How can we prove that discomfort is a message from our
evolutionary-past, telling us to change some general kind of thing in
our specific situation? More importantly perhaps, how can we prove that
it is a message that ought to be ascribed some moral authority in our
modern world?

The requisite beliefs would seem to include evolution and evolutionary
psychology, so if the principles of these approaches do not sit well
with you, then go and read something else. Beyond that we need to
establish a moral system from these premises, and fit comfort and
discomfort somewhere around the top and centre. That is quite a
challenge, but should be sufficient.

While another person can inpsire unhealthy habits, we need only to
consider a human without a society to see a good example of ill-health.
Humans are of course social animals, and this fact has certainly not
changed from our primate ancestors to our caveman prototypes to us
modern-day civilised apes. If anything we have become more dependent on
other people, or at least on more other people. Any brain that didn't
guide us towards some kinds of social advantage from time to time would
almost certainly get us killed long before the age of reproduction, let
alone the actual accomplishment of it, our chances of which would
likely be crippled enough if we were alive, but without any trace of
social awareness or competence. We instinctively care about other
people, but the levels and manifestations will vary according to your
life and the people you encounter.

We also have within us the capacity to cheat and steal and kill and
dominate. This has proven useful in the past when dealing with other
groups of people, but tends to lose more energy than co-operation, or
at least <shudder> democracy, when that's an option. The conflict
between our need for other people and the possible advantages of
screwing them over, provide the market for ethical systems. In
pragmatic terms, what strategic balance can be struck between the two
instinctive drives just mentioned?

I slipped in there the idea that co-operation is cheaper, and it barely
needs to be proven. Wars cost lives, cities and factories. They use up
power plants, workers, and political time. If the goal of any social
system is to secure wealth - in its broadest sense of useful forms of
energy and information - for the people in control, then wars are
clearly a fools errand when more peaceful development is possible. If
you can harness the energy and organise the people then you can create
the wealth. The only proof that needs to be offered is the relative
rates of peace within democratic countries in the last hundred years
(unless they lose their democracy, please note), and between them. The
relative wealth, health and education are also discoverable from the
united nations or the cia, although both of these organisations have an
obvious bias towards (some meaning of the word) democracy.

A moral system that aims for you and yours to win, can aim for others
to win as a means to this end, but not an end in itself, unless you get
a buzz out of that kind of thing. The possible need for conflict need
not be disputed, but the possible means for co-operation should be the
focus, since it's the better option, when it's genuine.

This is all merely to show that some forms of co-operation can be
selfish and hedonistic, and can be an effective means of looking after
your personal interests. The point is to show that genuine co-operation
is not precluded, and so neither is honest dealing. They are usually
preferable, even if only from a purely economic point of view, but it
must be allowed that one could conceivably be in a position where
telling the truth is the wrong thing to do, or where co-operation is
immoral.

How to further any ethical system, using comfort as a metric, is
another question entirely. From an evolutionary point of view, the
brain needs some means to guide the mind as to what's good and what's
bad, so its self-awareness can be aware of something useful. Our
awareness of possible effects in the long term, due to the things that
we see happening around us, could be offered as such as means, but as
with immediate decisions, our reflections are ultimately judged by how
we feel about them. I will leave it to the reader to prove this to
themselves.

In other words we make decisions by emotional means anyway, and to be
aware of this is not to be a selfish hedonist who neglects and abuses
everybody else, but a selfish hedonist who looks for the best way to
satisfy their various desires, and aims for peaceful development with
anyone who aims for the same.

Comfort and discomfort are more important than stronger pleasure and
displeasure, because they give you the strategic information you need,
earlier. Small comforts will build into pleasure over time and small
discomforts into displeasure. I guess I am splitting hairs here but
discomfort is intended to denote the minor, creeping unpleasantness
that usually arrives before any storms of displeasure, although perhaps
not always.

In other words one should focus on comfort because it will warn you of
what you need to know, and will warn you when it starts, rather than
when it's got out of control. The little bad things are usually not
there for a good reason, just something you haven't dealt with yet. The
little good things are often achievable with an unintrusive detour. Of
course balance is everything but comfort can guide you if you pay
attention to how it behaves. Just because it's yours doesn't mean you
understand it, and it gives you more important information than any
other single faculty.

Lastly, comfort is only useful in the first place because it is
attached to other pieces of information floating around inside your
mind. Focussing on feelings will therefore put the rest of ones life in
focus, rather than create a distraction from it.