Philosophical Studies

, Volume 166, Supplement 1, pp 69–89 | Cite as

What makes pains unpleasant?

Article
First Online:

Abstract

The unpleasantness of pain motivates action. Hence many philosophers have doubted that it can be accounted for purely in terms of pain’s possession of indicative representational content. Instead, they have explained it in terms of subjects’ inclinations to stop their pains, or in terms of pain’s imperative content. I claim that such “noncognitivist” accounts fail to accommodate unpleasant pain’s reason-giving force. What is needed, I argue, is a view on which pains are unpleasant, motivate, and provide reasons in virtue of possessing content that is indeed indicative, but also, crucially, evaluative.

Keywords

Philosophy of mind Pain Hedonic tone Affect Valence Unpleasantness Painfulness Reasons 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

For comments and discussion, I am extremely grateful to Murat Aydede, Michael Brady, Bill Brewer (who gave a very helpful reply to a presentation of an earlier version of the paper), Jennifer Corns, Frederique de Vignemont, Ruth Dick, Rose Drew, Kent Hurtig, Colin Klein, Manolo Martínez, Dermot O’Keeffe, Brendan O’Sullivan, Sebastian Sanhueza, Robert Schroer, Carolin Schulze, Barry Smith, Folke Tersman, and audiences at the Institute Jean Nicod, Paris, and at the Universities of Fribourg, Glasgow, and Uppsala. This paper was written while PI of Glasgow University’s Pain Project, which is funded by Sam Newlands and Mike Rea’s Problem of Evil in Modern and Contemporary Thought project, which is based at the University of Notre Dame and supported by the John Templeton Foundation.

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2012

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of PhilosophyUniversity of GlasgowGlasgowUK

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