The Mental States of Pleasure and Pain
In life we experience pleasant sensations (what I will refer to as pleasure) and painful sensations (what I will refer to as pain). These mental states play a central role in our lives. We are motivated by them. For example, people go on vacations and take drugs to acquire pleasure or avoid pain. We appeal to them in our judgments of the quality of people’s lives. We generally think it benefits an individual to experience pleasure and a disadvantage for an individual to experience pain. Some people say things like, “Your life is not worth living when you’re suffering too much pain”. We think they matter when we consider the morality of people’s intentions and actions. People say things like he’s a morally good person because he is always trying to give others pleasure or he is trying to ameliorate their pain or his action is morally wrong because it has caused unnecessary pain. Many even think that animals deserve moral consideration because they have the capacity to experience pleasure and pain. In this lecture, we will consider several central questions that philosophers have explored concerning pain and pleasure. These questions issues include,
- Are some pleasures/pains qualitatively better/worse than others?
- Can death be good or bad for a person if she cannot experience any pleasure or pain from it?
- Does the fact that an animal can experience pleasure and pain make it worthy of moral consideration?
- Are pleasure and pain the only intrinsically good and bad things?
Before I begin to discuss these questions, I want to explain why I say that pain is a mental state and what it means to say that pleasure has intrinsic value and pain has intrinsic disvalue.
I use the term ‘pain’ to refer to both emotional pain (e.g. the kind of feeling you have when you think about something that distresses you, such as the loss of a loved one) and physical pain (e.g. the kind of feeling you have when you injure your body, such as stubbing your toe). What both of these types of pain have in common – why they are both called pain – is that they feel a certain unpleasant way to the individual who has them. Any state that feels a certain way to an individual is a mental state because to feel something is to be conscious of something, and consciousness is an essential mental feature. This is why I say that both emotional pains and physical pains are mental states.
Why do we appeal to pain and pleasure when we assess the quality of people’s lives as well as the morality of their intentions and actions? It’s because these mental states have intrinsic value. Let me explain what ‘intrinsic value’ means.