If I understand what you’re saying, and if you really mean that is the sole or even the main reason why pain is a bad thing, I don’t like that line of thought at all. It implies:
There’s no reason to alleviate the pain of people who are incapacitated (eg bedridden hospital patients, people undergoing surgery) because they wouldn’t be accomplishing any goals anyway.
There’s no reason to care if a person with no goals or bad goals is in pain.
There’s no reason to care about low levels of pain that don’t prevent someone from achieving a goal.
Any infliction of pain that increases a person’s productivity, for example whipping slaves, has no downside (to one who already accepts slavery).
There’s no problem with inflicting pain on animals, since they don’t have any interesting values anyway.
If Hell existed, it wouldn’t be a big problem because what are you going to be accomplishing after you die anyway?
“Alleviate other people’s pain” shouldn’t be a supergoal, but only a subgoal depending on whether you like what those people’s goals are.
We don’t have to work for the sake of happiness alone, but happiness can’t be entirely subsumed by other wants.
I try to make space for people to recant old positions because I certainly need it.
You’re saying the points are implied by the first comment in the thread, and I don’t think they are. I see by your clarifications that I agree with you significantly about the issue itself but I think you are very wrong about the implications of “Pain...is bad, because it interferes with working towards what one values.”
For instance:
Consider someone whose only ambition is to collect every Pokemon in the world. Kpreid’s scenario suggests a dichotomy: either it is okay to cause this person pain, or the only reason not to cause this person pain is because it might prevent Pokemons from being collected.
If my goal is for people to not be in pain, pain to that collector is obviously bad. If my goal is for people who don’t want to be in pain not to be in pain, a consequentialist calculation probably indicates I should still work to minimize the pain of people who protest that they don’t care despite their statements.
I don’t disagree that “pain [can be] bad because it interferes with working toward what one values”, I only disagree that that is the only reason pain can possibly be bad.
Maybe the confusion here is translating between pain and utility. I view KPReid as making the claim:
“Pain in itself should not be considered disutility. Only failure to achieve a goal should be considered disutility, and pain should be counted as decreasing utility only insofar as it affects that.”
(where ‘goal’ here is an explicit goal like ‘collect Pokemon’ and not an implicit goal like ‘avoid pain’. If all kpreid was trying to say was that “avoid pain” can be considered a “goal”, I agree. In the Pokemon example, I’m assuming a neurotypical Pokemon collector who may have dedicated her life to collecting Pokemon, but still feels pain in the same way everyone else does and dislikes it—not a nonhuman Pokemon-maximizer)
I consider myself as making the different claim:
“Pain in itself can be disutility if the person involved does not want pain.”
Note that under my interpretation, it doesn’t matter whether or not the pain conveys information; information may be a counterbalancing factor that outweighs the disutility of the pain, but the pain is still bad. See my response to Silas.
I’m still not convinced we don’t mostly agree on this issue.
We pretty much agree on the issue itself. I don’t see why a person gets to “own” their pain, someone’s pain can be disutility for a second person who cares about it.
I agree with kpreid that you are wrong about what others are saying, that’s mostly it.
Nitpickery: I do not agree with “Pain in itself should not be considered disutility. Only failure to achieve a goal should be considered disutility [...]”, nor does kpreid_2009. On rereading the thread somewhat, I think that your comment “This seems like straightforward utilitarianism…” best describes what I was aiming at.
I think that pain in itself probably does become disutility (which is often offset by the information it carries), possibly through some intermediate stages. However, I don’t want to be more precise than that, as I think at the moment that this issue is inseperable from formalizing (I first wrote “turning into something like a utility function” but that may assume too much) the entirety of the godshatter.
Please don’t take me as having thought this through thoroughly...
I did not intend for that description to be considered outside the person. All of what you’re describing are plans the person or animal themselves would disagree with (if they could), yes?
Here’s a different statement of roughly the same idea: “My excess pain is bad because it interferes with what I want to do, without benefiting anyone else.”
Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re doing. Your criteria seems to set a standard for determining which pain is bad, and that criteria I would agree with. The pain that’s bad is the pain beyond that necessary to send a useful signal.
What I interpreted Alicorn as asking was why pain is bad in the first place. A lot of things can be useless, for example a tune that keeps playing in your head, but useless pain seems to be worse than useless anything else because of something especially bad about pain. Even from an intrapersonal perspective, I can’t agree that pain is all about goals. Consider the following thought experiment:
I offer you two choices for tomorrow. Option one: I will torture you for six hours, using a method that is very painful but will leave no lasting scars or aftereffects, and you can spend the rest of the day doing whatever you want. Option two: I will give you a sedative that causes you to sleep through all of tomorrow: you will wake up the day after tomorrow.
