I wish there was more discussion on this. It's self-evident to me that my pain is bad regardless of what anyone else thinks. If someone claims that my pain lacks intrinsic badness, then they've said something certainly false. Insofar error theory commits me to the view that my pain is not objectively intrinsically bad, then I'm certain that error theory is false.
I know what someone might say: Your pain is subjective / mind-dependent, so calling it objective is an obvious category error. But as Sharon Rawlette points out in her book The Feeling of Value, some things can be mind-dependent yet judgment-independent. What's relevant here is not mind-independent facts but judgment-independent facts. For example, if you visit the Louvre and see the Mona Lisa and tell your friend that you saw the Mona Lisa in person, and your friend says "No you didn't" (he mistakenly thinks you are lying), then the judgment of your friend is false despite the fact that you saw the Mona Lisa is dependent on your mind. Likewise, if you are injured and tell your friend that your pain is intrinsically bad and your friend says "No it's not" (i.e. No, your experiences do not have the qualities that you see directly that they have), then you're friend is certainly mistaken.
Some moral anti-realists try to claim that direct experiences of badness don't exist and there are only judgments of badness, and so claims about badness are always judgment-dependent. Rawlette addresses this. I would add that sure, claims about what is extrinsically bad are judgments and thus could be mistaken (e.g., the judgment from Christians that gay marriage is bad is mistaken), but claims about intrinsic badness are no different than claims about any direct experience, which cannot be mistaken. I agree with Josh Rasmussen about the security of our direct experience beliefs: ". . . a belief based directly and solely on a direct experience is the most secure a belief could possibly be, for it has the fewest sources of possible error. We could call it 'infallible' in the following sense: necessarily, if one directly experiences x (a thought, feeling, visual image, mathematical truth), and on that basis alone believes that x exists, then that belief is true." (Who Are You, Really, 29, fn8)
At this point the moral anti-realist can say something like: Yes, there are objective, judgment-independent axiological facts about intrinsic goodness and badness. But so what? Axiological facts are not moral facts. There are no facts about what you should do or not do; there is no categorical imperative that you ought to maximize intrinsic goodness, or that you ought to care about this person's intrinsic goodness or not care about this other person's intrinsic pain. Plus, there couldn't be any knowledge about which intrinsic goods are more important or of a greater magnitude than others. Banning gay marriage and annulling all current gay marriages would cause a lot of pain among gay folks and allies. But it would bring a lot of happiness among homophobic conservatives and Christians. So while it's a fact that banning gay marriage is good for bigots and bad for everyone else, there is no fact over which side's happiness "wins" over the other's, and so there is no fact that banning gay marriage is wrong or right.
The discussion could continue from there and would be very interesting to see.
Anyone can claim anything to be “self-evident” but this does not provide others with any reason to believe that what they regard as self-evident is, in fact, true. To me, nothing is more obvious than that there are no stance-independent moral facts of any kind, including the notion that pain is intrinsically bad. Claims that things are self-evident have mostly private epistemic status, and provide little public reason for anyone else to agree.
>>Some moral anti-realists try to claim that direct experiences of badness don't exist and there are only judgments of badness, and so claims about badness are always judgment-dependent. Rawlette addresses this.
I am someone who claims that there is no such thing as direct experience of badness. How does Rawlette address it? More generally, why should I think there are such experiences?
>> I would add that sure, claims about what is extrinsically bad are judgments and thus could be mistaken (e.g., the judgment from Christians that gay marriage is bad is mistaken), but claims about intrinsic badness are no different than claims about any direct experience, which cannot be mistaken.
What is direct experience and why can’t one be mistaken about them? You give a lot of examples of how antirealists might respond, but I'm an antirealist and I'm not inclined to offer any of those responses. Rather, I think your position rests on several assumptions that I either reject or am not sure what you mean by them.
Throughout this post I will be referencing Josh Rasmussen’s book Who Are You, Really? (2023) and Sharon Rawlette’s book The Feeling of Value (2016).
If I’m not mistaken, Lance Bush does not believe in qualia. If that’s right, then it’s no surprise that Lance Bush doesn’t believe in a positive / affective quale or a negative / aversive quale. I’m certain that qualia exists, and I’m certain that there is a positive quale in common with all positive experiences and a negative quale in common with all negative experiences. So we’re off to a bad start in terms of how much our views have in common.
"To me, nothing is more obvious than that there are no stance-independent moral facts of any kind, including the notion that pain is intrinsically bad."
