Delving into the World of "Pain": Understanding, Experiencing, and Reacting to “Pain”

Cause and Affect

In contrast to the Lockean world, Western society of the 21st century is confronted with racial, ethnic, gender, class and social polarities, the possibility of global warfare, and the probability global environmental disasters. Furthermore, medical and scientific advances have enabled different kinds of investigations into the human brain, raising new questions about its composition, functions, and capacity while a communications revolution has occurred that greatly surpasses the invention of print in its implications for social change. In addition, institutions such as religion and the heterosexual family, as well as the monolithic, monocultural belief systems that supposedly held reality firm, or at least delivered the ideology of stability, have been radically challenged.In the face of such radical social and technological transformations, the theoretical and moral questions of the 21st century, where humanity is increasingly described as fragmented, alienated, and unstable, are very different from those of the 17th century…One ethical arena where traditional assumptions of selfhood and moral agency have been challenged in recent years is healthcare.Since the early eighties, an increasing number of ethicists working in healthcare have begun to turn their attention to alternative approaches to describing and understanding the various elements of moral life. [McCarthy, 254-255]

“Among the essential features of this situation is that no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does any one know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength and the like. We shall even assume that the parties do not know their conceptions of the good or their special psychological propensities. The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance” (TJ 12/11) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance

This said, it is equally important not to understate the importance of language. As a public institution whose current lexicon, grammar, and network of broadly accepted sentences are under no individual ’ s exclusive personal control, a living language thereby constitutes a sort of ‘ center of cognitive gravity ’ around which individual cognitive activities may carve out their idiosyncratic but safely stable orbits. Moreover, as a cultural institution that long outlives the ephemeral individual cognizers that sequentially pass through it, a language embodies the incrementally added 28 Chapter 1wisdom of the many generations who have inevitably reshaped it, if only in small ways, during the brief period in which it was theirs. In the long run, accordingly, that institution can aspire to an informed structure of categories and conventional wisdom that dwarfs the level of cognitive achievement possible for any creature living outside of that transgenera-tional framework. Large-scale conceptual evolution is now both possible and probable. (Plato's Camera, 27-28)

Chapter 9. Legislation is needed if the end is to be attained: transition to Politics. If these matters and the virtues, and also friendship and pleasure, have been dealt with sufficiently in outline, are we to suppose that our programme has reached its end? Surely, as the saying goes, where there are things to be done the end is not to survey and recognize the various things, but rather to do them; with regard to virtue, then, it is not enough to know, but we must try to have and use it, or try any other way there may be of becoming good. Now if arguments were in themselves enough to make men good, they would justly, as Theognis says, have won very great rewards, and such rewards should have been provided; but as things are, while they seem to have power to encourage and stimulate the generous-minded among our youth, and to make a character which is gently born, and a true lover of what is noble, ready to be possessed by virtue, they are not able to encourage the many to nobility and goodness. For these do not by nature obey the sense of shame, but only fear, and do not abstain from bad acts because of their baseness but through fear of punishment; living by passion they pursue their own pleasures and the means to them, and and the opposite pains, and have not even a conception of what is noble and truly pleasant, since they have never tasted it. What argument would remould such people? It is hard, if not impossible, to remove by argument the traits that have long since been incorporated in the character; and perhaps we must be content if, when all the influences by which we are thought to become good are present, we get some tincture of virtue. (Aristotle, 198-199)

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