ABSTRACT
Many states, events, facts, and states of affairs can plausibly serve as reasons for a subject without themselves being responsive to reason. The claim with which we began, that suffering confers reason, can be understood as the claim that suffering plays a central and often beneficial role in practical deliberation for the purposes of action. One of the reasons that the disconnect between rationality and suffering we’ve identified bears interest is that, we claim, it has the potential to initiate novel forms of sensory and psychological suffering, and thereby can significantly impede the overall well-being of individuals subject to it. In the absence of an uncontroversial account of what suffering amounts to, we have had no choice in the foregoing but to constrain the story about the disconnect between suffering and rationality by appeal to paradigm cases.
