Pain

This is a form of the general question "What's so bad about X?" with pain as X.

For any X, we can ask "What's so bad about X", receive an answer X2, and ask "What's so bad about X2", ad infinitum. The three most common responses are semantic stopsigns, moral nihilism, and admitting you need to ask the question more rigorously [? · GW].

Once phrased more rigorously, the problem becomes easier, transforming into some combination of:

"Why do people dislike pain?", to which the answer is that it's hard-wired into the brain in some way a neurologist could probably explain, probably similar to how it's hard-wired to dislike things that taste bitter.

"Why do people call pain bad?", to which the answer is that most people think as emotivists, and call pain bad because they dislike it.

"Why is pain bad in Moral System Y?", to which the answer is that you'd have to ask the people in moral system Y, and they'll give you their moral system's answer. I think a lot of the better moral system would have it as an axiom. They probably make it an axiom because most moral systems are linked in some way or another to what people do or don't like, whether they admit it or not.

"Why is there a strong negative qualia for pain instead of it just feeling like a little voice at the back of your head saying 'that's painful'?", to which the answer will remain mysterious until we understand qualia, but no more mysterious than any other sensation.

Hmm hmm.

I've had bad pain. I've had non-bad pain (the feeling of wiggling a tooth as a child). I've had bad non-pain (the feeling of bumping the nerve in your elbow). I think I can pick pain apart.

• It's hurty. This is the least important part. Just a sensation, not even unpleasant on its own.

• It's loud. Even small amounts shout over everything else.

• It's intrusive. You can't will it away. About the most you can do is match its intensity and drown it out.

• And finally it makes you want to pull away. It's a flinch, abstracted. I suspect this is the "primitive op". All animal life flinches, even stuff too simple to have a brain. Since this is an abstract demand, you can't satisfy it.

So, you are being overwhelmed by an insistent demand to pull away from the pain, and it's not letting you pull away, all overlaid with a loud sensation that won't reduce - this is why pain causes something of a cognitive crash. Also explains my other experiences above. Non-bad pain doesn't demand a flinch, so as with the tooth it tempts you to increase it. Bad non-pain is loud and demands a flinch, it's just not hurty.

Given all that, what's bad about pain? I'd say the insistence and the inability to satisfy the flinch.

What we should do once we have supertech: first, make it not insistent at all, because as humans we're capable of thinking of strategies and sometimes "jerk my hand out of the box and ignore the Gom Jabbar" is a bad strategy. Second, make it satisfiable. "I bashed my thumb, but the hammer isn't coming back, so hush".

I think you are confusing levels, here. Observe:

Q. What, if anything, is bad about having the functional equipment to feel pain?

A. Pain is a useful indicator of conditions harmful to the body, and therefore can only be bad insofar as it (a) is less than optimal for that purpose or (b) has undesirable side effects.

Q. What, if anything, is bad about feeling pain?

A. Feeling pain frequently causes a reduction of pleasure, and in extreme circumstances can cause distraction from important tasks or significant psychological harm.

In other words, the falling of the tree causes mechanical vibrations but no auditory experiences.

(Yes, I repeat some things which have been said before. I apologize. My point is to note the confusion in the question.)

Pain is bad insofar as it causes suffering. It turns out that nociception (perception of pain) is a pure information-conveying process; suffering is a post-pain process that happens in the insula. Lesions in the insula can cause pain asymbolia, in which the location and intensity of pain is perceived without an associated negative experience.

I identify suffering as the root-level experience of "this is bad, make it stop".

People don't like it.

Pain is sensory input; ideally it conveys useful information to the brain.

Pain which does not convey new information is bad, because it interferes with working towards what one values.

• The anesthesiologist is removing pain which does not convey new information.
• The CIPA patient lacks pain whether or not it conveys new information, and therefore lacks information.

What, if anything, is bad about pain?

It hurts.

And it's just not the case that all people don't enjoy pain, so that's an immediate dead end.

Just a footnote, but even people who enjoy pain make a clear distinction between "good pain" and "bad pain"). I doubt that anyone into BDSM enjoys a migraine or a toothache, although the practice may help them deal with it..

Then there are also the hot chili enthusiasts.

ETA: updated link for good vs. bad pain

A preference utilitarian can just say pain is bad because people don't want it.

