I am not an expert on Peter Singer, or philosophy, or agriculture. But as a scientist, and an academic, I am (something) of an expert in logic and problem solving. The best way to solve a problem is to think of ALL the possible outcomes and implications and then try to choose the best course of action. Peter Singer takes arguments to their extreme. And if you read the Salon interview, he often backs up from that extreme and acknowledges that practicality has it's place. Taking arguments to their extreme can allow you to see all your options, and then find the best one. It is illuminating for society to have people who spend their time laying out all the options. This provides us with more information to help us make a choice, and that is never a bad thing.

You have start somewhere and choosing to minimize suffering as a goal is possibly better than trying to maximize profit or maximize the number of people you kill (that was a bit of hyperbole there...). Personally, I am hard pressed to find a better goal for a world where most of the population espouses belief in an afterlife where admission is based on doing good works here in this life.

I am not trying to defend every word Peter Singer has ever written. But I am going to defend the value of any work that expands the limits of human understanding by provoking us to consider the effects of our behaviour.

Finally, so many of these posts have mired themselves in the minutae of an argument, while pretty much completely missing the point. Local vs global, organic vs agribusiness - ONE IS NOT BY DEFAULT BETTER THAN THE OTHER. YOU MUST CONSIDER ALL THE FACTS. And I do not once remember reading a Singer response that said ALL organic farms were a disappointment or that ALL Kosher slaughter houses failed to live up to espoused standards.

I hope the posts thus far did not represent most readers' opinions. I think this article did a pretty good job discussing one framework for how to solve the problem of living ethically. This is a hard problem. Ignoring possible answers and completely rejecting logic is not the way to solve it.

I just posted a letter that is a response to Xanthro's letter on page 12. He makes good points but I cannot agree with most that he says. One point of his was that suffering should not be alleviated. A second point was that suffering is too confusing a word with too many possible definitions.

I don't agree with him here at all. I think that we have a good sense of what suffering is, and that on the whole we try to avoid it.

So now I ask, is suffering a good thing? Is it something that we don't have a firm grasp of?

I would like to hear other people's thoughts on this issue.

Suffering itself is personally subjective and so it should never be alleviated? I fail to see the logic in that at all. Could you explain that a bit more?

"Alleviated" just means "eased": it certainly doesn't mean "made to disappear". I agree with you that suffering is a necessary part of life, that it will never be gotten rid of, and that it can even be satisfying (like in your mention of "better to have loved and lost than to not have loved at all"). We all have the memory of that first high school romance that ended badly and we even seem to cherish those memories. Or, as you mentioned the death of your grandfather, that suffering that we feel can remind us of how important that person was to us

But the argument that you anticipated, that this isn't the kind of suffering we're talking about, you dismiss too hastily. "Suffering" is a convenient word to use to represent many awful things that we should want to alleviate. If it is too broad a word in your opinion, I'll be more exact.

In poorer nations and even too often in the U.S., the hunger that children feel in their stomachs, when they're too weak to play and learn -- we should want to alleviate that hunger and pain. The anguish that a woman feels when her husband dies in a car accident, and she is left to raise their children alone, and she is scared for her future -- we should want to help this woman feel better, and hopefully we could help her with other material needs as well. The apparent torment of chickens locked in tiny cages, pecking at each other and wasting away -- we often want to make the insignificant lives of those chickens better.

I could go on and on. I don't mean to mock your point. But you seem to be suggesting that since we don't have one universal, objective definition of the word "suffering", then we don't know what it is when it confronts us. I find this to be an impossible point to defend. The facts and details represented by regular use of the word "suffering" are GENERALLY things that we want to get rid of, or at least diminish.

When we say "suffering", and we're talking in a particular context, we understand the word very well. When your grandfather died, someone probably asked, "Did he suffer much?" I'm sure that your response wasn't, "I don't know what you mean by 'suffer'." If we talk about a poet suffering the cooled affections of his lover, we understand what that means as well -- that it is a matter of poetic conceit.

Even with that, I am sure that if you asked people, "Do you like to suffer?", their answers would be exclusively "no". Suffering is something that is seen negatively by most anyone around, and it is not a very confusing word at all.

Apart from that, I fail to see how "Suffering drives humanity forward" or that "without 'suffering' humanity stagnates to a meaningless existence". It is quite likely that the process of engaging a problem, defining the problem and then solving the problem helps in humans making long term changes and progressions. But I think to say that it is suffering that does it, is to take a strange view of "suffering".