1. 2024;27;E1123-E1127Toward A Naturalistic Neuroethics of Pain Care
   Editorial
   James Giordano, PhD, and John R. Shook, PhD.

We enlarge on our proposal to unify the naturality (both biologically and phenomenologically) of pain in its existential reality. Neuroethics should support the recognition of the objective identity of real pain and maintain the whole patient at the foreground for ethically responsible pain medicine. The virtues of medicine have been fracturing into divergent moral directions, affecting even principled ethics. The practitioner’s duties to both doing good and doing no harm, when scaled to entire mono-modal fields and monolithic approaches to pain, can amount to a retreat from the responsibility to lessen patient suffering. Humanistic and scientific worldviews, with the advice and assistance of both philosophy and neurophilosophy, should harmonize their joint enterprise of benefiting humanity. Nature, including organisms, were stripped of norms and normative value and thus left adrift without ethical implications, yet medicine has always known how health and malady alike are naturally norming for vulnerable organic beings. The neuroethics of pain positions the pain sufferer as the natural focus for both neurophysiological investigation and psycho-behavioral study and treatment. Pain is of the organic world, not just coincidentally in it nor superveniently near it. Neuroethical naturalization only asks that pain is addressed as an agent-level capability where nature evolved pain to be, so that medical approaches to pain treatment treat patients foremost as bio-psychosocial persons.