I don't enjoy it, to be sure, but I also don't enjoy soda or warm weather or chess or the sound of vacuum cleaners, and it seems that it would be a different thing entirely to claim that these things are bad.  Most people don't enjoy pain, but most people also don't enjoy lutefisk or rock climbing or musical theater or having sex with a member of the same sex, and it seems like a different claim to hold that lutefisk and rock climbing and musical theater and gay sex are bad.  And it's just not the case that all people don't enjoy pain, so that's an immediate dead end.

We don't classify lutefisk or rock-climbing or musical theater or gay sex as "bad" because people can choose to indulge in them if they like them, and forego them if they don't like them. If lutefisk (for example) just forced itself on random people who neither wanted nor needed it, and refused to go away, and even made some particularly unfortunate people's lives so terrible that they wanted to die, I think we'd all be pretty comfortable classifying it as "bad".

I don't think pain is universally bad. Many people enjoy pain in small doses; some even enjoy it in large doses. I think the key aspects to "bad pain" are when pain is non-consensual, when pain persists past usefulness, and when pain breaks us.

Consent is mentioned because plenty of people do invite some amount of pain in to their life willingly, and I think most utilitarian analysis would still conclude that being a CIPA patient is not a positive.

To persisting: It's useful to know that my leg hurts; it's not useful to have to endure the pain for miles as I hike back to camp on a cut foot.

To breaking: I know of no one who values being tortured until their psyche breaks, until their sense of self just collapses under the weight of it; as far as humans have universal values, that one actually seems pretty high on the list.

Most people don't enjoy pain, but most people also don't enjoy lutefisk or rock climbing or musical theater or having sex with a member of the same sex, and it seems like a different claim to hold that lutefisk and rock climbing and musical theater and gay sex are bad.

Pain is forced on people; lutefisk, rock climbing, musical theater and gay sex are not. So this comparison is wrong.

And it's just not the case that all people don't enjoy pain, so that's an immediate dead end.

From what I can tell BSDM masochists enjoy very narrow and selective kind of "pain"-like sensation, and they tend to dislike pain outside this narrow context as much as everyone else.

Something that seems to be getting ignored in the discussion of pain being good is the existence of pain asymbolia. People with pain asymbolia still get the signal of pain, so they know about damage and can mediate it, but it doesn't feel bad. If we accept that having the information content of pain without the negative affect would be preferable to having the information and the negative affect, then there's clearly something bad about pain.

I think there are two main bad things about pain.
1: Pain produces a strong negative affect, aka suffering, aka I just hate it.
2: Pain produces an aversion strong enough that people will do anything to stop or avoid enough of it. That makes pain something that can severely restrict people's freedom just by existing, more so than most other unpleasant things.

I have chronic pain, and I could tell you what's bad about that, which I think might be applicable to pain more broadly.

Pain doesn't always serve its purpose of keeping one out of trouble, and when it doesn't, it's distracting. It sometimes makes it difficult to get up and go, much less do anything great. It can be a spirit breaker when it goes on too long, affecting mental stamina and usefulness as well as physical.

Depending on where the pain is, it can make it difficult to complete tasks in a much more specific way too, by making it difficult to walk or use ones hands. I don't have kids but I imagine it would put a big ole damper on raising them.

Its painfulness.

After some medical procedure, there have been some patients for whom pain is not painful. When asked whether their pain is still there, they will report that the sensation of pain is still there just as it was before, but that they simply don't mind it anymore.

That feature of pain that their pain now lacks is what I am calling its painfulness and that is what is bad about pain.

When you talk about pain being good, you're talking about the information it sends being useful to survival, not about the method of signalling (pain).

Just as you looked at CIPA patients to ask what's good about pain by looking at those who don't have it, you can look at people who suffer from chronic pain to look at what's bad about it.

People with chronic pain have the method all the time without the useful information, and their lives suck. Chronic pain suffers are exhausted and depressed because they're fundamentally unable to do anything without it hurting.

Worse, because people without chronic pain don't highly dis-value chronic pain, it's not respected as being as bad as it is -- most people, when asked, would prefer chronic joint pain to a broken arm, yet most people with one of these conditions have the opposite preference, for good reason.

Very interesting question. I'll have a go at it, although these are 30-second thoughts: Pain is a warning system, very strongly correlated with damage and/or danger of death. Damage is bad, hence when we feel pain we want to stop whatever is causing damage; this has the incidental side effect (usually) of stopping the pain as well, so it feels as though we want to get rid of the pain - in other words, it feels as though the pain is bad, although what we really want is to stop the damage. A fitness-maximiser would want to stop the damage without the intervening step of pain.

