Pain, Dislike and Experience (original) (raw)
Related papers
Subjectivists Should Say: Pain is Bad Because of How it Feels
Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 2022
What is the best way to account for the badness of pain and what sort of theory of welfare is best suited to accommodate this view? I argue that unpleasant sensory experiences are prudentially bad in the absence of contrary attitudes, but good when the object of positive attitudes. Pain is bad unless it is liked, enjoyed, valued etc. Interestingly, this view is incompatible with either pure objectivist or pure subjectivist understandings of welfare. However, there is a kind of welfare theory that can incorporate this view of the badness of pain and which is very, very close to being a form of subjectivism. Moreover, this hybrid account of welfare is entirely compatible with the deep motivations of subjectivism. I therefore argue that those who lean towards welfare subjectivism should adopt this account of pain, and that we should revise our understanding of subjectivism to count such theories as subjective.
The Unpleasantness of Pain, 2018
In this thesis I provide an account of the unpleasantness of pain. In doing this, I shed light on the nature of pain and unpleasantness. I propose to understand the unpleasantness of pain based on the determinable determinate distinction. Unpleasantness is a determinable phenomenal property of mental states that entails badness. I propose that an unpleasant pain experience has two phenomenal properties: i) the phenomenal property of being a pain, and ii) a phenomenal determinate property (u1, u2, u3, etc.) of the unpleasantness determinable. According to this theory unpleasant pains feel bad, and this explains why we are motivated and justified in avoiding them. This explains, for example, why we are motivated and justified to take painkillers. This theory allows us to account for the heterogeneity of unpleasantness, i.e., we can explain how different unpleasant experiences feel unpleasant even if they feel so different. The thesis is organised into seven chapters and divided by three main themes: i) what the unpleasantness of pain consists in, ii) how we can account for the great phenomenal diversity among experiences of unpleasantness, and iii) which cases suggest that there could be pains that are not unpleasant. Broadly, the first two chapters deal with the first theme, where I analyse two reductive accounts of unpleasantness: the content theories and the desire theories. I deal with the second theme in the third and fourth chapter, where I analyse different theories that try to account for the phenomenal property of unpleasantness. In the fifth and sixth chapter, I focus on the third theme, where I consider different cases that suggest the existence of pains that are not unpleasant. In the final chapter, I offer a conclusion of the three main themes by providing my own view on the unpleasantness of pain.
Evaluativist Accounts of Pain's Unpleasantness
In Jennifer Corns (ed.) Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Pain, 2017
Evaluativism is best thought of as a way of enriching a perceptual view of pain to account for pain’s unpleasantness or painfulness. Once it was common for philosophers to contrast pains with perceptual experiences (McGinn 1982; Rorty 1980). It was thought that perceptual experiences were intentional (or content-bearing, or about something), whereas pains were representationally blank. But today many of us reject this contrast. For us, your having a pain in your toe is a matter not of your sensing “pain-ly” or encountering a sense-datum, but of your having an interoceptive experience representing (accurately or inaccurately) that your toe is in a particular experience-independent condition, such as undergoing a certain “disturbance” or being damaged or in danger (Armstrong 1962; Tye 1995). But even if such representational content makes an experience a pain, a further ingredient seems required to make the pain unpleasant. According to evaluativism, the further ingredient is the experience’s possession of evaluative content: its representing the bodily condition as bad for the subject. In this chapter, I elaborate evaluativism, locate it among alternatives, and explain its attractions and challenges.
Pain, 1999
This essay is an attempt to clarify the construct of unpleasantness in the context of the psychophysics of pain. The first critical point is that one aspect of unpleasantness is tightly coupled to stimulus intensity and is therefore a sensory discrimination. Pain has this quality, but so do other somatic sensations such as itch and dysesthesias that are not recognized as painful by most people. A corollary of this is that pain must have a quality other than unpleasantness that allows it to be unequivocally identified. I use the term algosity for that quality. In addition to stimulus bound (primary) unpleasantness, there is an unpleasant experience that reflects a higher level process which has a highly variable relationship to stimulus intensity and is largely determined by memories and contextual features. I have termed this experience secondary unpleasantness. I suggest that the sensory-discriminative/affective-motivational dichotomy has outlived its usefulness and is currently more of an impediment than a guide to neurobiological explanations of pain. In order to increase our understanding of pain we need psychophysical tools designed specifically to differentiate primary unpleasantness from both algosity and secondary unpleasantness. These tools can then be used to determine the neural mechanisms of pain.
