This is a form of the general question "What's so bad about X?" with pain as X.
For any X, we can ask "What's so bad about X", receive an answer X2, and ask "What's so bad about X2", ad infinitum. The three most common responses are semantic stopsigns, moral nihilism, and admitting you need to ask the question more rigorously.
Once phrased more rigorously, the problem becomes easier, transforming into some combination of:
"Why do people dislike pain?", to which the answer is that it's hard-wired into the brain in some way a neurologist could probably explain, probably similar to how it's hard-wired to dislike things that taste bitter.
"Why do people call pain bad?", to which the answer is that most people think as emotivists, and call pain bad because they dislike it.
"Why is pain bad in Moral System Y?", to which the answer is that you'd have to ask the people in moral system Y, and they'll give you their moral system's answer. I think a lot of the better moral system would have it as an axiom. They probably make it an axiom because most moral systems are linked in some way or another to what people do or don't like, whether t...
Hmm hmm.
I've had bad pain. I've had non-bad pain (the feeling of wiggling a tooth as a child). I've had bad non-pain (the feeling of bumping the nerve in your elbow). I think I can pick pain apart.
It's hurty. This is the least important part. Just a sensation, not even unpleasant on its own.
It's loud. Even small amounts shout over everything else.
It's intrusive. You can't will it away. About the most you can do is match its intensity and drown it out.
And finally it makes you want to pull away. It's a flinch, abstracted. I suspect this is the "primitive op". All animal life flinches, even stuff too simple to have a brain. Since this is an abstract demand, you can't satisfy it.
So, you are being overwhelmed by an insistent demand to pull away from the pain, and it's not letting you pull away, all overlaid with a loud sensation that won't reduce - this is why pain causes something of a cognitive crash. Also explains my other experiences above. Non-bad pain doesn't demand a flinch, so as with the tooth it tempts you to increase it. Bad non-pain is loud and demands a flinch, it's just not hurty.
Given all that, what's bad about pain? I'd say the insistence and the ina...
I agree strongly, except that you CAN eliminate most if not all pain (all I have tested) by paying attention to the details of the sensation relating to the pain. Don't flinch your attention away, rather, rest attention on the sensation until it wanders away from boredom.
I think you are confusing levels, here. Observe:
Q. What, if anything, is bad about having the functional equipment to feel pain?
A. Pain is a useful indicator of conditions harmful to the body, and therefore can only be bad insofar as it (a) is less than optimal for that purpose or (b) has undesirable side effects.
Q. What, if anything, is bad about feeling pain?
A. Feeling pain frequently causes a reduction of pleasure, and in extreme circumstances can cause distraction from important tasks or significant psychological harm.
In other words, the falling of the tree causes mechanical vibrations but no auditory experiences.
(Yes, I repeat some things which have been said before. I apologize. My point is to note the confusion in the question.)
Pain is bad insofar as it causes suffering. It turns out that nociception (perception of pain) is a pure information-conveying process; suffering is a post-pain process that happens in the insula. Lesions in the insula can cause pain asymbolia, in which the location and intensity of pain is perceived without an associated negative experience.
I identify suffering as the root-level experience of "this is bad, make it stop".
Pain is sensory input; ideally it conveys useful information to the brain.
Pain which does not convey new information is bad, because it interferes with working towards what one values.
If I understand what you're saying, and if you really mean that is the sole or even the main reason why pain is a bad thing, I don't like that line of thought at all. It implies:
We don't have to work for the sake of happiness alone, but happiness can't be entirely subsumed by other wants.
He was clear that the pain in surgery conveys no new information.
Let me try to explain this better, then. Imagine we take a person who needs surgery but was never told by their doctor what part of their body the surgery will be on. We perform the surgery without any anaesthetic and with the patient blindfolded. In this case, the pain is giving new information ("AAAIE! MY RIGHT LEG!") but we still don't approve.
kpreid could clarify that this information is useless (in that the patient doesn't gain anything from knowing) and that (s)he meant useful information. But this isn't true either. I could state before the surgery that I will give the patient ten cents if they can tell me which of their limbs I operated on, but this still wouldn't make it okay to perform surgery without anaesthetic.
