One obvious downside to pain is that it tends to hijack your thought processes. It becomes increasingly difficult to think (and act) effectively as the amount of pain you’re in increases. Therefore pain inhibits you from achieving any goals you might have, which seems like generic badness to me.
But an alternate way to phrase that is that being in pain supplies you with a new, generally overriding goal: to get out of pain. Unless you think that, in general, acquiring new goals is bad, or that, in general, you shouldn’t have goals that aren’t maximally compatible with each other, I don’t see what’s necessarily bad about acquiring the goal “get out of pain”—unless you have an independent reason to think that the situation which yields that goal (pain) is bad.
Anything that diverts your attention from without would be bad for the same reason: a sudden movement, the commencement of some noise, a change in temperature, an adjustment of the ambient light, celery suddenly tasting like sugar cane. That does not make these things bad. It makes them attention-getting. Pain is attention-getting, but that can’t be all there is to it.
What about brief pains, then? If I touch something that’s built up a static charge and it shocks me and I experience a moment of pain, it quite promptly “lets go”. Why does that situation seem worse than the situation in which I touch something that has built up a static charge and experience the scent of roses, or the sound of a flute, for that same moment?
I think it’s reasonable to say that having a new goal forced on you against your will is bad. Certainly if a person gave you a new goal against your will (through brainwashing, or just doing some damage to you) we would morally condemn that person.
Furthermore, many types of pain offer no obvious means to get rid of them (e.g. chronic lower back pain, or migraines), so it could be considered an objectively bad goal for that reason.
Certainly we would. But I don’t think it generally follows from “a person who causes state X should be condemned” that state X is bad. Intention matters. If someone, in attempting to lie to me, causes me to believe something true (because they were mistaken about the fact of the matter on which they lied), that doesn’t mean that believing a truth is bad, but (the attempt at) lying is still wrong/condemnable.
To put it a little differently: I’d be displeased about it if someone brainwashed me to have a new goal against my will. But I’d also be displeased about anything that anybody could do with my mind without my express invitation, even if it were something I would have expressly invited (e.g. “now raw celery tastes like sugar cane!”) My intuitions about that have to do with the invasiveness that comes of involving another agent, and not with the result. We tend to feel differently about things we do to ourselves, and things that happen to us through mindless processes, and things that are done to us on purpose by other persons. Even if those things are all alike.
I see your point and recognize that my motivational example was a bad one. If I were to try again I’d invoke something like stare decisis: it’s difficult to plan how to efficiently achieve your goals if the goals keep changing, therefore having your goals changed unexpectedly is bad.
I’m not sure quite what you mean by goals here. The most plausible interpretation I can offer is that:
Goals are the drives that cause behavior. “Because of goals X and Y” is an answer to “Why did you do Z?” (and not an answer to “Why should you do Z?”).
In this case, we ought to adopt the set of goals that (through the actions they cause) maximize our expected utility. Our utility function needn’t mention goal-achievement specifically; goals are just the way it gets implemented. Acquiring a goal uncorrelated with our utility function is bad, because value is fragile.
It’s not that the causes of the goal “get out of pain” are bad; it’s that the consequences might be. For a wide range of utility functions (most of which make no explicit mention of pain), a system that provided information about damage without otherwise altering the decision-making process would be more useful.
Goals are for achieving. If a high-priority goal is hard to satisfy, my utility function returns a low number.
My answer to the main question: pain does an important job, but there are better ways to do it. Heck, pain can even hinder the goal of getting out of pain, it’s so bad.
I don’t see what’s necessarily bad about acquiring the goal “get out of pain”
Well if the pain hurts (which it does), and you don’t know how to stop the pain, and the pain does not direct you to do things that make the pain go away, then I think the answer’s pretty obvious. The pain isn’t changing your goals; it’s just making it harder to think about them, and thus achieve them.
It seems that you can have a goal without any clear way to achieve it. If you’re in pain and don’t know how to fix that (short of, presumably, suicide), you can still have the goal “get out of pain”. I think I could legitimately be said to have the goal “live forever”, even though I don’t know how to do that. Are you saying it’s bad to have goals that you don’t know how to achieve?
One obvious downside to pain is that it tends to hijack your thought processes. It becomes increasingly difficult to think (and act) effectively as the amount of pain you’re in increases. Therefore pain inhibits you from achieving any goals you might have, which seems like generic badness to me.
