Felix:
I think you are confusing moral sensitivity with moral cognition. Inherently bad would mean always so but suffering is not always bad, nor is pleasure always good. For example, the emotional suffering of losing a loved one is not inherently bad, but lacking the ability to experience such suffering would be.
I say that suffering is always bad and pleasure is always good. I'll just put it flatly: When ethical issues arise in the world they are always entangled with our affairs, our culture, institutions, relations, opinions, the non normative "facts" that constitute our being here. Consider, you can analyze these for their rational features, and abstract from the full description of an engagement, and in doing so, you identify the structural features of reason. When you hail a taxi you raise your hand, expecting a taxi to respond, and this expectation is built out of the implicit reasoning of the conditional "If I raise my hand, then a taxi will duly acknowledge the sign." We thereby identify part of the rational structure of our engagement. The point is that the various particulars of the event are abstracted
from to identify the rationality. Value, I am arguing, is to be handled in the same way: Hailing the taxi certainly has rational features, but it also has valuative ones, such as, the importance of getting where you're going, the caring about some future event, and so on. Abstract from all that is not value, the mechanical movements of the legs, the rational structure of the judgment, and what is there is, if you will, pure value, unentangled. This value is an absolute (though language does not possess the power to say this. That's another issue).
Value experiences are entangled ones, and it is the entanglements that cause the confusion. Delivering a child from danger is a good thing; but then, what if the child will grow up to be a serial killer, and you know this? Then it is not so good. But the goodness and badness becomes bound to the non normative "facts" of the events, and the absoluteness of the badness of, say, falling on to a bed of nails, becomes entangled with other facts, like growing up to bring misery to many. The ethical nature remains what it is, regardless of the facts that in which it occurs. Hitler enjoyed sending Jews to the ovens, and we would say this is despicable. But the enjoyment as such remains untouched by this judgment, just as his enjoyment of a good cigar is still enjoyment, even though it was enjoyed by Hitler as he bombed London. The despicableness arises only in the entanglement the enjoyment has with other value-entangled facts.
Since you understand Eastern thinking, consider that when the Buddhist or Hindu settles down to meditate, one way to describe this is disentanglment: the attempt to close off the entangling effects of being in the world and experience "pure" joy. I have long thought they had it right, and it is only now, as deconstruction reveals the "end" of philosophy, are we starting to realize this.