facts about the well-being of conscious creatures are mind-dependent facts
How so? (Note that a proposition may be in some sense about minds without its truth value being mind-dependent. E.g. “Any experience of red is an experience of colour” is true regardless of what minds exist. I would think the same is true of, e.g., “All else equal, pain is bad for the experiencer.”)
I’m borrowing the concept ‘well-being of conscious creatures’ from Sam Harris, who seems to think of it in terms of mind-dependent facts, perhaps involving (e.g.) brain states we might call ‘pain’ or ‘pleasure’.
That doesn’t really answer my question. Let me try again. There are two things you might mean by “mind dependent”.
(1) You might just mean “makes some reference to the mind”. So, for example, the necessary truth that “Any experience of red is an experience of colour” would also count as “mind-dependent” in this sense. (This seems a very misleading usage though.)
(2) More naturally, “mind dependent” might be taken to mean that the truth of the claim depends upon certain states of mind actually existing. But “pain is bad for people” (like my example above) does not seem to be mind-dependent in this sense.
By saying that “facts about the well-being of conscious creatures are mind-dependent facts,” I just mean that statements about the well-being of conscious creatures are made true or false by facts abound mind states. A statement about my well-being is mind-dependent in the sense that a statement about my well-being (as I am using the term) is a statement about my brain states. A statement about the distance between my chair and my desk is not a statement about brain states, and would be true or false whether or not our Hubble volume still contained any minds.
I believe the “facts” in question were synthetic ones (“all else being equal, being set on fire is bad for the person set on fire,”) not analytic ones (“all else equal, pain is bad for the experiencer.”)
It’s not analytic that pain is bad. Imagine some crazy soul who thinks that pain is intrinsically good for you. This person is deeply confused, but their error is not linguistic (as if they asserted “bachelors are female”). They could be perfectly competent speakers of the english language, and even logically omniscient. The problem is that such a person is morally incompetent. They have bizarrely mistaken ideas about what things are good (desirable) for people, and this is a substantive (synthetic), not merely analytic, matter.
Perhaps the thought is that contingent (rather than necessary) facts about wellbeing are mind-dependent. That’s still not totally obvious to me, but it does at least seem less clearly false than the original (unrestricted) claim.
The issue is more whether anyone could think pain is good for them themselves. One could imagine a situation where pain receptors connect up to pleasure centers, but
then it becomes a moot point as to whether that is actually pain.
Yes, I was imagining someone who thought that unmitigated pain and suffering was good for everyone, themselves included. Such a person is nuts, but hardly inconceivable.
In the not distant past, some surgeons opposed pain-killing medication for post-operative pain, believing that the pain was essential to the healing process.
There’s also the reports by patients who have had morphone for pain relief, that the pain is still there, but it takes the hurting out of it.
Just to clarify: By ‘pain’ I mean the hurtful aspect of the sensation, not the base sensation that could remain in the absence of its hurting.
In your first paragraph you describe people who take pain to be instrumentally useful in some circumstances, to bring about some other end (e.g. healing) which is itself good. I take no stand on that empirical issue. I’m talking about the crazy normative view that pain is itself (i.e. non-instrumentally) good.
I’m with RichardChappell. Deeming pain intrinsically good is pretty easy, though highly unusual. And deeming pain intrinsically value-neutral is even easier, and not all that unusual. Thus there’s nothing incoherent about denying that pain is intrinsically bad.
For example, plenty of people think animal pain doesn’t matter, not intrinsically anyway. Perhaps Kant is the most famous example. He thinks cruelty to animals is morally wrong only because it is likely to make us cruel to humans. But the animal pain itself is, Kant thinks, irrelevant and perfectly devoid of any value or disvalue.
Certain Stoics would even say that human pain doesn’t matter, not intrinsically anyway. It matters only inasmuch as it causally relates to one’s own virtue, and it has no intrinsic relevance to what is good.
If someone went even further, reversing common sense and insisting that pain were intrinsically good, that would be unusual. But it wouldn’t be incoherent. Not even close. To invent an example, suppose an extremely credulous religious person were told by their leader that pain is intrinsically good. This true-believer would then be convinced that pain is intrinsically good, and they would try to bring about pain in themselves and in others (so long as they didn’t violate any other moral rules endorsed by the leader).
