The Relative Importance of the Severity and Duration of Pain

Le résumé fourni par la source

- Pains vary in their severity and duration. When one pain is longer-lasting but less intense than a second pain, the most straightforward way to compare how much disutility they cause is to multiply how much longer by how much less severe the first pain is than the second pain. The present report investigates whether this mathematical approach (a) is sufficient for making cause prioritization decisions, (b) requires some amendments, or (c) is fundamentally flawed. - Many writers believe that the moral badness of pain scales non-linearly as its severity increases. Some even believe that unbearable pain is always more urgent to relieve than bearable pain, no matter how much briefer it is. It is possible to amend the mathematical approach to account for the former possibility. Accommodating the latter possibility requires ignoring duration when comparing pain above a certain severity threshold to pain below that threshold. - So long as unbearable pain does not receive infinite weight in cause prioritization, long-lasting pain can matter more than severe pain when (a) the duration difference is very large, (b) the long-lasting pain is sufficiently severe to render most moments more bad than good, or (c) the long-lasting pain is severe enough to chronically prevent pleasure. - Health economics is the only field to our knowledge that appears to have an explicit research program evaluating how individuals trade off the severity and duration of pain. Incidentally germane studies from other fields are difficult to find efficiently. Extant evidence suggests interactions between severity and duration on preferences. Heterogeneity in how people weigh severity and duration is a potentially large validity threat to discovering an appropriate mathematical formulation from aggregate data- All alternatives or refinements to the mathematical approach are based on intuitions that are reasonable but are not incorrigible. There are cognitive and behavioral factors that could bias people towards overvaluing or undervaluing either duration or severity.

Ce résumé expose les affirmations des auteurs. BNTIC ne l’interprète pas comme une validation indépendante des résultats.