Does Evil Exist?

Ok, to put it another way – (For me) the avoidance of pain is sordid and degrading. Engagement with the world, with objects and relationships presupposes pain, disappointment, and suffering. What sort of life does the flight from pain get us? And what is the ethical dimension of this disengagement?

whatever possessed you to get your hair cut the way it is was a force of pure evil

Well I think that this supports my argument. I respect courage and I think that to endure pain for a reason has an ethical dimension. But this is due to the choice not the pain itself. A political prisoner may be sunjected to the same punishments as a chld molester say, but they suffer in diffeent ways, one suffers for something outside of him/herself the other does not. Someone with cancer is not automatically brave they may be scared shitless, they may be filled with the craven wish that someone else could take their place. In the same way that suffering does not automatically give you insight, pain, or the avoidance of it has only the ethical dimension that our choices give to it. Someone who chooses to suffer for the sake of others does inspire respect, and may do so even when the ideology that inspires them is one with which we have little or no sympathy.

Well the ethics of martyrdom work differently in my opinion, whilst female saints may be subjected to horrendous physical torture by would be rapists, they are never actually raped. That would be a stain, the physical pain however has a purifying function, it is a sign of their goodness. I do agree that pain has been gendered, although I would say that as men are supposed to shield women from pain and that a woman's pain under that system is in fact a male failure/absence. Also in that case it would almost certainly be a man causing the pain, which would exclude women except as a suffering body that exists only as a site for male ethics and behaviour to be played out.