Suffering is bad: experiential understanding and the impossibility of intrinsically valuing suffering

Suffering, I argue, is bad. This paper supports that claim by defending a somewhat bolder-sounding one: namely that if anyone—even a sadistic ‘amoralist’—fully understands the fact that someone else is suffering, then the only evaluative attitude they can possibly form towards the person’s suffering as such is that of being intrinsically against it. I first argue that, necessarily, everyone is disposed to be intrinsically against their own suffering experiences, holding fixed their specific overall degree of emotional aversiveness, because any evaluative attitude other than ‘being against’—including mere indifference—would in certain key circumstances make our suffering less emotionally aversive and thus different from the suffering experience (stipulatively) at issue. Second, fully understanding that someone else is having a given experience—Mary’s experiencing a vividly blue sky, say, or Job’s experiencing heart-rending grief—requires that we represent experientially their very instance of that experience-type (it requires, in other words, token phenomenal concepts). The result is that what goes for our own suffering goes for others’, too: maintaining an accurate experiential representation of the fact that someone else is having a suffering experience with a specific degree of overall emotional aversiveness is only compatible with coming to be intrinsically against their suffering. So suffering is—‘objectively’—bad: it’s only possible to respond with indifference towards anyone’s suffering if we don’t fully understand that they are suffering in the first place.


Introduction
The claim in my title might not strike you as the discovery of the decade: suffering's badness is likely to seem more obvious than any other normative fact, and it might even be a basic fact, making it a fool's errand to try to argue for it in the first place.
Even so, the objective badness of suffering at least seems to be in tension with another widely-accepted view: namely that it is possible to understand full well that someone else is suffering without being bothered in the slightest.Some people might even fully understand but be positively happy about the other person's suffering, just because that person is suffering.An epistemically idealized version of the reputedly sadistic Roman emperor Caligula, for instance (cf.Gibbard, 1999;Street, 2016), might be exceptionally good at understanding exactly how it feels for his victims to suffer, even in arbitrarily specific ways.But that might be precisely what he enjoys: he might delight in their suffering in proportion to how well he understands, in a vividly experiential way, what he's putting them through.
Such cases challenge the idea that it is irrational or ignorant-necessarily irrational or ignorant, for everyone, that is-to fail to care about someone else's suffering.Our imagined Caligula is epistemically perfect, after all (if only by supposition), so maximizing his sadistic joy might also be fully practically rational.But if there were nothing practically or epistemically objectionable about Caligula's sadism, then it would be difficult to make sense of the idea that suffering was objectively bad.What would its badness amount to, if it had no objective practical or epistemic 'reasongiving force'-if caring about it and not caring about it could be on equal normative footing?
My goal in this paper is to defend the normative force of suffering's objective badness by arguing directly against the possibility at issue: that is, by arguing that failing to care about someone else's suffering (in contrast to sadistically valuing it or even just being evaluatively neutral1 ) is only possible if we don't fully understand that they are suffering.In other words: If anyone fully understands the fact that someone else is suffering, it will be impossible for them-if they form an evaluative attitude towards it at all-to form any evaluative attitude other than being intrinsically against (intrinsically disvaluing2 ) that person's suffering.
If my argument for that claim is sound, then an epistemically idealized, allunderstanding, but sadistic Caligula is strictly impossible: practically and epistemically rational or not, if he fully understands the fact that his victims are suffering and forms an evaluative attitude towards that fact, then he will necessarily be disposed to Synthese (2023) 202:199 the specific degree of overall emotional painfulness or aversiveness (negative affect) of our experience as a whole; and second, if we value or disvalue something, then we are disposed to be, at least in certain privileged contexts, motivationally and affectively in favor of or against it, respectively.

On suffering
I'll be arguing, in Sect.2.3, that if we form an evaluative attitude towards our suffering at all, it will be impossible not to be intrinsically against it.A first reason to doubt that claim is that it seems quite possible not to disvalue many experiences we at least wouldn't normally hesitate to call 'suffering.'Some people claim to enjoy physical pain of certain kinds, for instance, and seemingly intrinsically: just in light of the way such pains feel. 7And in everyday speech, all or most physical pains could also be described as forms of physical suffering.
Still, there is an everyday way of understanding suffering that makes those apparent counterexamples seem like they are missing the point.One way to get into that frame of mind is to note that another natural description of such cases is as instances of pain that don't end up causing us to ('really') suffer-or at least not as much as they would have if we didn't enjoy them.
Hopefully that way of talking about suffering is intuitive.It may also be worth noting that virtually all philosophical accounts of suffering make the distinction between pain and suffering (Bain et al., 2020), with suffering usually taken to involve specifically emotional pain or 'felt aversion' (cf.Kauppinen, 2020): you only suffer, when experiencing physical pain-or experiencing a loss, annoyance, or anything else-if you 'mind' it, affectively, in the right way.
For that reason, it's probably better not to focus on cases of physical pain, as you read through this paper, but on emotional experiences of, say, grief or sadness.While physical pain may usually be emotionally aversive, it also seems to be the sort of thing we can in principle enjoy-or at least experience in an affectively neutral way as a result of, say, meditation practice (Grant, 2014) or brain injury (Grahek, 2007).And that could conceivably make it less emotionally aversive 8 without making it any less physically painful.
As I hinted above, then, the minimal feature of suffering I'll be drawing on-a feature compatible with virtually all accounts of experiential suffering-is that each suffering experience comes with a specific degree of overall emotional aversiveness ('overall affective negativeness').The most paradigmatic, thoroughgoing instances 7 See Rachels (2003, Sect. 4) for skepticism about this possibility.Even more common than enjoying physical pain, probably, is aesthetic appreciation of emotionally painful experiences.We sometimes find negative emotions stirred up by music or other forms of art-even deeply, intensely negative emotionsbeautiful (Smuts, 2007), so it seems possible to value those kinds of suffering, too.I won't actually be arguing against that possibility (see Sect. 2.3.2);my claim is just that valuing such experiences would, under certain conditions, make them importantly different experiences (less 'affectively bad-feeling,' in particular) than they otherwise would have been. 8Pain asymbolia (Grahek, 2007), in particular, can reportedly make the experience of pain entirely free of emotional unpleasantness. of suffering, for instance, seem to involve a kind of unmitigated overall emotional aversiveness. 9n important consequence, for the sections to follow, is that when I talk about suffering experiences, what I have in mind are whole experiences-almost always with some emotionally neutral or positive components in addition to the negative ones-rather than just the experience's emotionally negative parts. 10The reason is just that that's how actual suffering experiences are.We don't experience the negative and positive components in isolation; we experience them together, making every given suffering experience come with a specific degree of overall emotional aversiveness.

