Abolitionism

Moral empiricism, with Hume, measures good and evil by usefulness and agreeableness: suffering is an evil that benevolence moves us to relieve, and the pain one inflicts on oneself without profit, through mortification, is only a vice. No fruitfulness is granted to sought-out suffering; sensibility commands reducing it.

Hume, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, IX

Suffering, for Advaita, has its source not in being but in an error of knowledge, avidyā: it is the superimposition (adhyāsa) that takes the Self for the body and the appearance for the real, as one sees a snake where there is only a rope. But an illusion is not redeemed, it is dispelled: the moment the rope is recognized, the fear of the snake vanishes without a trace, and no act or merit was needed. This is why Advaita rejects the path on which suffering would be fruitful or redemptive: since its cause is cognitive, only liberating knowledge (jñāna) abolishes it at the root, not endured hardship nor accomplished work.

Śaṅkara, Commentary on the Brahma-Sūtras (Brahma-Sūtra-Bhāṣya), introduction (adhyāsa) · Gauḍapāda, Māṇḍūkya-Kārikā

The Enlightenment makes the reduction of suffering an object of progress: against judicial torture (Beccaria), fanaticism and its cruelties (Voltaire), the diseases that science must push back, it refuses to sanctify pain or to resign oneself to it. Avoidable suffering is an evil that reason and reform are charged with fighting.

Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments · Voltaire, Treatise on Tolerance

Pragmatism is meliorist: it holds evils and sufferings to be concrete problems to be reduced through intelligence in action and social reform, not a fatality to be interpreted. Dewey refuses both resignation and metaphysical consolation: the task is to act on the conditions that produce avoidable suffering, wagering on their possible improvement.

Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy · Dewey, The Public and Its Problems

Aristotelianism holds pain and misfortune to be genuine evils, against Stoic indifference: happiness needs external goods, and great misfortunes can impair it. Suffering has no value in itself and should be avoided; but the courageous person endures it nobly when a good end demands it, without seeking or sacralizing it.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I and III

Suffering has no redemptive value: it is the very evil that the whole poem seeks to disarm by tracing it back to its causes, the false opinion about the gods and about death. The great suffering, for Lucretius, is not so much bodily pain as the terror of the soul, which no ordeal sanctifies and which knowledge of nature must dissolve. The leaning is clearly abolitionist, without bodily pain itself receiving the slightest meaning.

On the Nature of Things, III, 1053-1075 (the malaise that drives men to flee)

The whole project aims at the cessation of suffering and of conditioned rebirth: Nāgārjuna grants suffering no redemptive value, it being an effect of ignorance and grasping, to be dissolved by seeing emptiness (śūnyatā). It is in grasping the absence of inherent existence that the mental fabrication (prapañca, conceptual proliferation) sustaining dis-ease comes to rest: a clearly abolitionist leaning.

Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way), XVIII, 5 (the cessation of conceptual proliferation) · Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, ch. XXVI (the examination of the twelve links)

The suffering of oppression has no redemptive fruitfulness: it is an evil to be fought, and any morality that would justify it in the name of a radiant future is a mystification Beauvoir denounces. Without denying the share of finitude and failure inherent in any existence, she leans toward the concrete abolition of avoidable suffering rather than toward its sacralization.

The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), critique of sacrificing the present to the future · The Second Sex (1949), suffering as a product of oppression

Sadness is always the passage to a lesser perfection, a diminution of the power to act: in itself it has no redemptive value. Wisdom consists in reducing it by understanding its causes, never in seeking or sacralizing it, hence a clear abolitionist leaning.

Ethics, III, prop. 11, scholium and definitions of the affects (sadness, the passage to a lesser perfection) · Ethics, IV, prop. 41 (joy is never directly bad, sadness never directly good)

In Lockean psychology, pain is, together with pleasure, the spring of all action: we naturally flee pain, and the good is measured in part by what delivers us from it. Suffering has no value of its own, it is an evil to be avoided and relieved, even if Locke's Christian horizon leaves it a place in the trial of this life.

Essay concerning Human Understanding, II, 20-21

Suffering belongs to saṃsāra and to the ignorance that identifies the self with the body: it has no redemptive value of its own, it is an evil bound to the empirical condition whose root is error (avidyā). The aim is not to assume or sanctify it but to undo it at its source, by dispelling ignorance through knowledge: the realized self, an impassive witness, is no longer reached by it. The position thus meets the idea of an abolition of suffering, by way of knowledge rather than mere relief.

Commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā · Upadeśasāhasrī

Sartre refuses any redemptive justification of suffering: without God or providence, no theodicy redeems it, and to lend it a hidden meaning would be a flight into bad faith. Suffering is a contingent fact that freedom must assume and, as far as possible, transform through action; it has only the meaning we give it, not a fruitfulness inscribed in the order of things.

Being and Nothingness · Existentialism Is a Humanism

Against Stoic indifference, Aristotle holds pain and misfortune to be real evils: great misfortunes, like Priam's, can spoil a happy life, for eudaimonia also requires external goods. Suffering therefore has no value in itself and should be avoided; but courage consists in enduring it nobly when the good demands it, without however seeking it out.

Nicomachean Ethics, I, 10-11 · Nicomachean Ethics, III, 6-9

Pain is quite real, and Montaigne, who suffered from kidney stones, dresses it in no redemptive virtue: he rejects the heroism of Stoic contempt as well as the Christian idea of meritorious suffering. But opinion adds much to the evil, and pain borne with suppleness, without swelling it through imagination, can become a schooling of the self. It is less a fecundity of suffering than an economy: neither to exalt it nor to think oneself crushed by it.

Essays, I, 14, "That the Taste of Good and Evil Depends on Our Opinion" and III, 13

Suffering is neither an evil to be abolished nor a redemptive trial that would forge character: it is a moment of the flux to be welcomed without dramatizing it, like the sickness that may turn the arm into a rooster. Zhuangzi lends it no moral fecundity in the manner of Pascal or Nietzsche, but neither does he campaign for its abolition: he dissolves its weight by ceasing to judge it a misfortune. The position leans slightly toward the median indifference, through release from the judgment that constitutes the hurt.

Zhuangzi, ch. 6 (The Great Source as Teacher)

The skeptic holds that the greater part of suffering comes not from the affections themselves but from the added opinion that they are evils by nature: it is this belief that doubles a pain with moral distress. To withdraw the judgment lightens it accordingly: the forced pain remains, but the surplus of anguish is removed. The position meets the "median" indifference toward the meaning of suffering, neither fruitful nor to be abolished on principle, but defused by suspending the value judgment.

Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 25-30 · Outlines of Pyrrhonism, III, 235-238