The Truth that Pain is Bad
This chapter articulates several core claims of Compassionate Moral Realism, and argues that the view thereby satisfies the semantic and metaphysical criteria for moral realism. The chapter focuses on the claim that pain is objectively bad, arguing that it is literally true and corresponds to a stance-independent moral fact. After clarifying the meaning of that claim, a partial analysis for “objectively bad” is defended, according to which something is objectively bad if any subject in touch with it would be averse to it. After showing how this partial analysis connects to other philosophers’ analyses of value-related notions and follows from several defensible full analyses, a potential objection based on Moore’s Open Question Argument is considered and answered. It is then shown that “pain is objectively bad” is therefore literally true on this analysis, and that the corresponding fact is stance-independent in the relevant ways.