The way I would have put kpreid's point is that the pain must provide sufficiently useful information to offset its painfulness. If putting someone under surgery without anaesthetic earned someone ten cents, I would consider it an atrocity, but if it was necessary so that the patient could help guide the surgeon by telling them what they feel, saving the patient's life, then it might be...
And it's just not the case that all people don't enjoy pain, so that's an immediate dead end.
Just a footnote, but even people who enjoy pain make a clear distinction between "good pain" and "bad pain"). I doubt that anyone into BDSM enjoys a migraine or a toothache, although the practice may help them deal with it..
Then there are also the hot chili enthusiasts.
...I don't enjoy it, to be sure, but I also don't enjoy soda or warm weather or chess or the sound of vacuum cleaners, and it seems that it would be a different thing entirely to claim that these things are bad. Most people don't enjoy pain, but most people also don't enjoy lutefisk or rock climbing or musical theater or having sex with a member of the same sex, and it seems like a different claim to hold that lutefisk and rock climbing and musical theater and gay sex are bad. And it's just not the case that all people don't enjoy pain, so that's
I don't think pain is universally bad. Many people enjoy pain in small doses; some even enjoy it in large doses. I think the key aspects to "bad pain" are when pain is non-consensual, when pain persists past usefulness, and when pain breaks us.
Consent is mentioned because plenty of people do invite some amount of pain in to their life willingly, and I think most utilitarian analysis would still conclude that being a CIPA patient is not a positive.
To persisting: It's useful to know that my leg hurts; it's not useful to have to endure the pain for ...
Most people don't enjoy pain, but most people also don't enjoy lutefisk or rock climbing or musical theater or having sex with a member of the same sex, and it seems like a different claim to hold that lutefisk and rock climbing and musical theater and gay sex are bad.
Pain is forced on people; lutefisk, rock climbing, musical theater and gay sex are not. So this comparison is wrong.
And it's just not the case that all people don't enjoy pain, so that's an immediate dead end.
From what I can tell BSDM masochists enjoy very narrow and selective kind of ...
Something that seems to be getting ignored in the discussion of pain being good is the existence of pain asymbolia. People with pain asymbolia still get the signal of pain, so they know about damage and can mediate it, but it doesn't feel bad. If we accept that having the information content of pain without the negative affect would be preferable to having the information and the negative affect, then there's clearly something bad about pain.
I think there are two main bad things about pain.
1: Pain produces a strong negative affect, aka suffering, aka I ju...
I have chronic pain, and I could tell you what's bad about that, which I think might be applicable to pain more broadly.
Pain doesn't always serve its purpose of keeping one out of trouble, and when it doesn't, it's distracting. It sometimes makes it difficult to get up and go, much less do anything great. It can be a spirit breaker when it goes on too long, affecting mental stamina and usefulness as well as physical.
Depending on where the pain is, it can make it difficult to complete tasks in a much more specific way too, by making it difficult to walk or use ones hands. I don't have kids but I imagine it would put a big ole damper on raising them.
Its painfulness.
After some medical procedure, there have been some patients for whom pain is not painful. When asked whether their pain is still there, they will report that the sensation of pain is still there just as it was before, but that they simply don't mind it anymore.
That feature of pain that their pain now lacks is what I am calling its painfulness and that is what is bad about pain.
When you talk about pain being good, you're talking about the information it sends being useful to survival, not about the method of signalling (pain).
Just as you looked at CIPA patients to ask what's good about pain by looking at those who don't have it, you can look at people who suffer from chronic pain to look at what's bad about it.
People with chronic pain have the method all the time without the useful information, and their lives suck. Chronic pain suffers are exhausted and depressed because they're fundamentally unable to do anything without it h...
Very interesting question. I'll have a go at it, although these are 30-second thoughts: Pain is a warning system, very strongly correlated with damage and/or danger of death. Damage is bad, hence when we feel pain we want to stop whatever is causing damage; this has the incidental side effect (usually) of stopping the pain as well, so it feels as though we want to get rid of the pain - in other words, it feels as though the pain is bad, although what we really want is to stop the damage. A fitness-maximiser would want to stop the damage without the interve...
What is bad about pain?
It short-circuits rationality. If you are in enough pain, it no longer matters what is the rational thing to do, only what will stop the pain.
