Abstract

In recent years, there is an increasingly higher number of people who believe in a prevalence of suffering over welfare in nature. This belief is usually coincident with a sentiocentric axiology according to which what is morally relevant are the mental states of pleasure and pain. This combination leads to the diagnosis that the prevalence of suffering has an enormous moral significance. This paper rejects this traditional line of thought and instead argues that could not be coherent. The claim that there is an ontological prevalence, in the abstract, of suffering in nature is unproblematic. However, the same is not true when considering its moral relevance. A sentiocentrist cannot consider an aggregationist calculation to be morally valuable, strictly speaking, since there is no subject that feels it. Nevertheless, the need for positive intervention in nature with the aim of reducing existing suffering could remain.