I see a distinction between axiological facts (facts about what is good and bad) and moral facts (facts about what ought to be done). I don't see why something's being good entails that it ought to be done. In fact it's easy to come up with examples where this isn't the case: eating treats all day is good. So should I eat treats all day? Not if I want to feel healthy.
So axiological and moral facts come apart as far as I can see. Philosophers (including Rawlette) say that claims about goodness and badness are normative. I don’t see why. Goodness contains ought-to-be-ness? Why think that? I see that my happiness is good, but I don’t see why it ought to be. Relative to the goal of maximizing my happiness, my happiness ought to be. But that’s conditional normativity, not categorical normativity.
"I'm an antirealist and I'm not inclined to offer any of those responses."
Because I am certain that pain is intrinsically bad, I'm not interested in any anti-realism that denies this. I'm wondering if there's a moral anti-realism compatible with axiological facts. I think there could be, and that's exciting to me (and I would think would be exciting to anti-realists). Indeed, the conflation of axiological and moral facts could be preventing more people from becoming moral anti-realists.
Nothing is more obvious to me than that pain is intrinsically bad. Giving up that belief would be as impossible as giving up the belief that I exist, or that my experiences of blue have bluey-ness. My experiences of pain have badness; it's just a label of the data.
What is direct experience? First-person data.
Josh Rasmussen: “The contents of consciousness are the objects of direct awareness. For example, when you have a visual experience, you can be directly aware of shapes and colors within your experience (as phenomenal contents).” (Rasmussen, 95) Rasmussen also uses the term ‘first-person data’.
Why can't one be mistaken about one's direct experience? Because data can't be mistaken.
Interpretations of data can be mistaken. But like Josh Rasmussen says, reports of direct experience, which I take to include no interpretation, cannot be mistaken. I imagine this is why he says, “. . . necessarily, if one directly experiences x . . . and on that basis alone believes that x exists, then that belief is true.” (Emphasis mine.) That is, if your belief contains nothing more than a reference to data, without any interpretation of that data, then that belief cannot be false.
Reports on the badness of pain are data reports, and denying the badness of pain is not only denying the data, but denying the most accessible kind of data.
Deniers of axiological facts could claim that reports on the badness of pain are interpretations. But I do not interpret my pain as bad anymore than I interpret my blue experiences as bluey.
So here’s a fun question: When can you tell whether a direct experience report contains interpretation and when it doesn’t?
One guide I can think of is to see that interpretations contain a hidden ‘therefore’. I imagine looking at a photo and reporting the following:
I see what appears to be a giant Lego figure in the street next to a person; therefore there is a giant Lego figure in the street next to a person. But really, the Lego is a minifigure placed on a stand in the foreground, and the stand was painted to blend in with the background, and a shadow was painted on the street. The shapes and colors of the first-person data are consistent with two different interpretations: that there is a giant Lego figure in the background, or a Lego minifigure in the foreground. Mistakes are possible when data is interpreted.
But even before these two interpretations, there are interpretations of the shapes seen, that the shape I see is really that of a physical Lego figure instead of say, a digital AI generated image. I.e., there appears to be a physical Lego figure, a physical person, a street, a garage from where the photo is taken, houses behind the street, clouds in the sky, etc., therefore, there is a physical Lego figure, a physical person, etc.
I can imagine dropping all the ‘therefores’ and reporting on just the visual experience itself: There is data that I might describe as appearing as such and such, but I make no assumptions on what this data actually means. My beliefs consist solely in the visual data itself. No interpretations are made. If I use words to try to communicate the data, the words do nothing other than reference the data itself. When trying to give a pure data report, I might have to gerrymander the meaning of the terms I use to remove all interpretive aspects. E.g., I might say “Lego figure”, but that references only the shape and color of the image and makes no assumption as to what that image really means, despite ‘Lego’ usually meaning something physical, manufactured, etc.
(Michael Huemer mentions in the interview with Philip Goff linked at the end that in philosophy of science this is the problem of data underdetermining theory. 39m: “people in philosophy of science widely recognize that theory is underdetermined by data. So there's a set of data. There's always more than one theory that explains it.”)
So are there any hidden ‘therefores’ in reports on the badness of pain? E.g., I experience pain, which contains such and such feelings, therefore my pain is bad? In my case, no. When I say “My pain is bad”, the word ‘bad’ contains nothing more than reference to phenomenal data. Likewise, when I use the word ‘blue’ in the report “I see blue”, I am referencing phenomenal blue.