It carries immediacy that forces action before proper consideration. Future be damned, you WILL do whatever needs to be done to end the pain NOW.
In its less excruciating forms, it is a drain on mental and physical energy. No matter what you can do with pain (and some people do truly amazing things), you would be able to do more without.
Finally, it is often unproductive. You have a headache, f...
Insofar as liking something and wanting it (that is, pleasure versus reward loops in the brain) seem to be separate bits of neural circuitry, I wonder if there's a meaningful sense (corresponding to hypothetical bits of brain architecture) in which pain and suffering might also be understood that way.
I enjoy pain, on occasion. It's part of why I like getting pierced and tattooed, and why I practice BDSM. Said pain is emphatically not bad when you look at what I'm getting out of it. I don't enjoy suffering on the other hand -- having my hair pulled and bei...
you can point to the grief of the loved ones (conveniently ignoring that not everybody has loved ones) which is... um... pain.
Chemically and psychologically, I believe there's a big difference between family-just-died and legs-just-got-cut-off pain (or lesser or greater degrees - and please correct me if they are the same neurological phenomenon). The telling thing is that we call emotional suffering "pain" even though it's rather different from the meaning of pain in a physical context. In general, pain is so unpleasant that people will read...
Pain is a sensation; it would be odd to call it fundamentally good or bad, any more than it would be to call heat or cold or sweet or sour good or bad.
However, pain usually causes suffering. The correlation is probably close to .95, at least if you except cases of minor pain (i.e. <4 out of 10 subjectively rated). Suffering (experiencing absolute negative utility, as opposed to missing out on positive utility) is bad under most moral systems. Because the correlation between pain and suffering is so high, the exceptions get ignored and pain gets called b...
Prolonged pain and stress tend in themselves to reduce health. Sapolsky's "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers" cites quite a lot of research in support of this.
Pain is broadly not preferred. That is to say, an absence of cognition is preferred to the cognition of pain. This makes the question easy for a preference utilitarian, who holds there is nothing impeding the value of the preferences of subjects: Badness attaches to pain when a subject would rather not be feeling it. When a subject prefers pain for whatever reason, there is nothing wrong with it. For objective moral systems outside of preference utilitarianism, the question is a little more threatening.
How does one define "bad" without "pain" or "suffering"? Seems rather difficult. Or: The question doesn't seem so much difficult as it is (almost) tautological. It's like asking "What, if anything, is hot about atoms moving more quickly?"
(Assuming we are discussing neural pain rather than emotional...)
Pain itself is not normally bad; it is an indicator that something bad is happening, or will happen if you don't take corrective action.
So why do we think of pain as bad?
First , we tend to think associatively; because pain is associated with bad things, we tend to think of it as bad even when it is actually helping us.
More to the point, though, sometimes the pain itself is the problem. When there is no corrective action we can take, then the pain itself becomes bad because there is no reason ...
The important thing to point out is that the information signal we experience as pain is an instructive signal more than just an indicative signal. I mean to say that pain's purpose is to make the organism react against whatever is hurting it, not just become aware of it. Since conscious decision making in humans is delayed at least 500ms (and sometimes up to 10 seconds!), signals such as pain have to be a result of low-level cybernetic reactions in the nervous system and not just a conscious experience after the fact. I'm sure if an intelligent designer...
The problem with pain is its inherent stupidity in dealing with its goals and inability to even cooperate with reason. It'd get more points if it were like vision, informing but leaving more advanced parts of mind in peace to do the decision-making.
Is pleasure any less stupid? It's a little less demanding about attention, but arguably that has more to do with the commonly encountered intensity level.
This is like asking what's wet about the water. I can't imagine a frame of mind that could put "pain" in doubt without putting "bad" in similar doubt, thus making the question meaningless and confusing like some kind of koan. "What's X-like about X?" To reduce confusion you should try a less vague formulation, like "why do people seek to avoid pain?", where we can hope for a neurological answer or something.
ETA: Righting a Wrong Question seems to apply well here, simplifying your question to "Why do people think pain is bad?" which is much easier to answer.
One obvious downside to pain is that it tends to hijack your thought processes. It becomes increasingly difficult to think (and act) effectively as the amount of pain you're in increases. Therefore pain inhibits you from achieving any goals you might have, which seems like generic badness to me.
