ABSTRACT
This chapter describes principlism and objectivism as it tends to function in bioethics scholarship, and notes some of the critiques of principlist bioethics that have sprung up largely within the last decade. Building on these critiques, it explains how attention to the phenomenology of illness is, unlike principlist bioethics, well-suited to accounting for the ethics of pain. In an important sense, the moral objectivism that dominates principlism and common morality bioethics mirrors the emphasis on objectivity that dominates contemporary understandings of pain. The dominant approach to ethics and pain policy in the United States focuses almost entirely on the opioid regulatory regime, which centers the physician-prescriber. Phenomenology is important to the ethics of pain because it implies that the primary locus of ethical significance is the being-in-the-world, the particular subject moving through their local, social world and experiencing and understanding the meaning of their pain in terms of these local worlds.
