This reminds me of the standard argument for infant circumcision: that a baby won’t remember it or be permanently damaged by it, and a baby is constantly crying in pain or discomfort anyway. The logic goes that it would be more hurtful to circumcise an older child or an adult, because he would be more aware of the pain, and remember the experience.
(The same claim would hold for, say, ear-piercing—should you pierce a baby girl’s ears or let her get pierced at thirteen?)
Of course, here the tradeoff is slightly different—it’s between pain that you forget, when you’re too young to have agency, and pain that you remember, when you’re old enough to have a chance to say “no.”
Assuming I want to have pierced ears, I would rather have had it done in my infancy, than have to exert willpower and endure pain now.
If you live in a culture where most males are circumcised, or most females have pierced ears, and most adults prefer to have the procedure done, then it’s kinder to a child to get the pain over with and forgotten, than to give him/her the opportunity to stress over it and remember it at an older age.
It’s also true, or so I’ve heard, that mothers forget the pain of childbirth. Some kind of opioids kick in and erase the memory. Otherwise women would never have more than one child. Assuming that I want more than one child, I’d choose extreme pain that I forget, rather than moderate pain that I remember, because it’ll require less willpower to have a second child.
This reminds me of the standard argument for infant circumcision: that a baby won’t remember it or be permanently damaged by it, and a baby is constantly crying in pain or discomfort anyway. The logic goes that it would be more hurtful to circumcise an older child or an adult, because he would be more aware of the pain, and remember the experience.
(The same claim would hold for, say, ear-piercing—should you pierce a baby girl’s ears or let her get pierced at thirteen?)
Of course, here the tradeoff is slightly different—it’s between pain that you forget, when you’re too young to have agency, and pain that you remember, when you’re old enough to have a chance to say “no.”
Assuming I want to have pierced ears, I would rather have had it done in my infancy, than have to exert willpower and endure pain now.
If you live in a culture where most males are circumcised, or most females have pierced ears, and most adults prefer to have the procedure done, then it’s kinder to a child to get the pain over with and forgotten, than to give him/her the opportunity to stress over it and remember it at an older age.
It’s also true, or so I’ve heard, that mothers forget the pain of childbirth. Some kind of opioids kick in and erase the memory. Otherwise women would never have more than one child. Assuming that I want more than one child, I’d choose extreme pain that I forget, rather than moderate pain that I remember, because it’ll require less willpower to have a second child.
I believe that pain is apt to result in habitual muscle tension, even if the pain isn’t consciously remembered.