Are Pains Necessarily Unpleasant?

Abstract

With apologies for asking you to do something unpleasant, I bid you think of some painful injury you suffered recently, say a cut finger, a burned hand, or a bruised leg. Concentrate on the painful sensation. No doubt it was unpleasant, more unpleasant, I fear, than your present memory of it. But was it necessarily unpleasant? In particular, was the unpleasantness an intrinsic aspect of the sensation, so that you couldn't have that very sensation without its being unpleasant? Many think so. Cf. Churchland: Pains have an intrinsic qualitative nature (a horrible one) that is revealed in introspection [Churchland, I 9 8 5, p. 24] and Pitcher: I think it is probably true that all pains are unpleasant. Are pains then necessarily unpleasant? I think it is probable that if they are all in fact unpleasant, then they are necessarily so. . [Pitcher, 1970, pp. 491-91]. I disagree. Outrageous as it sounds, I think pain sensations are not necessarily unpleasant. I think you could have exactly the same kinds of sensation as you have when you are cut, burned, or bruised, and they not be unpleasant. In this paper, I shall argue for this thesis. In the first section, I present a general picture of our perception of bodily damage and of the accompanying pain sensations. In section II, I present my theory of the contingent unpleasantness of pain, and I contrast this theory with the more traditional view that pains are inherently unpleasant. In section III, I present two arguments, drawing on actual pain phenomena, for my view. And in section IV, two objections are addressed.