One of the weirder claims I’ve seen is that people simply “perceive” or “see” that “pain is bad.”

First, it’s unclear why, if the goal of such a claim was to establish that moral realism was true, and that pain was stance-independently bad, you’d drop the explicit reference to “stance-independent.” Why not say we see that pain is stance-independently bad? I worry people drop this because “we see pain is bad” sounds less controversial and more “obvious” when you don’t explicitly reference the underlying theoretical addendum, that it’s “stance-independently” bad.

Second, and more importantly, how could you possibly “see” or have as part of your experience a counterfactual consideration? It’s one thing to taste a piece of cake and judge that it tastes good. But how could you perceive or see that the cake would be good independent of how it tasted to you or anyone else? Likewise, how, when you experience pain, could it part of the experience itself that the badness would be bad even if you didn’t disapprove if it? In other words, if you do dislike the pain and desire not to experience it, and then you experience it and find it to be bad, how can you deconfound the fact taht you dislike the pain and don’t want to experience it on stance-dependent grounds from the experience of the pain in such a way that you can somehow directly “see” or “perceive” what you would think under some other circumstance that you aren’t actually in?

For comparison, this reminds me of people who say even if they lived centuries ago, they wouldn’t have held the bigoted attitudes of the people in that era. How could they possibly know this? They’d need to have access to some counterfactual condition in which they grew up in a completely different environment. This isn’t something they are in a position to know. It certainly isn’t something they can directly experience.

Likewise, I don’t think stance-independence can possibly be part of experiences. It is a theoretical stance one takes towards their experiences, but it isn’t built into them.