But it is not overstated to say that “pain has never been the compass of morality” and “if pain has ever been ‘the compass of morality’, then for rhetorical reasons”, because it is a fact that it is used rhetorically.
Can you say more about what you mean? Are you saying Mill intended something else when he talked about suffering?
They are consenting to experiencing pain. There is not some abstract ‘consent’ separate from the thing being consented to. (X can’t be removed from the equation, therefore you can’t write y>z alone.)
The person who inflict the pain(or non-pain in this case) does not actually know that the ‘victim’ feels. That, in itself, would restrain their actions. If one can be certain that the ‘victim’ feels nothing, then the moral evaluation proceeds to considerations of physical damage. If there is no pain and no physical damage, than I would say that there is nothing immoral about the action.
Pain is unpleasant… that is one of it’s attributes. I don’t see how you can get away from that fact.
You would need to explain why we have morality … what purpose does it serve?
The relationship between pain and morality becomes obvious once that question is answered.
Oh for heaven’s sake. Carleas, you are using a psychologist as your authority reference on morality???
…geeezzz… Why not use a Scientologist or a botanist, perhaps a civil traffic engineer or street cop.
You know, when it comes to ethics and morality, you can find some idiot to agree with anything. During liberal eras, ethics gets over emphasized and applied to ridiculous issues (giving plants equal rights because they might be feeling pain).
Pain has either (a) never been the compass of morality or (b) if it has been, then as a fake, namely for rhetorical reasons (almost everywhere, especially in the media).
Yes. That is how it works - and with an increasing success.
Physical pain is more about present suffering, emotional pain is more about past, present, and future suffering which far outweighs physical pains and is easily understood by a multitude of psychology examples with far reaching implications from self-medicating (addictions/obsessions) all the way to phantom limb syndrome. Psychological pains are what determine the type of society we endure.
It’s funny you posting this because psychological pain and trauma exists everywhere yet so called moral or ethical theorists time and time again dismiss it all throughout society.
We should just rename morality and ethics in human philosophy institutionally enforced hypocrisy.
I haven’t and would never intentionally delete a post, but I’m looking into where it went. It certainly wasn’t anything that deserved to be removed, especially since it is partially quoted anyway. Please PM me if you notice any other missing posts.
But we know that other morally neutral actions, taken without consent, are bad. For instance, petting someone’s head does not cause them pain, but petting someone’s head without their consent does seem morally bad. Is it just the presumption of consent or lack of consent? I’d agree that we can presume that someone does not consent to being made to experience pain, but we can also presume that actions that cause pain also cause damage, so I don’t think that moves us forward.
But we don’t need to cancel pain from both sides of the equation, it’s enough to see that the presence of pain is not what makes the action immoral.
Yes, but so is Justin Beiber music, but it isn’t immoral. In all seriousness, unpleasant is either too broad and includes things that aren’t immoral, or just begs the question: they are immoral only if pain and unpleasantness are inherently immoral.
One thing that makes this unlikely is, for example, that a racist may find the presence of members of a disfavored race unpleasant, but it is not immoral to subject the racist to that unpleasantness. I would argue that that experience of unpleasantness is better described as immoral than is the actions that makes them experience it.
Yes, I agree this is a good place to start.
I’d say that morality exists because of our evolutionary roots: we have evolved to be moral because it makes our social existence possible, and our ability to have complex social systems has increased our ability to survive. If that’s the case, then what’s moral is whatever furthers our survival, especially when it comes to social norms.
And while pain seems a valuable shorthand, I think it’s the-thing-that-pain-is-a-shorthand-for that is actually doing all the work of aiding survival. Because we’re a social species, we do better when there are lots of us, and when those lots of us are fully functional, so damaging them is bad. Pain is a shorthand for damage, but it isn’t damage, and to the extent it isn’t, to the extent it’s just unpleasantness, it’s not immoral in itself.
So Singer’s inclusion of animals as moral beings on the basis of their ability to feel pain is not really about pain? What’s is his real reason?
