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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2008
In recent years, philosophical inquiry into individual welfare has blossomed into something of a cottage industry, and this literature has provided the conceptual foundations for an equally voluminous literature on aggregate social welfare. In this essay, I argue that substantial portions of both bodies of literature ought to be viewed as philosophical manifestations of a characteristically modern illusion—the illusion, in particular, that there is a special kind of goodness that is irreducibly person-relative. Theories that are built upon this idea suffer from a recurring defect. Such theories relativize welfare to subjective states that are wholly unsuited to settling deliberative questions concerning what it would be good for us to do, because they themselves are subjective outlooks on value and their dependability is itself fair game for deliberative review. They are unstable, then, in the course of first-person deliberation, which is precisely where they are supposed to have their primary application. The idea of an irreducibly person-relative kind of goodness is of modern vintage, and its rise has distorted prevailing interpretations of pre-modern alternatives, including the appealing alternative found in Plato and Aristotle. A further objective of this essay is to recover this alternative, bring out its appeal, and answer some possible objections to it.
1 Outside of academic philosophy, this formulation would perhaps not be widely affirmed nor even regarded as intelligible. Yet I believe that it captures a thought that is widely affirmed in the post-Enlightenment Western world—namely, the thought that what is genuinely good for a particular person need not be the least bit good in any more objective or impersonal sense.
2 This is not to say that we cannot make ordinal comparisons of different values and different lives unless we locate an underlying source of value. Aggregation, however, requires cross-personal cardinal comparisons, and it is hard to provide a plausible guide for such comparisons in the absence of such an underlying source of value.
3 Sumner, L. W., Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 79Google Scholar.
4 These are stock examples in the literature on well-being. The first can be traced to Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 432–33Google Scholar. The second is due to Anscombe, Elizabeth, Intention (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957), 70ff.Google Scholar
5 Sumner, Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics, 20; see also ibid., 42.
6 Ibid., 42.
7 Sidgwick, Henry, The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1981; first edition 1874), 120–21 and 403–5Google Scholar; the quote is from p. 404. See also Sidgwick, Henry, Outlines of the History of Ethics, 6th ed. (London: MacMillan and Company Limited, 1931; first edition 1886), 197Google Scholar.
8 Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 404. The diagnosis of the error is set out on p. 405 and 405n.
9 Ibid., 405n.
10 Ibid., 405.
11 Anscombe, Elizabeth, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” in The Collected Philosophical Papers of G.E.M. Anscombe, Volume Three: Ethics, Religion, and Politics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), 26Google Scholar.
12 Callicles explicitly puts forward this view in Plato, Gorgias, 483b–484b. Thrasymachus hints at a similar view in Plato, Republic, 344c. The view is set out more explicitly at Republic 358b–359c, where Glaucon attempts to reframe Thrasymachus's view so as to fortify it against the objections raised by Socrates in Book I of the Republic.
13 Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 92.
14 See Irwin, Terence, “Prudence and Morality in Greek Ethics,” Ethics 105, no. 2 (1995): 284–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 284.
15 Plato, Republic, 588b–589a. A similar if far less vivid idea of the connection between virtue and psychic unity or order can be found in the Gorgias, 506d–507c.
16 Plato, Republic, 520a–e.
17 See Plato, Republic, 519e–520a, for textual confirmation that the demand conduces to the good of the city yet does not maximize the happiness of the rulers (or any other class of citizens). Further on, at 521a–b, Plato makes clear that the ideal ruler would prefer to be permitted to spend his time in pure philosophical contemplation.
18 Ibid., 521a–b.
19 See especially Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1166a1–b23.
20 See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1168b16–33.
21 I explore these themes at greater length in Brewer, Talbot, “Virtues We Can Share: A Reading of Aristotle's Ethics,” in Ethics 115, no. 4 (2005): 721–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22 According to Socrates, for instance, Callicles' love of the Athenian demos, and his related concern to avoid getting bested by Socrates in front of others in the course of what is and is not a philosophical dialogue (the love of wisdom being represented by only one of the parties to it), keep him from being won over by Socrates' arguments concerning the proper use of the human capacity for reasoned thought and action. See Plato, Gorgias, 513c–d.
