More pain or less?
Analysis, vol. 56, no. 2, 1996, pp. 116–118
Abstract
Daniel Kahneman has investigated people’s judgments of painful episodes. He has shown that episodes containing more pain may be judged less bad than episodes containing less pain, if they end less badly. Sometimes doctors have to cause their patients pain. They may sometimes be able to prolong the pain unnecessarily, but in doing so reduce it at the end. When this is possible, Kahneman’s discovery poses a moral problem for them. Should they prolong the pain in this way? If they do, they will cause more pain, but their patients will judge the whole episode less bad. This paper investigates this problem.
Quotes from this work
[Pain] is a bad thing in itself. It does not matter who experiences it, or where it comes in a life, or where in the course of a painful episode. Pain is bad; it should not happen. There should be as little pain as possible in the world, however it is distributed across people and across time.