Lexicon of Arguments

 

II 192 ff
Pain/Dennett: E.g. Is a fetus capable of suffering: so far, one cannot make such statements, and there is also no reason to believe that it will be the case sometime later.
Perhaps a natural boundary reveals itself eventually, but we should not count on it while we still cannot even imagine it.
Pain/Animal/Dennett: The phenomenon of pain is neither uniform nor simple in different biological species. We even experience that with ourselves.
E.g. Do we experience the stimuli that prevent us from taking a twisted posture during sleep as pain?
In order for sstates of pain to be important there must be a suffering subject for which they have meaning!.
E.g. Suppose you could shift all your pain to the last five minutes of the year.
Dennett. I would certainly be willing, even if the pain would be doubled.
However, this would have the amazing consequence that the "benefactor" who made this possible would double the suffering in the world and would even receive gratitude!.
The terrible thing is not the suffering, but the event which caused it. E.g. the loss of a job, loss of a person.
If we want to reduce the suffering in the world, we need not examine the brains of the creatures, but their lives.