On 'being against'
Turning to the attitude of 'being against' or disvaluing, the main question is whether the kind of attitudes at issue-valuing, disvaluing, and evaluative neutrality-are cognitive, non-cognitive, something in between, or some combination of the two.
All that matters for the argument to come, though, is that whatever cognitive features they may have, attitudes of valuing, disvaluing, and evaluative neutrality seemingly necessarily involve, at least under certain specific conditions, some corresponding affect and motivation.If someone claims to be against something-racism, say-but never feels or would feel even the slightest negative affect or motivation of any kind against it,11 then it's natural to think they don't really disvalue racism.
It might still be possible (though it also might not be: cf.Rosati, 2016) for someone who is 'left cold' by racism in that way to make a related sincere judgment or form a related normative belief, such as ‹it's good to combat racism›.But we would be justified in characterizing such a person-someone who truly had no accompanying motivating or affective attitude in favor of combating racism-as someone who didn't care about combating racism in the way required for it to count among their values, properly understood.
In short, it seems safe to endorse a very weak version of affective and motivational internalism about valuing and disvaluing: valuing something, for instance, entails that at least under certain specific conditions (see Sect. 2.3.1) and to some subtle degree, we would feel affectively positive towards, and motivated in favor of, what we valued. 12efore I move on, note that on its own, Sect.2.1's minimal conceptual constraint on suffering-that each suffering experience comes with a specific degree of overall emotional aversiveness-has no direct entailments for the attitude of disvaluing as I'm understanding it here; my argument below is not a defense of the tautology that we're necessarily disposed to disvalue the kind of suffering that we're necessarily disposed to disvalue.Even if there turns out to be some tight relationship between them, overall emotional aversiveness is neither, say, constituted by nor conceptually inseparable from disvaluing,13 which may well include (for all I've said here) much more complicated cognitive attitudes.Overall emotional aversiveness is an experiential quality with which we are all familiar and which we can understand independently of disvaluing.

Evaluative attitudes towards our own suffering
Together, those two minimal constraints on suffering and valuing provide an argument for my first main claim: necessarily, everyone is disposed to be intrinsically against their own suffering-or any experience they 'represent experientially as suffering.' Here is the core idea, without further ado: if someone comes to value or be evaluatively neutral towards their suffering, then their overall experience will-at least in certain key moments-thereby become less overall emotionally aversive.In slogan form, if you're into it, then you're not suffering as much.The result is that it's impossible to come to value (positively or neutrally) the specific 'pre-evaluative-attitude' suffering at issue while maintaining its specific degree of overall emotional aversiveness.

The 'test conditions' for intrinsically valuing our suffering
It's worth addressing one potential worry right away.Remember that on my proposed way of understanding valuing (Sect.2.2), it only necessarily involves feeling affect and motivation under certain specific conditions.So it might sound possible, despite the argument I just introduced, to come to value a suffering experience intrinsically without thereby reducing its overall emotional aversiveness.In particular, as long as the 'certain specific conditions' in which we have the relevant affective attitude (associated with the evaluative attitude) only come about when we're not actively experiencing our suffering, the argument sketched above won't secure the impossibility of coming to value, intrinsically, our suffering: there would never be any conflict between our suffering experience's degree of overall emotional aversiveness and the positive affective contribution of our valuing it.
It's true that Sect.2.2's proposal-that valuing requires that we would feel the corresponding affective attitude, at least under certain key conditions-left that possibility open.The thought was just that having no positive or negative affective disposition whatsoever about something would entail that we neither valued nor disvalued it.Valuing and disvaluing (again, possibly in contrast to attitudes like simply believing something is valuable) get us 'affectively involved.'So I now want to make two specific points in connection with the conditions in which our evaluative attitudes would 'contribute affectively,' to help show why coming to value our suffering experiences as such-holding fixed their specific degrees of overall emotional aversiveness-is impossible.
First, note that if I'm right and anyone who values something positively, negatively, or neutrally is necessarily disposed to have the corresponding affective attitude under some conditions, then the test of whether they intrinsically value somethingfriendship, say-concerns the moments in which they are or would be experiencing the relevant affective attitude characteristic of valuing (an affectively positive attitude, at minimum) towards friendship.They only intrinsically value friendship, in other words, if there are or would be such moments of being affectively involved in the way associated with valuing it.
Second, note that we are specifically interested in what follows from valuing something intrinsically.As I use that expression in this paper, to value something intrinsically is to value it just in light of that 'something' itself : just in light of its essential or constitutive features, or in light of understanding it for what it is. 14But suffering, as I'm understanding it (see Sect. 2.1), is essentially experiential: one of its essential features is its feeling the way it feels, experientially. 15Coming to an evaluative attitude towards it just in light of its essential features thus requires that we be in conditions of experientially appreciating 'what it's like' to have the relevant suffering experience.
The result is that another part of the 'test' of whether someone values their own suffering intrinsically is whether they value their suffering when confronted with it in its full experiential glory-that is, while experiencing it and focusing just on its precise constitutive experiential qualities (cf.Sect.3).
Putting those observations together gives the following result for the conditions of the 'test' of whether someone intrinsically positively, neutrally, or negatively values their suffering.In particular, if a person values their suffering, then there must be circumstances in which they would be both (i) experiencing that suffering, with its same specific degree of overall emotional aversiveness, while also (ii) coming to experience the positive, negative, or neutral affect (towards that suffering) that characteristi- 14 The expression is probably infelicitous for disvaluing, but another common and related way of glossing valuing intrinsically is valuing something "for its own sake" (e.g.Arpaly & Schroeder, 2013, Sect. I.3).Note that "intrinsic (dis)valuing" can be used less narrowly than the way I'll be using it.As I'm understanding them here, for instance, intrinsic valuing and disvaluing involve more than just non-instrumental (and non-'realizer' (Arpaly & Schroeder, 2013, Sect. I.3)) valuing and disvaluing.Note also that, in keeping with my neutrality on the nature of (dis)valuing as such (Sect.2.2), the way I'm using "intrinsic valuing" is not meant to rule out Humean views of emotions or valuing (or both) according to which they are 'original existences' with no representational content of their own (e.g.Whiting, 2020).On such views, someone S's valuing some X 'just in light of its essential or constitutive features' should just be understood as S's having the relevant evaluative or affective mental component M, where M stands in ('Humean') relation H to representation R, such that (i) R is S's representation of 'X as such,' or X's essential properties, or the properties of X mentally but 'constantly' associated with X 'taken on its own'; and (ii) Humean relation H is specified by the relevant preferred Humean account of the affect-representation relationship (e.g., M "follows on immediately from [and] is directly caused by" R (Whiting, 2011, p. 288)).Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for inviting me to address this question. 15Some accounts of suffering reject this 'essentially experiential' commitment (e.g.Corns, 2021;Carruthers, 2004; for a defense of experiential accounts, see Coleman, 2019).If they're right, my paper should be taken to be concerned with one specifically experiential subtype of suffering, identified by the constraint proposed in Sect.2.1.cally accompanies valuing, disvaluing, or being evaluatively neutral, respectively.That is, someone only intrinsically values their own suffering if they could come to feel affectively positive towards their suffering experience as a whole while actively experiencing it.
It follows that coming to value (positively or neutrally) our suffering experience as a whole, with its specific degree of overall emotional aversiveness-coming to value it intrinsically, that is-is impossible: it would only be possible if it were possible under those two conditions: (i) actively experiencing the suffering and (ii) experiencing the new valuing-specific affect; and it isn't.The reason, as I introduced above, is that adding positive or neutral affect to our suffering experience reduces its degree of overall emotional aversiveness, thereby constitutively chasing away the specific degree of overall emotional aversiveness that was in question in the first place.