If CIPA patients are an extreme case of what's good about pain, it seems their opposite might be useful for finding what's bad about it. And indeed, I'd consider patients disabled by chronic pain to be the opposite of patients disabled by a lack of pain. Pain is good when it pushes us to do things which we regard as good for ourselves, such as "go eat a vegetable" or "stop putting weight on that broken limb". For as much as "good" and "bad" have any meaning, then, isn't pain "bad" when it pushes us to do things that we regard as bad for ourselves?
For insta...
This is my idea:
Pain is a signal. Like pleasure, it converts neutral events in the body or mind into concepts imbued with value, positive or negative. Things that happen that are (evolutionary) determined to be bad for an organism's survival or reproduction are, over time, linked to a pain signal in the brain, giving the organism a reason not to do them. Pleasure is also a signal. Some events can cause pleasure AND pain, which just means that they trigger both signals (with varying strength.) The signalling mechanism is, of course, imperfectly calibrated, ...
I don't know if pain is bad, but it's definitely something I don't like and want to avoid. I'd much prefer a warning and alert mechanism that doesn't feel so subjectively awful, and that doesn't misfire so much.
I don't know if I'd want to have congenital insensitivity to pain, but I'd like to "cap" my sensitivity to something much less than it currently is.
most people also don't enjoy lutefisk or rock climbing or musical theater or having sex with a member of the same sex, and it seems like a different claim to hold that lutefisk and rock climbing and musical theater and gay sex are bad
Hmm, I've never tried lutefisk...
Well, let's make a sharp distinction between response to physical injury and response to mental distress, both usually called "pain," both feeling very similar.
Physical pain serves a definite purpose. It alerts us to injury and trains as a strong negative re-enforcement against getting hurt. Physical pain can of course be exploited in torture to do real, permanent damage, and if given the chance I would vouch to reduce the uncomfortable properties of pain. Physical pain is a damage response (very good) but is too effective (i.e. torture is possib...
Pain to me means something that forces me into a state of being that is the exact opposite of those I desire to experience. Good = what I want, and pain is what I don't want, and what robs me from Good.
Is it just a question of the definition of "pain" and "bad"?
"When is pain worst?" an is important and deeply related question which is, fortunately for us, much easier to examine directly. I feel worse to have a papercut than it is to have an equally painful, but ultimately more damaging cut elsewhere. I feel worse to have a chronic pain that will not go away than I do when I feel a brief pain that goes away shortly after. I feel worse if I am unable to fix the injury that is causing me pain. It feels unfair, awful and even unbearable to ache for days during a bad bout of the flu. I know that the pain doe...
Most people don't enjoy pain, in those people, it causes suffering. With near certainty, suffering decreases the utility of the universe according to the coherent extrapolated volition of humanity.
Torturing masochists is perfectly fine as far as I can tell, in fact, better than fine.
Most people here seem to be giving reasons why pain is GOOD. It's a warning system, etc.
Pain is bad, because it causes us to abandon our higher thoughts, and react impulsivly, occasionally making the situation much worse. Sharp pain typically demands a swift response, like the automatic jerking of a hand away from the flame. One can learn to train themselves to surpress this automatic response, but then the damage from the flame is greater while they take the time to think out why and how they should remove thier hand from the flame.
In short, pain is bad because it, more oft than not, forces an unthinking instinctual reaction.
If it's trivially easy to say what's bad about the lack of an ability to feel pain because you wouldn't want it to happen to your child, isn't it trivially easy to say that pain is bad for precisely the same reason?
Pain is pretty much body-ese for "bad". It is necessary as an indicator of what is bad - injuries, poisons, illnesses cause pain because pain is how we know those things are bad.
It's kind of a meaningless question then; the badness is not contained in the pain but in the things causing it.
You might as well ask what is acid about the colour on indicator paper.
It seems like this is a resurgence of the ought-from-is dilemma. For this reason I think accepting that "pain is bad" as a primitive is acceptable, as there doesn't seem any way to derive it from anything. Off hand I might venture that more specifically we call pain "bad" because creatures strive so strongly to avoid it, this too being a primitive. (And like you mentioned, we appreciate it when it helps us avoid other things we want to avoid even more, like death).
What makes this different from lutefisk is how strongly we try to avoid ...