When I use the word ‘pain’, I refer to a set of qualia of the form A + B where B is phenomenal badness and A is the phenomenal qualities that differentiate it from other pains. E.g., the pain of the disgust produced by a bad bite of food is different from the pain of having a nightmare, but both share B (hence, both are pains). So when I say “Pain is bad”, it’s like saying “Experience A + B contains B”. Physical pains are pains where A includes qualities of nociception.
It’s self-evidently true that the set {A,B} contains {B}. But whether “Experience A + B contains B” is self-evidently true depends on whether it’s self-evident that A and B are real experiences. And it is self-evident that A and B are real experiences, to me at least.
How does Rawlette respond to authors who claim that pain is not intrinsically bad?
Rawlette claims that there is intrinsic goodness and badness:
“My proposal is that intrinsic goodness and badness just are felt qualities. One of the things I normally feel when I am in pain is an intense unpleasantness. This unpleasantness, I propose, is intrinsic badness itself. . . . It is bad to have experience with that negative quality, simply in virtue of the nature of the feeling itself. The feeling itself is badness. When I feel pleasure, on the other hand, I feel goodness itself.” (Rawlette, 73-74)
And she claims that this is observable via introspection:
“Ultimately, however, we must turn to introspection for confirmation (or disconfirmation) of the existence of normative phenomenal qualities.” (Rawlette, 94)
Which makes it difficult to prove publicly:
“Unfortunately, there is no straightforward way to present evidence for a phenomenal manifestation of aversion, since there’s no way literally to point at the instantiation of a phenomenal quality as proof of its existence.” (Rawlette, 80)
“. . . in the end there is no way to demonstrate that all positive and all negative experiences share common phenomenal qualities, because we cannot display phenomenal experience for collective examination . . .” (Rawlette, 94)
Right. Because first-person data is private and cannot be shown, the fundamental “argument” for the existence of phenomenal goodness and badness is no argument at all: it’s an ability. I use my ability to introspect and see that there’s a feeling there unlike any other feeling, in need of its own label, and it’s a feeling in common with all experiences of this sort. I call that feeling ‘bad’, just like how I call that visual experience ‘blue’ when I see blue.
Rasmussen also seems to believe that there is phenomenal positivity and negativity, accessed directly via introspection:
“Conscious awareness allows you to see many things. . . . through the window of your sense of good and bad, you become aware of positive and negative aspects of things.” (Rasmussen, 95)
SIDE NOTE:
The following terms all refer to the same thing (when I use them):
a) B in the pain formula A + B;
b) phenomenal badness;
c) intrinsic badness;
d) the quale of badness;
e) the quale of aversion;
f) the quale of dislike / disapproval;
g) the quale of unpleasantness;
h) the quale of hurtfulness;
i) the quale of painfulness;
j) the quale of negativity;
k) the quale of not-worth-it.
Conversely, for pleasures, all the following terms refer to the same thing (when I use them):
a*) B in the pleasure formula A + B;
b*) phenomenal goodness;
c*) intrinsic goodness;
d*) the quale of goodness;
e*) the quale of affection / conation;
f*) the quale of like / approval;
g*) the quale of pleasantness;
h*) the quale of niceness;
i*) the quale of happiness / joy;
j*) the quale of positivity;
k*) the quale of worth-it.
We might therefore use B- to refer to phenomenal negativity and B+ to refer to phenomenal positivity. We could also use C- to refer to judging something as extrinsically bad or judging a pain or pleasure as overall not worth the trouble, and C+ to refer to judging something as extrinsically good or judging a pain or pleasure as overall worth the trouble. C properties are explained later.
You can replace the word ‘quale’ with ‘feeling’ or ‘experience’.
Someone could reasonably want to make distinctions between these terms. Someone might want to say that ‘joy’ is a more intense feeling than ‘happiness’. Someone might even want to say that ‘happiness’ should be reserved to mean something more like ‘contentment’, where it’s not so much a positive feeling as it is a state of lacking any negative feelings. At the very least, all positive feelings having something in common, and I can imagine someone saying: all positive feelings are intrinsically good, subject to basic affection, subject to basic conation (striving for or desire for), liked, subject to basic approval, pleasant, nice, happy, joyful, positive, and worth pursuing for its own sake.