Other ways of valuing our suffering
It's worth emphasizing that this argument says nothing about the possibility of coming to value our suffering experience non-intrinsically-as, say, a necessary step towards some larger goal, or even just as a sign of progress towards it.First, the 'test' of nonintrinsic valuing doesn't require that there be moments of confronting suffering 'in its full experiential glory' at all.What makes us count as (say) instrumentally valuing something is just our attitude towards the relevant instrumental features.And second, even if there were moments in which instrumentally valuing our suffering made our overall experience less emotionally aversive, 16 we might still count as valuing our suffering-just as long as by "our suffering" we don't mean our specific suffering experience as a whole, with its specific previous degree of overall emotional aversiveness.In fact, the same goes for coming to value our suffering intrinsically: if we use "our suffering" that way-to pick out, say, a specific affectively negative experiencecomponent (see Sect. 2.1)-then it's perfectly possible to come to value 'our suffering' intrinsically.
For parallel reasons, on yet another way of understanding the expression "our suffering," my argument doesn't even rule out the possibility of coming to value our suffering intrinsically while holding fixed the degree of emotional aversiveness we are experiencing over time.In particular, that will be possible if by "our suffering" we mean not some specific 'pre-evaluative attitude' suffering experience, but any experience with the same degree of overall emotional aversiveness.
Here's an example.Suppose that, at t 1 , we are experiencing (i) the emotional aversiveness of a stinging insult about our choice of hairstyles but also (ii) the emotional pleasingness of a tasty lollipop in our mouth, with a resulting overall affective aversiveness-to-pleasingness ratio of (say) 3:1.Now suppose that, at t 2 , we have managed to maintain exactly the same 3:1 aversiveness-to-pleasingness ratio but have replaced the emotional pleasingness contributed by the lollipop with the emotional pleasingness contributed by valuing this (new) suffering experience-that is, the experience constituted by the aversiveness of the insult and the pleasingness associated with valuing the new but still 3:1 aversive-to-pleasing experience as a whole.We would then have come to value a suffering experience while maintaining the same degree of overall emotional aversiveness.
Note, though, that the main question relevant to generalizing from the case of our own suffering to the suffering of others is what new evaluative attitudes we can form towards a given pre-existing, specific suffering experience as a whole, with its specific degree of overall emotional aversiveness.The 'valuing-replaces-lollipop' case does involve the formation of a new evaluative attitude,17 but that new attitude is also towards a new and importantly different suffering experience.It is partly constituted by our now liking our experience qua suffering experience, after all, and has no lollipop-based pleasingness.So we can ask my question with respect to either suffering experience in the 'valuing-replaces-lollipop' case: What new evaluative attitudes can we form towards the insult-plus-lollipop suffering experience?What about towards the insultplus-valuing one?In both cases, the argument in Sect.2.3.1.entails that we can only come to disvalue them.The mere existence of the insult-plus-valuing experience, then, doesn't constitute an answer to the question of what attitudes we can form towards the insult-plus-lollipop experience, despite their sharing the same degree of overall emotional aversiveness, and despite, in the insult-plus-valuing case, our valuing our suffering experience in light of its degree of overall emotional aversiveness.
More generally, the point of the argument in this section is just that given any particular suffering experience-a specific experience of suffering, with a specific degree of overall emotional aversiveness-coming to value it positively or neutrally would make the overall suffering experience we were experiencing less emotionally aversive, in the relevant 'test' conditions, and thus an importantly different experience.
It would be importantly different, that is, with respect to the standard of having exactly the same degree of overall emotional aversiveness-even if it were in all other respects the same.That standard may not, in general, be particularly practically relevant when it comes to our own suffering: why not make our suffering less emotionally aversive?But again, and as I will be arguing in the sections to come, it turns out to be a central epistemic requirement for understanding someone else's specific suffering experience as a whole, which (unlike our own suffering) doesn't change, experientially-let alone for the better-just in virtue of our coming to value it.

'Intrinsic meta-affect' and the possibility of disvaluing our suffering
A last question concerns the affective contribution of disvaluing.All I have said so far is that, in the relevant ('test') conditions, valuing and evaluative neutrality would lessen our experience's overall emotional aversiveness and thus make it an importantly different suffering experience from the one we were supposedly forming the attitude towards.But you might think, for parallel reasons, that disvaluing our suffering would increase its emotional aversiveness.If that were so, it would be impossible to come to any evaluative attitude whatsoever with respect to our own suffering's specific preevaluative-attitude degree of overall emotional aversiveness-disvaluing included.
My answer is that, as others have observed (e.g.Klein, 2015, p. 55;Korsgaard, 1996, p. 154), it seems to be an intrinsic feature of suffering that we are averse not only to the subjective source of our suffering but to our suffering itself-at least when focusing on it, as we're here supposing we are.When we're suffering, then, we already have an affectively negative attitude towards our suffering: 'intrinsic meta-aversion' is an existing part of our suffering experience's degree of overall emotional aversiveness. 18 The result is that we can come to disvalue our suffering intrinsically without increasing its degree of overall emotional aversiveness.Suffering's existing intrinsic meta-aversion can be (or be 'recruited' or 'co-opted' as) the affective component of our disvaluing.Intrinsic meta-aversion is directed at our suffering, after all, and in all likelihood our intrinsically generated meta-aversion to suffering is in fact part of the unpleasantness of many unpleasant everyday experiences.
In sum, the only evaluative attitude compatible with sustaining a given suffering experience as a whole-with its specific degree of overall emotional aversiveness-is disvaluing it.So, necessarily, everyone is disposed to be intrinsically against their own suffering. 19

Full understanding and token phenomenal concepts
It may already have sounded intuitive to you that necessarily everyone is disposed to disvalue their own suffering (if they form an evaluative attitude towards it at all)-and on its own, that fact doesn't entail anything about what attitudes we can form towards other people's suffering.So you might take what I've said so far to establish that suffering is bad 'for the sufferer'; but Caligula, for instance, might happily agree, and 18 A parallel phenomenon no doubt holds for affectively positive experiences: at least when we're focusing on how they feel (and not on, say, their fleetingness), it's arguably part of the nature of happiness experiences to be partly constituted by 'intrinsic meta-liking.'So it should be possible, for parallel reasons, to come to value our happiness intrinsically without increasing its overall degree of emotional pleasingness: intrinsic meta-liking can act as the affective component of our valuing.An important consequence is that the argument of this section also doesn't rule out valuing a given affective state-even a suffering state-in light of its having whatever non-zero degree of overall positive affect it has.My claim is just that qua suffering-state (with its specific degree of overall emotional aversiveness), the only evaluative attitude towards it that wouldn't reduce our experience's overall emotional aversiveness, in the relevant conditions, is disvaluing. 19There are plenty of apparent counterexamples, to be sure: religious ascetics, for instance, or perhaps wholehearted retributivists (cf.note 50), or just people racked by guilt and committed to the idea that they deserve to suffer, might at least take themselves to value their suffering intrinsically-even their maximally overall emotionally aversive suffering.As I already noted in the main text, my proposal is compatible with valuing suffering: intrinsically valuing our experience's being to some unspecified degree or other emotionally aversive doesn't mean our experience as a whole loses all overall emotional aversiveness; it just reduces it.But my argument does force me to deny that we can value-intrinsically and thus while fully in the grips of the experience-our own maximally emotionally aversive suffering experiences.(2023) 202:199 Page 11 of 28 199

