It does seem natural to think that pleasure (in and of itself) is a good thing, and pain a bad thing. But it would be hasty to conclude that these connections are necessary, rather than merely observations of general regularities. The experience of being in pain, in particular, need not always be unpleasant. Even normal subjects may be indifferent to very mild pains – such as when muscles become stiff after strenuous exercise. Furthermore, the terms ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’ both extend to cover a wide range of states: we experience pleasant sensations (or ‘sensory pleasure’), are pleased at finishing a piece of work, undergo painful operations, are pained by our failures, etc. Not only do the subjects of the experiences vary (good food, success, music, may all be sources of pleasure), but the subjective nature of the mental states also varies: pleasure may dominate our consciousness, be acute, mild, or – on some accounts – entirely devoid of phenomenal feel.46
44 See e.g. Dennett 1978: 220-222; Elithorn, Glithero & Slater 1958. 45 Grahek 2007, esp. 30-35.
46 See Feldman 1997: 104 &
The natural conclusion to draw from the lobotomy and pain asymbolia cases, I think, is that pain need not always be disvaluable – since if we are genuinely indifferent to its presence, it doesn’t matter whether we feel it or not. What is missing is an aversion to the sensation: were the patients averse to the sensation, then there would be reason for them (and us) to diminish that sensation. So we may distinguish between ‘mere’ sensory pain, on the one hand, and suffering, on the other, where suffering is to be understood as a combination of a sensation and a certain kind of aversion to that sensation. Following Feldman, let us clarify that this aversion needs to be ‘intrinsic’ – i.e. an aversion to the sensation for what it is, rather than for some other reason. This rules out, for
instance, being averse to the pleasant taste of chocolate because we know that it will lead to obesity. I leave the phenomenal nature of this aversion open for the time being.
There is an immediate worry here, that if the key property is ‘intrinsic aversion’, rather than the sensation itself, then any kind of sensation whatsoever may give rise to this aversion – even
sensations which are generally considered pleasant, such as the sensation of a cool breeze on a hot day. But this, I think, is an advantage, rather than a problem, for the theory. There are those who – although rare – have peculiar tastes, or pathological aversions to certain stimuli. For these people, their lives would go much better if they managed reliably to avoid whichever normally- pleasant sensations they are averse to.
Now it does seem slightly curious to allow that the ‘brute’ sensation may detach from our
response to it. There is a great deal of evidence – both from introspection and from more rigorous sources – for the existence of top-down as well as bottom-up processing for ‘brute’ sensations. That is, the quality of a ‘brute’ sensation may vary according to how averse we are to the sensation, what we expect of the sensation, and so on. I am not, therefore, claiming that sensations, on the one hand, and our responses to them, on the other, are entirely independent. What I am claiming – and this seems to me to be fairly plausible – is that in certain abnormal cases the relation between the sensation and the response may be non-standard, but that the sensation and response may nonetheless be identifiably similar to standard sensations and
responses. Pain asymbolia patients, for instance, do indeed feel pain, but are simply indifferent to it (as opposed to feeling pain*, rather than pain). Yet there is a strong intuitive resistance to the thought that, in the case of such patients, there is no particular reason to refrain from torturing them (provided that it doesn’t cause them physical harm, that is). It isn’t acceptable to inflict pain on others simply because they don’t mind it (although this might be less obvious in the case of the
masochist who actively welcomes certain kinds of pain). I suspect, however, that this intuition is mistaken, although warranted. The entirely justifiable reluctance to inflict pain on others is unlikely to be sensitive to such exceptional cases as those of patients with pain asymbolia.47 Equally, we should expect it to be difficult to empathise with such exceptional cases. In order to see the world from the point of view of someone with, for instance, a severe phobia of certain colours, we need to work very hard - and even then, it is unlikely that we will be particularly successful.
Similarly, one might raise the following concern. I have suggested that empathy provides a route to moral knowledge: by putting ourselves in the others’ shoes, we can see that there is (agent- neutral) reason to relieve their pain. But if the brute sensation detaches from its unpleasantness, such that there can be pleasant (or at least non-aversive) instances of pain, then empathy may not give us an accurate indication of the reasons that there are. The relevant question, here, is whether empathy is a matter of understanding the other’s brute sensations, or whether it is a matter of putting ourselves in their shoes. After all, what we need to know is how to treat other people. Understanding that, for instance, lobotomy patients are not averse to pain may give us less reason to refrain from harming them. The key question is not what brute sensations they are experiencing - after all, patients with pathological aversions to certain stimuli may be experiencing perfectly standard ‘brute sensations’ - but whether they are averse or amenable to these sensations.