Justine Bieber music is deeply immoral. We, as citizens of Humanity and a Free Earth, must sue Justine for his audio atrocities. We deserve 25,000 grand checks paid for all the irrepairable mental trauma his music has done to our soul.
Damage and intrusive/intrusion would be better than pain as deciding morality. The biggest pain one could ever have generally comes from loved ones and yet it is acceptable. Sadly animals are seen as objects not life
Okay.
This would be a false conclusion. I did not say that it was “not really about pain”. But the point is that you can refer to real pain and - simultaneously - refer to morality without any real connection (but with many ideal resp. rhetorical connections, for example: fallacies on prurpose) between the two.
There are many reasons.
So you think that petting someone’s head without consent is immoral but subjecting someone to Justin Bieber music is not immoral???
That’s just too twisted for words.
People can consent to personal damage so then “consent is doing all the work” in the case of damage as well. :-"
You give someone permission to take your couch. Someone takes your couch without your permission. Why is one moral and the other immoral?
So the act of ‘taking stuff’ is not what makes the action immoral.
What about damage?
Losing your couch could be considered damage if you need it. But you might still give it away.
You ask someone to come into your house. Someone enters your house without permission …
That’s your personal morality presented as The Morality of the situation. Right?
Pain isn’t immoral.
Inflicting pain on someone without consent is immoral.
What is your reason for believing that?? If some criminal was to sat, “I disagree with your punishment”, thus no “consent”, how would you respond?
Morality is far more about attitudes than about results. Pain isn’t inherently immoral, it’s merely (generally) unpleasant - wilfully/needlessly causing pain shows an attitude of indifference to others. I think most people would agree that enjoying doing so is worse still: it’s more immoral to break two of someone’s fingers purely because you enjoy hearing their screams, then to break three of their fingers through negligence. The pain someone puts themselves through to be a world-class athlete is seen as at worst a necessary discomfort, and by some as worthy, or edifying.
The big moral problems with the consequences of utilitarianism - the train question, whether a life on a heroin high is desirable, consensual, enjoyable sex with a sibling/minor/animal - which seem to fly in the face of morality are because they confuse the results with the attitudes demonstrated.
The reason? Because morality’s function is to inform respectful attitudes and conscientious habits, not to provide a scientific calculus of pain/pleasure.
That’s a question about justice and how to deal with people who break the moral code. I admit that one sentence cannot sum up all the complex situations that are found in the world but I attempted to start moving in a logical direction. The same question arises with Carleas’ concept of damage … capital punishment, self-defense and war all seem to be legitimate exceptions to a simple rule about damage.
As to your question : In modern society, inflicting pain on prisoners is considered immoral.
I would (as I would be forced to) argue that, no, people can’t consent to damage to the same degree they can consent to pain. Pain, after all, is subjective: if someone tells you they want to feel pain, they are the expert on that question, they get to decide virtually without limit. But damage is objective; while I can’t tell someone that they will value the damage, I can certainly tell them that they will be damaged, and that person has no particular expertise to disagree with me.
So if we’re talking about an objective morality, damage seems a better candidate. (As an aside, we might for other reasons choose not to police damage or destruction, even though it is objectively wrong. I don’t think there’s any tension there.)
In the sense that I mean it, I don’t think that’s right. I like James’ formulation of ‘anentropy’: giving away a couch doesn’t increase entropy, but burning a couch does.
I agree with this, although I think the questions aren’t easy to separate: we might condemn less harshly the negligent infliction of more pain/damage because over the long term we expect negligence to produce less harm than sadism. In that case, attitude is just expressing a bet about results.
And a further question is where attitude does, and more importantly should come from. Here, I’m suggesting a split in attitudes: we could condemn either pain or damage more heavily. So rather than willfulness/negligence, vary pain: suppose we crush 2 fingers in a press smeared with hot sauce, or 3 fingers in a press smeared with topical analgesic; which should we prefer? What should our attitude be? I’d say we should prefer the pain, for much the same reason that I think we prefer the negligence: over the long term, more damage is worse, produce worse utility, than does pain.