Synthese
just take it as further fuel for his sadistic delight: he likes that suffering is bad for his victims.
So this section moves on to defend the second main premise of the paper: namely, that fully understanding the fact that someone else is suffering requires that we represent their suffering experientially.If so, then (by the argument in Sect.2.3), necessarily, anyone-Caligula included-who fully understood the fact that someone else was suffering could only come to be intrinsically against it.
A few important clarifications are in order before diving in.A first point to acknowledge is that some things are no doubt just impossible to understand, fully or otherwise, and for all I've said so far, that could turn out to be the case for understanding that someone else is suffering.If so, that might make it hard to interpret my claim-that anyone who fully understood that someone was suffering could only come to be intrinsically against that fact-as establishing a practical-rationality-relevant epistemic deficiency in everyone who intrinsically valued or was evaluatively indifferent about someone else's suffering.In particular, how could it establish a necessary epistemic deficiency if someone like Caligula, say, could go on intrinsically valuing someone's suffering even when understanding as fully as humanly possible that the person was suffering? 20ow, the most straightforward barriers to full understanding are the finite time, storage, and 'processing power' available to our minds: some things might just be too complex, or require knowledge of too much information, to afford full understanding by a given individual, or even by humans in general.It's also arguably impossible for any mind-finite or not-to understand fully something like what it's like to be devoting 100% of one's attention to (say) the taste of their coffee while at the same exact time also fully understanding what it's like to be devoting just half of one's attention to the taste of their coffee. 21n order to see whether such worries apply to our case, the main thing to note is that the question my argument is concerned with is (i) which intrinsic evaluative attitudes we can form (ii) towards a fact constituted by a very minimal set of features: namely, the fact that someone other than ourselves is suffering.Next, recall that on my understanding of intrinsic valuing, it involves valuing something 'just in light of its essential or constitutive properties' (Sect.2.3.1).The result is that counting as having a given attitude intrinsically towards the fact that someone else is suffering requires fully understanding just (i) that there is someone who isn't us and (ii) that they (whoever they are) are experiencing an instance of the experience-type suffering.Finally, if my observations in the sections to come are right, then it should in fact be possible to understand-even fully-those much more limited features of the suffering-situation at issue.
One last point to note is that even though I'll be defending in passing the idea that fully understanding those minimal features is possible, my argument actually doesn't hinge on whether that's true.The reason is that the core relevant premise of my argument really only concerns a specific necessary condition for fully understanding that someone is suffering-namely, again, that we represent the other person's suffering experientially, with an experiential mode of presentation or 'token phenomenal concept.' Strictly speaking, then, as long as my argument for the possibility of satisfying that necessary condition works, my central claim could be restated in terms of the "fullest (humanly) possible understanding": necessarily, anyone who understood as fully as (humanly) possible the bare fact that someone else was suffering, to a given specific degree of emotional aversiveness, could only come to disvalue, intrinsically, that person's suffering.

On 'understanding'
Quite a few historical and contemporary metaethical projects have tried to establish something like that claim: namely, that having a certain epistemic good would make it impossible not to care about other people or their well-being (e.g.Kant, 2002;Nagel, 1970; possibly even Hume: see Railton, 1999).But the relevant 'epistemic goods' vary.The projects closest to mine, for instance, are Marshall's (2018) Compassionate Moral Realism and Atiq's (2021) "Acquaintance, knowledge, and value" (cf.Atiq & Duncan, in press;Sinhababu, 2022).Marshall's target epistemic good is being in touch, and Atiq's (acquaintance) knowledge. 22 There are no doubt important differences between the target goods, but my 'full understanding' is meant to be maximally inclusive: my concern is with epistemic improvements of any kind, such that fully understanding something entails that no epistemic situation with respect to it would be (epistemically) better.My actual target 22 The more important difference between my argument and Marshall's and Atiq's has to do with the possibility of the 'epistemically perfect but sadistic Caligula,' who we are to suppose is perfectly in touch with, has perfect acquaintance knowledge of, fully understands … (and so on) his victim's suffering experienceincluding how bad it feels-but who is also very much in favor of that situation as a whole.Unlike Atiq's and Marshall's arguments, my response draws centrally on observations about the degree of emotional aversiveness of a given sufferer's suffering.In particular, my argument's focus is on fully understanding the sufferer's suffering experience in light of its degree of overall emotional aversiveness, and the implications for the (specifically evaluative) attitudes Caligula can form towards the sufferer's suffering experience as a whole.While my approach to the problem is thus (to my knowledge) novel, I nonetheless see it as fleshing out a rough strategy Marshall and Atiq both seem to find attractive.Atiq, for instance, doesn't directly address Caligula-type cases, but he does claim that "being acquainted with the sensible content of others' suffering [entails that] one feels aversion towards the pains of others just as they do" (Atiq, 2021, Sect.5, my emphasis); and Marshall argues that "the most obviously morally problematic conflicted sadists are not proportionately in touch with the pain they cause[:] though the pain they cause […] is greater than the pleasure they experience, they are more pleased by their own pleasure than pained by others' pain" (Marshall, 2018, p. 140).So my argument can be seen as taking up where Atiq and Marshall left off, developing a somewhat more precise version of a possible through-line on display in such passages.(2023) 202:199 Page 13 of 28 199