Tangentially:
How so? (Note that a proposition may be in some sense about minds without its truth value being mind-dependent. E.g. “Any experience of red is an experience of colour” is true regardless of what minds exist. I would think the same is true of, e.g., “All else equal, pain is bad for the experiencer.”)
I’m borrowing the concept ‘well-being of conscious creatures’ from Sam Harris, who seems to think of it in terms of mind-dependent facts, perhaps involving (e.g.) brain states we might call ‘pain’ or ‘pleasure’.
That doesn’t really answer my question. Let me try again. There are two things you might mean by “mind dependent”.
(1) You might just mean “makes some reference to the mind”. So, for example, the necessary truth that “Any experience of red is an experience of colour” would also count as “mind-dependent” in this sense. (This seems a very misleading usage though.)
(2) More naturally, “mind dependent” might be taken to mean that the truth of the claim depends upon certain states of mind actually existing. But “pain is bad for people” (like my example above) does not seem to be mind-dependent in this sense.
Which did you have in mind?
By saying that “facts about the well-being of conscious creatures are mind-dependent facts,” I just mean that statements about the well-being of conscious creatures are made true or false by facts abound mind states. A statement about my well-being is mind-dependent in the sense that a statement about my well-being (as I am using the term) is a statement about my brain states. A statement about the distance between my chair and my desk is not a statement about brain states, and would be true or false whether or not our Hubble volume still contained any minds.
I believe the “facts” in question were synthetic ones (“all else being equal, being set on fire is bad for the person set on fire,”) not analytic ones (“all else equal, pain is bad for the experiencer.”)
It’s not analytic that pain is bad. Imagine some crazy soul who thinks that pain is intrinsically good for you. This person is deeply confused, but their error is not linguistic (as if they asserted “bachelors are female”). They could be perfectly competent speakers of the english language, and even logically omniscient. The problem is that such a person is morally incompetent. They have bizarrely mistaken ideas about what things are good (desirable) for people, and this is a substantive (synthetic), not merely analytic, matter.
Perhaps the thought is that contingent (rather than necessary) facts about wellbeing are mind-dependent. That’s still not totally obvious to me, but it does at least seem less clearly false than the original (unrestricted) claim.
The issue is more whether anyone could think pain is good for them themselves. One could imagine a situation where pain receptors connect up to pleasure centers, but then it becomes a moot point as to whether that is actually pain.
Yes, I was imagining someone who thought that unmitigated pain and suffering was good for everyone, themselves included. Such a person is nuts, but hardly inconceivable.
In the not distant past, some surgeons opposed pain-killing medication for post-operative pain, believing that the pain was essential to the healing process.
There’s also the reports by patients who have had morphone for pain relief, that the pain is still there, but it takes the hurting out of it.
Just to clarify: By ‘pain’ I mean the hurtful aspect of the sensation, not the base sensation that could remain in the absence of its hurting.
In your first paragraph you describe people who take pain to be instrumentally useful in some circumstances, to bring about some other end (e.g. healing) which is itself good. I take no stand on that empirical issue. I’m talking about the crazy normative view that pain is itself (i.e. non-instrumentally) good.
I’m with RichardChappell. Deeming pain intrinsically good is pretty easy, though highly unusual. And deeming pain intrinsically value-neutral is even easier, and not all that unusual. Thus there’s nothing incoherent about denying that pain is intrinsically bad.
For example, plenty of people think animal pain doesn’t matter, not intrinsically anyway. Perhaps Kant is the most famous example. He thinks cruelty to animals is morally wrong only because it is likely to make us cruel to humans. But the animal pain itself is, Kant thinks, irrelevant and perfectly devoid of any value or disvalue.
Certain Stoics would even say that human pain doesn’t matter, not intrinsically anyway. It matters only inasmuch as it causally relates to one’s own virtue, and it has no intrinsic relevance to what is good.
If someone went even further, reversing common sense and insisting that pain were intrinsically good, that would be unusual. But it wouldn’t be incoherent. Not even close. To invent an example, suppose an extremely credulous religious person were told by their leader that pain is intrinsically good. This true-believer would then be convinced that pain is intrinsically good, and they would try to bring about pain in themselves and in others (so long as they didn’t violate any other moral rules endorsed by the leader).