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

Choosing Desert: Painful Calculus

Nevyrazimov sat down at his table and pondered. The lamp in which the kerosene had quite run dry was smoking violently and threatening to go out. The stray cockroach was still running about the table and had found no resting-place. "One can always send in a secret report, but how is one to make it up? I should want to make all sorts of innuendoes and insinuations, like Proshkin, and I can't do it. If I made up anything I should be the first to get into trouble for it. I'm an ass, damn my soul!" And Nevyrazimov, racking his brain for a means of escape from his hopeless position, stared at the rough copy he had written. The letter was written to a man whom he feared and hated with his whole soul, and from whom he had for the last ten years been trying to wring a post worth eighteen roubles a month, instead of the one he had at sixteen roubles. "Ah, I'll teach you to run here, you devil!" He viciously slapped the palm of his hand on the cockroach, who had the misfortune to catch his eye. "Nasty thing!" The cockroach fell on its back and wriggled its legs in despair. Nevyrazimov took it by one leg and threw it into the lamp. The lamp flared up and spluttered. And Nevyrazimov felt better. [chekhov, 7-8]

[Mill] believed that the pleasure and pain of all people affected y your actions… belong in your moral calculus. Further, Mill stressed not just quantity of pleasure but wuality, attaching a special value to pleasures involving the “higher faculties.” He wrote: “Few human creatures would consent to e changed into any of the lower animals, for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast’s pleasures… It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.” [moral animal, 132]

…in our culture there is a dogma that states, roughly, that all human lives are worth exactly the same amount. And yet we violate that dogma routinely. The most obvious case is that of a declared war, where as a society we officiallydsldip into an alternative collective mode in which the value of the lives of a huge subset of humanity is suddenly reduced to zero. I needn’t spell this out because it is so blatant. Another clear violation of our dogma is capital punishment, where society collectively chooses to terminate a life. asically, dsociety has judged that a certain soul merits no respect at all. Short of capital punishment, there is incarceration, where society treats people with many different feels of dignity or lack thereof, implicitly showing different levels of respect for different-sized souls. Consider also the phenomenal differences in the measures taken y physicians in attempting to save lives. A head of state (or the head of any large corporation) who has a heart attack will receive far better care than a random citixzen, not to mention an illegal alien… I think that wittingly or unwittingly, we all equate the size of a living being’s souls with the “objective” value of that being’s life, which is to say, the degree of respect that we outsiders pay to that being’s interiority. And we certainly do not place equal values on all beings’ lives! [Strange Loop, 343-344]

Schadenfreude: https://health.usnews.com/wellness/mind/articles/2017-03-01/the-roots-of-schadenfreude-why-we-take-pleasure-in-other-peoples-pain

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