A fair amount of the philosophical discussion about pain and unpleasantness has focused on providing a constitutive account of unpleasantness. These theories provide a more fundamental description of what unpleasantness is by appealing to other well-established notions in the architecture of the mind. In contrast, I address the nature of unpleasantness from a structural account. I will argue for how unpleasantness is built, rather than what unpleasantness is made of, as it were. I focus on the heterogeneity of experience, which (...) has been a somewhat neglected issue in the literature about unpleasantness: after careful introspection, there seems to be nothing phenomenal that all and only unpleasant experiences share. In order to address the heterogeneity of unpleasant experiences, I propose that the structure of the rich phenomenology of unpleasantness should be understood as a determinable property constituted by multiple essential dimensions. (shrink)

What makes it the case that a given experience is pleasurable? According to the felt-quality theory, each pleasurable experience is pleasurable because of the way that it feels—its “qualitative character” or “felt-quality”. According to the attitudinal theory, each pleasurable experience is pleasurable because the experiencer takes certain attitudes towards it. These two theories of pleasure are typically framed as rivals, but it could be that they are both partly right. It could be that pleasure is partly a matter of felt-quality, (...) and partly a matter of attitudes. It could be that a hybrid theory is true. In this paper, I aim to advance the cause of hybrid theories of pleasure. I do this in two ways. I begin by examining the challenges which motivate the search for a hybrid theory. I call these the HONEST challenges: Heterogeneity, Oppositeness, Normativity, Euthyphro, Separateness, and Togetherness. The first three challenges—HON—are challenges for the felt-quality theory. The second three challenges—EST—are challenges for the attitudinal theory. Having established the HONEST challenges, I then describe and motivate a particular cluster of hybrid theories which I will call dispositional hybrid theories. According to these theories, pleasurable experiences are all and only those experiences which dispose us to desire them in virtue of feeling the way that they do. The dispositional theories deliver on the promise of hybrid theories: because they appeal to both felt-qualities and attitudes, they have the resources to avoid most, if not all, of the HONEST challenges. (shrink)

I argue that, insofar as we endorse the general idea that desires play an important role in well-being, we ought to believe that their significance for well-being is derived from a pair of more fundamental attitudes: attraction and aversion. Attraction has wholly positive significance for well-being, and aversion has wholly negative significance for well-being. Desire satisfaction and frustration have significance for well-being insofar as the relevant desires involve some combination of attraction and aversion. I defend these claims by illustrating how (...) our desires can be asymmetrical. They can have greater positive than negative significance for well-being, or vice versa. (shrink)

The desire-satisfaction theory of well-being says, in its simplest form, that a person’s level of welfare is determined by the extent to which their desires are satisfied. A question faced by anyone attracted to such a view is, *Which desires*? This paper proposes a new answer to this question by characterizing a distinction among desires that isn’t much discussed in the well-being literature. This is the distinction between what a person wants in a merely behavioral sense, in that the person (...) is, for some reason or other, disposed to act so as to try to get it, and what a person wants in a more robust sense, the sense of being *genuinely attracted* to the thing. I try to make this distinction more clear, and I argue for its axiological relevance by putting it to work in solving four problem cases for desire satisfactionism. The theory defended holds that only desires in the latter, genuine-attraction sense are relevant to welfare. (shrink)

The heterogeneity problem, which stems from the alleged difficulty of finding out what all pleasant experiences have in common, is largely considered as a substantial issue in the philosophy of pleasure, one that is usually taken as the starting point for theorizing about the essence of pleasure. The goal of this paper is to move the focus away from the heterogeneity problem and toward an alternative approach to pleasure. To do this, I first show that, although the approach stemming from (...) the heterogeneity problem has led to an interesting discussion about the essence of pleasure, it has usually endorsed an introspectionist methodology and other problematic assumptions that have led to doubtful results. I thus propose a natural-kind approach to pleasure, which seeks to determine what, if any, the natural kind of pleasure would consist in. This approach broadens the investigation of pleasure by enabling the use of a larger range of methodological tools, thus opening new promising directions for research. (shrink)

According to attitudinal theories of pleasure and pain, what makes a given sensation count as a pleasure or a pain is just the attitudes of the experiencing agent toward it. In a previous article, I objected to such theories on the grounds that they cannot account for pleasures and pains whose subjects are entirely unaware of them at the time of experience. Recently, Chris Heathwood and Fred Feldman, the two leading contemporary defenders of attitudinal theories, have responded to this objection, (...) in very different ways. In this paper, I reconstruct and evaluate these responses. My conclusion is that neither response succeeds. (shrink)

A good deal of recent debate over the nature of pleasure and pain has surrounded the alleged phenomenon of unconscious sensory pleasure and pain, or pleasures and pains whose subjects are entirely unaware of them while experiencing them. According to Ben Bramble, these putative pleasures and pains present a problem for attitudinal theories of pleasure and pain, since these theories claim that what makes something a sensory pleasure or pain is that one has a special sort of pro- or con-attitude (...) toward it at the time one experiences it. In this paper, I look at the two existing defenses of attitudinal theories against this worry and explain (following Bramble) that each is inadequate. I show that this inadequacy is in part a result of existing attitudinal theories failing to recognize an important distinction in pro- and con-attitudes, and I propose and defend an amended attitudinal view that does recognize this distinction. I then offer a more promising response to the objection from unconscious sensory pleasures and pains: that experiences of apparently unconscious pleasure or pain only seem pleasant or unpleasant because their subjects are disposed to experience pleasantness or unpleasantness. In this sense, unconscious pleasures and pains are not really pleasures or pains at all. (shrink)

Pain is unpleasant. Given that pain is the paradigmatic example of an unpleasant experience, I aim to shed light on what pain and unpleasantness are by trying to understand what it means for a pain to be unpleasant, what the structure of unpleasantness is, and by tackling several problematic aspects of the relation between pain and unpleasantness. By doing this, I will also provide a general account of what it means for an experience that might not be a pain to (...) be unpleasant. The thesis is organised into seven chapters and divided by three main themes: i) what the unpleasantness of pain consists in, ii) how we can account for the great phenomenal diversity among experiences of unpleasantness, and iii) which cases suggest that there could be pains that are not unpleasant. Broadly, the first two chapters deal with the first theme, the third and fourth chapter with the second theme, and the fifth and sixth chapter focus on the third theme. In the final chapter I offer a conclusion of the three main themes by providing my own view on the unpleasantness of pain. According to this account, an unpleasant experience is something felt, it is a phenomenal property of mental states, and this property should be understood using the determinable determinate distinction. By doing all of this, this thesis will provide a detailed understanding of the nature of pain and unpleasantness. (shrink)