Pain feels bad.
That’s not a complex philosophical statement. It’s not even interesting. But it might be the only moral fact we can know for certain.
Think about everything else people disagree on. Whether God exists. What makes life meaningful. Whether we have free will. Whether anything is truly right or wrong.
But nobody argues that pain feels good while you’re experiencing it. The person writhing from a kidney stone isn’t confused about whether this is pleasant. The child with a scraped knee isn’t having a philosophical debate about the nature of suffering.
Pain just is bad. Not bad because of consequences or social rules or evolutionary programming. Bad in itself. Immediately. Obviously.
This seems almost too simple to matter. But I think it’s the foundation of everything else.
If you’re trying to build an ethical system and you can’t start with “unnecessary pain is bad,” where can you start? What could be more basic than the direct experience of suffering?
Most moral disagreements happen several steps up from here. We argue about which actions cause pain, or whether some pain is justified, or how to weigh different people’s pain against each other.
But we’re not arguing about whether pain hurts.
That’s something, at least. In a world where people disagree about nearly everything, we have one shared starting point. One thing we all know from the inside.
Maybe that’s enough to build on.