2006
Chapter 1 Introduction If anything is intrinsically bad, pain is. Even the staid skeptic should accept this conditional. For anyone who cares about the nature of value, consequentialist, Kantian, virtue ethicist, and even those who deny the intelligibility of mind-independent value, an account of the putative intrinsic badness of pain is compulsory. If one believes that moral evaluations attach only to agents, she must explain why pains, which seem to be mental states, are bad. If she holds that nothing is intrinsically bad, she must account for the seeming wrongness of my stomping on your gouty foot. And if she agrees that pains are, in fact, intrinsically bad, she must at least say what she means, if not why this is the case. I believe all existing accounts of pain's intrinsic badness are false. Their mistake has two sources. First, these views assume a virtually universal but false conception of what pains are. Second, accounts of pain's intrinsic badness are usually developed in tandem with accounts of the intrinsic goodness of pleasure. But there are some important disconnects between the source of pain's intrinsic badness and the source of pleasure's intrinsic goodness. At the least, assuming that we can seamlessly transpose claims about pain's intrinsic badness to pleasure's intrinsic goodness, and vice-versa, obscures what is distinctive about pain and its intrinsic badness. Thus in this dissertation I shall focus solely on understanding pain and its intrinsic badness. This will yield new insights that extend to other areas of value theory. In particular, I shall argue that when we correctly understand the nature of pain and its intrinsic badness we must revise the existing theories of the nature of intrinsic value. In this chapter, I'll sketch the main claims and arguments of this dissertation. I'll start with a quick overview and then sketch the content of each chapter. Before I begin, one note about terminology. I shall use 'intrinsic value' and 'value' to include the positive, neutral, and negative valences-thus pain's intrinsic badness will be an intrinsic value. Many prefer to reserve 'value' for the positive valence, and use 'disvalue' for the negative. But the difference in terminology does not reflect a substantive difference. §1.1 Synopsis Let me begin with a quick synopsis of the arc of this dissertation and its main claims. I'll then discuss each chapter in a bit more detail. Nearly everyone believes that pain is just a sensation. More specifically, they believe that everything normatively significant about a pain is contained in the way it hurts. The nature of a stubbed toe's pain is exhausted by the way it stings and throbs. This is the kernel view of what pains are.
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2011
Pain, crucially, is unpleasant and motivational. It can be awful; and it drives us to action, e.g. to take our weight off a sprained ankle. But what is the relationship between pain and those two features? And in virtue of what does pain have them? Addressing these questions, Colin Klein and Richard J. Hall have recently developed the idea that pains are, at least partly, experiential commands—to stop placing your weight on your ankle, for example. In this paper, I reject their accounts. Against Klein, I use dissociation cases to argue that possession of ‘imperative content’ cannot wholly constitute pain. Against them both, I further claim that possession of such content cannot even constitute pain’s unpleasant, motivational aspect. For, even if it were possible to specify the relevant imperative content—which is far from clear—the idea of a command cannot bear the explanatory weight Klein and Hall place on it.
Bad by Nature: An Axiological Theory of Pain
This chapter defends an axiological theory of pain according to which pains are bodily episodes that are bad in some way. Section 1 introduces two standard assumptions about pain that the axiological theory constitutively rejects: (i) that pains are essentially tied to consciousness and (ii) that pains are not essentially tied to badness. Section 2 presents the axiological theory by contrast to these and provides a preliminary defense of it. Section 3 introduces the paradox of pain and argues that since the axiological theory takes the location of pain at face value, it needs to grapple with the privacy, self-intimacy and incorrigibility of pain. Sections 4, 5 and 6 explain how the axiological theory may deal with each of these.
Tracking Representationalism and the Painfulness of Pain (Philosophical Issues, 2011)
Representationalism is the thesis that the phenomenal character of an experience supervenes on its representational content. Tracking representationalism is the conjunction of representationalism with a “tracking” or causal-covariation account of the content of experience. Several philosophers have maintained that the experience of pain poses a serious challenge to tracking representationalism. In particular, tracking representationalism is thought to be unable to account for the negative affective quality or “painfulness” of pain. In this paper we defend tracking representationalism against this challenge. We argue that pain has both descriptive and evaluative content and that pain has its negative affective quality in virtue of its (negative) evaluative content. We then show how a tracking theory of experiential content can accommodate this view of the content of pain. We conclude by noting some advantages of our account over a rival representationalist account, which explains the negative affective quality of pain in terms of imperative content rather than evaluative content.
The Philosophy of Pain - Introduction
Forthcoming in The Philosophy of Pain, edited by D. Bain, M. Brady, and J. Corns. London: Routledge
Over recent decades, pain has received increasing attention as – with ever greater sophistication and rigour – theorists have tried to answer the deep and difficult questions it poses. What is pain’s nature? What is its point? In what sense is it bad? The papers collected in this volume are a contribution to that effort ...
When, How, and Why Did “Pain” Become Subjective?
Philosophy of Medicine
The pain-assessment literature often claims that pain is subjective. However, the meaning and implications of this claim are left to the reader’s imagination. This paper attempts to make sense of the claim and its problems from the history and philosophy of science perspective. It examines the work of Henry Beecher, the first person to operationalize “pain” in terms of subjective measurements. First, I reconstruct Beecher’s operationalization of “pain.” Next, I argue this operationalization fails. Third, I salvage Beecher’s insights by repositioning them in an intersubjective account. Finally, I connect these insights to current pain-assessment approaches, showing that they enrich each other.