GE Morton
Well, if the "badness" of pain (or of anything else) is a "fact," i.e., expressible by a proposition such as, "Pain is bad," and if that proposition is to be cognitive, then there must be some understood procedure, universally acknowledged, for determining whether it is true or false. I know of no such procedure. There are procedures for determining the truth or falsity of some related propositions. E.g., "Alfie considers pain to himself to be bad," or, "Alfie considers pain to Bruno to be good." We can verify or falsify the latter two by observing Alfie's behavior. How do we verify/falsify the former? What observations or deductions will answer that question? If there are none, then it is a mistake, a misuse of the term, to characterize "Pain is bad" as a "fact." It is a non-cognitive proposition.
You look to verification. The assumption that x is an absolute makes x self verifying and therefore coercive to cognition, just as a mathematical idea is. What is the nature of cognition's acknowledgment of the apodicticity in the proposition 'pain is bad'? You seem to want to relativize pain's moral badness to judgment that can go either way, that is, Bruno may just like the pain and this compromises the universality of the badness of the pain. Of course, you are right to say that if the pain were immediately recognized as bad by the agent receiving it there is no problem with verification: it is self verifying, intuited as bad.
First, it is admitted that pain in-the-world is a complicated thing. What does one do with a masochist's pain and the badness ascribed to it? But I don't think this is a refutation of the universality of the moral badness of pain. The judgment and the pain are one and the same, or, if attestation of the pain being bad is genuine then it is an authentic case of true suffering. Pain is not, after all, bad if acknowledged as good, and while I would like to say that such cases are rare, I think lived experience is filled with such ambiguities, and I think many are so ambiguous one can hardly discern good from bad. Ambivalence is the mark of truly being a social creature. But none of this affects, call it, absolute badness, in the world. Apply a lighted match to your finger and there it is. Apply it to Stalin's finger and you could say he deserves it, but this has no bearing of the nature of pain qua pain.
The verification you seek in the pudding. And to verify the suffering in another is to simply infer based what you witness in the other's visible communications. You could be wrong about this, interpret badly, but so what?
To say that something is "bad" simply means that some agent considers it unpleasant, or undesireable, and would seek to avoid it or to be rid of it. Similarly, to say that something is "good" means that an agent desires it and would seek to obtain or retain it. Goodness and badness are pseudo-properties imputed to things by agents, and are idiosyncratic; they are subjective and relative to agents. That Alfie is in pain is a fact; that the pain is bad is a subjective evaluation of that fact which varies with the agents doing the evaluating.
Moreover, neither the judgment that Alfie's pain is bad, or that it is good, has, in itself, any moral implications. Nor do any other values. What does have a moral implication is the fact that Alfie considers the pain to be bad, and the fact that it reduces his welfare.
Te trouble you have with my thoughts on this is that you refuse to allow for an absolute to be an absolute. If you accept this, at least hypothetically, then the logic clears up. All you do above is posit what conditions would be if there were no such thing as absolute badness, and you
are right: pain would be localized, contextualized, placed against a background of circumstances. Such a thing would be contingent, as in the proposition "this knife is good because it is sharp". Well, the goodness of the sharpness depends entirely on what you want the knife for. It is not an absolute indication of a good knife; you could be doing Macbeth and want it dull.
But absolutes are very different things. If it is there, it is bad regardless of the conditions that apply. It is inherently bad. Posit the pain and you posit the badness. Subjective? What does this matter save for verification, which is incidental?
Surely you can see that is a non sequitur:
1. Pain hurts (true by definition).
2. Therefore I must not inflict pain on Bruno.
The conclusion makes undefended assumptions and contains terms not found in the premise.
Not a non sequitur. The defense of the assumption lies with the positing of the the "hurting" itself. It is inherently bad. always, already.