Antifrustrationism is an axiological position proposed by German philosopher Christoph Fehige, which states that "we don't do any good by creating satisfied extra preferences. What matters about preferences is not that they have a satisfied existence, but that they don't have a frustrated existence." According to Fehige, "''maximizers of preference satisfaction'' should instead call themselves ''minimizers of preference frustration''." What makes the world better is "not its amount of preference satisfaction, but the ''avoided preference frustration''." In the words of Fehige, "we have obligations to make preferrers satisfied, but no obligations to make satisfied preferrers." The position stands in contrast to classical

utilitarianism In ethical philosophy, utilitarianism is a family of normative ethical theories that prescribe actions that maximize happiness and well-being for all affected individuals. Although different varieties of utilitarianism admit different charac ...

, among other ethical theories, which holds that creating "satisfied preferrers" is, or can be, a good in itself. Antifrustrationism has similarities with, although it is different from,

negative utilitarianism Negative utilitarianism is a form of negative consequentialism that can be described as the view that people should minimize the total amount of aggregate suffering, or that they should minimize suffering and then, secondarily, maximize the to ...

, the teachings of

Buddha Siddhartha Gautama, most commonly referred to as the Buddha, was a wandering ascetic and religious teacher who lived in South Asia during the 6th or 5th century BCE and founded Buddhism. According to Buddhist tradition, he was born in ...

Stoicism Stoicism is a school of Hellenistic philosophy founded by Zeno of Citium in Athens in the early 3rd century BCE. It is a philosophy of personal virtue ethics informed by its system of logic and its views on the natural world, asserting that ...

philosophical pessimism Philosophical pessimism is a family of philosophical views that assign a negative value to life or existence. Philosophical pessimists commonly argue that the world contains an empirical prevalence of pains over pleasures, that existence is ontol ...

, and

Schopenhauer Arthur Schopenhauer ( , ; 22 February 1788 – 21 September 1860) was a German philosopher. He is best known for his 1818 work '' The World as Will and Representation'' (expanded in 1844), which characterizes the phenomenal world as the p ...

's philosophy.: "An outline of the ancestors and near and distant relatives of antifrustrationism will have to wait another occasion. (See, however, the sources listed in notes 2 and 21.) It is instructive, for example, to compare the doctrine of the relevant teachings of Buddha, the Stoics, Schopenhauer, or Albert Ellis, to Seana Shiffrin’s recent work, to pessimism (in the various meanings of that word), and to what has become known as ‘negative utilitarianism’. Some similarities notwithstanding, all of these differ from antifrustrationism in important respects." In particular, negative preference utilitarianism states that we should act in such a way that the number of frustrated preferences is minimized and is therefore directly based on antifrustrationism. The difference is that antifrustrationism is an axiology, whereas negative preference utilitarianism is an ethical theory. The moral philosopher

Peter Singer Peter Albert David Singer (born 6 July 1946) is an Australian moral philosopher, currently the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. He specialises in applied ethics and approaches ethical issues from a secular, ...

has in the past endorsed a position similar to antifrustrationism (negative preference utilitarianism), writing:

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* * *{{cite news, url=http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1980/aug/14/right-to-life/ , title=Right to Life? , last=Singer , first=Peter , newspaper=The New York Review of Books , date=1980-08-14 Axiology Utilitarianism

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