With that said, though, I appear to have moved the question without really resolving it, because why is damage bad? Why is death bad? I don't think these can be answered without appeal to the plain utility functions: DO NOT WANT. So at best I've resolved the problem with masochism (edit to add: as a counterexample to people wanting to avoid pain), in that it's a rare BDSM scene which intentionally inflicts actual damage - piercings, at most. Accidents do happen, but intentional damage is very rare.

What is bad about pain?

It short-circuits rationality. If you are in enough pain, it no longer matters what is the rational thing to do, only what will stop the pain.

It carries immediacy that forces action before proper consideration. Future be damned, you WILL do whatever needs to be done to end the pain NOW.

In its less excruciating forms, it is a drain on mental and physical energy. No matter what you can do with pain (and some people do truly amazing things), you would be able to do more without.

Finally, it is often unproductive. You have a headache, for example. Does the pain tell you why you have a headache? No. It could be tiredness, allergies, sinus infection, deadly brain tumor, or a million other things. In cases of chronic pain, it is even worse: the pain "migrates to the cortex." In other words, the injury can heal completely, but the brain "learns to feel the pain" and continues feeling it for years to come (often for the rest of person's life).

I would say that is plenty of bad about pain.

A more controllable damage signaling system would be great. People are working on it.

Insofar as liking something and wanting it (that is, pleasure versus reward loops in the brain) seem to be separate bits of neural circuitry, I wonder if there's a meaningful sense (corresponding to hypothetical bits of brain architecture) in which pain and suffering might also be understood that way.

I enjoy pain, on occasion. It's part of why I like getting pierced and tattooed, and why I practice BDSM. Said pain is emphatically not bad when you look at what I'm getting out of it. I don't enjoy suffering on the other hand -- having my hair pulled and being smacked around in the right situation is unambiguously fun, whereas recovering from wisdom tooth removal surgery and dry socket are emphatically Not Fun (to use two examples I've encountered in the last couple weeks).

Furthermore, there are things that many consider painful, but that aren't especially painful to some given subset of humanity, or at least not worth noting as such. Walking barefoot, a splinter, falling down suddenly, physical exertion... some significant number of basically-normal people would find any of those intolerable but would be just fine with any of the others.

you can point to the grief of the loved ones (conveniently ignoring that not everybody has loved ones) which is... um... pain.

Chemically and psychologically, I believe there's a big difference between family-just-died and legs-just-got-cut-off pain (or lesser or greater degrees - and please correct me if they are the same neurological phenomenon). The telling thing is that we call emotional suffering "pain" even though it's rather different from the meaning of pain in a physical context. In general, pain is so unpleasant that people will readily call unpleasant experiences painful.

"Pain is bad" might be called a practical universal, like "murder is bad." There are exceptions, but these are unusual enough not to merit a long disclaimer.

Pain is a sensation; it would be odd to call it fundamentally good or bad, any more than it would be to call heat or cold or sweet or sour good or bad.

However, pain usually causes suffering. The correlation is probably close to .95, at least if you except cases of minor pain (i.e. <4 out of 10 subjectively rated). Suffering (experiencing absolute negative utility, as opposed to missing out on positive utility) is bad under most moral systems. Because the correlation between pain and suffering is so high, the exceptions get ignored and pain gets called bad. If sourness caused suffering as reliably and frequently as pain does, people would likely also call it bad.

Also, with respect to human health, pain is "good" only because no alternative exists. My hand can't code an urgent message to my brain to get it the hell off the stove without using pain (in almost all people, anyhow). That makes presence of pain preferable to absence of pain, but that hardly makes pain itself "good," it's simply the only tool we have to accomplish that ends. And a great deal of pain (particularly, intense pain) is either incorrect or redundant; the pain either seriously exceeds its source, or the injury or ailment would register as sufficiently urgent without overwhelming pain signals.

Prolonged pain and stress tend in themselves to reduce health. Sapolsky's "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers" cites quite a lot of research in support of this.

What's 'bad'?

Maybe I can't be sure about pain, but lutefisk is bad.

Pain is broadly not preferred. That is to say, an absence of cognition is preferred to the cognition of pain. This makes the question easy for a preference utilitarian, who holds there is nothing impeding the value of the preferences of subjects: Badness attaches to pain when a subject would rather not be feeling it. When a subject prefers pain for whatever reason, there is nothing wrong with it. For objective moral systems outside of preference utilitarianism, the question is a little more threatening.

How does one define "bad" without "pain" or "suffering"? Seems rather difficult. Or: The question doesn't seem so much difficult as it is (almost) tautological. It's like asking "What, if anything, is hot about atoms moving more quickly?"