SIDE NOTE 2:
While we’re in side note mode here, I wanted to flag another thing. Rawlette says (extended quote bolded):
“My proposal is that intrinsic goodness and badness just are felt qualities. One of the things I normally feel when I am in pain is an intense unpleasantness. This unpleasantness, I propose, is intrinsic badness itself. It is bad to feel that way (all else being equal).” (Rawlette, 73)
This ceteris paribus clause doesn’t make sense. When I see phenomenal blue, that blue quale is never blue “all else being equal.” It’s just phenomenal blueness itself. Likewise, when I feel pain, I feel phenomenal badness itself. It is bad simpliciter. There is no ceteris paribus clause to be applied here. So why would Rawlette be tempted to put one here?
(I thank an anonymous YouTube commenter for pointing out that the ceteris paribus clause doesn’t make sense here, because in a YouTube comment of my own I made this exact mistake that Rawlette makes here.)
Here’s a potential answer: Painfulness, by itself, is not worth it. But often pains come bundled with pleasures. Pleasures, the opposite of pains, contain the quale of worth-it. We weigh the worth-it-ness against the not-worth-it-ness of experiences and based on that calculation either accept or reject the experience. Often pain is accepted in a tolerating way, but pain is always rejected all else being equal, meaning that if I can get the exact same good result but with less pain, I will always choose the less painful version. This demonstrates the intrinsic not-worth-it-ness of pain; to the degree something is painful, it is, exactly to that degree, not worth it, and to the degree that something is pleasurable, it is, exactly to that degree, worth it, and sometimes, in our minds, the worth-it outweighs and other times the not-worth-it outweighs. To put it in terms explained later, we must not confuse B (the feeling of badness) with C (the feeling of taking that badness to be overall worth it (or overall not worth it) because of the pleasures B leads to (or fails to lead to). While the ceteris paribus clause makes sense with respect to C, it does not make sense with respect to B.
CONTINUING:
Rawlette agrees that there is phenomenal positivity and negativity:
“. . . the phenomenal quality that makes the experience of tasting a food disgusting is the same quality that makes pain feel bad. . . . all of our negative experiences, whatever differences they may have, all have at least one qualitative aspect in common: their negativity.” (Rawlette, 87)
Josh Rasmussen defends the reliability of introspection, and I agree with this defense (Rasmussen, 6-10). Rasmussen says what I say: Data cannot be wrong, but interpretations of data can be:
“. . . mistakes from introspection ultimately have their origin in some shaky inference . . . Regardless, I believe we can be directly consciously acquainted with contents of consciousness prior to forming a theory-laden, conceptual analysis of what we are acquainted with.” (Rasmussen 7)
I would add, and I’m sure Rasmussen would agree: it’s all too easy to make an interpretation without realizing it. I agree with Rawlette’s cautionary statement (extended quote bolded):
“Ultimately, however, we must turn to introspection for confirmation (or disconfirmation) of the existence of normative phenomenal qualities. And there we should not be too quick to come to conclusions, since it may take us time to identify accurately all of the components, dimensions, and relations of our phenomenal experiences.” (Rawlette, 94)
So the denier of intrinsic badness should say that I’m right to be certain about the data I am reporting, but that my interpretation of this data is mistaken. For example, what I see as bad qualia is really the qualia of witnessing myself taking something to be bad. That is, there is something it is like to evaluate or judge or interpret something as bad, and that’s the data I am reporting. And so, there is nothing judgment-independent here, only the judgment of badness and its accompanying qualia. This is basically what Sharon Street argues, as quoted by Rawlette:
“In order to salvage his or her view of pain as bad independently of our evaluative attitudes, the realist must admit that pain’s badness depends on its being a sensation such that the creature who has it is unreflectively inclined to take it to be bad. But this, in turn, is just to admit that its badness depends in an important sense on our evaluative attitudes—in particular, on our being unreflectively inclined to take it to be bad. Pain may well be bad, in other words, but if it is so, its badness hinges crucially on our unreflective evaluative attitudes toward the sensation which pain is.” (Street, “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value”; Rawlette, 78)
This passage is frustrating.
a) In order to salvage my view, I need to give it up entirely?
b) What is the “sensation which pain is”? It can’t include B, because B is bad independent of anyone’s attitude towards B. But if Street’s concept of pain lacks B, then it’s not my concept of pain.
c) How can I “take” an experience to be bad unless there is something about that experience that could explain why I judge the experience to be bad? I think of the taste of high-quality vanilla frozen custard. Could I take that taste to be bad? No, no more than I could “take” the color blue to be red. I don’t “take” phenomenal blue to be blue; I just see that it is blue. Likewise, I don’t “take” the taste of high-quality vanilla frozen custard to be good; I just see that it is good.
