About not feeling pain being good or bad... I know there is a physical condition where somebody is unable to feel physical pain, and it's actually very inconvenient. You can bite your tongue to death, or drink scalding hot beverages, or get a nasty infection somewhere you can't see, or have apendicitis and never know... generally speaking, pain is good, it shows us in a clear way when something is bad for us, and makes us go away from it's source, or do something to fix it. The only problem with it comes when the situation is unfixable, or when the pain itself is worse than the actual situation or maybe others I can't think of right now. In those cases, temporarily not feeling pain would be alright, for me, and that's why they invented anaesthesia and antidepressants. Now to talk about transducting it to somebody else...
To give it this a proper analysis, a further step should be taken in the "out of sight, out of mind" policy, and make it so we don't know about our pain being transferred. I mean, "sight" is just an analogy of being able to sense something, to realize what's happening, and if we know someone is suffering for us, then it's not "out of sight". Or an alternative explanation if that one was not good enough; if we know about it then it's on our mind, by definition, whether we see it or not. If they told me all my pain went to someone else, then my morals would never allow me to accept that, no matter how far or whether I'll ever see the poor other guy (being a child is just to give it more shock value and ultimately irrelevant, really, it could be a grown up man and still be awful). But if they just told me "hey, we found this neat way to make pain go away" and they deceived me into thinking nobody else got hurt in the process" then yeah, probably, because I just have no idea. But if I ever saw through the deception and figured out the truth, utter shock would not start to describe the way I'd feel.
Has anyone seen a movie named The Island? They grew human clones in a remote facility, where they had a life for months and sometimes years, then they got killed to harvest their organs and give them to their non-clone counterparts. The latter where deceived into thinking nobody got hurt. It makes a decent analogy for what you say; if somebody knew about such facility but decided to go on anyway for his own happiness, then that guy is a monster in my opinion. But if he didn't, and just went looking for his own happiness, then... they just didn't know better. In that case, it's truly out of sight and out of mind.
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To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day. - Winston Churchill
03 Jul 2012, 2:43 pm