(Assuming we are discussing neural pain rather than emotional...)

Pain itself is not normally bad; it is an indicator that something bad is happening, or will happen if you don't take corrective action.

So why do we think of pain as bad?

First , we tend to think associatively; because pain is associated with bad things, we tend to think of it as bad even when it is actually helping us.

More to the point, though, sometimes the pain itself is the problem. When there is no corrective action we can take, then the pain itself becomes bad because there is no reason for it; we have been alerted that there is a problem, thanks, but the unpleasant reminder continues -- like an alarm clock that refuses to shut off; it is evil and you want to smash it.

Our brains are wired in such a way that the sensation of pain itself is unpleasant; we may choose to do unpleasant things in expectation of some reward, but when an unpleasant thing is forced, that pretty squarely puts it in the "bad" category, I should think. (I would suggest that this is perhaps a good definition of suffering: unpleasantness you can't stop.)

The important thing to point out is that the information signal we experience as pain is an instructive signal more than just an indicative signal. I mean to say that pain's purpose is to make the organism react against whatever is hurting it, not just become aware of it. Since conscious decision making in humans is delayed at least 500ms (and sometimes up to 10 seconds!), signals such as pain have to be a result of low-level cybernetic reactions in the nervous system and not just a conscious experience after the fact. I'm sure if an intelligent designer created an intelligent agent instead of dumb evolution, she would have created it so as to take advantage of its intelligence to relay painless 'bad' signals without resorting to pain. Pain is a necessary legacy subsystem that came about due to the stupidity of evolution.

So what is bad about pain? It is a cruel hack built by a blind, dumb hacker with lots and lots of time on its hands.

The problem with pain is its inherent stupidity in dealing with its goals and inability to even cooperate with reason. It'd get more points if it were like vision, informing but leaving more advanced parts of mind in peace to do the decision-making.

This is like asking what's wet about the water. I can't imagine a frame of mind that could put "pain" in doubt without putting "bad" in similar doubt, thus making the question meaningless and confusing like some kind of koan. "What's X-like about X?" To reduce confusion you should try a less vague formulation, like "why do people seek to avoid pain?", where we can hope for a neurological answer or something.

ETA: Righting a Wrong Question seems to apply well here, simplifying your question to "Why do people think pain is bad?" which is much easier to answer.

One obvious downside to pain is that it tends to hijack your thought processes. It becomes increasingly difficult to think (and act) effectively as the amount of pain you're in increases. Therefore pain inhibits you from achieving any goals you might have, which seems like generic badness to me.

If CIPA patients are an extreme case of what's good about pain, it seems their opposite might be useful for finding what's bad about it. And indeed, I'd consider patients disabled by chronic pain to be the opposite of patients disabled by a lack of pain. Pain is good when it pushes us to do things which we regard as good for ourselves, such as "go eat a vegetable" or "stop putting weight on that broken limb". For as much as "good" and "bad" have any meaning, then, isn't pain "bad" when it pushes us to do things that we regard as bad for ourselves?

For instance, if I get a splinter under my fingernail, the pain from it tells me "don't touch this area", when actually the thing that I'd consider "good" for me is to get in there with a pair of tweezers and pull it out. If someone dislocates a joint, pain tells them "don't let anybody move this", whereas the intervention likeliest to accomplish the patient's general goals is to have a medical professional move the joint in the particular (briefly even more painful) way that pops it back into place and makes it stop hurting. And experiencing an excess of mental or emotional pain can deter someone from seeking the sort of emotional assistance or support which would alleviate the pain and improve their life.

All such examples of detrimental pain that I can come up with seem to have the detriment revolving around short-term avoidance of pain inducing greater amounts of pain in the longer term. It seems, then, that the "bad" sort of pain could be framed as a cause of akrasia, in which pain is the force countering "strength of will" and winning.

This is my idea:

Pain is a signal. Like pleasure, it converts neutral events in the body or mind into concepts imbued with value, positive or negative. Things that happen that are (evolutionary) determined to be bad for an organism's survival or reproduction are, over time, linked to a pain signal in the brain, giving the organism a reason not to do them. Pleasure is also a signal. Some events can cause pleasure AND pain, which just means that they trigger both signals (with varying strength.) The signalling mechanism is, of course, imperfectly calibrated, since evolution rarely results in anything perfect, and since the environment and the cues the organism needs to respond to are constantly changing anyway. Chronic pain could be seen as a misfiring. As for people who enjoy pain, the pain-signal in the brain could (for certain events and situations, after the right past history and operant conditioning) be tied directly to the pleasure-signal.

