From causal to moral models of pain, and the right to pain relief

Abstract This chapter argues that our mechanical causal theories about pain provide the basis for our moral theories about pain and our policies about opioids, including the right to pain relief. Our modern medical view of pain sees it as a natural event with causes but not reasons. We separate pain (as produced by impersonal mechanisms originating within the body) from suffering (as arising from personal and interpersonal meanings originating between bodies). Patients with pain have done nothing to cause or deserve the pain they experience. This causal passivity and its moral corollary, innocence, are the basis for the claim of a right to pain relief. That is why this right to pain relief is limited to the use of prescribed opioids for the treatment of physical pain, never for the rest of human suffering.