But an alternate way to phrase that is that being in pain supplies you with a new, generally overriding goal: to get out of pain. Unless you think that, in general, acquiring new goals is bad, or that, in general, you shouldn’t have goals that aren’t maximally compatible with each other, I don’t see what’s necessarily bad about acquiring the goal “get out of pain”—unless you have an independent reason to think that the situation which yields that goal (pain) is bad.
I agree with the below discussion. Pain allows an external person/thing to override my existing thought processes. It’s like mind control.
But is this my true reason? I don’t think so.
Anything that diverts your attention from without would be bad for the same reason: a sudden movement, the commencement of some noise, a change in temperature, an adjustment of the ambient light, celery suddenly tasting like sugar cane. That does not make these things bad. It makes them attention-getting. Pain is attention-getting, but that can’t be all there is to it.
I’m not sure I’d characterize those things as not bad if they distracted me from what I’m doing. Badness is subjective.
It gets attention and WON’T LET GO.
What about brief pains, then? If I touch something that’s built up a static charge and it shocks me and I experience a moment of pain, it quite promptly “lets go”. Why does that situation seem worse than the situation in which I touch something that has built up a static charge and experience the scent of roses, or the sound of a flute, for that same moment?
I think it’s reasonable to say that having a new goal forced on you against your will is bad. Certainly if a person gave you a new goal against your will (through brainwashing, or just doing some damage to you) we would morally condemn that person.
Furthermore, many types of pain offer no obvious means to get rid of them (e.g. chronic lower back pain, or migraines), so it could be considered an objectively bad goal for that reason.
Certainly we would. But I don’t think it generally follows from “a person who causes state X should be condemned” that state X is bad. Intention matters. If someone, in attempting to lie to me, causes me to believe something true (because they were mistaken about the fact of the matter on which they lied), that doesn’t mean that believing a truth is bad, but (the attempt at) lying is still wrong/condemnable.
No, of course it doesn’t follow generically. That was more along the lines of a motivation than a formal argument.
To put it a little differently: I’d be displeased about it if someone brainwashed me to have a new goal against my will. But I’d also be displeased about anything that anybody could do with my mind without my express invitation, even if it were something I would have expressly invited (e.g. “now raw celery tastes like sugar cane!”) My intuitions about that have to do with the invasiveness that comes of involving another agent, and not with the result. We tend to feel differently about things we do to ourselves, and things that happen to us through mindless processes, and things that are done to us on purpose by other persons. Even if those things are all alike.
I see your point and recognize that my motivational example was a bad one. If I were to try again I’d invoke something like stare decisis: it’s difficult to plan how to efficiently achieve your goals if the goals keep changing, therefore having your goals changed unexpectedly is bad.
I’m not sure quite what you mean by goals here. The most plausible interpretation I can offer is that:
Goals are the drives that cause behavior. “Because of goals X and Y” is an answer to “Why did you do Z?” (and not an answer to “Why should you do Z?”).
In this case, we ought to adopt the set of goals that (through the actions they cause) maximize our expected utility. Our utility function needn’t mention goal-achievement specifically; goals are just the way it gets implemented. Acquiring a goal uncorrelated with our utility function is bad, because value is fragile.
It’s not that the causes of the goal “get out of pain” are bad; it’s that the consequences might be. For a wide range of utility functions (most of which make no explicit mention of pain), a system that provided information about damage without otherwise altering the decision-making process would be more useful.
Goals are for achieving. If a high-priority goal is hard to satisfy, my utility function returns a low number.
My answer to the main question: pain does an important job, but there are better ways to do it. Heck, pain can even hinder the goal of getting out of pain, it’s so bad.
Well if the pain hurts (which it does), and you don’t know how to stop the pain, and the pain does not direct you to do things that make the pain go away, then I think the answer’s pretty obvious. The pain isn’t changing your goals; it’s just making it harder to think about them, and thus achieve them.
It seems that you can have a goal without any clear way to achieve it. If you’re in pain and don’t know how to fix that (short of, presumably, suicide), you can still have the goal “get out of pain”. I think I could legitimately be said to have the goal “live forever”, even though I don’t know how to do that. Are you saying it’s bad to have goals that you don’t know how to achieve?
My comment mentioned that the pain keeps you from thinking.
So, if the goal is something that you:
a) don’t know how to achieve
b) are unlikely to learn how to achieve
c) have trouble thinking about anything due to the existence of it,
d) don’t even agree with the goal,
e) your health does not suffer from not pursuing the goal
Then yes, taken together, it’s obvious why goals meeting a-e are bad.