Pain is a sensation; it would be odd to call it fundamentally good or bad, any more than it would be to call heat or cold or sweet or sour good or bad.
However, pain usually causes suffering. The correlation is probably close to .95, at least if you except cases of minor pain (i.e. <4 out of 10 subjectively rated). Suffering (experiencing absolute negative utility, as opposed to missing out on positive utility) is bad under most moral systems. Because the correlation between pain and suffering is so high, the exceptions get ignored and pain gets called bad. If sourness caused suffering as reliably and frequently as pain does, people would likely also call it bad.
Also, with respect to human health, pain is “good” only because no alternative exists. My hand can’t code an urgent message to my brain to get it the hell off the stove without using pain (in almost all people, anyhow). That makes presence of pain preferable to absence of pain, but that hardly makes pain itself “good,” it’s simply the only tool we have to accomplish that ends. And a great deal of pain (particularly, intense pain) is either incorrect or redundant; the pain either seriously exceeds its source, or the injury or ailment would register as sufficiently urgent without overwhelming pain signals.
Pain is a sensation; it would be odd to call it fundamentally good or bad, any more than it would be to call heat or cold or sweet or sour good or bad.
However, pain usually causes suffering. The correlation is probably close to .95, at least if you except cases of minor pain (i.e. <4 out of 10 subjectively rated). Suffering (experiencing absolute negative utility, as opposed to missing out on positive utility) is bad under most moral systems. Because the correlation between pain and suffering is so high, the exceptions get ignored and pain gets called bad. If sourness caused suffering as reliably and frequently as pain does, people would likely also call it bad.
Also, with respect to human health, pain is “good” only because no alternative exists. My hand can’t code an urgent message to my brain to get it the hell off the stove without using pain (in almost all people, anyhow). That makes presence of pain preferable to absence of pain, but that hardly makes pain itself “good,” it’s simply the only tool we have to accomplish that ends. And a great deal of pain (particularly, intense pain) is either incorrect or redundant; the pain either seriously exceeds its source, or the injury or ailment would register as sufficiently urgent without overwhelming pain signals.