Ethical thinking can be pragmatically framed as striving for impact in improving the world, without relying on traditional moral language. Consciousness or sentience is central to anything mattering, but only suffering has an inherent urgency to be addressed. This call to action applies regardless of species or physical substrate. From a perspective on personal identity that recognizes separateness as an illusion, the most extreme suffering can be considered intolerable per se, not just for the physical being experiencing it. Prioritizing the prevention of such suffering is therefore rational. Strong, potentially competing intuitions, including the desire to thrive, must also be accommodated for an ethical framework to be viable, without the creation of happiness formally balancing out intense suffering that exists elsewhere. A framework termed “xNU+” captures these considerations. Suffering metrics such as Years Lived with Severe Suffering (YLSS) and Days Lived with Extreme Suffering (DLES), used alongside existing health and well-being metrics, would better track what matters, in humans and, using different methodologies, in other species and potential artificial sentient entities. The rapid, potentially irreversible, technology-driven transformations now occurring on our planet make it urgent that we embed a suffering-focused ethical framework in our governance and policy-making.

This paper revisits the longstanding debate over the nature of suffering, focusing on the divide between subjective and objective accounts. I defend a Personalist conception of suffering, rooted in an Aristotelian understanding of human flourishing, that recognizes suffering as both universally human and deeply personal. On this view, suffering is neither a purely sentient, inner experience nor reducible to external conditions, but a disruption of flourishing that arises when love or justice is violated or absent—and that calls for a communal response. Understood through this lens, suffering, I argue, invites a shared practice of meaning-making—not as sentimental optimism but as a form of grounded hope: realistic, responsive, and attuned to the dignity of both the sufferer and those who accompany them. Even when suffering cannot be cured or fully comprehended, it can be met with deeper engagement, mutual responsibility, and a reaffirmation of our commitment to a life lived in relation and shared purpose.

This article examines the poetry of Raïssa Maritain as a distinctive form of theodicy shaped by prayer, suffering, and the catastrophic violence of the twentieth century. Situating Maritain’s poetic work within the context of debates on suffering, this article places her in dialogue with Johann Baptist Metz’s concept of Leiden an Gott (‘suffering unto God’), as well as with the challenges to theodicy articulated by Elie Wiesel and Emmanuel Levinas. While Wiesel’s refusal of theology after Auschwitz and Levinas’s ethical critique of teleological accounts of suffering underscore the crisis of theodicy, Metz offers a theological response that centres on prayer as anguished address to God rather than rational explanation. I argue that Maritain’s poetry anticipates, embodies and extends this insight by functioning as a form of poetic prayer that confronts evil without aestheticising or prematurely redeeming suffering. Through close engagement with poems written before and during the Second World War, I show how Maritain’s poetic language gives voice to accusation, lament, and solidarity with the suffering other, while nonetheless holding open the possibility of redemption. In doing so, her work offers a humane poetic theodicy that both complements and critically deepens Metz’s political theology.

This article examines Teresa of Avila’s articulation of and response to spiritual suffering in the Interior Castle. It applies a feminist hermeneutic to the text in order to locate the resources that contribute to Teresa’s resiliency in the face of this suffering. This approach to the text reveals that Teresa’s use of contemplative prayer and interactions with her community facilitate a direct engagement with her suffering so as to make it manageable. Her successful navigation of the spiritual journey allows her the opportunity to share her insights toward resiliency with her community by speaking honestly about her experience in her writings. This article’s approach to reading the Interior Castle lifts up Teresa’s experience as a potential resource for women today who may have difficulty locating a sense of agency in their own experiences of suffering.

This paper critiques the use of the term ‘evil’ in philosophical discussions of the problem of evil. We argue that what is commonly identified as ‘evil’ in this debate is better as ‘misfortune.’ The division between moral and natural evil equivocates between agentic and non-agentic ‘evil,’ undermining its coherence as a unifying concept. Evil events are necessarily caused by evildoers, which are non-existent in events of natural evil. By contrast, ‘misfortune’ places the focus on the victim regardless of the source, better capturing what philosophers intend with the prior term ‘evil.’ Our more precise definition of ‘evil’ satisfies Jean Nabert’s notion of evil as the unjustifiable while also being sufficiently distinct from badness. What distinguishes ‘evil’ from mere badness is moral erasure, which is the perception of other human beings as objects unworthy of moral consideration. While a bad person causes misfortunes as a trade-off in pursuit of a perceived good, an evil person is either completely indifferent to their victim’s misfortunes, or malicious by deliberately causing misfortunes for pleasure’s sake. Our distinction between ‘misfortune’ and ‘evil’ clarified as (im)moral, indifferent, or malicious challenges the assumption that evil, as traditionally framed, poses a direct contradiction to God’s existence.

If panpsychism is true then consciousness pervades the cosmos, and there exist many more conscious subjects than other worldviews contemplate. Panpsychism’s explanatory story about how human material composition and complexity grounds human consciousness seems to entail that there exist, notably, various conscious subjects within human organisms. Given the plausibility of the thesis that consciousness confers moral status – a thesis many panpsychists endorse – questions thus arise about the wellbeing of these inner subjects. In this article I raise the possibility that the lives of our inner subjects may not be morally suitable to a sophisticated centre of consciousness of the sort that likely exists, for example, inside various of our brain areas. Panpsychism, indeed, seems on the face of it to generate a good deal more suffering, in this way, than other worldviews. If that is correct, panpsychists who would embrace theism, and theists who would embrace panpsychism – for example pantheists – should be given serious pause. If panpsychism positively compounds the problem of evil, then one may have to choose between panpsychism and theism.