Thus “Pain is bad” is the prime example of a moral proposition, because it leads directly to ought-statements such as “You ought to do something about that person’s pain”. These are the mental states that create obligation and trigger moral action, along with their positive counterparts. All the things that we don’t like, that turn us off, that bring us down, that ruin our day: thwarted desires, nasty sensations, unpleasant forebodings. Pain and suffering are paramount in this class: from physical injury to bad smells to romantic pangs to boredom, lassitude, and despair. Rather, there is a subclass of mental states that are morally relevant-the class that includes desire, happiness and unhappiness, agreeableness and its opposite, good experiences and bad. There is nothing good or bad about having such mental states considered in themselves: they impose no moral obligations on moral beings (we are not obliged to increase the incidence of seeing yellow). But what is it about consciousness that confers value on it? Not merely its subjectivity or its intentionality or its rationality or its innerness, since many conscious states have these features but have nothing particularly to do with morality-for instance, seeing yellow or thinking about the moon. That is, it is states of consciousness that form the necessary and sufficient conditions for morality to apply. Obviously it is not intended that the merely physical states of sentient beings impose such obligations the idea is that it is in virtue of the mental states of sentient beings that moral obligations apply. The thought is that the states of insentient objects impose no obligations on us while the states of sentient beings do. It is often said these days that morality applies when and only when sentience is present, but the exact connection between the two is not often spelled out.
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