So...sometimes pain is good, and sometimes it's bad, depending on whether the signalling system is working correctly, is a rational response to the environment. To torture someone is, because you're subjecting their brain to a pain signal that serves no useful purpose in helping them survive.

I don't know if pain is bad, but it's definitely something I don't like and want to avoid. I'd much prefer a warning and alert mechanism that doesn't feel so subjectively awful, and that doesn't misfire so much.

I don't know if I'd want to have congenital insensitivity to pain, but I'd like to "cap" my sensitivity to something much less than it currently is.

Eliezer has written about this, too.

most people also don't enjoy lutefisk or rock climbing or musical theater or having sex with a member of the same sex, and it seems like a different claim to hold that lutefisk and rock climbing and musical theater and gay sex are bad

Hmm, I've never tried lutefisk...

Well, let's make a sharp distinction between response to physical injury and response to mental distress, both usually called "pain," both feeling very similar.

Physical pain serves a definite purpose. It alerts us to injury and trains as a strong negative re-enforcement against getting hurt. Physical pain can of course be exploited in torture to do real, permanent damage, and if given the chance I would vouch to reduce the uncomfortable properties of pain. Physical pain is a damage response (very good) but is too effective (i.e. torture is possible) (slightly bad).

Mental Pain is much harder to pin down, and by my estimates, much worse. A real depression can kill people. Sadness drive people mad, boredom drives them stupid, unmitigated anger drives them to violence, guilt drives them to misery, etc. I say that there isn't anything good about mental pain, or at least the utility reverses rapidly as we go up the scale.

To sum up: Damage response is good except for allowing torture, Mental distress is bad.

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Pain to me means something that forces me into a state of being that is the exact opposite of those I desire to experience. Good = what I want, and pain is what I don't want, and what robs me from Good.

Is it just a question of the definition of "pain" and "bad"?

"When is pain worst?" an is important and deeply related question which is, fortunately for us, much easier to examine directly. I feel worse to have a papercut than it is to have an equally painful, but ultimately more damaging cut elsewhere. I feel worse to have a chronic pain that will not go away than I do when I feel a brief pain that goes away shortly after. I feel worse if I am unable to fix the injury that is causing me pain. It feels unfair, awful and even unbearable to ache for days during a bad bout of the flu. I know that the pain doesn't serve me any useful purpose, it isn't going to make me any less likely to catch the flu, which makes it all the worse. Likewise, if I've hurt my foot and it keeps on hurting even as I walk over to the cabinet to get out a bandage and some disinfectant, that is worse than a pain that hurts just as bad for a second and then stops once I've stopped doing the thing that injured me.

This seems to indicate that pain is worst when there is a conflict between my objective assessment of my injuries and what my "gut" tells me about my injuries through the proxy of pain. There was a post somewhere on this site, perhaps by Yvain and I'd thank anyone that could find it and link it, about how there is not a single unitary self, but rather many seperate selves. I suspect that the main reason why pain is bad is due to a conflict between these many parts of me. Pain is at its worst when "rational, far-mode assessor of injury" me is at odds with "hindbrain, near-mode tabulator of pain nerves" me and the former has no way to get the near-mode brain to stop sending pain signals even after my initial panic at being injured has been overridden and all useful steps towards recovery and preventing future injuries have been taken, while the latter can't keep the far-mode brain from constantly ignoring these dire warnings about how my nerves are reporting bad things and how my skin is cut and how I'm probably bleeding and how it hasn't stopped and I need to lie still and wait to heal. The two argue in circles somewhere in the back of my mind leaving me with a certain unease that I can't but at rest by either laying still and resting or by ignoring my pain and going on with my day.

That is why pain is bad. Because, on some level or another, it causes different parts of me to come into conflict, neither being able to overcome the other (and neither should, for I shudder to think of what would happen if one did win out) and neither being able to let me rest.

Most people don't enjoy pain, in those people, it causes suffering. With near certainty, suffering decreases the utility of the universe according to the coherent extrapolated volition of humanity.

Torturing masochists is perfectly fine as far as I can tell, in fact, better than fine.

Most people here seem to be giving reasons why pain is GOOD. It's a warning system, etc.

Pain is bad, because it causes us to abandon our higher thoughts, and react impulsivly, occasionally making the situation much worse. Sharp pain typically demands a swift response, like the automatic jerking of a hand away from the flame. One can learn to train themselves to surpress this automatic response, but then the damage from the flame is greater while they take the time to think out why and how they should remove thier hand from the flame.