If the only problem with pain was that it interferes with things people want to do, then everyone should take Option 1 without a second thought: the pain interferes with what they want to do for six hours, and then they can spend the rest of the day free. But I would take Option 2 (would you?) suggesting that there is more to the negative value of pain than simple inability to do things while you’re experiencing it.
I have no particular well-structured reply to this. Miscellaneous thoughts.
Let’s just attribute that preference to bias and move on :) (That is: This is an extremely “unnatural” scenario involving rather primitive brain hardware.)
No lasting aftereffects? I think you’d have to turn this into an “and you don’t remember afterward” scenario.
No lasting aftereffects? I think you’d have to turn this into an “and you don’t remember afterward” scenario.
Indeed. Pain causes operant conditioning; removing the operant conditioning makes the pain be something very unlike pain. In fact, according to a theory I vaguely remember, the idea of pain is, to a great extent, a rationalization of aversion: “I don’t want to do X. I guess I don’t want to do it because it will cause me pain.” If this vague rememberance were completely true, it wouldn’t be pain at all. But this vague rememberance ignores the fact that we know whether we’re in pain or not at the time we are or not in pain.
I don’t think your counterexamples accurately state a scenario or apply kpreid’s reasoning correctly:
There’s no reason to alleviate the pain of people who are incapacitated (eg bedridden hospital patients, people undergoing surgery) because they wouldn’t be accomplishing any goals anyway.
He was clear that the pain in surgery conveys no new information. Plus, the bedridden can clearly accomplish some goals.
There’s no reason to care if a person with no goals or bad goals is in pain.
In this context, it’s not really possible for someone not to have goals. They might not explicitly be able to state long-term goals, but as long as they’re taking deliberate actions, they have goals. And yes, for sufficiently bad goals, you do care how hard it is for the person to carry them out!
There’s no reason to care about low levels of pain that don’t prevent someone from achieving a goal.
The standard is hindrance, not prevention, and any level of pain will hinder, or you will not identify it as pain.
He was clear that the pain in surgery conveys no new information.
Let me try to explain this better, then. Imagine we take a person who needs surgery but was never told by their doctor what part of their body the surgery will be on. We perform the surgery without any anaesthetic and with the patient blindfolded. In this case, the pain is giving new information (“AAAIE! MY RIGHT LEG!”) but we still don’t approve.
kpreid could clarify that this information is useless (in that the patient doesn’t gain anything from knowing) and that (s)he meant useful information. But this isn’t true either. I could state before the surgery that I will give the patient ten cents if they can tell me which of their limbs I operated on, but this still wouldn’t make it okay to perform surgery without anaesthetic.
The way I would have put kpreid’s point is that the pain must provide sufficiently useful information to offset its painfulness. If putting someone under surgery without anaesthetic earned someone ten cents, I would consider it an atrocity, but if it was necessary so that the patient could help guide the surgeon by telling them what they feel, saving the patient’s life, then it might be a necessary measure.
However, this seems like straightforward utilitarianism, in which the benefit of getting information must outweigh the cost of having such terrible pain. This means it can’t be used as a definition of why pain is a cost.
I would say that pain is a cost for other reasons, but that when pain conveys information, the information can be a counterbalancing factor. This makes it a mistake to say that the reason pain is a cost is that it doesn’t convey information, equivalent to saying that the reason bombing civilians in Afghanistan is bad is that it doesn’t kill Osama bin Laden. The reason bombing civilians is bad is because murder is wrong. Killing Osama bin Laden would be a potential counterbalancing factor that might justify bombing the civilians, but lack of Osama-killing is not the definition of the evil of murder.
In this context, it’s not really possible for someone not to have goals. They might not explicitly be able to state long-term goals, but as long as they’re taking deliberate actions, they have goals. And yes, for sufficiently bad goals, you do care how hard it is for the person to carry them out!
Consider someone whose only ambition is to collect every Pokemon in the world. Kpreid’s scenario suggests a dichotomy: either it is okay to cause this person pain, or the only reason not to cause this person pain is because it might prevent Pokemons from being collected. I don’t think this captures the reason we don’t break the bones of Pokemon collectors (even though we all feel sorely tempted sometimes.)
