Pain and Bodily Care: Whose Body Matters?
Frederique de Vignemont2014, Australasian Journal of Philosophy
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Abstract
At first sight, pain seems intimately related to bodily care. Intuitively, one might say that one wants to avoid pain because one cares about one's body. Individuals who do not experience pain as unpleasant and to be avoided, like patients with pain asymbolia, seem not to care about their body. This view has been recently defended by Bain (2014) and Klein (forthcoming). In their view, one needs to care about one's body for pain to have motivational force. But does one need to care about one's body qua one's own? Or does one merely need to care about the body that happens to be one's own? In this paper, I will consider various interpretations of the notion of bodily care in light of a series of pathological cases in which patients report pain in a body part that they do not experience as of their own. These cases are problematic if one adopts a first-personal interpretation of bodily care, according to which pain requires one to care about what is represented as one's own body. The objection can run as follows. If the patients experience the body part as alien, then they should not care about it. Therefore, they should be similar to patients with pain asymbolia. But they are not. Hence, bodily care is not necessary to pain. To resist this conclusion, one can try to revise the interpretation of the notion of bodily care and offer alternative interpretations that are not first-personal. However, I will show that that those alternatives also fail to account for these borderline cases of pain.
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Over recent decades, pain has received increasing attention as – with ever greater sophistication and rigour – theorists have tried to answer the deep and difficult questions it poses. What is pain’s nature? What is its point? In what sense is it bad? The papers collected in this volume are a contribution to that effort ...
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