Preferring more pain to less

Abstract

Plausibly, more pain is worse than less and, hence, we should avoid extending episodes of pain. However, experiments by Kahneman suggest that subjects can evaluate an episode with less pain as worse than one with more. Should, then, physicians performing a painful medical procedure stop causing pain immediately thereafter, or should they add an interval of diminishing pain, knowing that this will subsequently cause the patient to judge the episode as less painful? I argue that the experimental results pose no serious ethical dilemma, though they may have some surprising implications for our prereflective assumptions about pain.