Per Rawlette, Street has the following dilemma in mind for the person who accepts that pain is intrinsically bad (my paraphrase):
Either pain, in order to be intrinsically bad, depends on a negative evaluation (in other words, a judgment of badness) or it doesn’t.
Horn 1: If pain doesn’t depend on a judgment of badness, then someone could judge their pain as good even though it’s bad. I.e., someone could enjoy their pain, which doesn’t sound possible.
Horn 2: If pain does depend on a judgment of badness, then the pain is judgment-dependent.
But this dilemma is easily answered: I would go with Horn 1, with clarification. Someone can judge their pain as worth it, as a net good, while still experiencing its intrinsic badness.
An example: I dab some hydrogen peroxide on a cut on my hand. I feel a brief sting. The sting is painful, but its pain is so slight and brief that I almost don’t register it. But when I do the same for my young niece or nephew and see their reaction, I am reminded that yes, this sting is painful. But by paying the small cost of the slight sting, I get the comfort of knowing that my cut has been disinfected. The goodness of this reassurance outweighing the badness of the sting explains why it is that I judge the sting to be a worth-it pain. This reassurance is a big comfort to me, someone who knows how serious infections are. But my young niece and nephew don’t appreciate the danger of infection, so there’s more of the sting than the reassurance. This could help explain why their reaction is much worse than mine – that and the natural increase in pain tolerance as one gets older. So I see how our psychology can affect how painful something is, or how willing we are to tolerate a particular pain. Sure enough, it’s not as if I would ever go seeking out the sting of hydrogen peroxide for its own sake. If I came to find out that hydrogen peroxide was useless at disinfecting cuts, then I would stop using it; I would no longer tolerate the sting. (Why do I have to tolerate pains that I deem overall worthy? The tolerating is telling. I have to tolerate pain because pain is intrinsically bad.)
So while the sting of the hydrogen peroxide is intrinsically bad, I judge it to be a good pain. I don’t enjoy the pain, but I do enjoy the reassurance it brings. The hydrogen peroxide is extrinsically bad and extrinsically good, because it causes something intrinsically bad and intrinsically good. When we judge something as extrinsically bad or good, that’s a judgment. When we feel the intrinsic goodness or badness of a joy or pain, that’s a direct experience.
So the confusion on Street’s part seems to be thinking that because there is a judgment involved in evaluating something as extrinsically good or bad, there must be a judgment involved when reporting data on intrinsic goodness and badness. But that’s false. That fails to distinguish between intrinsic and extrinsic goodness and badness and fails to account for B data.
At this point it will be helpful to expand my model of pain. To recap, pains are experiences of the form A + B where A refers to the properties that distinguish one pain from another and B refers to the intrinsic badness that all pains have in common and makes them characteristically painful. Conversely, joys (or pleasures or instantiations of happiness) have the form A + B where A refers to the properties that distinguishes one joy from another and B refers to the intrinsic goodness that all joys have in common and makes them characteristically pleasant.
We need to add C: The experience of judging something to be extrinsically bad or extrinsically good.
I know the taste of chocolate is good in itself. I judge chocolate to be (extrinsically) good because I know chocolate causes the taste of chocolate. There is something it is like to take chocolate to be good or to evaluate or judge chocolate as good. That qualia is what C refers to.
(Technically then there are two layers to C: one is the attitude one takes toward their pain, i.e., toward B, as worth it or not. But of course those who want to explain pain qualia purely in terms of C will reject that layer. The other layer is the qualia involved in judging something as extrinsically good or bad.)
Rawlette responds to Street’s comments:
“Such arguments for antirealism about the badness of pain rely on a fairly simple, but faulty, strategy. They note that there is a part of the experience of pain that includes no feeling or judgment of badness [the A properties], and another part that is this feeling or judgment of badness [the C properties]. They note that obviously the part that includes no feeling or judgment of badness is not intrinsically bad, and then conclude that the badness of pain as a whole is not intrinsic, because it depends on the other part of the experience, which is our reaction to the first. What they don’t consider is that this other part of the pain experience might be the experience of an additional phenomenal quality and that this quality might itself be intrinsically, judgment-independently bad.” (Rawlette, 78)
I wouldn’t characterize what anti-realists are doing here as strategies – more like confusions.