Synthese
is thus the broad idea corresponding to-to use a colloquial expression-(as fully as possible) knowing what we're talking about.
The reason for my maximally inclusive notion of epistemic value is that, first, when it comes to representing experiences or experiential qualities-the taste of freshsqueezed lemonade, say-there is already quite a broad consensus (see Nida-Rümelin & O'Conaill, 2021) that someone who has never had a given kind of experience is importantly epistemically impoverished with respect to that experience-type. 23And second, the core reasons motivating that consensus are ultimately all my argument relies on.
It's worth noting, despite my very inclusive notion of epistemic value, that most dedicated theories of understanding as such would also support categorizing the specific epistemic good at issue in this section as (at least) a form of understanding.First, understanding a given fact is usually taken to be less compatible with epistemic deference than merely knowing the same fact (e.g.Hills, 2016). 24And second, while some have argued that understanding might ultimately reduce to propositional knowledge (e.g.Sliwa, 2015;cf. Lawler, 2018), even they think that, relative to just knowing some fact, understanding it generally requires richer information and more fine-tuned cognitive abilities (Grimm, 2021;Pritchard, 2009, Sect. 2.2) or 'know-how' (cf. Hills, 2016).
What follows for understanding experiential qualities like suffering, given those established commitments about understanding?A natural proposal is that fully understanding an experience-type requires the specific 'know how,' gained from experiencing it for ourselves, of being able to recognize the target experience-type-say, the taste of cold, fresh-squeezed lemonade, again-when experiencing it (cf.Lewis, 1990;Sliwa, 2017).
We can go further, though: in particular, being actively confronted with the experience also seems to be doing some of the epistemic work in these understanding-related moments of recognition.
Consider Jackson's (1986) famous example of Mary the color scientist who has lived in a gray-scale environment her whole life and finally sees, say, a stunningly blue sky.Now imagine that Mary returns to her gray-scale environment and completely forgets how the sky looked-despite, we can suppose, now having the ability to recognize blueness if she sees it again.It seems clear that Mary is in a worse epistemic position, blueness-wise, than when she was outside.What's more, if she is suddenly struck by a vivid visual memory of the blue sky, it seems clear that she is back in a better epistemic position.
Arguably for the same reason, Mary also seems to be in a worse epistemic position with respect to blueness whenever she isn't actively recalling (or seeing) something 23 Note that being 'epistemically impoverished' needn't involve any lack of propositional knowledge.Lewis (1990), for instance, agrees that there is an epistemic improvement attainable through direct experience (namely, the improvement constituted by now "knowing what [the] experience is like" (Lewis, 1990, p. 517)), but he characterizes the improvement as a form of 'knowing-how' rather than 'knowing-that' (cf.Nida-Rümelin & O'Conaill, 2021, Sect. 4.3 and my comments on understanding in the main text). 24The parallel asymmetry might not hold for knowledge of things (Duncan, 2020;cf. Atiq, 2021;Atiq & Duncan, in press)-or for knowledge as implicitly understood in the everyday notion of 'knowing what we're talking about.' blue, even if she could summon up a vivid memory on command.We might not hesitate to say-though on my view we would be speaking somewhat loosely-that Mary, understood as a temporally extended thinker and imaginer, 'knows full well what she's talking about,' now, when talking about blueness experiences.And yet, as Atiq (2021, Sect. 3) has argued at greater length, Mary remains importantly like her former, experiential-blueness-benighted self, in these specific moments: she could, for instance, coherently wonder whether she has completely forgotten what blueness looks like or whether she can still simulate a blue mental image on command-even if she in fact can.Relatedly, the moments actually constituting her remembering what a blue sky looks like are, arguably, the moments in which she is actively experiencing a visual memory of a blue sky.So there are good reasons to think that it's only in those moments that Mary is in the best epistemic position with respect to experiential blueness. 25 In any case, I will hereafter be assuming that when it comes to something essentially experiential like suffering, we are always in a better epistemic position to the degree that we are actively experiencing (or vividly 'simulating' 26 or recalling) the relevant experiential quality.For anyone unswayed by the above observations or related arguments from Atiq and others, my overall claim in this paper should thus be understood conditionally: if fully understanding something essentially experiential requires an 'actively experiential' mode of presentation, then suffering is bad.
To be sure, that is more understanding than we need, for most purposes.The point is that any evaluative attitudes-towards, say, the color blue or the taste of lemonadethat we would form if we did have this more robust kind of understanding would be more authentically about blueness or lemonade-taste as they really are.
In any case, as promised, this proposed requirement for full understanding is equivalent to one requiring that we represent things like blueness or the taste of lemonade using phenomenal concepts: here type phenomenal concepts, and specifically ones 25 Note that neither Atiq (as I read him) nor I should be taken as attempting to explain (rather than just argue for) the irreplaceable epistemic value of 'actively experiential' representation.My own suspicion is that a successful explanation would draw on at least the following points: (i) experiential representation directly and experientially exemplifies (e.g.Elgin, 1983;Goodman, 1976) the relevant experiential qualities, whereas all other ways of representing them do so indirectly (say, 'by description,' using lexical concepts); (ii) full understanding requires directly mentally instantiating (at least) the relevant structural relations of the fact or phenomenon to be understood (cf.Strevens, 2008;Zagzebski, 2019); (iii) experiences of experiential qualities are at least partly constituted by essentially perspectival structural relations (cf.Nagel, 1974).The simplest motivation for the third point is the observation that instances of experiential qualities necessarily stand in the perspectival relation of being experienced by an experiencer.An attractive second reason to accept it would be a version of structuralism about the very nature of each experiential quality as such (cf.Clark, 2000;Lyre, 2022), which may be especially appealing in the case of suffering (cf.Clark, 2005) even if you think it flounders for (e.g.) color-qualia.In any case, [(i)-(iii)], if true, would suggest that, in the case of experiential qualities, only experiential representation directly mentally instantiates the relevant structural relations, so only experiential representation allows for full understanding.Thanks to Dan Burnston for the suggestion about exemplification. 26Though I won't be discussing empathy (see Bailey, 2022 for a project parallel to mine but with empathy as its focus), my proposal about what is required for full understanding has some things in common with the 'simulation' theory of empathy (for an overview, see Barlassina & Gordon, 2017).See Mayerfeld (1999, Sect. 4.4) for related observations on the specific case of understanding suffering.(2023) 202:199 Page 15 of 28 199

Synthese
constituted by an occurrent instance27 -understood broadly to include vivid memories or mental imagery-of an experience of the relevant type.
There is an active debate over the nature of phenomenal concepts.Some (e.g.Levin, 2006) say they are are best understood as being like demonstratives: deploying a phenomenal concept of the taste of lemonade is like thinking ‹it tastes like PthisP›, where ‹ PthisP› directly refers to the remembered, simulated, or actual taste-experience or the experience-type it instantiates. 28Balog's (2012) 'quotational' account, in contrast, proposes a "concept-forming mechanism that operates on an experience and turns it into a phenomenal concept that refers to either the token experience, or to a type of phenomenal experience that the token exemplifies" (Balog, 2012, p. 33).
For my purposes, all that matters is that phenomenal concepts can be taken to constitute an essentially experiential representational format or mode of presentation. 29epresenting the taste of cold, fresh-squeezed lemonade using a phenomenal concept makes us relate to that taste-type in an experiential way, partly constituted by our currently (re)experiencing the lemonade-specific experiential character.

Token phenomenal concepts of other people's experiences
In short, fully understanding an experience-type seems to require that we represent it experientially.Now, that might sound like it already establishes what I set out to establish: if understanding the type suffering requires that we represent it experientially, then the argument in Sect.2.3 might entail that (if they come to an evaluative attitude about it at all) it's impossible for anyone not to disvalue not just their own suffering but the whole experience-type of which it is an instance.
Even if that were true, though, it would be unclear what followed from it.What is it to disvalue an experience-type?If it entails disvaluing all instances of the type ('in' anyone, ever), then I don't need any further argument for the conclusion that necessarily, anyone who fully understood the fact that someone else was suffering would only be able to come to be intrinsically against it.But disvaluing an experiencetype might just as easily turn out not to have that entailment, and it's not obvious how to determine which verdict is right.So I'll now turn directly to the question of what it takes to represent someone else's token instance of a given experience-type with full understanding.
Note, first, that the central lemma of this paper-that full understanding is compatible only with coming to disvalue someone's suffering intrinsically-just concerns (i) someone other than ourselves (ii) experiencing an instance of suffering.In other Synthese (2023) 202:199 words (as I noted above), we are abstracting away from who the sufferer specifically is, and even from how their specific instance of suffering differs from other instances of suffering-so long as (following Sect.2.1) we represent their experience as having some specific, non-zero degree of overall emotional aversiveness.My question just concerns what evaluative attitudes we can form with respect to the bare fact that someone other than ourselves is suffering, and who the sufferer specifically is doesn't have any direct bearing on that question. 30 It's worth noting, in particular, that understanding the bare fact that they are the sufferer is very unlikely to require an experiential mode of presentation for the person as such. 31It is controversial, after all, whether specific 'subjects of experience' (our selves, in other words) are themselves direct objects of our experience in the first place (cf."Anattalakkhan .a Sutta: The Characteristic of Not-Self," 2018; Nāgārjuna, 1934;Hume, 1738, I, IV, Sect. 6;Dennett, 1992;see Duncan, 2019 for an argument against such views).
In any case, I'll hereafter be assuming that being a minimally competent user of the sufferer's name-which, following Kripke (1980), for instance, likely requires little more than that we be properly situated in a causal chain of name-users leading back to the individual's 'baptism' with that name-is (more than) enough.Fully understanding the expression "someone who isn't me" would do just as well.
The main things we need to understand, then, are just the experience-type suffering and the fact that the relevant sufferer's experience is an instance of that type.My claim in what follows is that fully understanding someone else's experience as an instance of a given experience-type requires an experiential mode of presentation for their instance itself: it requires a token phenomenal concept of their experience.
At the outset, it might seem to be enough, for full understanding, just to represent the type experientially.Suppose, for instance, that the state of affairs we're trying to understand is the fact that the long-suffering Job 32 is being subjected to an instance of the mealy, unpleasantly soft mouth-feel of an unexpectedly over-ripe Red Delicious apple.It might seem to be enough to recall, vividly, an instance of that kind of experience and think, ‹Job is having an experience of Pthis typeP›.
The representational target, again, is Job's experience's being an instance of mealy apple mouth-feel.So we might think of our representation as having two argument 30 Another way of putting the point is that given the question at issue, all that matters about the specific sufferer is that they are the one suffering.But fully understanding that about them doesn't require that we understand-let alone know (cf.Benton, 2017)-the sufferer or 'who they are' in any way that involves appreciating their specific differences from other sufferers.Their 'numerical' difference is enough. 31In contrast, as I'll be arguing in Sect.3.3, fully understanding the sufferer's being an experiencer arguably (i) is a necessary condition on fully understanding the fact that someone other than ourselves is suffering and (ii) does seem to require an experiential mode of presentation-though still probably not of the sufferer as such. 32See The Book of Job in any version of the Bible or the Tanakh.Job is famous mostly for suffering a lot, so I use him as the main 'arbitrary person other than ourselves' in the rest of the paper.Any apparent relevance of the details of Biblical Job's suffering or his relationships with his friends (let alone God or the devil) is purely accidental.(2023) 202:199 Page 17 of 28 199 places: one for the experiencer (Job), and one for the experience-type of which his experience is an instance (mealy apple mouth-feel).