Without commenting on the rest of your comment, I would like to clarify a point:
Let me try to explain this better, then. Imagine we take a person who needs surgery but was never told by their doctor what part of their body the surgery will be on. We perform the surgery without any anaesthetic and with the patient blindfolded. In this case, the pain is giving new information (“AAAIE! MY RIGHT LEG!”) but we still don’t approve.
The first little twinge (also, mechanical sensation that is not pain) in any given spot tells them what’s going on and is useful. The rest of it that sums up to “AAAIE!” is useless-and-therefore-bad.
Also, it’s common for someone to not want to know what’s going on; they would prefer, not just the absence of pain, but any sensation, any information from the body part(s) involved; this is reasonable and, I would argue, a separate module from the badness of (some) pain.
Consider someone whose only ambition is to collect every Pokemon in the world. Kpreid’s scenario suggests a dichotomy: either it is okay to cause this person pain, or the only reason not to cause this person pain is because it might prevent Pokemons from being collected.
I would agree with this statement. This person’s ambition does not involve not having pain; they would gladly be tortured for six years if that were the most efficient way of getting one more Pokemon.
Does “not having pain” count as an ambition? If so, then probably anything we like or dislike can be described as ambition or goal, and “pain interferes with our goals” reduces to liitle more than “we don’t like pain”.
Well, “ambition” isn’t much of a word for it, seeing as how it isn’t very ambitious. But yes, I think that we can generally describe our likes and dislikes as goals, in which case not liking pain very much makes pain interfere with our goals.
I would say that pain is a cost for other reasons, but that when pain conveys information, the information can be a counterbalancing factor. This makes it a mistake to say that the reason pain is a cost is that it doesn’t convey information, equivalent to saying that the reason bombing civilians in Afghanistan is bad is that it doesn’t kill Osama bin Laden. The reason bombing civilians is bad is because murder is wrong. Killing Osama bin Laden would be a potential counterbalancing factor that might justify bombing the civilians, but lack of Osama-killing is not the definition of the evil of murder.
Good point; I wasn’t careful to distinguish between a “benefit” and an “outweighed cost”. However, as I mentioned in another comment, akrasia can blur the distinction. For example, what if pain causes me to take the necessary action against a minor health problem before it becomes a major problem, when otherwise I’d procrastinate? My future self would be very thankful.
Yet you cannot view the pain as some add-on attribute here. The displeasure is part of its usefulness. Simply informing me that “hey, you gotta have this looked at soon” isn’t enough; what I need is for my short-term goal ranking to agree with my long-term goal ranking.
Consider someone whose only ambition is to collect every Pokemon in the world.
A contrived scenario. There is no such person, nor will there likely ever be. There might be someone whose only stated, conscious goal is to collect every Pokemon, but their biology prevents them from making that their only actual goal.
So you’re right that we don’t break the bones of Pokemon collectors, but their friends do try make the collector’s long-term goals match up with their short-term goals, and exert social pressure to tame the obsession. As in the above example, pain can be good here.
If I understand what you’re saying, and if you really mean that is the sole or even the main reason why pain is a bad thing, I don’t like that line of thought at all. It implies:
There’s no reason to alleviate the pain of people who are incapacitated (eg bedridden hospital patients, people undergoing surgery) because they wouldn’t be accomplishing any goals anyway.
There’s no reason to care if a person with no goals or bad goals is in pain.
There’s no reason to care about low levels of pain that don’t prevent someone from achieving a goal.
Any infliction of pain that increases a person’s productivity, for example whipping slaves, has no downside (to one who already accepts slavery).
There’s no problem with inflicting pain on animals, since they don’t have any interesting values anyway.
If Hell existed, it wouldn’t be a big problem because what are you going to be accomplishing after you die anyway?
“Alleviate other people’s pain” shouldn’t be a supergoal, but only a subgoal depending on whether you like what those people’s goals are.
We don’t have to work for the sake of happiness alone, but happiness can’t be entirely subsumed by other wants.
I’m curious as to whether or not you still stand by the opinions and reasoning expressed in this comment.
Yes, and by the clarifications elsewhere on this thread. Is there some reason I shouldn’t?
Well, you’re usually right about everything, so this is quite a break in the pattern. ;-)
That’s the most confusing way of being disagreed with I’ve ever experienced :)
...you are aware that I’m attacking each of the bullet points in the comment above, not agreeing with them—right?
I try to make space for people to recant old positions because I certainly need it.
You’re saying the points are implied by the first comment in the thread, and I don’t think they are. I see by your clarifications that I agree with you significantly about the issue itself but I think you are very wrong about the implications of “Pain...is bad, because it interferes with working towards what one values.”
