Random musings (nonsense) on Suffering

I hate to see suffering in the world - whether it be a westerner bereft of his family in tragic circumstances, or a third world father realisng that his children will die becasue he cannot feed them. In both cases I will cry over their situations and want to make the world a place with less suffering.But what is less suffering? If more people suffer, does this mean that suffering is greater? Suffering is individual and personal. No one person can suffer any more than the sum of their experiences. Surely the total suffering in the world is simply the maximum of all the individual suffering, not the sum of the suffering?If I manage to resolve the suffering of all but one of the population, have I actually achieved anything? I will still cry over the one left...

Simple addition leads to results which seem intuitively wrong. Under that principle it would be desirable to inflict great suffering on one person to save sufficiently many people from very minor sufferings.But using the maximum value isn't any better. Under that principle it would be desirable to inflict great suffering on any number of people for a small reduction in the suffering of one (the worst case). In fact it's worse because it places no value on alleviating the suffering of anyone other than the person experiencing the worst suffering.Any worthwhile view of suffering must escape both traps. It is good to alleviate any suffering, no matter how small. But no number of small sufferings can add up to a great suffering.