First I want to note that “the sensation of pain, considered in and of itself” is, after “the redness of red”, the second most standard example of “qualia”. So if, like good Dennettians, we’re going to deny that qualia exist then we’d better deny that “the sensation of pain in and of itself” has moral disvalue!
I know Dennett’s usually right about this sort of thing and so there must be something to that argument, but I’ve never been able to understand it no matter how hard I try. It looks too much like wishful thinking—“these qualia things are really confusing, so screw that.” Certainly it’s not the sort of Reduction with a capital “R” I’ve heard that’s left me genuinely satisfied about the nonexistence of things like Free Will or Good or Essence-Of-Chair-Ness.
I would be hesitant to say the sensation of pain in and of itself has moral disvalue; I would say that people have preferences against pain and that the violation of those preferences causes moral disvalue in the same sense as the violation of any other preference. I would have no trouble with inflicting pain on a masochist, a person with pain asymbolia, or a person voluntarily undergoing some kind of conditioning.
Damage can also be something people have a preference against, but it’s not necessarily more important than pain. There are amounts of torture such that I would prefer permanently losing a finger to undergoing that torture, and I suspect it’s the same for most other people.
What I want to say is that even with these elaborations, the story is just as repulsive—it offends our moral sense just as much—as any story of torture. This would still be true even if the victim had died shortly after the lobotomy.
You seem to be arguing from “Things other than pain are bad” to “Pain is not bad”, which is not valid.
I admit your Paul Atreides example doesn’t disgust me so much, but I think that’s because number one I have no mental imagery associated with gom jabbars, and number two I feel like he’s a legendary Messiah figure so he should be able to take it.
If we start talking about non-Kwisatz Haderach people, like say your little sister, and we start talking about them being whipped to death instead of an invisible and inscrutable gom jabbar, I find my intuition shifts pretty far the other direction.
I’d be lying if I said I was 100% happy about biting it, but neither am I 100% sure that my position is inconsistent otherwise.
So I’m reading about your moral system in your other post, and I don’t want to get into debating it fully here. But surely you can recognize that just as some things and systems are beautiful and fascinating and complex, there are other systems that are especially and uniquely horrible, and that it is a moral credit to remove them from the world. Sometimes I read about the more horrible atrocities perpetrated in the Nazi camps and North Korea, and I feel physically sick that there is no way I can’t just kill everyone involved, the torturers and victims both, and relieve them of their suffering, and that this is the strongest moral imperative imaginable, much more important than the part where we make sure there are lots of rainforests and interesting buildings and such. Have you never felt this emotion? And if so, have you ever read a really good fictional dystopian work?
There are amounts of torture such that I would prefer permanently losing a finger to undergoing that torture, and I suspect it’s the same for most other people.
What if you could be assured that you would have no bad memories of it? (That is, what if you can recall it but doing so doesn’t evoke any negative emotions?)
If I could be assured that I would be genuinely undamaged afterwards, then an interval of intense pain no matter how intense doesn’t seem like a big deal. (As I recall, Dennett makes this same point somewhere in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, as an illustration of what’s wrong with the kind of utilitarianism that scores everything in terms of pain and pleasure.)
You seem to be arguing from “Things other than pain are bad” to “Pain is not bad”, which is not valid.
You keep talking about torture rather than just pain. The point of my bringing up the ‘lobotomy story’ was to suggest that what makes it so awful has a good deal in common with what makes torture so awful. Something about a person idly and ‘cruelly’ doing something ‘horrible’ and ‘disgusting’ to a victim over whom they have complete power. Using another human as an ‘instrument’ rather than as an end in itself. Pain is not an essential ingredient here.
If we start talking about non-Kwisatz Haderach people, like say your little sister, and we start talking about them being whipped to death instead of an invisible and inscrutable gom jabbar, I find my intuition shifts pretty far the other direction.
Yeah, but this is reintroducing some of the ‘extra ingredients’, besides pain alone, that make torture awful.
So I’m reading about your moral system in your other post, and I don’t want to get into debating it fully here. But surely you can recognize that just as some things and systems are beautiful and fascinating and complex, there are other systems that are especially and uniquely horrible, and that it is a moral credit to remove them from the world. Sometimes I read about the more horrible atrocities perpetrated in the Nazi camps and North Korea, and I feel physically sick that there is no way I can’t just kill everyone involved, the torturers and victims both, and relieve them of their suffering, and that this is the strongest moral imperative imaginable, much more important than the part where we make sure there are lots of rainforests and interesting buildings and such. Have you never felt this emotion? And if so, have you ever read a really good fictional dystopian work?
