The History Channel’s Kings of Pain is a glorified version of MTV’s Jackass. Rather than Steve-O launching bottle rockets from untold orifices, “wildlife biologists” allow spiders to inject them with venom, hornets to sting them, and snakes to bite them, all in the name of ratings. I mean science.
However, I won’t pretend to be too good to watch something like this. I’m a Johnny Knoxville fan all the way. And since Kings of Pain is ever-so-slightly more mature, I can enjoy it with my kids with slightly less guilt. (I’ll watch Jackass with my oldest, but with considerable guilt.)
And since we’re serious moral reasoners here, I was excited to see the “wildlife biologists” scoring their encounters according to criteria that would have made Jeremy Bentham proud.
Looky there: intensity, duration. Of course, one man’s 9.25 might be another man’s 8. But by averaging and contrasting the scores inspired by tarantulas and pythons, we can quantify how much pain to assign various encounters, thereby making that Utilitarian calculus thing practical after all. Imperfect, of course. But more precise than critics give the theory credit.
Now all we need is a comparable show devoted to quantifying experiences of intense pleasure! On HBO, perhaps?