Mary the Pain Scientist

I last looked at the question of what we should do if we encounter a bizarre moral revelation. This question is worth thinking about, because it is possible that some of us are in a very similar situation.

Suppose that instead of being instructed in visual science, Mary the color scientist had been a pain scientist. She studied human behavioral and neural reactions to pain from an isolated room, but she was safely kept from ever experiencing pain or suffering herself. She knows that people act strangely when they step on a nail. She knows that their c-fibers fire, and that the resulting signal is registered in the somatosensory and cingulate areas of the cortex. She knows that it causes screeching and subsequent avoidance behavior. Would she be able to intuitively recognize the moral significance of pain?

I don't think so. In fact, I suspect that Mary (or you or I in the same position) would not see anything remotely wrong with pain, or causing pain -- any more than we see anything wrong with wearing socks.

Too see this, consider what you would think about the wrongness of causing nociceptive neural states and pain-typical behavioral responses if those states and responses were not tied to conscious experience. Is wrong to cause zombie-pain to a zombie? Intuitively, it is not, because there is nothing about the physical responses we have to painful stimuli that are bad (under their physical guise).

We only know from experiencing pain that pain feels bad. If pain is a particular brain state, we can't decipher the badness of that state from the armchair.

This might be taken as some evidence for thinking that pain is not a physical state. If we can know a priori that pain is bad, and we can't know a priori that neurological nociceptive responses are bad, then pain must not be a nuerological nociceptive response. This argument parallels Jackson's original argument for dualism with Mary the color scientist.

There have been a number of good responses given to Jackson's argument, and they work for just as well in the context of the pain variant. Plausibly, Mary knows that pain is bad under one guise, but not under another.

However, the fact that Mary doesn't realize that neurological pain is bad suggests that she will encounter a bizarre moral revelation if she ever becomes a physicalist. She goes from thinking that it is not at all wrong -- clearly not at all wrong -- to cause neurological nociceptive responses to thinking that it is clearly very wrong to do so. She learned that something that didn't seem wrong from the outside turned out to be very wrong from the inside. At least one of her intuitions from the outside turned out to be terribly inaccurate. What should she think of her other intuitions from the outside? If bizarre moral revelations should lead us to some amount of moral skepticism, then it looks like Mary should be a moral skeptic.

In essence, physicalists are in the same predicament as Mary. We may have long known that pain is bad and long believed that pain was a brain state. That doesn't change the fact that when we just think about pain as a brain state, there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with causing it.