The Structural Dilemma of Parfit’s Agony Argument: A Fundamental Deconstruction Based on the System of Generalized Harm-Avoidance Monism

In the debate between objectivism and subjectivism about reasons in contemporary metaethics, Derek Parfit’s "Agony Argument", with its strong intuitive force, has become the core theoretical weapon for objectivism about reasons to refute subjectivism about reasons. Taking "the extreme future agony necessarily provides an objective reason for harm avoidance independent of the subject’s desires" as its self-evident premise, the argument attempts to falsify the position of subjectivism about reasons, which holds that "all reasons for action ultimately stem from the agent’s subjective desires", through the logic of reductio ad absurdum. In 2025, Wang Baofeng published his paper The Childbirth Experience Machine and Parfit’s "Agony Argument" in Morality and Civilization, challenging the core premise of the Agony Argument with the thought experiment of the "childbirth experience machine", yet failing to complete the underlying logical construction of the connection between agony and action. Existing research has always been confined to the normative framework of "reasons" for offense and defense, but failed to examine the applicability boundary of this framework itself. From the core analytical perspective of the original Generalized Harm-Avoidance Monism, this paper systematically reveals the threefold structural dilemma of Parfit’s Agony Argument from the underlying dimension of evolutionary ontology: the misplacement of extreme cases, the fiction of rational subject, and the category transgression between ontology and normative theory. Meanwhile, with the core logic of Generalized Harm-Avoidance Monism, this paper supplements the theoretical foundation of Wang Baofeng’s counterexample, and finally realizes the integration of Parfit’s and Wang Baofeng’s seemingly mutually exclusive theoretical positions within the monistic framework. It provides an ontological foundation with more explanatory power for the connection between agony and action, and also offers a brand-new analytical paradigm for the debate between objectivism and subjectivism about reasons in metaethics.