In this post, I will briefly consider the nature of suffering. What is it, exactly, to suffer? My view is that
(SUH) suffering is unsanctioned harm.
So, in other words (by my understanding of “unsanctioned harm”), to suffer is to be harmed against one’s will. I will leave open the question of what, precisely, constitutes harm, understanding it in the broadest possible sense: namely, as referring to whatever one believes can make someone objectively worse off.1 I will insist that it includes (even if it is not limited to) pain; however, pain could not be equivalent to suffering, given that pain can be rationally willed - not as an end in itself, but as the necessary means by which certain valuable ends are attained (or so I will suggest).
2.1 Pain and Suffering
In ordinary, everyday discourse, the terms “pain” and “suffering” are now often used interchangeably. However, I think there is value in disentangling and distinguishing them. I propose understanding “suffering” as a broader concept than “pain”, designating certain states that are not aptly described as instances of pain - including, perhaps, even some non-experiential states. We should, I propose, understand “pain” to rigidly designate only “unpleasant sensation”. This view has been given well-known expression by Saul Kripke, in the context of his broader discussion of issues relating to philosophy of mind:
Pain...is not picked out by one of its accidental properties; rather it is picked out by its immediate phenomenological quality...If any phenomenon is picked out in exactly the same way that we pick out pain, then that phenomenon is pain. (1980, pp. 1952-53)
There is one view on which the intrinsically aversive nature of pain entails straightforwardly that it is always bad for2 the subject who experiences it. This is the view that seems to have been endorsed by the classical utilitarians3 and, more recently, by Thomas Nagel (1985). Peter Singer and Katarzyna DeLazari-Radek (2013) also endorse it in their discussion of Henry Sidgwick’s utilitarianism.
I think that there is reason to reject this view, or at least to modify it. Pain is intrinsic to some activities (e.g., running marathons, lifting weights, and doing difficult intellectual labor) in which many of us engage voluntarily, for purposes of enjoyment, broadly construed. By my lights, it is odd to say that such voluntarily undertaken activities involve suffering. Do I really suffer when I run a marathon?
One might think that the right thing to say here is simply that it is in spite of their painfulness that we value some pain-involving activities. Or, perhaps it might seem that we should say simply that the pain involved in a painful but, on balance, valuable experience is valuable only insofar as it results in the production of some greater good (e.g., elation, a profound sense of accomplishment, etc.).
This could be true of some such experiences, but I do not think it is true of them all. To subtract the pain from one’s experience of, say, running a marathon would, in my judgment, be to strip this experience of much of its value; to diminish it. Contending with, and overcoming, the pain inherent in running a marathon is a significant part of what makes completing one so gratifying; there would be little point in running a painless marathon.
Similarly, subtracting all of the pain-inducing (or pain-involving) mental states - the frustration, confusion, loneliness, and so on - characteristic of writing a philosophical treatise, or solving some difficult equation would, to some extent, be to diminish the value of these achievements (or at least so it seems to me).
Some of the value - the all-things-considered enjoyment, even - of activities such as these derives in no small part from the struggle - the overcoming - that they involve. This is why we can come to enjoy the pain inherent in performing difficult cognitive and physical labor, even when this pain would be immiserating if we did not will, or sanction, it. Indeed, imposed upon us against our will by some other agent, such pain would be intolerable and, in fact, would constitute torture. Sanctioning these experiences in full, including their painful aspects, seems, therefore, to have a causal influence on their phenomenological character, such that they can be made tolerable, and even enjoyable, rather than purely agonizing.
The existence of possible states of experience such that to strip them of their pain would be to decrease their value suggests that pain is not itself necessarily bad for the subject of experience. We can be in pain and no worse off for it, so that neither we, nor anyone else, has any reason to diminish or eliminate it.