Synthese
The problem is that we might be able to understand fully both the experience-type mealy apple mouth-feel and Job's being the experiencer but fail to appreciate fully the nature of the instantiation of an experiential type.What matters, in particular, is that an experience-type's being instantiated is itself an essentially experiential fact.
The result is that even if we fully understand the content of both argument placesand even accurately represent the instantiation relation between them-we will still fail to understand fully the fact as a whole unless we also represent the instantiation relation itself experientially.Otherwise, with respect to the experience-type's actually being (experientially) instantiated, we are at best like the version of Mary, above, who maybe could summon up a vivid memory of blueness on command but wasn't currently doing so.
Full understanding, then, requires that we represent the given experienceinstantiation itself experientially.But to do that-to represent experientially, say, Job's instantiating the experience-type mealy apple mouth-feel-just is to represent his experience with a token phenomenal concept.
It turns out, then, that there is a version of the thought ‹Job is having an experience of Pthis typeP› that can suffice for full understanding: namely, a version in which we deploy a phenomenal concept for the instantiation of the relevant type, too.And that makes that version of the thought equivalent to ‹Job is having Phis experience of this typeP› or ‹Job is having PthisP›, where ‹ PthisP› is a token phenomenal concept of his instance of mealy apple mouth-feel-or even, if you'll allow thoughts with less obviously propositional structure-just ‹ PJob's instance of mealy apple mouth-feelP›. 3333 In Sect.2.3, I claimed that adding just a small amount of positive or even neutral affect to a given suffering experience makes it an importantly different suffering experience.So you might wonder why the same shouldn't hold when Job's friend Bildad (see Sect. 3.3) adds, to his phenomenal concept of Job's token experience, his mental label of the experience as 'happening in Job': why doesn't that labeling undermine Bildad's ability to maintain an accurate simulation of Job's overall affective state?The worry is particularly clear if Job is having such an all-consuming suffering experience that he momentarily lacks the cognitive bandwidth even to represent himself as Job.The answer to this question, as I see it, hinges on the affective contribution of the 'labeling' at issue.First, to the degree that our knowledge of our own identity (as (e.g.) Job that is, rather than just as "me"; cf.note 36) can be wholly implicit, non-experiential, or just non-affective (rather than, say, merely affectively neutral), to that degree there should be no issue: I see no reason to think Bildad's 'representing this as Job's' couldn't be just as minimal as Job's own self-representation.But suppose Job's experience is, necessarily, one that would be affectively changed by 'self-labeling' of even the most minimal sort.My view entails that in that case, Bildad would indeed be barred from simultaneously fully accurately simulating Job's suffering experience and knowingly using that simulation as a token phenomenal concept of Job's suffering.Note, though, that even if that were right and Bildad's experiential representation had to 'underplay' Job's suffering by the relevant amount, in such cases, the argument in Sect.2.3 would still entail that he could only come to intrinsically disvalue Job's suffering, so represented.The affective contributions of valuing and evaluative neutrality would still make it impossible for Bildad to sustain that best possible representation of Job's suffering.Note, finally, that despite not embodying full understanding, that best possible representation could also be unproblematic in terms of accuracy: Bildad could think of Job's experience as (say) ‹even worse than PthisP›.Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for bringing these very interesting issues to my attention.
Bildad's representation, in contrast, is like the ones we might generate when reading an engrossing biography: as we read about the person's experiences, many of us spontaneously internally simulate those experiences, as a part of our representation of their experiencing what they experienced: we are implicitly deploying an experiential mode of presentation-a token phenomenal concept, in other words-to represent those actual events (cf.Walton, 2015).
The important result is that token phenomenal concepts allow Bildad to represent Job's actually experiencing an instance of the relevant experience-type with more complete understanding, insofar as his representation is experientially explicit about this essentially experiential relation.So Bildad's token phenomenal concept puts him in a position to attribute to Job's token experience, in a 'cognitively direct' way and while fully experientially understanding it, the experiential feature of instantiating mealy apple mouth-feel.Now, that doesn't guarantee that Bildad fully appreciates the fact that Job is just as truly an experiencer as Bildad is.Experientially, Bildad's thought might be equivalent to ‹ Pthis experience-type's being instantiated in its experiencerP has some feature or another›, where ‹has some feature or another› corresponds to Bildad's representation of the fact that the experiencer is Job.So it's possible, even with an experiential mode of presentation for the instantiation of an experience-type, not to be particularly precise about who is having (or had) the relevant token experiences in the first place-let alone being specifically clear on the fact that we and the target experiencer both exist and are distinct individuals. 36 That said, Bildad gets much closer to full understanding than Eliphaz, all else being equal.By vividly representing the experiential nature of Job's instantiation of mealy apple mouth-feel, Bildad understands, experientially, that a mealy apple mouth-feel experience is happening in an experiencer, whereas Eliphaz's thought only experientially represents the experience-type in the abstract.

Normalizing other-regarding token phenomenal concepts
In short, then, we need token phenomenal concepts for effectively the same reason we need type phenomenal concepts: namely, to appreciate fully the experiential nature of their referents.
Even so, it's natural to be especially skeptical about token phenomenal concepts of other people's experiences-maybe because it can be hard to imagine what it's like to deploy them, which might then fuel skepticism about their coherence in the first place.
Footnote 35 continued which a person's experiences happen (cf.Sect.2.2).It is their actually happening, in a person distinct from ourselves, that Eliphaz is failing to appreciate fully. 36See Kripke (1982, postscript), Nussbaum (2001, pp. 327-328), andWittgenstein (1953, especially Sects. 293-317) for more on this and related issues (and cf.note 34).Kripke's reading of Wittgenstein in particular draws out the difficulty of identifying even ourselves: while we know 'I am myself' (the subject of ' P these experiences P'), we might fail to know virtually everything else about ourselves-including "whether [we are, say,] Jones or the person in the corner" (Kripke, 1982, p. 144).Thanks to Ken Walton for very helpful conversation on these and related issues.