C Confusions: Confusions where C data is thought to account for why people (mistakenly) think there is B data.
Example 1: Thinking that because there is a judgment involved in evaluating something as extrinsically good or bad, there must be a judgment involved when reporting data on intrinsic goodness and badness.
Example 2: Thinking that when someone tries to report phenomenal badness, really they are just reporting the qualia involved in witnessing themselves take something to be bad.
Example 3: Thinking that C data can account for what all our pains or joys have in common.
C data cannot account for why I think there is B data. I see two distinct sets of data here. I mentioned the sting of hydrogen peroxide and how I think of it as a good pain. The A properties of the sting include nociception; the B property includes the intrinsic badness of the sting; and the C properties include my willingness to tolerate B and my assessment that even though B is slightly bad, it’s worth it. This contrasts with my experience with ear infections, where the C properties include an assessment that B is too much and not worth it. C properties include the judgment of viewing hydrogen peroxide as a good thing despite the slight pain it causes, or include the judgment that swimming without ear protection is bad because of the risk of the pain of ear infections.
You can’t explain the phenomenal badness in terms of C properties in both cases, because in the hydrogen peroxide case my C properties are positive while in the ear infection case my C properties are negative. And yet clearly there is something painful in both cases. That painfulness is B. In fact, I have no idea how the C properties could come about without the B properties.
Put another way, because I see that I can have an experience that is B- but C+, and an experience that is B+ but C- (e.g., going to the family gathering makes me happy because I get along with such and such family members, but makes me miserable because I don’t get along with other family members, and the latter is bad enough that I judge the happiness to overall not be worth it), I see that phenomenal goodness and badness cannot be fully explained in terms of C data alone.
Are there any other authors who are guilty of a C Confusion? Yes. Here’s Richard Hall, as quoted by Rawlette:
“The natural view is that there is a common sensational quality, a common phenomenological feel, that unites all these pain sensations and accounts for our calling them all pains. . . . But what could that common phenomenal feel be? Think of how different the initial stabbing pain of a pin prick is from the dull ache of a bruise, and both of those from the feel of a burn or a cut. What phenomenal feel is common to all those pains? The obvious answer may seem to be: unpleasantness (or awfulness or horribleness). ‘Pains . . . have an intrinsic qualitative nature (a horrible one) that is revealed in introspection . . .’ I disagree with this view. While I admit that pains are unpleasant, I hold that unpleasantness is not a phenomenal quality of pains. What does the unpleasantness of pain sensations consist in, then?
The unpleasantness of pain sensations consists in their being disliked. The dislike of a pain sensation is a separate mental state, separate, that is, from the sensation.” (Hall, “Are Pains Necessarily Unpleasant?”; Rawlette 88-89)
Before I talk about the C Confusion here, there’s an even more clear confusion present:
A Confusions: Confusions where the diversity of A properties across pains and pleasures is interpreted as meaning there is nothing phenomenal that our pains and pleasures have in common.
Rawlette acknowledges the confusion: “Merely showing that unpleasantness and sensations of nociception can come apart goes no way towards proving that unpleasantness is not also a phenomenal quality.” (Rawlette, 89)
When authors say our pains have no phenomenal quality in common, I wonder in virtue of what do they unite these experiences under the term ‘pains’? We talk about pains and pleasures as if there is some property that makes something a pain or pleasure. There is: the B- or B+ property. But these authors might suggest that what our pains have in common is nothing more than our judgment of badness. But the possibility of B-/C+ or B+/C- mismatch shows that there is something phenomenal there in addition to judgment qualia. So an A Confusion can lead to a C Confusion.
Rawlette notes how strange it is that Hall recognizes phenomenal dislike. So do I. Hall cannot have in mind that phenomenal dislike is B data when he explicitly rejects the existence of B data. So instead Hall must think that phenomenal dislike falls under C data; dislike is the experience of judging something as bad, and this is enough to account for our sense of badness. And because this data depends on our judgment, it is judgment-dependent. But this is a C Confusion.
