Pain is bad. It’s unpleasant to trip over and hurt your knees or be heartbroken by a breakup. These experiences are bad, and everyone would agree. But, there are disagreements among thinkers on the question of why pain is bad.
The simplest answer comes from dolorists. Dolorism is a philosophical theory that is parallel to hedonism, which theorizes about well-being. Dolorism specifically addresses the concept of ill-being, identifying pain as intrinsically bad; pain contributes to ill-being not merely because it lacks pleasure, but because it inherently embodies unpleasantness in a robust sense. According to dolorism, the explanation of badness of pain is exhausted by its unpleasant phenomenal character alone. It suggests that the negative tone of pain itself is sufficient to make pain bad, independent of any external circumstances or subjective attitudes. Another answer comes from proponents of what I call the attitude theory. This theory encompasses all views that consider an attitude—whether a pro- or con-attitude—as the sole explanans of the badness of pain. Heathwood, for example, defends the idea that sensory pleasure is fundamentally connected to desire and pain to aversion. Essentially, pain is bad because the subject intrinsically desires not to experience it. Similarly, Sumner defends the view called welfarism, which posits that well-being (and ill-being) necessarily depends on subjective attitudes, roughly put.
Dolorism and attitude theories, however, have their own problems. Dolorism cannot explain certain painful experiences, such as eating very spicy food that makes your tongue numb or getting a deep tissue massage, where you undeniably feel pain but still relish the experience. Nor do generic attitude theories succeed in cases like the one cited by Bradford, in which a toddler whimsically dislikes her mother’s tender kiss.
Bradford proposes an alternative explanation called reverse conditionalism. According to this theory, a painful experience is bad if and because it has a negative feeling tone, unless the subject has a relevant attitude towards the experience. Here, negative feeling tone refers to the unpleasant phenomenal character associated with a negative valence. This theory differs from others by considering both the felt quality and the subjective attitude, giving attitude a defeating role so that a welcoming attitude toward a negative tone can defeat its intrinsic negativity. In this way, the theory avoids the challenges faced by earlier theories on the badness of pain.
Although, prima facie, reverse conditionalism offers the best explanation of the badness of pain, I argue that it captures too much in one sense and doesn’t capture enough in another sense. First, consider a hypothetical scenario from Kurth, where a doctor advises you to place your mother, suffering from Alzheimer’s, in a care facility due to the severity of her illness. Despite agreeing with the doctor’s instructions, the decision to put her in the facility evokes anxiety because you are aware of your mother’s fear of it. This unpleasant psychological discomfort, though distressing, is good for you as a decent human being to experience. It “reflects well on you,” to echo Kurth’s expression. Your anxiety, despite its negative feeling tone and your disliking attitude toward it, reflects your moral sensitivity. Reverse conditionalism struggles to explain why such unpleasant experiences can still be positive.
Second, reverse conditionalism fails to account for certain types of pain that retain a negative valence but are still found desirable by the subject. For instance, most patients diagnosed with pathological skin-picking disorder (SPD) experience repetitive urges to pick their skin, even though the act causes pain. More surprisingly, Schienle and Osmani reported that compared to a female control group, female SPD patients group showed greater sensitivity to scratching than to gentle touch, suggesting they derived greater satisfaction from skin-picking behavior than a caress. Even if these individuals might savor the scratching, it still seems bad for them—setting aside all the physical, social, and psychological comorbidities. The pain caused by skin-picking contributes to their ill-being; it makes them worse off as human beings. Reverse conditionalism cannot fully explain why this pain remains bad despite their welcoming attitude toward it.
From these two counterexamples, we can deduce that an objective aspect of pain’s badness must be factored in. Regardless of whether the phenomenal character is pleasant or unpleasant, and regardless of the subjective attitude, there seems to be an objective value that determines whether a painful sensation is intrinsically good or bad as a human being. It’s good for you to experience moral anxiety in response to the unavoidable and uncomfortable situation in the mother’s Alzheimer’s case. Conversely, in the case of SPD patients, it is bad for them to experience pain through skin picking, even if they cherish the sensation with their sincerity. Bradford’s reverse conditionalism fails to account for these cases.
This is why I propose a modification of reverse conditionalism, which I call hierarchical reverse conditionalism. The intrinsic value of S’s unpleasant experience E (at t) is determined by:
- negative feeling tone of E;
- S’s relevant de re attitude towards E;
- objective value of E (intrinsically, de re, and at t), which is measured in terms of fulfillment of relevant human capacities.
(The latter clause prevails over the former in case of a conflict between clauses.)
Two points are worth emphasizing. First, the objective factor in the axiology of pain is measured in terms of perfectionism. Perfectionism posits that what is intrinsically good depends on fulfilling a set of capacities characterized by human nature. On the other hand, intrinsic badness is determined by the malfilment of those sets of capacities, defined as producing the wrong outcomes from exercising such capacities. While it is almost impossible to specify these capacities characterized by human nature in detail, most theorists would agree that theoretical and practical rationality, autonomy, and physical and mental health are included. Under this interpretation of perfectionism, holding a false belief is bad because it accrues wrong outputs by exercising theoretical rationality. Similarly, the painful sensation SPD patients experience from skin picking is bad because it results in the wrong outcome with negative value by exercising physical capacities, irrespective of their welcoming attitude toward it.
Second, in hierarchical reverse conditionalism, the third clause—objective value—has overriding, value-defeating power. The intrinsic value of an unpleasant experience doesn’t flip unless the relevant human capacities are either fulfilled or malfilled. In most everyday cases, the badness of unpleasant experiences, such as eating very spicy food, is determined by their subjective phenomenology and the subject’s attitude toward them. However, in special cases, such as the moral anxiety in the mother’s Alzheimer’s case or the maladaptive pain in SPD cases, the objective value from the perspective of perfectionism of the experience itself ought to override subjective factors. Hierarchical reverse conditionalism better explains the badness of pain in such cases.
Yoonhee Jung
Yoonhee Jung is a PhD student in Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research interest is in the intersection of philosophy and empirical science, with a focus on the philosophy of mind, moral psychology, and the philosophy of cognitive science. Her work aims to bridge the conceptual and empirical approaches, addressing questions about the nature of human mind, the foundations of moral reasoning, and the cognitive mechanisms underlying human behavior.
