Diotima: The Marist Undergraduate Philosophy Journal
the question of whether pain is ultimately bad for me. To think so would be to slide
from a motivational (or qualitative) stance towards pain to a normative stance,
committing Moore’s “naturalistic fallacy,” and assuming the truth of some w elfare
theory in advance. And this is precisely what Lerner’s and Sinhababu’s claims 3
about pain’s intrinsic, undeniable badness— which LRS cite approvingly — do.
Curiously, in the very next passage, LRS seem to recognize the distinction
between normative and motivating stances towards pain:
To be motivated to seek pleasure and avoid pain it is not necessary that we
have the normative belief that pleasure is good and pain is bad. The way
pleasure and pain feel is already sufficiently motivating.
They buil d on this to suggest that “there is no reproductive advantage in our
holding that belief,” and so the belief is not vulnerable to debunking (p. 269). But
this is in tension with what they previously argued about sweet things and fire —
that claims that these things are intrinsically good and bad, respectively, are
debunkable. Under LRS’ own reasoning, those claims should not be debunkable. To
see this, just substitute “sweet things” and “fire” for “pleasure” and “pain,”
respectively, in the above passage. The result is sensible enough:
To be motivated to seek sweet things and avoid fire it is not necessary that we
have the normative belief that sweet things are good and fire is bad. The way
sweet things and fire feel is already sufficiently motivating. Hence there is no
reproductive advantage in our holding that belief.
It seems, then, that LRS can have the claim that pleasure is normatively
good, but only if they also assent that sweet things and fire are intrinsically
3 Cited in LRS, p. 267: Lerner: “our belief in pain’s badness seems to be justified by our immediate experience of how its object feels.” Sinhababu: “One can discover the badness of pain perfectly well just by experiencing it and knowing what it is like. There is something in pain, detectable through phenomenal introspection, which leads one to believe that it is a bad thing.”
Volume VI (2023)
57
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