Empathy may allow us to understand that a stimulus which would be amenable to us is, for them, deeply unpleasant (or vice versa).
The upshot of the present discussion is that we should, for the purposes of the hybrid theory, talk of ‘pleasureP and suffering’, where pleasurep is to be understood as a mental state involving some
kind of pro-attitude, and suffering is to be understood as a mental state involving some con- attitude. This proposal mirrors Feldman’s – unsurprisingly, given the shared theoretical
motivation (viz., hedonism). If it is possible for there to be pains to which we are not averse – and which are not disvaluable – then pain cannot be intrinsically disvaluable (at least, not on the strict
understanding of intrinsicality at use in this thesis, according to which an object or property X is intrinsically F if and only if at every possible world W at which X exists X is F), since to be intrinsically disvaluable requires being disvaluable in each and every situation in which pain
arises.48 It also locates value in the complex experience of enjoying whichever sensations, facts, or possibilities we are experiencing, contemplating, or imagining, rather than in those sensations, facts, or possibilities themselves.
This, of course, leaves open the question of what pleasureP and suffering are. There is a possible
problem here: one might think, with Feldman, that some cases of pleasurep are
phenomenologically inert. There is simply nothing that it is like to experience some cases of propositional pleasure. Feldman, for instance, claims that ‘propositional pleasure is not a feeling . . . from the fact that someone is taking propositional pleasure in some fact, it does not follow that he is experiencing any pleasant feelings.’49I may be pleased that the war in Bosnia has ended, but
this does not mean that I am experiencing any pleasant sensations. Although there is a sense in which this is certainly true – I can be pleased that some fact obtains without experiencing any pleasant sensations – there is also a sense in which it is false. Provided that we assume that ‘being pleased at . . .’ is a conscious experience, we must assume that there is something that it is like to be pleased at. Pleasure, in the sense that the hedonists are interested in, should be understood to be a conscious experience – otherwise, we don’t have much reason to think that it is valuable. Even supposing that Feldman were right, and that ‘being pleased at x’ is a state which, like ‘hoping for x’, may be unconscious, that kind of pleasure would not interest the hedonist. The key intuition which is being traded on here is that undetectable goods are of no value to the recipient, and hence of no value simpliciter. So the relevant notion of ‘being pleased at’ is one of ‘being consciously pleased at’, or ‘being pleased at in a way which impinges on our consciousness’ (I take it that being pleased at something might have a noticeable impact on our conscious
experience, even if we are not aware of being pleased as such). And in that case, although being
pleased at something is not a matter of having a pleasant sensation, there is something that it is like to be in this state – something distinctively pleasant.
Even if we allow that there may be instances of pains to which we are indifferent – or perhaps even pleasurable pains – there does seem to be some conceptual connection between pain and unpleasantness (or suffering). This connection can be brought out by some now-familiar Twin- Earth considerations. On Earth, it is generally true that individuals who feel pain perceive it as unpleasant, wish to avoid it, and so on. The inhabitants of Sensation Twin-Earth, on the other
48 It is possible to understand the notion differently: as Feldman suggests (Feldman 1997: 140 fn. 29),
height is an intrinsic property of persons, but any given individual might have had a different height. But I will leave this issue to one side.
hand, claim to feel pain but display indifference to it, whilst being alike Earthlings in every other important respect. For the abnormal cases on Earth – lobotomy patients who feel pain but are indifferent to it, instances of pain asymbolia, etc. – we can maintain that they are competent users of the term ‘pain’ in virtue of their relation to their pre-lobotomised selves, or to others. On Twin Earth, however, this is not possible: we should not, therefore, be willing to treat Twin Earthlings as being competent users of the term ‘pain’. One might think, then, that there is a conceptual connection between pain and unpleasantness such that, necessarily, for any given community of language-users, it is generally true that pain-sensations are unpleasant. This, in turn, would go some way towards explaining why pain and pleasure are naturally – if erroneously – thought of as opposites.