"The second prima facie right that all sentient creatures possess is the right not to be made to suffer. Sentient creatures, by their nature, are able to take enjoyment from their lives and to endure suffering: in part, this is what gives them equal intrinsic moral worth. ... in general terms all sentient creatures experience suffering as something that is bad for them and inimical to their welfare. And that explains why the vast majority of us already accept that the interest of sentient creatures in not being made to suffer grounds duties in others."
Suffering-focused ethics are views in ethics that give special priority to the reduction of suffering. Some suffering-focused views hold that reducing suffering is the only moral aim, while others treat it as one aim among others, such as reducing inequality or promoting pleasure, but give it greater weight than those other aims.
"[T]he fight against suffering must be considered a duty, while the right to care for the happiness of others must be considered a privilege confined to the close circle of their friends. ... Pain, suffering, injustice, and their prevention, these are the eternal problems of public morals, the agenda of public policy ..."
"One suffering may be so wholly incommensurable with another that no true impression is given by calling it a hundred or a thousand times greater; in other words, the lesser, endured in a thousand frames, could not for an instant be set against the greater endured in a single frame. Nor is the essential distinction between endurable and unendurable pain at all impugned, as some seem to think, by the impossibility of drawing a distinct line between them — an argument which would equally forbid us to call yellow and red essentially distinct colours."
"We all, thank goodness, feel a natural spark of sympathy for the sufferings of others. We need to catch that spark and fan it into a fire of rational and universal compassion."
"Our first moral concern should always be with the individual who is the maximum sufferer."
"It is always wrong to cause pain to A merely in order to increase the pleasure of B."
"[H]uman rights norms are primarily focused on preventing the worst forms of human suffering, even if they only concern a small portion of the population. This task has moral priority over the promotion of the maximum well-being of the majority of people. [...] the entire human rights enterprise can be regarded as a social response to suffering [...]."