Synthese
(2023) 202:199 The worry, first of all, seems to stem from the fact that other-regarding token phenomenal concepts represent something that is experiential (say, Job's suffering) but which is distinct from the experience constituting the phenomenal concept itself (say, Bildad's simulated or remembered token suffering experience).
A first response is thus to note that type phenomenal concepts have that same feature: they represent something-an experience-type-that is distinct from the token experience out of which which those concepts are formed.But there is also direct precedent for positing token phenomenal concepts that designate an experience (albeit still one happening in the representer of the experience) distinct from the experience constituting the token phenomenal concept itself.Balog, for instance, might even think all token phenomenal concepts work that way (see Balog, 2012, pp. 36-37).
Second, note that we seem to do something closely analogous to deploying other-regarding token phenomenal concepts whenever we remember our own past experiences or anticipate or ponder future experiences (or even merely possible ones) using experiential modes of presentation.
Think back to the last time you had a burrito at your favorite taquería, for instance (or any other specific food on any specific day).It's not uncommon for vivid visual, olfactory, and gustatory 'images'37 to be a part of such memories.And most of the time, I submit, we have no separate thought like ‹that burrito experience was of Pthis typeP›; the images are just part of our mode of presentation of the token experience we had at the taquería (cf.Fernández, 2017;Montero, 2020).
In memories, then, the content of the time of occurrence argument-place in our representation is the time we're remembering, while the time of occurrence of the memory itself is (say) now.That makes memory strongly parallel to token phenomenal concepts of other people's experiences.The difference is just that in the latter, it is the content of the experiencer argument place, rather than the time argument place, that differs from the corresponding feature of the representation itself.The experiencer of Job's suffering is Job, and the experiencer of the 'representational' remembered or simulated suffering-the one constituting Bildad's phenomenal concept of Job's suffering-is Bildad.
In both cases, then, a property of the relevant represented experience is importantly different from the corresponding property of the experience constituting the experiential representation itself.So if (as we seem to take for granted) there is nothing suspect about that feature of normal memory and prospective and counterfactual imagination, then there also shouldn't be anything suspect about token phenomenal concepts of other people's experiences, unfamiliar though they may seem.
Third and finally, though, other-regarding token phenomenal concepts needn't even seem so unfamiliar: I suspect most of us already use them quite often in the context (similar to the 'gripping biography' context I discussed earlier) of hearing a friend describe an experience they went through.38

Caligula and the (normative?) 'Mary's room' of suffering
We now have my two central premises in place.First, if we form an evaluative attitude towards it at all, it's impossible not to be intrinsically against any suffering we represent experientially as suffering-as exemplified by the case of our own, occurrent suffering (Sect.2): otherwise, given the relevant 'test' conditions for intrinsic valuing, the attitude we end up forming can only be towards a less overall emotionally aversive experience than the suffering experience at issue.Second, fully understanding the fact that, say, Job is suffering requires that we represent his token instance of suffering experientially, by means of a token phenomenal concept (Sect.3).It follows that anyone-sadist or saint-who fully understands the fact that someone else is suffering will care: they will necessarily be disposed to be intrinsically against the other person's suffering.

Affect-components and impossible understanding, revisited
That might sound very counterintuitive, given that we're no longer talking about our own suffering.Suppose Caligula fully understands the fact that Job is suffering, using a token phenomenal concept constituted by a specific degree of overall emotional aversiveness.Why should coming to value (positively or neutrally) what he thereby represents necessarily lessen that emotional aversiveness?It's natural to think that the representation of Job's suffering could be 'affectively encapsulated,' in other words, such that the rest of Caligula's affective experience-including the affective contribution of his evaluative attitudes under the relevant 'test' conditions-would be free to vary.
My response is that, first, as long as two affective experience-components are happening within one genuinely unified mind and mental state, they will necessarily contribute to that mental state's overall balance of positive, negative, and neutral affect.But, in keeping with Sect.2.3, if Caligula is to meet the conditions for intrinsically valuing Job's suffering, then he must be able to feel, simultaneously and within a single, unified mental state, both the positive affective contribution of valuing and the affective contribution of what would on its own be an accurate simulation of Job's suffering experience, with its specific degree of overall emotional aversiveness.Oth-erwise, it isn't Caligula as such but at most an encapsulated component of Caligula's mind (opaque to Caligula himself) that fully understands. 39So the degree of overall emotional aversiveness of Caligula's experience-and thus of the token phenomenal concepts of overall affective tone that he can form-will necessarily be less than Job's.
A last thing to note is that while we can probably get close, especially with the help of sincere descriptions from the sufferer, it's very unlikely that we or anyone can-knowingly-simulate or recall an instance of exactly the same degree of overall emotional aversiveness instantiated by someone else's suffering experience.It is nonetheless in a clear sense 'humanly possible' to do so, even if we can't know we're pulling it off.More to the point, though, even if we're certainly getting it wrong, intrinsic disvaluing is still the only intrinsic evaluative attitude we can form towards their suffering, as we represent it, if we represent it experientially.All other attitudes would, in the relevant 'test' conditions, force us to (at best) 'change the subject' on ourselves, by changing the overall degree of emotional aversiveness experientially available for forming our phenomenal concept of the suffering we were supposed to be considering.So the fullest possible human understanding-but also any understanding constituted by a token phenomenal concept representing a specific degree of overall emotional aversiveness (accurately or not)-makes it impossible to form any intrinsic evaluative attitude towards someone else's suffering other than being intrinsically against it. 40

