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.
There are many good things – that is, things worth having. To name a few, there is sleep, food, sex, money, vacations, jobs, entertainment, love, freedom and pleasure. There are also many bad things – that is, things worth avoiding. To name a few, there is disease, torture, war, bad people, mosquitoes, dishonesty, slavery, natural disasters, pollution and pain. Philosophers distinguish between those things that are instrumentally good or bad (that is, good or bad only because of what they lead to) and those things that are intrinsically good or bad (that is, good or bad for their own sake). Take money for example. It’s a good thing, but only because it allows you to buy things, like food to eat. So it’s instrumentally good. But why is eating food good? It’s only good because it gives you energy and pleasure. Therefore food is instrumentally good. What about the pleasure you get from eating food? It may lead to something else, as I explain in the next paragraph. But is it only good for something else? No. Pleasure is good for its own sake. It is therefore intrinsically good. Now let’s consider something that is bad, such as torture. It’s bad, but only because it leads to injury. So torture is instrumentally bad. But why is injury bad? It’s bad only because it leads to pain. So torture and injury are both instrumentally bad. Now why is pain bad? It may lead to something, as I explain in the next paragraph. But is it only bad for something else? No. Pain is bad for its own sake. It is therefore intrinsically bad.
Things that are intrinsically good or bad can also be instrumentally good or bad. Here is a case where something is intrinsically bad and instrumentally good. You go to the dentist and she cleans your teeth. This may be painful and therefore intrinsically bad. But the pain that you experience may be necessary for the dentist to prevent you from getting gum disease. So the pain is also instrumentally good. Here is a case where something is intrinsically bad and instrumentally bad. You have some disease and and are suffering horrible pain from. This is intrinsically bad. If this pain causes you to miss work, which you don’t want to miss, then it’s leading to something instrumentally bad. Here is a case of something intrinsically good and instrumentally good. When I teach, I sometimes experience pleasure, which is intrinsically good. But it’s also instrumentally good because the fact that I’m experiencing pleasure from my teaching makes me want to teach more, which is instrumentally good. Finally, here is a case where something is intrinsically good and instrumentally bad. I get a lot of pleasure from eating pizza. But too much of this intrinsic pleasure leads me to become overweight, which is bad for my health and how I look. This is instrumentally bad.
- Are some pleasures/pains qualitatively better/worse than others?
To say that pleasure and pain have positive and negative intrinsic value does not mean that all pleasures and pains count the same. The value (or dis-value) of an experience is determined by the quantity of pleasure and pain, which are determined by their function of intensity and duration of the pleasure or pain. The pleasure of falling in love counts more towards the value of an experience than the pleasure of watching your favorite TV show. And and the pain of losing a loved one counts more than stubbing your toe. Some philosophers believe that the quantity of pleasure isn’t the only relevant factor in determining the value of an experience. The philosopher John Stuart Mill believes the value of an experience should also be a function of the kind of pleasure or pain it is. He thinks that some pleasures are qualitatively better than others. Specifically, he believes that pleasures that are caused by the higher-faculties – pleasures of the intellect and imagination – are more valuable than pleasures that are caused by the lower-faculties – sensual pleasures. So, given his view, you would have a more valuable experience reading a play by Shakespeare than reading a Harlequin romance novel because the former requires more thought than the latter. You would have a more valuable experience eating a fancy French meal than eating at McDonald’s. Mill famously said, “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinions, it is because they only know their side of the question.”
It’s not clear what Mill means when he says that the intellectual pleasures are qualitatively better than the sensual pleasures. He says that a person who has tried both kinds of pleasures will prefer the higher, intellectual pleasures over the lower, sensual pleasures when the two conflict. First, it’s not clear what makes a pleasure intellectual as opposed to sensual. Are intellectual pleasures those that require using the intellect and sensual pleasures those that are derived from the body? But this distinction is not helpful. What are the pleasures of music and art, where you use your ears and eyes to experience them? Are people who get high from pot having intellectual pleasures? Moreover, it’s simply not the case that a person would always choose the higher, intellectual pleasures over the lower, sensual pleasures. In general, I would prefer a good slice of pizza over some fancy French cuisine, even though I’ve tried both. There is evidence that Mill’s distinction was based not on the object of pleasure, but rather on the approach to the object of pleasure. One can take a sensitive approach or an oafish approach to any object. There are those who read poetry and just look for catchy rhymes. This would be an oafish approach to poetry. There are those who read poetry and appreciate the deeper meaning and are profoundly effected by it. This would be a sensitive approach to poetry. Once you develop sensibilities you are going to experience frustration and anxiety. You might not be as content, but you wouldn’t want to going back to being an oaf, or as Mill says, ‘a pig satisfied’.
Do you think that some pleasures are qualitatively better than others?
- Can death be good or bad for a person if she cannot experience any pleasure or pain from it?
If you experience pleasure from something it can be good for you. If you experience pain it can be bad for you. But what happens when you can neither experience pleasure nor pain? Can such a state of affairs be either good or bad for you? But what is a possible state of affairs in which you neither experience pleasure or pain? Death. Many philosophers believe that your mental states are states of your brain and when you die your brain can no longer function and so you can longer have any mental states. This means that when you’re dead you can neither experience pleasure or pain. So could death be either good or bad for you if you can no longer experience anything?
Some philosophers answer yes. They say that death cannot be either intrinsically good or bad for the person who has died. Rather, death is comparatively good or bad for the person who has died. This is because the person who has died is being deprived of experiences that he would have otherwise had if he had continued to live. This means that if a person’s life is going well, it would be bad for him to die because he would be deprived of more pleasant experiences. It also means that if your life is going poorly – that you have much pain in it – that you could be better off dead.
