Jonathan Leighton's The Tango of Ethics is such a book.

It stands within the field of what is called "suffering focused ethics", meaning moral thinking that prioritizes the reduction or avoidance of extreme suffering in the world.

Prior to reading this book, I had implicitly and naively assumed that *all* ethics was about the prevention of extreme suffering, but this book made me realize that a lot of ethical thinkers - and people in general - are not about that, and are much more focused on creating wellbeing - to the extent that they believe it's a good thing (or even a moral duty) to bring more people into the world who can experience more happiness (even as the risk of many of them suffering greatly, remains high).

It's hard to express what reading this book meant to me. I'm not even sure I know, but I think to a certain extent I felt confirmed and comforted. This book told me that yes, it's actually *okay* to doubt whether it's all worth it and if maybe, it might be better if this whole world - or the entire universe - would not exist because there's so much horrible suffering in it.

"Even blissful existence doesn't justify any occurrence of the worst forms of extreme suffering. A reluctance to adopt this view is an understandable concession to our Darwinian, life- and personal-identity-affirming intuitions. But these intuitions overlook the reality of extreme suffering - a reality that no one who was fully aware of it would consent to risk experiencing".

Still, conscious life exists, and we have to make the best of it. Moreover, if humans continue to exist and grow, they may down the road be able to help other suffering creatures.

So there's no point in striving for our own annihilation, and this is not a negative book. Rather, it gives pointers to what we can do to make things better - first of all by focusing on making the avoidance of extreme suffering a priority. Rationality, science, love and compassion... all will have important roles in this.

I'm very thankful to Jonathan for writing this extremely compassionate book, that takes into account *all* sentient beings. In a world that often seems uncaring, it's so good to know that there are individuals who actually see what's happening all around us, and use whatever skills they have to do something about it.

[Matt Ball · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are a lot of great thinkers out there writing about philosophy. However, many of them:

1. Write for academic circles.
2. Have discussions are far-removed from being able to have real-world applications.
3. Are limited by human biases and assumptions and personal limitations that keep them from approaching ethics from a truly universal and rational perspective.

In contrast, Jonathan's new book, "The Tango of Ethics" is book that transcends the limitations of most philosophy books. "Tango" takes an interesting and important approach to help us recognize and address the most pressing issue we face.

Is this a book that would win tenure? Probably not. But it is a book that could change your view of the world and of humanity. More importantly, it could help you actually change the world.

[Crte · Rating 5 out of 5]

An inspiring exploration of the implications of suffering for ethics. The book attempts to develop a theory that places the alleviation of suffering at the centre of our moral thinking, while still allowing room for our desires to exist and flourish. It also offers a compelling exploration of theories of personal identity and their ethical ramifications.

[Ketlīna Kļaviņa · Rating 4 out of 5]

The underlying ideology is very sound, the book itself was not an easy read though and maybe it is not supposed to be. For me it was a bit too dragged out, but overall I agree with the author.