23 Aristotle, De Anima, Book III, chapters 7 and 10.
24 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1179b5–18.
25 Moore, G. E., Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), chapter III, section 59, paragraph 4Google Scholar.
26 Sumner, Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics, 24.
27 Ibid., 51.
28 Such reticence will be particularly natural if we accept the Aristotelian thought that the goodness of a thing is a matter of its approximation to the telos by reference to which we grasp the kind of thing it is. It is not clear that the world has a telos, nor that a world is made better whenever the entities found in it more closely answer to their telos—as, for instance, when all knives are sharp or all chicken eggs fertile.
29 Moore, Principia Ethica, chapter III, section 59, paragraph 4.
30 Sumner, Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics, 159.
31 Scanlon, Thomas M., What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 33–55Google Scholar; Stampe, Dennis, “The Authority of Desire,” The Philosophical Review 96, no. 2 (1987): 335–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
32 See Brewer, Talbot, “Maxims and Virtues,” The Philosophical Review 3 (2002): 539–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Brewer, , “The Real Problem with Internalism about Reasons,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 42 (2002): 443–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
33 Another way to see the difficulty with preference-satisfaction and desire-satisfaction conceptions of well-being is to ask whether the good is supposed to lie in the fact that one's preferences are satisfied or in that which satisfies one's preferences. The preference-satisfaction theorist must take the former view, and certainly we will have to take this view if we are to have the right sort of raw material for an aggregative conception of the social good. But from the point of view of the agent, it is far more natural to locate value in that which satisfies the preference or desire. Given this, we cannot ground this sort of aggregative view in the generalization of a conception of value that everyone finds it natural to affirm in his or her own case.
34 This position would have to be refined to be genuinely workable. The problem is that there are cases in which one ought to have a desire for something, but only for instrumental reasons and not because the thing in question is at all good. An insanely insecure ex-lover might threaten to kill his ex-mate if she does not work up a burning desire to marry him, yet might not care in the least if they actually end up tying the knot. The ex-mate would then have a very powerful reason to desire to do something that would be very bad for her. This is a straightforward adaptation of the “wrong kind of reasons” objection to Scanlon's buck-passing conception of the good, as found in D'Arms, Justin and Jacobson, Daniel, “Sentiment and Value,” Ethics 110, no. 4 (2000): 722–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and in Rabinowicz, Wlodek and Rønnow-Rasmussen, Toni, “The Strike of the Demon: On Fitting Pro-Attitudes and Value,” Ethics 114, no. 3 (2004): 391–423CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
35 Cf. Smith, Michael, “Neutral and Relative Value after Moore,” Ethics 113, no. 3 (2003): 576–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
36 In my view, Nozick, Robert has offered a decisive argument for this conclusion in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 42–45Google Scholar.
37 Aristotle formulates and defends this sort of view of pleasure in Books VII and X of the Nicomachean Ethics. Gilbert Ryle articulates a similar, self-consciously Aristotelian view in Ryle, Gilbert, The Concept of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 107–10Google Scholar; and Ryle, , “Pleasure,” in his Collected Papers, Volume 2: Collected Essays, 1929–1968 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971), 326–35Google Scholar. I defend a view of this sort in Brewer, Talbot, “Savoring Time: Desire, Pleasure, and Wholehearted Activity,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 6 (2003): 143–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
38 Williams, Bernard, “A Critique of Utilitarianism,” in Smart, J. J. C. and Williams, Bernard, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 108–18 and 129–35Google Scholar.
39 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1174a13–1176a29.
40 This can occur not only in the pursuit of idiosyncratic projects but also in the fulfillment of duties to strangers; hence, the possibility of this relation to value does not mark off those acts that are ordinarily regarded as self-interested. But the point here is not to provide an alternative telltale marker of prudential value. The point is to safeguard the intuitive notion that full responsiveness to the goods bearing on deliberation does not require a renunciation of idiosyncratic projects and commitments.
