If the pain is so strong he can’t focus on and appreciate some good he otherwise would without the pain, isn’t this his brain itself deciding the pain is more important? I think this is the cognitive process of motivational salience, which integrates both positive (incentives, pleasure, desire) and negative (aversion, unpleasantness). If (actual or hypothetical/​idealized) motivational salience determines importance, then measures of attention during joint exposure experiments are plausibly more reliable for ranking importance than people’s statements, because the latter can be subject to additional biases, e.g. believing your commitments, especially to others, are more important than your pain serves your self-image as a good person, partner, friend, child or parent.
You could use more direct measures of motivational salience, including while separately exposed to the good or the pain and this is plausibly closer to what we want to actually measure to determine the scale, but I’d expect the same rankings from measuring attention during joint exposure, all else equal. Similarly if you used some measure of felt (hedonic, desire) intensity directly when separately exposed, although I’m less sure positive and negative would even be commensurable with such a measure. I have read attention disruption is one of the functions of pain, so maybe joint exposure experiments would be negatively biased.
However, if reflective preferences are what matter or are part of it, then for those we would probably use people’s (and other animal’s) statements or choices. We’d still have to worry about some of the same biases in people, though, but then intense pain may especially interfere with reflection. It’s also not clear to me how we would construct an absolute scale to use across even humans, let alone across all animals or possible conscious beings. Even if there isn’t one, that doesn’t rule reflective preferences out, but then the implications seem much less clear. We might get incomparability between beings or even for the same being over time.
(Actual or hypothetical/​idealized) motivational salience, felt intensity and reflective preferences could be different kinds of welfare, possibly incommensurable, if they’re determined by very different kinds of valuing systems.
If the pain is so strong he can’t focus on and appreciate some good he otherwise would without the pain, isn’t this his brain itself deciding the pain is more important? I think this is the cognitive process of motivational salience, which integrates both positive (incentives, pleasure, desire) and negative (aversion, unpleasantness). If (actual or hypothetical/​idealized) motivational salience determines importance, then measures of attention during joint exposure experiments are plausibly more reliable for ranking importance than people’s statements, because the latter can be subject to additional biases, e.g. believing your commitments, especially to others, are more important than your pain serves your self-image as a good person, partner, friend, child or parent.
You could use more direct measures of motivational salience, including while separately exposed to the good or the pain and this is plausibly closer to what we want to actually measure to determine the scale, but I’d expect the same rankings from measuring attention during joint exposure, all else equal. Similarly if you used some measure of felt (hedonic, desire) intensity directly when separately exposed, although I’m less sure positive and negative would even be commensurable with such a measure. I have read attention disruption is one of the functions of pain, so maybe joint exposure experiments would be negatively biased.
However, if reflective preferences are what matter or are part of it, then for those we would probably use people’s (and other animal’s) statements or choices. We’d still have to worry about some of the same biases in people, though, but then intense pain may especially interfere with reflection. It’s also not clear to me how we would construct an absolute scale to use across even humans, let alone across all animals or possible conscious beings. Even if there isn’t one, that doesn’t rule reflective preferences out, but then the implications seem much less clear. We might get incomparability between beings or even for the same being over time.
(Actual or hypothetical/​idealized) motivational salience, felt intensity and reflective preferences could be different kinds of welfare, possibly incommensurable, if they’re determined by very different kinds of valuing systems.