You keep assuming that somehow I have to make the inference “if pain has no moral disvalue in itself, then neither does torture”. I do not. If I can say that “the lobotomy story” is an abomination even if no pain was caused, then I think I can quite easily judge that the Nazi atrocities were loathesome without having to bring in ‘the intrinsic awfulness of pain’. The Nazi and North Korean atrocities were ‘ugly’ - in fact they are among the ‘ugliest’ things that humans have ever accomplished.
Conclusion: “It all adds up to normality”. Ethical reasoning involves a complex network of related concepts, one of which is pain. Pain—the pain of conscious creatures—is often taken to be a (or even ‘the’) terminal disvalue. Perhaps the best way of looking at my approach is to regard it as a demonstration that if you kill the ‘pain node’ then actually, the rest of the network does the job just fine (with maybe one or two slightly problematic cases at the fringe, but then there are always problematic cases in any ethical system.)
(The advantage of taking out the ‘pain node’ is that it sidesteps unproductive philosophical debates about qualia.)
I know Dennett’s usually right about this sort of thing and so there must be something to that argument, but I’ve never been able to understand it no matter how hard I try. It looks too much like wishful thinking—“these qualia things are really confusing, so screw that.” Certainly it’s not the sort of Reduction with a capital “R” I’ve heard that’s left me genuinely satisfied about the nonexistence of things like Free Will or Good or Essence-Of-Chair-Ness.
I would be hesitant to say the sensation of pain in and of itself has moral disvalue; I would say that people have preferences against pain and that the violation of those preferences causes moral disvalue in the same sense as the violation of any other preference. I would have no trouble with inflicting pain on a masochist, a person with pain asymbolia, or a person voluntarily undergoing some kind of conditioning.
Damage can also be something people have a preference against, but it’s not necessarily more important than pain. There are amounts of torture such that I would prefer permanently losing a finger to undergoing that torture, and I suspect it’s the same for most other people.
You seem to be arguing from “Things other than pain are bad” to “Pain is not bad”, which is not valid.
I admit your Paul Atreides example doesn’t disgust me so much, but I think that’s because number one I have no mental imagery associated with gom jabbars, and number two I feel like he’s a legendary Messiah figure so he should be able to take it.
If we start talking about non-Kwisatz Haderach people, like say your little sister, and we start talking about them being whipped to death instead of an invisible and inscrutable gom jabbar, I find my intuition shifts pretty far the other direction.
So I’m reading about your moral system in your other post, and I don’t want to get into debating it fully here. But surely you can recognize that just as some things and systems are beautiful and fascinating and complex, there are other systems that are especially and uniquely horrible, and that it is a moral credit to remove them from the world. Sometimes I read about the more horrible atrocities perpetrated in the Nazi camps and North Korea, and I feel physically sick that there is no way I can’t just kill everyone involved, the torturers and victims both, and relieve them of their suffering, and that this is the strongest moral imperative imaginable, much more important than the part where we make sure there are lots of rainforests and interesting buildings and such. Have you never felt this emotion? And if so, have you ever read a really good fictional dystopian work?
What if you could be assured that you would have no bad memories of it? (That is, what if you can recall it but doing so doesn’t evoke any negative emotions?)
If I could be assured that I would be genuinely undamaged afterwards, then an interval of intense pain no matter how intense doesn’t seem like a big deal. (As I recall, Dennett makes this same point somewhere in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, as an illustration of what’s wrong with the kind of utilitarianism that scores everything in terms of pain and pleasure.)
You keep talking about torture rather than just pain. The point of my bringing up the ‘lobotomy story’ was to suggest that what makes it so awful has a good deal in common with what makes torture so awful. Something about a person idly and ‘cruelly’ doing something ‘horrible’ and ‘disgusting’ to a victim over whom they have complete power. Using another human as an ‘instrument’ rather than as an end in itself. Pain is not an essential ingredient here.
Yeah, but this is reintroducing some of the ‘extra ingredients’, besides pain alone, that make torture awful.
You keep assuming that somehow I have to make the inference “if pain has no moral disvalue in itself, then neither does torture”. I do not. If I can say that “the lobotomy story” is an abomination even if no pain was caused, then I think I can quite easily judge that the Nazi atrocities were loathesome without having to bring in ‘the intrinsic awfulness of pain’. The Nazi and North Korean atrocities were ‘ugly’ - in fact they are among the ‘ugliest’ things that humans have ever accomplished.
Conclusion: “It all adds up to normality”. Ethical reasoning involves a complex network of related concepts, one of which is pain. Pain—the pain of conscious creatures—is often taken to be a (or even ‘the’) terminal disvalue. Perhaps the best way of looking at my approach is to regard it as a demonstration that if you kill the ‘pain node’ then actually, the rest of the network does the job just fine (with maybe one or two slightly problematic cases at the fringe, but then there are always problematic cases in any ethical system.)
(The advantage of taking out the ‘pain node’ is that it sidesteps unproductive philosophical debates about qualia.)