The elusive subjective conscious experience — the redness of red, the painfulness of pain — that philosophers call qualia?
The "redness" of red and the "painfulness" of pain are what philosophers refer to as qualia.
In other words, the painfulness of pains was constituted by their power to immediately "evoke in [one] the peremptory desire that the [pain] perception should cease" (Armstrong 1968, pp. 314 16).
A purely behaviorist creature, a 'zombie', as it were, may engage in pain behavior, including beneath the skin pain responses, yet completely lack whatever is qualitatively distinctive of and proper to pain (its painfulness).
The question is: in what does the painfulness, the hurting quality, of pains consist?
Traditionally, acquaintance theorists have taken the most promising candidates for entities with which we can be acquainted to be conscious states of mind (e.g., an experience of pain, a sensation of red) and their properties (e.g., painfulness, redness).
A complete hedonist position will involve also explanatory hedonism, which consists in an answer to the following question: 'What makes pleasure good, and pain bad?', that answer being, 'The pleasantness of pleasure, and the painfulness of pain'.
A few contemporary authors have even speculated that suicide could become the preferred end to life, because it permits individuals the maximum amount of choice over the timing, manner and painfulness of death.
It seems easy to deny the existence of pain as an object but much harder to deny the existence of pain as a property to deny, for example, that there is a property of intense painfulness that is possessed by the experience of unanesthetized dentistry.
The painfulness of McMath's story suggests a legal controversy where there is none; California's law is quite clear.
"Così" was long regarded as a wanly charming diversion, and even today productions like the Metropolitan Opera's emphasize its picturesqueness over its painfulness.
