Abstract
Pain is ubiquitous. It is also surprisingly complex. In this chapter, we first provide a truncated overview of the neuroscience of pain. This overview reveals four surprising empirical discoveries about the nature of pain with relevance for ethics. In particular, we discuss the ways in which these discoveries both inform putative normative ethical principles concerning pain and illuminate metaethical debates concerning a realist, naturalist moral metaphysics, moral epistemology, and moral motivation. Taken as a whole, the chapter supports the surprising conclusion that the sciences have revealed that pain is less significant than one might have thought, while other neurological kinds may be more significance than has hitherto been recognised.
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Notes
- 1.
The McGill Pain Questionnaire (Melzack 1975) is the most widely used tool for pain reporting in diagnostic contexts and includes more than 75 descriptors.
- 2.
For discussion of the history of pain science, especially as relevant for philosophers, see Dallenbach (1939). For introductory overviews of the competing, contemporary, dominant views about the nature of pain in neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy, see the chapters in part 1 of the Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Pain (Corns 2017).
- 3.
A pro tanto reason for (or against) x-ing is a reason for (or against) x-ing which is defeasible but ineradicable. That is, it is a reason which can be overridden by competing considerations, but is not thereby cancelled. For example, for there to be a pro tanto reason to keep one’s promises is for it to be the case that the fact that one’s action would be the keeping of a promise always counts in favour of the action, even when, all-things-considered, there are overriding reasons not to keep one’s promise (because, for instance, it would result in a catastrophe). This contrasts with prima facie reasons. A prima facie reason for (or against) x-ing is a reason for (or against) x-ing which is apparent “at first sight” but can be defeated and cancelled by other considerations. For example, for there to be a prima facie reason to trust one’s memory is for there to be an initial presumption in favour of trusting one’s memory, which can, however, be eliminated if one, for instance, discovered that one’s memory was irredeemably faulty due to brain damage. In this paper we will be discussing normative principles concerning pro tanto moral reasons.
- 4.
For a more technical discussion of neural specificity as debated in the relevant sense, see Easter et al. (1985).
- 5.
In general, two processes doubly dissociate when each can occur independently of the other.
- 6.
The study most often cited as initially establishing this surprising claim is Rainville et al. (1999), but many further investigations have been taken to support it and it is now widely accepted across pain science and medicine.
- 7.
Such pains include some of those experienced while on morphine or other opiates, some chronic pains following lobotomy and leuchotomy, and pains of pain asymbolics (as against pain insensitives). For descriptions and initial references of empirical work concerning these, along with a central discussion of their philosophical relevance, see Grahek (2001).
- 8.
- 9.
We later discuss utilitarian principles. But note that Principles 1 and 2 (and the other non-utilitarian principles we discuss) are likely to command more support among philosophers and non-philosophers than utilitarian ones.
- 10.
See, e.g., Audi (2004) for an account of self-evidence.
- 11.
Moreover, insofar as negative affect can occur non-consciously, it is plausibly experienced negative affect which is morally significant. For purposes of space, we set aside the question of whether negative affect is necessarily conscious. One of us doubts that it is, but we agree that non-conscious negative affect would at any rate be less morally significant than consciously experienced negative affect.
- 12.
For a central discussion, see again Grahek (2001).
- 13.
For further discussion of the good reasons to take these reports at face value, see Corns (2014).
- 14.
See Dennett (1978) for an argument along these lines. Dennett, it is worth noting, here also argues for an eliminativism for pain, i.e. the claim that ‘pain’ never successful refers and so should be eliminated from everyday discourse. It seems to us that the revisionary move recommended in this text is also appropriate in response to his eliminativism, i.e. that we revise, without eliminating, our ordinary notion of pain in response to empirical discoveries. Space precludes further discussion.
- 15.
See, for example, Allen (2004).
- 16.
See, for example, Derbyshire et al. (1996).
- 17.
See, for example, Bostrom and Yudkowsky (2014).
- 18.
See, e.g., J.S. Mill: (1861, II 2) “The creed which accepts as the foundations of morals “utility” or the “greatest happiness principle” holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain and the privation of pleasure.”
- 19.
For purposes here, we set aside the question of whether pleasure, like pain, is a complex, convergent phenomenon and whether the utilitarian should focus not on pleasure, but on positive affect. It is a matter of some controversy whether and to what degree pain and pleasure, or positive and negative affect, are symmetrical.
- 20.
See, for instance, Eisenberger and Lieberman (2004).
- 21.
See Huemer (2005) for discussion of this kind of view.
- 22.
For discussion on how to formulate naturalism and ethical naturalism, see Lenman (2006).
- 23.
- 24.
- 25.
See Cowan (2017).
- 26.
See Bain (2017).
- 27.
But see Cutter and Tye (2011) for an argument against this.
- 28.
See also the chapter by Zarpentine, this volume.
- 29.
See his (2015).
- 30.
As we argue in Corns and Cowan (2018), it is far from obvious that the Affective Appeal can straightforwardly ground the truth even of attenuated versions of Internalism, e.g. ones which posit a necessary connection between moral judgment and motivation only for well-functioning or practically rational agents.
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Corns, J., Cowan, R. (2020). Lessons for Ethics from the Science of Pain. In: Holtzman, G.S., Hildt, E. (eds) Does Neuroscience Have Normative Implications?. The International Library of Ethics, Law and Technology, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56134-5_3
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