Are there other authors who make similar mistakes? Yes. Consider Alan Fuchs, as quoted by Rawlette:
“there is obviously no felt quality or sensation common to all of the experiences we enjoy, which would have had to have been the case if the enjoyment consisted in having the experience along with a sensation of pleasure . . . Consider, for example, a pleasing stimulus, the sound of a rock-and-roll band, or the taste of a great wine. Simple introspection reveals, even in these cases, no element of sensory experience common to them all.” (Fuchs, “The Production of Pleasure by Stimulation of the Brain: An Alleged Conflict Between Science and Philosophy”; Rawlette, 92)
I agree that the A properties between joys differ significantly, just as the A properties between pains differ significantly. But there is a property that all pains have in common, lest we could not talk about pains as if there were. The pain of a nightmare is bad. The joy of a happy dream is good. The pain of the disgust of a bite of undercooked chicken is bad. The joy of the taste of a ripe strawberry is good. The pain of the sting of an injection is bad. The pain of the dread from anticipating the sting is bad. The joy from believing that one has done the right thing is good. Are all these experiences good or bad in the same way? Not at all; folks compare all the time how bad one pain is compared to another, or how good such and such experience is. But all are unmistakably good or bad, which is what makes it possible to compare the experiences to begin with. As Rawlette points out (93), there is a property that all phenomenal properties have in common: they are all phenomenal. All feelings are felt. That doesn’t stop the sheer diversity of phenomenal properties. But it would be silly to conclude, based on that diversity, that felt experiences were, somehow, not felt after all.
Rawlette identifies yet another kind of confusion we find, which requires us to expand our model of pains:
D: That which causes our pain (i.e., that which causes A + B).
D properties are not necessarily phenomenal, and indeed usually not. The syringe that causes my fear is not a phenomenal syringe, but a physical one (unless I am dreaming, in which case the syringe is phenomenal – but even in that case presumably my subconscious was inspired ultimately by a physical syringe).
But there are cases where our mental properties are the cause of our pains, and those properties can include judgments, making that pain appear judgment-dependent:
“For example, if one thinks that it’s good for people to marry and have lots of children, then when one sees someone married with a large family, one’s perception will be accompanied by the experience of a positive normative quale. On the other hand, if one thinks it’s bad for people to marry and have lots of children, then when one sees the very same family, one will experience a negative normative quale. Surely this is judgment-dependence!
Actually, this example includes both judgment-dependent and judgment-independent normativity. What is judgment-dependent is whether a particular person will experience a positive or negative normative quale in response to seeing a married couple with several children in tow. What is judgement-independent is that experiencing a positive normative quale is good and experiencing a negative normative quale is bad.” (Rawlette, 93) (Emphasis mine.)
D Confusions: Confusions where the judgment-dependence of the cause of a pain is seen to imply that the badness of the pain is itself judgment-dependent.
The ontology of a pain can be judgment-dependent; i.e., whether the pain exists at all depends on a judgment. But once the pain comes to be, no judgment has any effect on the felt quality of a past pain. Likewise, if there is an experience of blue in my past, no one’s judgment—not even my own—can change the fact that the blue-ness of that experience was exactly as it was in the moment it occurred. (Perhaps a current pain can be reduced by a judgment via, for example, the placebo effect. But that just means that the current pain is partially caused by a judgment.)
The fact that a D Confusion is a confusion can clearly be seen by the distinction between cause and quality, which can be seen by the fact that someone else’s judgment can be the cause of your pain and yet not bear on the badness of your pain.
For example, a society might be convinced that you deserve punishment. So they judge your pain itself as good, as comprising retributive justice. It is because of their judging your pain as good that they cause your pain by sending you to prison. But it would be absurd to think that the badness of your pain depends on their judgment when you see how the painfulness stays the same regardless of whether your pain is judged as good or bad. If the same society discovered that you had been falsely convicted and thus changed their attitude toward your pain from approval to disapproval, the painfulness of your incarceration doesn’t change despite the change in the judgment that originally caused your pain. (And note that society likely would not view your pain as fair for a time relative to a group of people and then unjust relative to that same group, without any absolute injustice. Rather, the pain was absolutely unfair the entire time. Our attitude toward your pain, that entire time, was mistaken. Granted, this is an empirical, sociological claim that I make as an educated guess.)
By analogy, I imagine someone judging the color blue as looking good on them, and because of that they wear a blue shirt. Seeing them I’m now having a blue experience, caused in part by their judgment. But their judgment has no bearing on the quality of the experience itself. If suddenly they changed their mind and decided that blue does not look good on them, my visual experience of their blue shirt remains the same despite the change in their judgment. (If they tried to claim that I’m not having a visual experience of blue, and instead I’m somehow only having an experience of “taking myself to be having a blue experience”, I would be confused as to why anyone would think that this is even possibly true. I’m not even sure it’s a coherent thing to say. It looks like a misunderstanding of what a first-person data report is.)