In short, pain is bad because it, more oft than not, forces an unthinking instinctual reaction.

If it's trivially easy to say what's bad about the lack of an ability to feel pain because you wouldn't want it to happen to your child, isn't it trivially easy to say that pain is bad for precisely the same reason?

Pain is pretty much body-ese for "bad". It is necessary as an indicator of what is bad - injuries, poisons, illnesses cause pain because pain is how we know those things are bad.

It's kind of a meaningless question then; the badness is not contained in the pain but in the things causing it.

You might as well ask what is acid about the colour on indicator paper.

It seems like this is a resurgence of the ought-from-is dilemma. For this reason I think accepting that "pain is bad" as a primitive is acceptable, as there doesn't seem any way to derive it from anything. Off hand I might venture that more specifically we call pain "bad" because creatures strive so strongly to avoid it, this too being a primitive. (And like you mentioned, we appreciate it when it helps us avoid other things we want to avoid even more, like death).

What makes this different from lutefisk is how strongly we try to avoid it: whatever you say, when choosing between being branded and lutefisk, we'll choose lutefisk. And then most moral theories posit that the suffering of eating lutefisk is minor enough to not be worth serious moral consideration. But if we held someone down to feed them lutefisk (or tied them up to funnel sauerkraut into their mouth) and they were crying and screaming terribly and honestly willing to run across hot coals to avoid said ethnic provender, we might well consider lutefisk "bad", at that time and for that person.

I don't think anything about pain as a concept or feedback process is bad. The things which may cause or accompany pain however are bad or challenging and can cause harm to sustainable life. That is what people actually don't like. I am unfamiliar with cases where pain does not accompany some destructive situation.

On the flip side, I like the pain in my muscles after exercise because I understand it's origins and it is signaling to me that I successfully broke muscle down which I have a reasonable expectation of growing back stronger.

Pain in and of itself is the most effective signal for motivation that can occur in the animal kingdom. What we refer to as pain is simply a feedback mechanism for indications of change in homeostasis.

I wrote this blog post a while back on brain pain and how I think it is similar to muscle pain, which I think is apropos.

It's unwanted and frightening. Your awareness of it, even your awareness of the possibility creates revulsion and fear.

It's so strong you have a hard time thinking about anything else, a hard time functioning, and you feel that something is deeply wrong that you are powerless to change.

At least, that's what I find bad about pain. I suppose those things are technically my fault.

The difficulty of answering this question suggests one possibility: pain might very well be the only intrinsically bad thing there is. Pain is bad simply because it is bad, in a way that nothing else is. It could be argued that the "goodness" or "badness" of everything else is reducible to how much pain qualia it causes or prevents.

I think (though I haven't thought about it very much yet) that maybe the most coherent line of argument is that pain per se is not a bad thing, but it is an indication that a bad thing is occurring, e.g., burning oneself, tearing a muscle, walking on a joint that is damaged and therefore damaging it further. All these are easily argued to be bad things because they get in the way of the goals of the pain-experiencer. So when we say "pain is bad, we should minimise it", that's really just shorthand for "things that cause pain are bad, we should minimise them". It strikes me as similar to the way genes, in shaping the behaviour of their bodies, might use "have sex as often as possible" as shorthand for what they really want: "produce as many surviving offspring as possible".

Re: "Your standard-issue utilitarianism is, among other things, "hedonic". That means it includes among its tenets hedonism, which is the idea that pleasure is good and pain is bad, end of story."

I wouldn't put it like that! Positive utility is different from pleasure. Negative utility is different from pain. Pleasure and pain are elements of the human utility function, but there's also happiness, boredom, anxiety, desire, etc. Pain often provides important feedback about when you are going wrong. Otherwise, we would all be taking pain-killers.

Well, what is the purpose of pain then? It is a conditioning trap of sorts which our cleverly self-serving genes have set to keep us alive. It is the whip of the microscopic slave-masters we harbor in our every bit of flesh. So, we are the goons which live to spread these tiny double-helixed Hitlers and pain is there means of keeping us in line. Everything we do is a byproduct of this slavery. Every interest we think we have, every sensation we believe we enjoy (from sex to milkshakes to, though somewhat harder to directly correlate, philosophizing), these are merely the weapons of our despots. Though there is no escape, all is the cage, all is chains. So, pain is as good or bad as anything else, it merely depends on your purpose.