I don't think anything about pain as a concept or feedback process is bad. The things which may cause or accompany pain however are bad or challenging and can cause harm to sustainable life. That is what people actually don't like. I am unfamiliar with cases where pain does not accompany some destructive situation.
On the flip side, I like the pain in my muscles after exercise because I understand it's origins and it is signaling to me that I successfully broke muscle down which I have a reasonable expectation of growing back stronger.
Pain in and of itself...
It's unwanted and frightening. Your awareness of it, even your awareness of the possibility creates revulsion and fear.
It's so strong you have a hard time thinking about anything else, a hard time functioning, and you feel that something is deeply wrong that you are powerless to change.
At least, that's what I find bad about pain. I suppose those things are technically my fault.
The difficulty of answering this question suggests one possibility: pain might very well be the only intrinsically bad thing there is. Pain is bad simply because it is bad, in a way that nothing else is. It could be argued that the "goodness" or "badness" of everything else is reducible to how much pain qualia it causes or prevents.
I think (though I haven't thought about it very much yet) that maybe the most coherent line of argument is that pain per se is not a bad thing, but it is an indication that a bad thing is occurring, e.g., burning oneself, tearing a muscle, walking on a joint that is damaged and therefore damaging it further. All these are easily argued to be bad things because they get in the way of the goals of the pain-experiencer. So when we say "pain is bad, we should minimise it", that's really just shorthand for "things that cause pain are bad, we shou...
Some time ago, I came across the All Souls College philosophy fellowship exam. It's interesting reading throughout, but one question in particular brought me up short when I read it.
What, if anything, is bad about pain?
The fact that I couldn't answer this immediately was fairly disturbing. Approaching it from the opposite angle was much simpler. It is in fact trivially easy to say what is good about pain. To do so, all you need to do is look at the people who are born without the ability to feel it: CIPA patients. You wouldn't want your kid saddled with this condition, unless for some reason you'd find it welcome for the child to die (painlessly) before the age of three, and if that fate were escaped, to spend a lifetime massively inconvenienced, disabled, and endangered by undetected and untreated injuries and illnesses great and small.
But... what, if anything, is bad about pain?
I don't enjoy it, to be sure, but I also don't enjoy soda or warm weather or chess or the sound of vacuum cleaners, and it seems that it would be a different thing entirely to claim that these things are bad. Most people don't enjoy pain, but most people also don't enjoy lutefisk or rock climbing or musical theater or having sex with a member of the same sex, and it seems like a different claim to hold that lutefisk and rock climbing and musical theater and gay sex are bad. And it's just not the case that all people don't enjoy pain, so that's an immediate dead end.
So... what, if anything, is bad about pain?
Let's go back to the CIPA patients. I suggested that they indicate what's good about pain by showing us what happens to people without any: failure to detect and respond to injury and illness leads to exacerbation of their effects, up to and including untimely death. What's bad about those things? If we're doubting the badness of pain, we may as well doubt the badness of other stuff we don't like and try to avoid, like death. With death, there are some readier answers: you could call it a tragic loss of a just-plain-inherently-valuable individual, but if you don't like that answer (and many people don't seem to), you can point to the grief of the loved ones (conveniently ignoring that not everybody has loved ones) which is... um... pain. Whoops. Well, you could try making it about the end of the productive contribution to society, on the assumption that the dead person did something useful (and conveniently ignore why we tend not to be huge fans of death even when it happens to unproductive persons). Maybe we've just lost an anesthesiologist, who, um.... relieves pain.
And... what, if anything, is bad about pain?
Your standard-issue utilitarianism is, among other things, "hedonic". That means it includes among its tenets hedonism, which is the idea that pleasure is good and pain is bad, end of story. Lots of pleasure is better than a little and lots of pain is worse than a little and you can give these things units and do arithmetic to them to figure out how good or bad something is and then wag your finger or supply accolades to whoever is responsible for that thing. Since hedonists are just as entitled as anyone to their primitive notions, that's fine, but it's not much help to our question. "It is a primitive notion of my theory" is the adult equivalent of "it just is, that's all, your question is stupid!" (I don't claim that this is never an appropriate answer. Some questions are pretty stupid. But I don't think that one of them is...)
...what, if anything, is bad about pain?