It would be capable of comprehending and fully emulating a creature with such an axis if doing so had a high expected value in paperclips but it does not have such a module as part of itself.

It's not at all clear that you could bootstrap an understanding of pain qualia just by observing the behaviour of entities in pain (albeit that they were internally emulated). It is also not clear that you resolve issues of empathy/qualia just by throwing intelligence at ait.