Related: What can I do to prevent my own intense suffering?
Here are some things we can do to prevent intense suffering:
- Take action if we ourselves suffer from depression, anxiety or chronic pain.
- Prevent our own future scenarios of intense suffering and those of our close loved ones, anticipating ourselves to prevent suffering risks.
- Support those close to us who suffer from depression, anxiety or chronic pain.
- Investigate the psychological mechanisms that make us ignore suffering, and how we can overcome them.
- Challenge the world view that aims to maximize life at all costs.
- Challenge the humanistic vision of the world that only takes into account human beings, ignoring the suffering of non-human animals. I refer to exclusive, pseudo-religious humanism.
- Advocate for the right to avoid intense suffering, as an inalienable right, of equal or greater importance to the right to life.
- Promote palliative care (and among them, therapeutic morphine), particularly in countries where it hardly exists (projects such as this one)
- Support other projects in which with little effort we could achieve a great reduction in intense suffering, such as this campaign in favor of therapies for cluster headaches.
- Promote voluntary legal euthanasia with guarantees (for example, in Spain DMD, in Chez Mojesmrt)
- Promote the realization of the “living will” with instructions to avoid dysthanasia, therapeutic stubbornness or therapeutic cruelty (same link)
- Support efforts to reduce suffering in factory farming, either by rejection, reducing consumption, cultured meat or in other ways (Animal Ethics, Sentience Institute)
- Support efforts to reduce suffering in nature (same links)
- Promote a culture of rejection of torture.
- Support projects and initiatives to avoid torture, both social and technological (Amnesty International)
- Promote a culture of rejection or reduction of harmful experimentation with involuntary individuals.
- Support the development of new and better anesthetics.
- Support the development of technologies based on genetics and neuroscience to avoid suffering (Neuroethics / The Hedonistic Imperative)
- Support strategic and deep research to reduce suffering (Simon Knutsson, Magnus Vinding, Brian Tomasik, S-Risks, Rethink Priorities, Long Term Risk —formerly Foundational Research—, Center for Reducing Suffering)
- Support research to understand experiences (qualia), aimed at a world with less suffering (QRI)
- Support research for the understanding of the nature and origin of the ability to feel oriented to a world with less suffering, including respectful research regarding the ability to feel in machines and other speculative types of sentience (Sentience Research, PETRL)
- Support organizations that, such as OPIS – Organization for the Prevention of Intense Suffering, promote that, at a personal, social and political level, greater relevance and priority be given to the prevention of suffering. Something that would facilitate this is to develop good tools to estimate and communicate the amount of suffering, and for example, we could not only measure the magnitude of tragedies by the number of deaths, but also by taking into account the amount of associated suffering.
- Oppose experimentation on artificial or manipulated biological substrates when there is suspicion that said substrate could be generating or experiencing suffering (“Organoids”, “Chimeras” and “Ex vivo Tissues”). Particularly, but not exclusively, in cases where increasingly larger chunks of animal brains (human or otherwise) taken from neurosurgical discards or recent deceased are kept alive.
- Support documentation and research efforts to understand suffering as a phenomenon (International Association for the Study of Pain, Suffering-Focused Ethics (SFE) Resources, Institute of Algonomy, Sentience Research)
- Support the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for a better world taking the risks of suffering seriously (Ethics Net)
- Giving visibility to hard-to-measure suffering.
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