How the Attention-Demandingness of Pain Favors Felt-Quality Accounts

Sensory pain demands attention from the person experiencing it. The significance of this property of sensory pain to debates about both its nature and prudential badness have previously been overlooked. I argue that felt-quality views—according to which all pains share a phenomenal character—are well-positioned to accommodate the attention-demandingness of pain, and that attitudinal views—according to which there is no such phenomenal character—cannot. Attitudinal views are deficient in this respect in three ways: they count experiences that are not attention-demanding as pains, they are unable to identify the feature of pains in virtue of which they demand attention, and they cannot account for the fact that pain can be distinctively unignorable. If I am right, this three-pronged failure is a mark against the viability of attitudinal accounts of the nature of prudentially bad sensory pain.