To our ever-expanding model we could add E: Your pain behaviors. An E Confusion would be confusing someone’s pain behaviors with pain itself; i.e. denying the existence of B and claiming that E accounts for B. While this sounds unbelievable, once upon a time behaviorism was a live theory of consciousness that stated that conscious states just are behaviors.
Summarizing reasons to believe in the existence of B:
1) Introspection. This is not an argument, but a claim of sight. I introspect and see, directly, that there is phenomenal badness / phenomenal goodness and I label that first-person data B in the formula for pains and pleasures A + B + C + D + E.
Deniers of B seem to think that A + C + D + E does the job of explaining everything there is to explain about pain, and so there is nothing left for B to refer to. And so, B doesn’t refer. But that’s clearly mistaken: A + C + D + E does not do the job, as the following points show.
2) Denying B data leaves C data unexplained. How could it be possible for me to judge anything as bad, unless there was some bad experience I was appealing to as reason to judge the thing in question as bad? I cannot make sense of judgments over the goodness or badness of things unless that judgment is caused by some experience, and that experience is B. Put another way, I need intrinsic badness to explain judgments over extrinsic badness. Because I see that value and disvalue could not exist without consciousness, I see that at the fundamental level value and disvalue must be experiential. So there must be phenomenal goodness and badness. The very concepts of positivity and negativity could not exist unless there were conscious experiences giving rise to those categories. We can’t just invent badness or goodness out of thin air; first we experience it, and then we judge things as extrinsically good or bad based on whether and how likely they are to cause good and bad experiences. So the very distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic goodness and badness is something I see as necessary to explain my experiences. How can I “take something to be bad” if I don’t know what ‘bad’ means? I know what bad means: it’s phenomenal.
3) Denying B data leaves it unexplained why it is we tolerate pain that we judge to be necessary to bring about greater happiness.
4) Denying B data leaves unexplained what's in common with pains with different C data.
5) Denying B data leaves D data unexplained. I cannot make sense of something causing me to feel bad without positing feeling bad, which is B.
6) Denying B data leaves it unexplained why it is that ‘why’ questions over motivation terminate in an essence fact when we arrive at pains and pleasures. I.e.: Why not place your hand on the hot stove? Because that would be painful. Why avoid pain? Because of the essence of pain; because painfulness is worth avoiding for its own sake.
7) If we take the idea of mental causation seriously, and thus take seriously the idea that our actions are caused by our experiences, then it seems like if any qualia is going to cause us to pursue or avoid certain things, it would be something as basic as good qualia and bad qualia. (Rawlette makes this point; see pgs. 84-86.)
8) It seems like animals do not make judgments about what is good or bad. But we see animal pain as bad in and of itself regardless of any judgments. Same with human infants: Human infants feel something that is bad in virtue of what it is even if they are not capable of making judgments. Same with humans who have mental disabilities, like advanced dementia; here there can be a lack of C — no phenomenology of the disabled person taking their pain to be bad – and yet clearly there is still phenomenal badness. But again, even if someone can “take” their pain to be bad, what could explain the possibility of this process? Complex mental calculations? But animals, infants, and disabled folks aren’t capable of that. The judgment, if there is one, would have to be based on something as simple as a feeling. (Cf. Rawlette, 82, 86.)
9) ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ require phenomenal definitions. Trying to use words to describe what goodness or badness is like to a robot who has never experienced them is like trying to describe what red or blue is like to someone blind from birth. And yet, despite not being able to define these terms, we know what they mean; we know the experience gestured to by these terms. This is characteristic of phenomenal definitions. I cannot define ‘blue’ with words, only gesture toward what blue is, because blue has a phenomenal definition. What is blue? It’s that... bluey... color – not exactly helpful. Yet, I am certain there is something it is like to see blue. What is pain like? It's that... painful feeling. ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ have the same features as other phenomenal terms. (Cf. Rawlette, 74.)
To be a bit cheeky: If you still aren’t certain that there is something it is like to feel bad, then I feel bad for you, and by feeling bad for you I see, with certainty, that there is something it is like to feel bad.
PS - Philip Goff is another philosopher who seems to agree that it’s self-evident that there is phenomenal badness and goodness (1 hr 13m): https://philipgoff.substack.com/p/is-morality-objective