“The study of pleasure and pain belongs to the province of the political philosopher; for he is the architect of the end, with a view to which we call one thing bad and another good without qualification. ” – Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
The systematic approach to suffering will present a collection of lists, a series of enumerations as exhaustive as possible concerning suffering, causes of suffering, people and organizations who cause suffering, factors of difficulty in work against excessive suffering, ideas of strategy, solutions, people and organizations who contribute to solve excessive suffering, documents interesting the systematic approach to suffering, and many other lists.
All those inventories, mostly without precedent, call for a new type of gathering and classification work. And the interrelationships among all those elements will also call for new specialties. Moreover, it will be necessary to develop standardized procedures for measuring individual or collective suffering. Those measurements will be used to guide the work of prevention, reduction, suppression, eradication.
Such a wider and more precise mapping of the field will better inform us on what is occurring and where we should go, will better prepare us to react to the evolution of the global problematique (for instance, it would make it possible to detect and control the harmful consequences of certain solutions, or to use advisedly new shrewd tactics). It will make it easier for us to find our way through the abundance, the vastitude and the complexity of the subject.
The systematic approach to suffering proposes a general plan of solution to the whole problem of excessive suffering; it proposes which steps would lead to a global victory; it proposes a framework apt to accomodate all collaborations and to organize usefully their theoretical or practical contributions; it offers “an operational environment supporting the mutual reinforcement of the approaches and the projects of solution, too often isolated and vulnerable at present.