It’s not about quality of life. Abuse victims will say they are happy, and stay with their abusers. War veterans can think fondly on their time at war, but neither are objectively good situations. Reporting that you are happy is not the same as being happy.
I guess what I’m describing is the difference of trauma/suffering (both physical and mental) vs not. There’s too much psychology in play when dealing with how we handle trauma to trust a self reported metric.
The psychology being subjective is my point. The physiological condition is not subjective. My statement wasn’t that something was “objectively good” but that experiencing pain and suffering was “not objectively good” or rather (objectively) not a good thing. Pain is real, and the absence of pain is objectively better.
> Pain is real, and the absence of pain is objectively better.
But that’s observably false. There are persons who don’t feel pain, and they are considerably more likely to seriously injure or even maim themselves than normal persons. That’s hardly “objectively better.”
Furthermore, the existence of masochism shows that some people prefer pain to its absence at least some of the time. Thus “Pain is real, and the absence of pain is objectively better” is just your subjective opinion.
Since we’re talking about subjective reports regardless, we may as well rely on the subjective reports of the people having the experiences rather than the subjective opinions of others who aren’t having the experiences.
If you can’t agree that physically harming people is bad, I don’t think we’re going to see eye to eye on this. But, your example of masochism is exactly my point. You can’t trust their reported state because people can bend their psychology to believe it to be fine. Nevertheless, torture/murder/rape, etc are all still objectively bad.
As an example: there are genuine cases of masochists that are subjectively happier because pain is being inflicted on them. In many of these cases no serious harm is done to their body. Your claim "you can't trust their reported state" is either 1) a claim that the outside observer knows better than the individual what their subjective state is or 2) that the health of the subject is more important than their subjective happiness.
If you are arguing for #1, I disagree. If you are arguing for #2, you should be more clear about why/how you keep using the word "objectively".
People can feel less happy when there is a lack of challenge in their life. Consider the example of the guy that spends his life wasting away in front of video games, going for impulsive pleasures instead of long term rewarding goals.
I would guess that each person has a different ideal level and variety of suffering (or responsibility, or challenge, or whatever you want to call it), for which their personality is best suited. We are so far removed from the challenges of the past that we don't know what the subjective experience would be like.
