[drdeca]

They are saying that judgements of what qualifies as harm is something like a judgement of what is good, or what is right or wrong. That’s not the same thing as evaluating whether something causes pain. You can measure whether something caused pain, sure. (Well, the sort of limitations you mentioned in measuring pain exist, but as you said, they are not a major issue.)

“Harm” isn’t the same thing as “pain”.

I would say that when I bite my finger to make a point, I experience pain, but this doesn’t cause me any suffering nor any harm. If something broke my arm, I claim that this is harm to me. While this (“if my arm were broken, that would be harm to me”) might seem like an obvious statement, and I do claim that it is a fact, not just an opinion, I think I agree that it is a normative claim. It is a claim about what counts as good or bad for me.

I don’t think normative claims (such as “It is immoral to murder someone.”) are empirical claims? (Though I do claim that they at least often have truth values.)

[Gormo]

I'd go beyond that and even say that one might consider something harmful, but be willing to endure a certain level of harm in pursuit of something of higher value.

For example, I once asked a smoker why she smoked, and the response was "because I love it" -- when I asked if the enjoyment was worth the health risks, she said "yes; I never planned to live forever". She was making a conscious decision to seek short-term pleasure at the cost of potential longer-term damage to her health. At that point, there wasn't really anything remaining to debate about.

[drdeca]

I didn’t mean to imply that the harmful effects of something can’t be worth it for the beneficial effects of that thing. Yeah, if someone is trapped, doing something that frees them and also breaks their arm, may well be an appropriate action for them to take.