Establishing and explaining suffering's badness
With that in place, all we need for the conclusion that suffering is bad is the following: If some (non-'centered' 41 ) state of affairs is such that necessarily, everyone who fully understood it would be disposed to disvalue it intrinsically, then that state of affairs is objectively, agent-neutrally bad.
39 See Atiq's 'split-brain Mary' (2021, Sect.3) for an evocative related case. 40To be clear, there is no guarantee that anyone will actually come to disvalue someone else's suffering, despite this conclusion, because there is no guarantee that anyone will come to understand the fact that someone else is suffering in the ways at issue.It is relatively easy to remember that we ourselves don't enjoy suffering, that it 'feels bad,' and that other people probably feel the same about their own suffering-all without using token phenomenal concepts.But those less demanding forms of understanding are in principle quite compatible with valuing other people's (or even our own) suffering.It's also worth noting that my argument didn't rely on any claims about Caligula's identifying with or valuing the person who is suffering (Job, say), or about anyone's coming to believe that suffering is bad-whether prudentially bad for the sufferer, morally bad for us to cause or ignore, or bad in any other way.As far as my argument is concerned, full understanding could be compatible with Caligula's actively disidentifying from the sufferer, explicitly disvaluing Job as a person, and believing his suffering is objectively good.All three are probably unlikely, if he does come to disvalue Job's suffering; it all depends on the exact relationship between disvaluing someone's suffering and believing it's bad, valuing the sufferer, and 'identifying' with the sufferer.Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for inviting me to clarify these points. 41Importantly, something's being agent-neutrally (dis)valuable-roughly, being (dis)valuable such that the normative reasons entailed for a given agent are "[not] a function of the features of that agent as such" (Ridge, 2023, Sect. 5)-requires that the candidate (dis)values not include anything 'agent-relative' or 'centered' (Egan & Titelbaum, 2022, Sect. 3.1).So the 'centered property' (Lewis, 1979) of suffering-the property such that to disvalue it is to disvalue (ourselves) being subjected to suffering-is not a candidate agent-neutral disvalue, but Job's suffering is.(2023) 202:199 Page 23 of 28 199
If the arguments in the previous sections were sound, then such philosophers might happily embrace a very minimal version of moral realism-at least on the assumption that the objective, agent-neutral badness of anyone's suffering would constitute a specifically moral fact (cf.Machery, 2012;Marshall, 2018, e.g., Chap. 9).My main goal in this paper was to give an argument that might convince global moral skeptics, 42 so since many or most of them accept the above sufficient condition for objective, agent-neutral badness, I may now have done all I could on that score. 43 That said, my arguments in this paper fit especially well with one appealing story about what explains suffering's badness. 44First, Sect.2's take on suffering and valuing aligns nicely with the idea that the 'reason-giving force' of suffering is grounded in the fact that it feels really bad to the one suffering.It's natural to think, in particular, that suffering's felt badness not only makes it reasonable for the sufferer to want it to stop but also grounds all further normative facts about suffering (cf.Kahane, 2009). 45 If that's right, then my paper can be seen as pointing to a partial explanation for one derivative (if important) class of further normative facts: in particular, it might help explain why the reason-giving force of anyone's suffering also 'applies' to or generates recognizably practical-rationality-related reasons for other people.The thought is that if fully understanding the fact that someone else is suffering guarantees that we will be disposed to disvalue it, then coming to value it positively or neutrally entails that we don't even fully 'know what we're talking about' (cf.Sobel, 2009;Lewis, 1989) when considering their suffering.If Caligula values Job's suffering, it's not actually as 'Job's instance of suffering' (as such) that Caligula values it, but at most under some importantly inaccurate or incomplete mode of presentation. 42My goal thus differs significantly from that of Lee (in press) and Nagel; theirs is "to get rid of the obstacles to the admission of the obvious" (Nagel, 1980, p. 109, as quoted in Lee, in press;cf. Goldstein, 1989;Nagel, 1986).Something similar is arguably also true for Guy Kahane (2010). 43Others-especially non-naturalists (e.g.Enoch, 2017)-might not have much attraction to the idea that something's being objectively valuable is guaranteed whenever necessarily everyone who understood it would be disposed to value it intrinsically.In particular, anyone leery of the mere whiff of a suggestion that people's value-dispositions are what explain or ground facts about objective goodness or badness might be turned off.So, to be clear, my goal has not been to say what explains suffering's badness, in this sense of 'explains'; my argument is thus compatible with any explanation for why meeting that condition would guarantee suffering's badness.Note also that many non-naturalists will have very good reason not to reject the sufficient condition at issue (minus offending 'metaphysical whiff').Many non-naturalists give pride of place to everyday spontaneous evaluative attitudes and intuitions, corrected by reflective equilibrium-no doubt with the evidential value of a given attitude scaled by how unbiased and clear-sighted it is.So it's hard to imagine any attitude evidentially better off than one necessarily shared by everyone who fully understood what they were considering and formed an evaluative attitude about it at all. 44See Marshall (2018, especially Chap. 10) for an extended treatment of related questions. 45A recent view related to Kahane's is that, contra Moore (1903) and others, negative affective states are intrinsically bad by definition (Rawlette, 2020).(2023) 202:199 We're arguably all committed to holding our attitudes-attitudes that we ourselves take to be about something as it in fact is 46 -accountable to the consequences of fully understanding what we're evaluating in the first place.(Think of someone pontificating on the quality of a film they haven't seen or the taste of a food they've never tried or only dimly remember.)And if so, then there's a fairly straightforward sense in which we would be going against our own, 'non-alien' (cf.Railton, 1986) reasons if, faced with someone else's suffering, we failed to respond to its reason-giving force by failing to be intrinsically against it. 47 In short, requirements like the one to 'know what we're talking about' might be understood as establishing a kind of normative channel, through which the normative force of more ground-floor (say, experiential) values are passed on to other agents.This is a very speculative proposal, though, and it might not be possible to identify any candidate values other than suffering that would fit the specific pattern at issue-other than, for strictly parallel reasons, happiness. 48

Conclusion
In conclusion, suffering is bad.More radically, but in support of that pretheoretically uncontroversial conclusion: when it comes to other people's suffering, it's impossible to come to any evaluative attitude other than being intrinsically against it, as long as we fully understand the fact that they are suffering.
My argument has its share of potentially controversial premises.Probably the most in need of further support is my claim that fully understanding something essentially experiential requires not just that we can vividly remember or simulate the relevant experiential qualities, but that we actually be doing so, right in the moment of understanding.Others have defended that premise in greater depth than I did in Sect.3.1, 46 We might not take our attitude to be about someone else's suffering as such, in a given case.But note that we presumably always implicitly take our attitudes to be about something 'as such' (e.g. about Job's suffering's being deserved or its allowing me to take his favorite seat at the feast), and the question of this paper is whether anything-and suffering in particular-is such that understanding it ('for what it is') guarantees universal (dis)valuing. 47I suspect this section's observations might also secure a recognizable sense in which something that met that condition would be objectively bad, insofar as it might secure a way in which we would be rationally criticizable for not disvaluing it.But that kind of badness might be somewhat less forcefully reason-giving than 'full-on, morally demanding badness.'The reason is that on their own, universalizing-, interpersonal consistency-, or 'full understanding'-related rational requirements don't seem to be in a position to explain why suffering is more important than, say, chocolate.A requirement to 'know what we're talking about,' for instance, makes no distinction between Caligula's intrinsically valuing his victim's suffering and a child's being intrinsically against the taste of chocolate before ever tasting it.Both valuers don't fully know what they're talking about, and potentially to the same degree.So the main normative work, in terms of explaining the difference in normative 'weight' between such cases, would seemingly have to be done not by epistemic principles but by intrinsic features of the specific values and disvalues at issue.The reason suffering is more important than chocolate, for instance, might come down to the difference in their felt importance, from the inside. 48Happiness, I strongly suspect, is good.as I noted, but my conclusion should in any case be understood as conditional on the success of those and other arguments. 49 My argument also left many questions relevant to suffering's badness unanswered, including whether what I've said is compatible with retributivist justifications for punishment, 50 what follows for what we're morally required to do about someone's suffering, whether the argument extends to non-human suffering (though I see no reason why it wouldn't), and in general most of the relevant normative ethical questions worth asking.
In sum, though, I hope I've motivated the idea that, when we consider someone else's suffering, intrinsically disvaluing it is not just a likely or morally fitting reaction but the only evaluative attitude towards their suffering (as such) that we can form at all-that is, if we fully understand that they are suffering in the first place.Any other attitude, I've argued, would make it impossible to continue to represent their specific suffering experience accurately, with its specific degree of overall emotional aversiveness.
Failing that, I hope I've at least highlighted the difficulty-and perhaps the glimmer of the possibility of overcoming the difficulty-of establishing and explaining this seemingly obvious fact that suffering is bad.
Synthese (2023) 202:199 appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material.If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.