I think maybe well-being is being conflated with a lack of pain? Or pain with suffering? If you don’t have hands, your well-being would also diminish. Your assessment of pain being preferable to not having hands seems to me to be an assessment of the value your hands have to...your well-being, functionality being important to it, which it is for all people. I think, if I’m understanding your position, my response would be that functionality is integral to well-being, so they can’t really be pitted against each other.

I see where he’s setting himself up to be misunderstood with some things because he is in some instances conflating those things as well, and I guess it comes down to what your values and abilities are and I also would consider Bright Tyger’s argument as well. I’ve been in some pretty extreme amounts of pain, and at least for me, I’d rather be non-functioning.

But if you feel you could handle the pain, then you would simply be deriving your well-being from your functionality despite your suffering. Well-being, I think, is a pretty solid way of defining what we aim at with our morals though our assessments are sometimes way off.

Here's my take on your first point, as a nurse. You don't really know what you'd do if you were in extreme pain. You might think you understand but few people have the correct perspective to actually know. I deal with diabetics who have been chronically sick for years. I've seen dozens and dozens of limbs get amputated d/t wounds and poor healing. I've probably watched about half of those people become resistant to the thought of losing a limb initially but I've never watched one patient when confronted with their own mortality choose to keep the limb and die. As we age we will lose functionality. It's inevitable.

I think you misunderstand SH’s arguments. His position is that at some point enough suffering makes life not worth living regardless of functionality or purpose. I can accept this view because it’s a given that suffering at some point is totally disabling and “functionality-destroying.” If you accept this, you must then go on to accept that the main purpose of life is to preserve itself in such a way that it can formulate and pursue other “functionalities and purposes.” While you agree that functionality or purpose is the highest value, unlike SH you don’t state what that means. Again, SH seems to say that there is a purpose, and this purpose is to foster conditions under which other purposes can be formulated and accomplished. This is a necessary condition to being able to do anything else. Pain is bad. I’m not talking about workout pain, which is beneficial. I’m saying that mind-numbing, excruciating pain such as torture is without baby question bad, and I can’t think of any circumstances under which such pain may be good.