For instance:
If my goal is for people to not be in pain, pain to that collector is obviously bad. If my goal is for people who don’t want to be in pain not to be in pain, a consequentialist calculation probably indicates I should still work to minimize the pain of people who protest that they don’t care despite their statements.
I don’t disagree that “pain [can be] bad because it interferes with working toward what one values”, I only disagree that that is the only reason pain can possibly be bad.
Maybe the confusion here is translating between pain and utility. I view KPReid as making the claim:
“Pain in itself should not be considered disutility. Only failure to achieve a goal should be considered disutility, and pain should be counted as decreasing utility only insofar as it affects that.”
(where ‘goal’ here is an explicit goal like ‘collect Pokemon’ and not an implicit goal like ‘avoid pain’. If all kpreid was trying to say was that “avoid pain” can be considered a “goal”, I agree. In the Pokemon example, I’m assuming a neurotypical Pokemon collector who may have dedicated her life to collecting Pokemon, but still feels pain in the same way everyone else does and dislikes it—not a nonhuman Pokemon-maximizer)
I consider myself as making the different claim:
“Pain in itself can be disutility if the person involved does not want pain.”
Note that under my interpretation, it doesn’t matter whether or not the pain conveys information; information may be a counterbalancing factor that outweighs the disutility of the pain, but the pain is still bad. See my response to Silas.
I’m still not convinced we don’t mostly agree on this issue.
We pretty much agree on the issue itself. I don’t see why a person gets to “own” their pain, someone’s pain can be disutility for a second person who cares about it.
I agree with kpreid that you are wrong about what others are saying, that’s mostly it.
Okay, I assume it’s a misunderstanding on my part and sorry about that. (lays dead thread to rest)
Nitpickery: I do not agree with “Pain in itself should not be considered disutility. Only failure to achieve a goal should be considered disutility [...]”, nor does kpreid_2009. On rereading the thread somewhat, I think that your comment “This seems like straightforward utilitarianism…” best describes what I was aiming at.
I think that pain in itself probably does become disutility (which is often offset by the information it carries), possibly through some intermediate stages. However, I don’t want to be more precise than that, as I think at the moment that this issue is inseperable from formalizing (I first wrote “turning into something like a utility function” but that may assume too much) the entirety of the godshatter.
Please don’t take me as having thought this through thoroughly...
I did not intend for that description to be considered outside the person. All of what you’re describing are plans the person or animal themselves would disagree with (if they could), yes?
Here’s a different statement of roughly the same idea: “My excess pain is bad because it interferes with what I want to do, without benefiting anyone else.”
Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re doing. Your criteria seems to set a standard for determining which pain is bad, and that criteria I would agree with. The pain that’s bad is the pain beyond that necessary to send a useful signal.
What I interpreted Alicorn as asking was why pain is bad in the first place. A lot of things can be useless, for example a tune that keeps playing in your head, but useless pain seems to be worse than useless anything else because of something especially bad about pain. Even from an intrapersonal perspective, I can’t agree that pain is all about goals. Consider the following thought experiment:
I offer you two choices for tomorrow. Option one: I will torture you for six hours, using a method that is very painful but will leave no lasting scars or aftereffects, and you can spend the rest of the day doing whatever you want. Option two: I will give you a sedative that causes you to sleep through all of tomorrow: you will wake up the day after tomorrow.
If the only problem with pain was that it interferes with things people want to do, then everyone should take Option 1 without a second thought: the pain interferes with what they want to do for six hours, and then they can spend the rest of the day free. But I would take Option 2 (would you?) suggesting that there is more to the negative value of pain than simple inability to do things while you’re experiencing it.
I have no particular well-structured reply to this. Miscellaneous thoughts.
Let’s just attribute that preference to bias and move on :) (That is: This is an extremely “unnatural” scenario involving rather primitive brain hardware.)
No lasting aftereffects? I think you’d have to turn this into an “and you don’t remember afterward” scenario.
Indeed. Pain causes operant conditioning; removing the operant conditioning makes the pain be something very unlike pain. In fact, according to a theory I vaguely remember, the idea of pain is, to a great extent, a rationalization of aversion: “I don’t want to do X. I guess I don’t want to do it because it will cause me pain.” If this vague rememberance were completely true, it wouldn’t be pain at all. But this vague rememberance ignores the fact that we know whether we’re in pain or not at the time we are or not in pain.
I don’t think your counterexamples accurately state a scenario or apply kpreid’s reasoning correctly:
He was clear that the pain in surgery conveys no new information. Plus, the bedridden can clearly accomplish some goals.
