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).
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).