Jon Cogburn's Blog

PAIN or ONE's OWN PAIN

I think you are able to be the least philosophical about things that just seem obvious to you. I've seen this with lots of friends. The seeming obviousness gives you an excuse not to think any more about whatever issue it is.

For me it's meta-ethics. It just seems obvious to me that pain has intrinsic normative significance.

That's not quite the end of the story, because one might raise a "disjunction problem" between the concepts PAIN and ONE'S OWN PAIN. If all that has intrinsic normative significance is one's own pain, then ethics won't get off the ground.

I think that there are two responses. First, there is the Hegel/Marx/Heidegger/Sartre/Wittgenstein/Levinas reversal, which argues that the concepts concerning the self are in some sense dependent on concepts involving others. A Wittgensteinian would do this in terms of having to learn the public applicability of "pain" which involves perceiving other people's pain and grasping its normative significance in terms of their pain. Or, if that is implausible (and I think it is) one can do something similar by arguing that the primary concept is PAIN, just because the differentiation between self and others is something that comes later.

I think the second type of response is a lot more promising. With some interpretive stretching, one can read Kant [I'll post the relevant passage from the Groundwork here later today] as raising a burden of proof issue. The challenge is to produce an argument to the claim that one's own pain has normative moral force while everybody else's does not. You can't do this, so if you believe that your own pain has normative moral force, you are rationally constrained to believe that everybody else's does too.

This just seems like it should be commonsense to me, which makes me pretty bad at engaging in philosophical disputes regarding it. Maybe it's not commonsense because it borrows both from the Millean utilitarian tradition and Kantian deontological tradition, but I just don't buy the over-application of Rawlsian reflective equilibrium to the project of ethics. I think the phenomena of tragic choices shows that there are genuine moral contradictions, and that a lot of these arise out of the way utilitarianism and kantian ethics contradict one another. But, again, this just seems like commonsense to me. . .

In any case, here's this boss Danzig song that involves some of the same concepts.

Does anyone have a citation for a generality problem for the utilitarian?

I don't know anything about ethics, so please direct me to a relevant citation.

It seems to me that the utilitarian claim that we have the obligation to act so as to produce the greatest happiness is only plausible if there is a decent relevant background set of acts from which we choose. For example if I'm choosing between punching someone in the face or just saying hello and smiling, I should (ceteris paribus) do the latter. It is when utilitarianism is applied to living (in William James' sense) choices and then used to argue for one relevant course of action over another that it really has decent teeth, and has led to improvement in humanity (British labor laws, etc.).

But if the set of relevant choices is construed too narrowly, then we might consider any act to be obligatory (just consider the set to be the unit set containing the act). But if the set is construed too widely then no act we might seriously consider is obligatory (instead of buying those flowers for your wife, you could be taking an extended holiday in Cambodia to help lots of very hungry people).

Isn't this exactly analogous to the generality problem for deontological theories with respect to how to construe the relevant maxim?

It would be interesting to see if attempted solutions and dissolutions to the deontological generality problem have any purchase with this problem for the utilitarian.