In this context, it’s not really possible for someone not to have goals. They might not explicitly be able to state long-term goals, but as long as they’re taking deliberate actions, they have goals. And yes, for sufficiently bad goals, you do care how hard it is for the person to carry them out!
The standard is hindrance, not prevention, and any level of pain will hinder, or you will not identify it as pain.
Let me try to explain this better, then. Imagine we take a person who needs surgery but was never told by their doctor what part of their body the surgery will be on. We perform the surgery without any anaesthetic and with the patient blindfolded. In this case, the pain is giving new information (“AAAIE! MY RIGHT LEG!”) but we still don’t approve.
kpreid could clarify that this information is useless (in that the patient doesn’t gain anything from knowing) and that (s)he meant useful information. But this isn’t true either. I could state before the surgery that I will give the patient ten cents if they can tell me which of their limbs I operated on, but this still wouldn’t make it okay to perform surgery without anaesthetic.
The way I would have put kpreid’s point is that the pain must provide sufficiently useful information to offset its painfulness. If putting someone under surgery without anaesthetic earned someone ten cents, I would consider it an atrocity, but if it was necessary so that the patient could help guide the surgeon by telling them what they feel, saving the patient’s life, then it might be a necessary measure.
However, this seems like straightforward utilitarianism, in which the benefit of getting information must outweigh the cost of having such terrible pain. This means it can’t be used as a definition of why pain is a cost.
I would say that pain is a cost for other reasons, but that when pain conveys information, the information can be a counterbalancing factor. This makes it a mistake to say that the reason pain is a cost is that it doesn’t convey information, equivalent to saying that the reason bombing civilians in Afghanistan is bad is that it doesn’t kill Osama bin Laden. The reason bombing civilians is bad is because murder is wrong. Killing Osama bin Laden would be a potential counterbalancing factor that might justify bombing the civilians, but lack of Osama-killing is not the definition of the evil of murder.
Consider someone whose only ambition is to collect every Pokemon in the world. Kpreid’s scenario suggests a dichotomy: either it is okay to cause this person pain, or the only reason not to cause this person pain is because it might prevent Pokemons from being collected. I don’t think this captures the reason we don’t break the bones of Pokemon collectors (even though we all feel sorely tempted sometimes.)
The plural of Pokémon is Pokémon.
...give me one reason not to break your bones right now.
Because pain is bad? :P
Interesting, how the biggest karma gains are from replies which aren’t serious (please don’t downvote this :)
I could explain it, but then the joke wouldn’t be funny anymore. ;)
Without commenting on the rest of your comment, I would like to clarify a point:
The first little twinge (also, mechanical sensation that is not pain) in any given spot tells them what’s going on and is useful. The rest of it that sums up to “AAAIE!” is useless-and-therefore-bad.
Also, it’s common for someone to not want to know what’s going on; they would prefer, not just the absence of pain, but any sensation, any information from the body part(s) involved; this is reasonable and, I would argue, a separate module from the badness of (some) pain.
I would agree with this statement. This person’s ambition does not involve not having pain; they would gladly be tortured for six years if that were the most efficient way of getting one more Pokemon.
Does “not having pain” count as an ambition? If so, then probably anything we like or dislike can be described as ambition or goal, and “pain interferes with our goals” reduces to liitle more than “we don’t like pain”.
Well, “ambition” isn’t much of a word for it, seeing as how it isn’t very ambitious. But yes, I think that we can generally describe our likes and dislikes as goals, in which case not liking pain very much makes pain interfere with our goals.
Good point; I wasn’t careful to distinguish between a “benefit” and an “outweighed cost”. However, as I mentioned in another comment, akrasia can blur the distinction. For example, what if pain causes me to take the necessary action against a minor health problem before it becomes a major problem, when otherwise I’d procrastinate? My future self would be very thankful.
Yet you cannot view the pain as some add-on attribute here. The displeasure is part of its usefulness. Simply informing me that “hey, you gotta have this looked at soon” isn’t enough; what I need is for my short-term goal ranking to agree with my long-term goal ranking.
A contrived scenario. There is no such person, nor will there likely ever be. There might be someone whose only stated, conscious goal is to collect every Pokemon, but their biology prevents them from making that their only actual goal.
So you’re right that we don’t break the bones of Pokemon collectors, but their friends do try make the collector’s long-term goals match up with their short-term goals, and exert social pressure to tame the obsession. As in the above example, pain can be good here.