Very interesting article about a girl born with a rare genetic defect that prevents her from feeling physical pain. Although I had realized in the abstract that feeling pain is necessary for self-protection, I hadn’t really considered the specifics. For instance, the girl’s self-explorations destroyed one eye and permanently damaged another before her parents realized that she had to be outfitted with goggles. (To bad the article is written in a gross faux-touching style.)
Donna at NoodleFood considers how this little girl’s case might apply to Peter Singer’s utilitarian philosophy, which is all about minimizing pain:
For Singer, she can still experience happiness. Yet the harms this small child routinely does herself demonstrates the great value of pain to human and animal life. Although particular pains are certainly experienced as unquestioningly bad, our capacity to feel pain provides an enormous protection against injury. So achieving the utilitarian goal of minimizing or eliminating pain would actually be quite harmful to creatures.
Read (as, AATS, they say) the whole thing..
Singer’s philosophy (and utilitarianism more generally) isn’t about minimizing physical pain, though. It’s about maximizing net happiness or satisfaction. The injuries the girl does to herself weigh on the “bad” side of utilitarian calculation just as much as the pain experienced does. If you were going to poke yourself in the eye anyway, then utilitarians would say it’s better not to feel pain from doing it, but if it’s a choice between poking your eye out without feeling anything and feeling pain that stops you from permanently damaging yourself, then you’d have to have a pretty distorted utility calculus to come down in favor of the former.
Going further, the function of pain can be described as an aid to utilitarian calculations: “Does my interest in exploring what happens when I stick my finger in my eye outweigh the immediate pain it causes me?” The pain is essentially a built-in measurement of the long-term harm caused by the action, allowing one to weigh the immediate gain against an immediate (unnecessary) harm that serves as a proxy for inherent long-term harm.
The girl’s problem is not an over-interest in minimizing pain. The girl’s problem is that she has no pain to minimize.
An excellent book on this subject: Frank T. Vertosick Jr, *Why We Hurt: A Natural History of Pain*
Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. We might generalize the point to assert that mechanisms lacking feedback are unlikely to thrive.
Oliver Sacks, in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat, describes a young woman who lost proprioception – most of her sense of what her body was doing – as the result of anesthesia. The life she was left with was diminished, but at least at the time of the telling still worth living.
Poor little girl. I don’t know much about child development, but I don’t get why she wouldn’t realize, hey, I poked out an eye and I can’t see so well now; maybe I shouldn’t poke the other one. Seems like maybe that’s a conclusion that can be reached without feeling pain. Maybe she was too young…
Poor little Alien Jane.
I don’t agree with the comment about Singer’s philosophy, since he’s writing about minimising the harm done *to others*, ie by an external source. We can’t feel other creatures’ (human or otherwise) pain in a physical way anyway, unless we’re talking metaphorically. This girl’s problem is internal, that she doesn’t know (yet: she could figure it out as she gets older) that things are harming her, due to lacking the normal physical response to pain. This is different from being abused avoidably by someone else.
yeah, I think pain is most critical for children — we learn many limits by the difference between “I’m (not) enjoying this” and “it hurts!” adults can be considered in a better position to look out for their interests, but a child can’t really know the consequences, say, of not being able to see…
I think it’s important to distinguish between pain and suffering. The girl can feel no pain, but her not feeling pain leads to suffering.
Interesting book about life and civilization without pain.
> Painless Civilization: A Philosophical Critique of Desire
Perhaps an understanding that we need both pain and pleasure to live a “normal” life. That some of us are not so lucky as to lead a “normal” life…..
Think too much of one…….. is a shame for those living in daily pain….. emotional or physical.
I wish/hope something can/could be done one day to equalize the inequities!