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Bongo comments on Unspeakable Morality - Less Wrong
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Comments (116)
You don't?
When is pain or death not bad?
Masochism.
Pain: when it wakes you up to alert you that you are in mortal danger.
At the risk of getting into semantics: in that case, pain serves a useful purpose, but that doesn't make pain itself non-bad. Creating an alternative ("upgraded") alert system that served the wake-up function but wasn't painful would be better. If pain in that context wouldn't be bad, then "does the alert system cause pain" would be an irrelevant question and the upgraded alert system wouldn't be considered any better.
Right, which was exactly my point: not every instance of pain should be classified as bad, and so it doesn't make sense to say the general phenomenon is "unconditionally bad, in all cases, with no exceptions", which is exactly what Bongo implicitly asserted.
To be perfectly fair, the absolute is difficult to assert due to the fuzziness of the concept. I mean, is tearing a piece of paper in half bad, because you killed the paper? What about tearing a virus in half? What about a bacterium? Where does the transition come in from merely irreversible to murderous.