However, when pain is unsanctioned by the subject of experience, it is a different matter entirely. Then it is unpleasant (e.g., in the case of stubbing a toe or sitting on a thumbtack), at best, and immiserating (e.g., in the case of severe bodily damage or an acute feeling of despair), at worst - and therefore is, I suggest, properly understood as suffering.4
2.2 Beyond Pain: Non-Experiential Suffering
The category of suffering is not simply isomorphic with that of unsanctioned pain, because there are intrinsically unpleasant states that clearly count as instances of suffering but are not naturally thought of as instances of pain - for example: the misery associated with such states of mind as depression, loss, remorse, grief, loneliness, despair, existential dread, profound fear, and so on. And while it is true that at times these states might involve pain - the pangs of grief, as we all know, can stab sharply and surely as daggers - they often do not. Yet, even in such cases, these psychological states can be far more immiserating, and make someone far worse off, than can pain as classically conceived. Certain states of bodily discomfort such as nausea, persistent dizziness, extreme hunger, and thirst, too - though miserable - are not (to my ear) described naturally as painful.
Moreover, there may be some non-experiential forms of suffering. If, for example, one holds that well-being consists partially in the development of certain capacities, in the cultivation of one’s talents, in achieving particular aims, or in having rational or true beliefs about the world, then one might think that suffering is possible in the absence of any psychological discomfort. One might, for instance, insist that there is a sense (if not a very familiar one) in which the couch potato who lives his life glued to the television set suffers, despite feeling little in the way of pain or unhappiness.5
Conclusion
I have suggested that suffering is helpfully understood as a broader category than pain. At the very least, suffering is unsanctioned pain: that is, pain that one has not endorsed as a necessary harm in the pursuit of some rationally-desired end. But if there are non-experiential harms - that is, harms that are not harmful merely in virtue of their connection to any negative affective state - then one would, by my proposed taxonomy, suffer when one was in such an unsanctioned state. My view that
(SUH) suffering is unsanctioned harm
is ecumenical in that it does not rest upon any tendentious view of either suffering or harm. Whatever one’s understanding of suffering, one should agree that it is a harm; whatever one’s understanding of harm, one should agree that it often amounts to a form of suffering when unsanctioned by the one who is harmed. In the next post, I will attempt to establish that there are sound reasons for supposing that we ought, epistemically, to believe that
(S) suffering is intrinsically bad.
References
Bentham, Jeremy. 1789. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. London: T. Payne and Son.
De Lazari-Radek, Katarzyna and Peter Singer. 2013. The Point of View of the Universe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kripke, Saul. 1980. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Nagel, Thomas. 1974. "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?". The Philosophical Review. 83 (4): 435–450.
Sidgwick, Henry. 1907/1982. The Methods of Ethics. 7th edition, John Rawls (ed.), Indianapolis: Hackett.
The notion of objectivity is notoriously fraught - and yet is, I think, indispensable. When I speak of being made “worse off objectively”, I should be understood as meaning worse off by the standard of some neutral, hypothetical observer; from (if one likes) Thomas Nagel’s “view from nowhere”. See Nagel (1986, Chapters IV and V). I should also say that objectivity and “stance-independence” are, for me, equivalent notions.
Bad for” can, in this context, be understood either subjectively or objectively. Understood subjectively, x is bad for me iff it makes me worse off by my own lights. Understood objectively, x is bad for me iff it makes me worse off in some objective sense.
Most significantly: Jeremy Bentham (1798), John Stuart Mill (1863), and Henry Sidgwick (1907/1982).
It is worth noting, I think, that there is quite likely a one-to-one correspondence between pain and suffering in most sentient beings, for the simple reason that the cognitive faculties required to sanction pain - to recognize this state for what it is and, nevertheless, will its instantiation in one’s conscious awareness - seems to be distributed quite scarcely throughout the animal kingdom and, in fact, is probably possessed only by relatively mature human beings. For to sanction pain, and to be rational in doing so, seems to necessitate one’s understanding that experiencing pain will lead to, or will come bundled up with, something of greater positive value. This, in turn, requires advanced cognition of a kind which may be present only in a subset of the entire population of human beings, in which case it follows that the vast majority of the pain in the world also counts as suffering - and that, of the known sentient beings in existence, we alone have the capacity to instantiate painful states that are impersonally good.
See, e.g., Kant’s Groundwork For the Metaphysics of Morals and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.