Review of Philosophy and Psychology, special issue on Pain and Pleasure, ed. D. Bain & M. Brady, 2014

What is the contrary of pleasure? “Pain” is one common answer. This paper argues that pleasure instead has two natural contraries: unpleasure and hedonic indifference. This view is defended by drawing attention to two often-neglected concepts: the formal relation of polar opposition and the psychological state of hedonic indifference. The existence of mixed feelings, it is argued, does not threaten the contrariety of pleasure and unpleasure.

Eudaimonists hold that all happiness should be promoted, and all suffering should be eliminated. However, Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine casts doubt on the first claim: some happiness is meaningless, and there is little if any reason to promote such happiness. Similarly, I argue, it is not the case that there is moral reason to attempt to prevent or eliminate all suffering. Just as some happiness is meaningless, some suffering – grief, for example –is meaningful: grief, when directed toward an appropriate object, represents an appropriate cognitive response. That the justification of grief is partly epistemological, and not purely ethical, has significant implications for ethics, practical reasoning, and philosophy of mind.

In this paper I seek to answer two interrelated questions about pleasures and pains: (i) The question of unity: Do all pleasures share a single quality that accounts for why these, and only these, are pleasures, and do all pains share a single quality that accounts for why these, and only these, are pains? (ii) The question of commensurability: Are all pleasures and pains rankable on a single, quantitative hedonic scale? I argue that our intuitions draw us in opposing directions: On the one hand, pleasures and pains seem unified and commensurable; on the other hand, they do not. I further argue that neither intuition can be abandoned, and examine three different paths to reconciliation. The first two are response theory and split experience theory. Both of these, I argue, are unsuccessful. A third path, however—which I label " dimensionalism " —succeeds. Dimensionalism is the theory that pleasure and pain have the ontological status as opposite sides of a hedonic dimension along which experiences vary. This view has earlier been suggested by C. D. Broad, Karl Duncker, Shelly Kagan, and John Searle, but it has not been worked out in detail. In this paper I work out the dimensionalist view in some detail, defend it, and explain how it solves the problem of the unity and commensurability of pleasures and pains.

Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2014

Compare your pain when immersing your hand in freezing water and your pleasure when you taste your favourite wine. The relationship seems obvious. Your pain experience is unpleasant, aversive, negative, and bad. Your experience of the wine is pleasant, attractive, positive, and good. Pain and pleasure are straightforwardly opposites. Or that, at any rate, can seem beyond doubt, and to leave little more to be said. But, in fact, it is not beyond doubt. And, true or false, it leaves a good deal more to be said: about the nature of sensory affect; its relations to perception, motivation, and rationality; its value; and the mechanisms underlying it. In this paper, we map the dialectical landscape, locating areas ripe for further research.

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.

Utilitas, 2009

It is widely held that it is only contingent that the sensation of pain is disliked, and that when pain is not disliked, it is not intrinsically bad. This conjunction of claims has often been taken to support a subjectivist view of pain’s badness on which pain is bad simply because it is the object of a negative attitude and not because of what it feels like. In this paper, I argue that accepting this conjunction of claims does not commit us to this subjectivist view. They are compatible with an objectivist view of pain’s badness, and with thinking that this badness is due to its phenomenal quality. Indeed, I argue that once the full range of options is in view, the most plausible account of pain is incompatible with subjectivism about value.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

This was a paper I did for my M.A. Phil. Attempts to seek an answer to the role pleasure plays in moral goods and evils if any. For example, is there a moral difference between the doctor that finds pleasure in healing his patients versus the doctor who heals his patients out utility or business reasons.

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.

Phoenix, 2011

Plato’s account of pleasure in Republic IX, offered in the context of his third proof that the just man is happier than the unjust, has been treated as an ill-conceived and deeply flawed account that Plato thankfully retracted and replaced in the Philebus. I am convinced, however, that this received view of the Republic’s account is false. In this paper, I will not concern myself with whether, or in what way, Plato’s account of pleasure in the Republic falls short of what we find in the Philebus, but will rather focus on the merits of the former. My concern will be further narrowed down to the first half of the third proof: the proof involves two criteria for the evaluation of pleasures, the criteria of purity and of truth, both of which yield the result that the philosopher’s pleasures are the most pleasant (because it turns out that only those pleasures are pure and only they are true). I will be addressing the criterion of purity, which is based on a psychological/phenomenological account of pleasure and pain. This account has been harshly criticized as full of ambiguity and confusion. I believe, however, that these criticisms result from misunderstanding, and failing to appreciate the complexity of, Plato’s account. In this paper, I will offer an interpretation of Plato’s psychological account of pleasure and pain in Republic IX, showing that this account is, contrary to its detractors, both interesting and persuasive on many points.