What I've done is to treat pain as something we make a conscious decision about, even though it really isn't. I treat it as a matter of personal preference, and act as though it were a matter of preference, because it gives me some cover to act consistently later on, when we start talking in moral terms about things that really are a matter of preference. I treat it as arbitrary, because for my purposes, it doesn't really matter that it's not, and in fact it's to my advantage to treat it as though it were.
Set me straight if I'm off here, but did you just admit to me that you're altering reality to fit your argument? Not that your paragraph isn't entirely without justification, but... I don't know. In any case, pain is pretty much by definition unpleasant. I'm not sure what else to say in that regard.
I accept your preferences as valid, and when I combine that with one other precept - that your preferences for yourself and your life carry more weight than someone else's preferences for you and your life - I have the beginnings of a system of morality.
COOL!!!... I hope. That is, I think you're acknowledging that morality has more than just a social-pragmatic basis. Is that what you're saying? (Please say yes)
And there is, IMO, an objective reason why pain hurts, why it has to be unpleasant.
This is a relatively minor but not insignificant point: It's true that there's an objective reason why pain hurts (and not just IYO, but AAMOF), but there is no objective description of what it is. And that's what makes it axiomatic in terms of morality. It truly doesn't matter why it hurts, what biological function it serves, what neurotransmitters it involves, whatever. Finding the answers to these questions even in their most fundamental details is not only unnecessary - as you've acknowledged - but not even useful. It would provide no further insight into morality at all. Only the experience of it provides the insight.
Well, yes, I agree with that as far as it goes. But my point in tossing that stuff out was to say that it's not just you and I who disagree on what that foundation is - there are deep divisions among people in general about what the foundations of morality are, and what the precepts of morality are.
Set me straight if I'm off here, but did you just admit to me that you're altering reality to fit your argument? Not that your paragraph isn't entirely without justification, but... I don't know. In any case, pain is pretty much by definition unpleasant. I'm not sure what else to say in that regard.
Not altering reality per se, in the same way that calling an elephant a frog doesn't make it a frog in any sense other than the trivial linguistic sense. What I'm doing there is glossing over the differences in favor of some consistency - I'm not really arguing that an elephant is a frog, just that there are some advantages to treating elephants as though they were frogs ;)
By the same token, me saying that the unpleasantness of pain is a "decision" doesn't really make it a decision, but there are practical advantages to treating it as though it were. The unpleasantness of pain may be inevitable, but the unpleasantness of tomatoes probably isn't ;)
COOL!!!... I hope. That is, I think you're acknowledging that morality has more than just a social-pragmatic basis. Is that what you're saying? (Please say yes)
I can...sort of ;)
In one sense, using the precept that your preferences for yourself should outweigh the preferences of others for you is a subjective judgement. It's a judgement call based on what I see as the consequences of deciding otherwise. I could have just as easily said that one major precept of morality is that my desires for people are paramount to everything, including their own desires. And there have been societies predicated on exactly that premise - think of the god-kings of the ancient Egyptians, for example. What the Pharoah said was absolute law, no matter what you happened to prefer - if he said "eat tomatoes", you were going to be eating tomatoes, no matter how you happened to feel about tomatoes.
But, because of the potential consequences of a society like that - not least among them, the notion that power corrupts - I make the subjective judgment that we'd like a society where people's preferences for themselves are given more weight than other people's preferences about them. It's a subjective judgement, but not a completely arbitrary one, since there is pragmatic, practical reasoning underneath the making of that judgement, and supporting that decision.
So, yes, it's subjective, but not arbitrary. How's that? ;)
This is a relatively minor but not insignificant point: It's true that there's an objective reason why pain hurts (and not just IYO, but AAMOF), but there is no objective description of what it is. And that's what makes it axiomatic in terms of morality. It truly doesn't matter why it hurts, what biological function it serves, what neurotransmitters it involves, whatever. Finding the answers to these questions even in their most fundamental details is not only unnecessary - as you've acknowledged - but not even useful. It would provide no further insight into morality at all. Only the experience of it provides the insight.
Yes. Here I think you and I are basically in agreement. For the purposes of building a system of morality wherein inflicting pain on others is wrong, it does not really matter why people think of pain as being unpleasant - the fact that they find it unpleasant is enough. We might be interested in investigating further, and discovering why exactly it is so, but that investigation is not necessary to construct a system of morality.