Some philosophers think if you cannot experience anything when you’re dead, then the idea that death is either good or bad for the person who has died is simply mistaken. For example, the Greek philosopher Epicurus famously said,
Thus that which is the most awful of evils, death, is nothing to us, since when we exist there is no death, and when there is death we do not exist..
One interpretation of this argument is that something can only be bad if it exists and when you’re dead you no longer exist; so death cannot be bad for you. Is this argument any good?
The Roman poet and philosopher and follower of Epicurean thought once said,
Look back at the eternity that passed before we were born, and mark how utterly it counts as nothing. This is a mirror that Nature holds up to us, in which we may see the time that shall be after we are dead. Is there anything terrifying in sight – anything that is not more restful than the soundest sleep?
It seems that Lucretius is giving a different argument for why death cannot be bad for the person who has died. One interpretation is that he is giving this argument from analogy. Since your prenatal non-existence is not bad for you (the time before you were born is ‘nothing’), your post-mortem non-existence is similarly not bad for you (the time after you die is ‘nothing’ too). So do you think death can be bad (or good) for the person who has died if the person no longer can experience pleasure or pain?
- Does the fact that an animal can experience pleasure and pain make it worthy of moral consideration?
Pleasure and pain are relevant when considering the morality of actions. Why, for instance, is it morally wrong to hit a child with a baseball bat, but not morally wrong to hit a baseball with a baseball bat? The obvious answer is that the child, unlike the baseball, can feel pain. But given that pleasure and pain are morally relevant factors, one might wonder whether it’s morally acceptable to do medical experiments on animals or eat meat that is raised in factory farms, both of which cause a tremendous amount of suffering to animals. The philosopher Peter Singer argues that anyone who think it’s morally acceptable to treat animals this way, but not morally acceptable to treat humans this way, is just being prejudiced. One is favoring one species over another for no good reason. He calls this prejudice speciesism and compares it to racism and sexism.
One might respond that speciesism is not a prejudice like racism and sexism because humans are more intelligent than animals. Singer would not be moved by such a response. He would point out that some people are cognitively impaired and have cognitive capacities similar to that of certain animals. Yet, most people do not think it’s morally acceptable to treat a cognitively impaired human in the harsh way that we treat animals. Singer’s view is that you have a moral obligation to count all like interests equally. Since animals and humans have relevantly like interests, namely they both have the capacity to feel pain and pleasure, we have a moral duty to treat animals the way we treat humans.
Another response people have given to the speciesism charge is to claim that one has a moral intuition that humans count in a special way that animals don’t. To say that one has a moral intuition is to say that it just seems that there is a difference, without giving any specific difference, such as intelligence. This response assumes moral intuitions can be mistaken, but they still count as evidence. If this moral-intuition move works, one is not having a mere prejudice, holding a double standard, as someone who is a racist or sexist does. But why should moral intuitions have any moral weight? One answer is that you cannot do any moral philosophy without having some presumptive weight in favor of our moral intuitions?
- Are pleasure and pain the only intrinsically good and bad things?
We’ve said that pleasure and pain are intrinsically good and bad. But are these mental states the only things that are intrinsically good and bad? According to a theory called hedonism the answer is yes. Hedonism is an appealing view because it offers a relatively simple and straightforward method for evaluating whether one’s life, or some part of it, has been good or whether some future choice should be made. What you do, is add up all the pleasures for the chunk of life that is being evaluated, subtract all the pains, and then see whether the balance is positive or negative. If it’s positive – there is more pleasure than pain – then the chunk of life that is being measured is good and worth having. If the balance is negative – there is more pain than pleasure – then the chunk of life that is being measured is bad and not worth having. The more positive the balance the better it is. And the more negative the balance the worse it is.
Hedonism is a controversial view. There are many philosophers who reject it and give the following thought-experiment known as the experience machine as a reason why. Suppose there was a machine created by scientists that could stimulate your brain through electrodes and give you a completely realistic virtual experience of any scenario, so realistic that while hooked up to you couldn’t tell that it was virtual reality. If you were hooked up to this machine you would think and feel that you were actually experiencing whatever scenario the machine was generating for you. Moreover, while you’re hooked up to the machine you would not realize that you’re hooked up to it and you would forget your actual life and think the life you were experiencing was your actual life. Let’s suppose the virtual scenario the machine generates for you is one where you think and feel you have a great happy and healthy and loving family, wonderful friends, a great love life, lots of money, and a job where you will eventually be awarded the Nobel prize in medicine for discovering the cure for cancer. Let’s assume that in this virtual scenario you will experience some pain, but it won’t be horrible pain. For example, you might feel as if you’re spending many tedious hours working in the lab away from your family, getting into arguments with colleagues who think your research is stupid. But overall the net balance of pleasure to pain will be extremely positive, in fact so positive, that by hedonism standards, it’s the best possible life you could live. Remember that once you hook up to this experience machine, you will forget that you’re hooked up and the life that you once had outside of the machine. You will no longer be interacting with your real friends and real family. You will just be lying somewhere, maybe in a tank in a lab, being fed intravenously for the rest of your life. The question is, “Would you want to be hooked up to such a machine for the rest of your life?” If you answer no, as those who offer this thought experiment answer, then you cannot accept hedonism. After all, hedonism says that the pleasures and pains are the only things that matter when considering a life worth living, and when you’re hooked up to the experience machine you have all the best possible balance of these.
If you think hedonism is not correct, can you think of anything in addition to pleasure or pain that is intrinsically good or intrinsically bad? To answer this question, think about what you would lack if you were hooked up to the experience machine for the rest of your life.
