PEA Soup

The Good vs. The Desirable

I was just reading the bit of Gibbard's Thinking How to Live where he talks extensively about the good and the desirable—specifically, about its being a conceptual truth that they are one in the same. I know that this is a common line people take, and I'm curious how many of you agree with it, because I'm not entirely convinced.

Getting clear on 'sophisticated consequentialism'

I am currently working on a manuscript in which sophisticated consequentialism (SC) plays a role, and I want to make sure I characterize the view accurately.

The heart of SC is the recommendation that the act consequentialist standard of right action not necessarily be utilized by agents in their deliberations.  The 'sophisticated consequentialist' is supposed to be justified is not using that standard in her deliberations to the extent that using it would have worse consequences than using some other non-consequentialist deliberative procedure. On its face then, SC is not a view of right action but a view about right deliberation.

Conference: 'Measures of Subjective Well-being for Public Policy: Philosophical Perspectives'

Sam Wren-Lewis is organizing a conference on subjective well-being and public policy at Leeds in July that might be of interest to Peasoupers (indeed, several of us are speaking there). Here's the official announcement:

Conference:  'Measures of Subjective Well-being for Public Policy: Philosophical Perspectives'

Registration now open.

Keynote Speakers:

• Richard Layard
• Peter Railton
• Valerie Tiberius
• Dan Haybron

Comparative Desert and the Bounds of Well-Being

Suppose, for simplicity, that the basis for moral desert is virtue and what’s deserved is well-being. According to the Ratio View of Comparative Desert, for two people to get what they comparatively deserve, the ratio of their levels of well-being must be the same as the ratio of their noncomparatively deserved levels of well-being. That is, if A noncomparatively deserves 10 units of well-being (A’s ‘peak’ is 10) and B noncomparatively deserves 20, they get what they comparatively deserve whenever B gets twice as much as A. So if A’s level is fixed at 15 (there’s no way to change it), B comparatively deserves 30.

This is an appealing view with an impressive pedigree (it is suggested by what Aristotle says about distributive justice, for example). But recently Shelly Kagan (2003, forthcoming) has presented seemingly devastating objections to it. I'll try out a straightforward response to them. It'll require that there is, at least, a lower bound to well-being.

Aggregating for lifetime character (and well-being): is there an end-of-life bias?

Newman, Lockhart, and Keil recently published their finding that when judging a person’s overall moral goodness or badness across a lifetime, we seem biased toward the end of life (at Cognition here).  According to this theory, we do not judge the moral qualities of a person’s lifetime character by merely adding up the ‘moral points’ of her individual actions over that life.  Instead, if Scrooge or Andrew Carnegie turns things around at the end of their lives, we will attribute much greater goodness to them across their whole lives because we give greater consideration to what people do at the end of their lives than we give to the rest of their lives, when determining the moral character of a life.  I think that the data presented by Newman et al. are open to at least two other explanations, however.

Susan Wolf and Meaningfulness

A lot of interesting work has been done recently on what makes lives meaningful. One brilliant example of this is Susan Wolf’s recent wonderful book Meaning in Life and Why It Matters. It consists of two short lectures, critical commentaries by John Koethe, Robert M. Adams, Nomy Arpaly, and Jonathan Haidt, and responses by Wolf herself. What I want to do here is to introduce quickly Wolf’s ‘Fitting Fulfillment’ View, and then I'll raise a potential objection to it.

What is instrumental goodness?

In “Two Distinctions in Goodness” (Philosophical Review 1983), Christine Korsgaard argued that the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic goodness should not be conflated with the distinction between final and instrumental goods. As it happens, I believe that she is entirely right that these two distinctions are distinct from each other. Still, her account of the distinction between final and instrumental goods does not seem quite correct to me.

As she puts it, a final good is something that “is valued as an end or for its own sake”, while an instrumental good “is valued as a means or for the sake of something else” (p. 170). There are at least three problems with this account.

Fitting Consequentialist Agents

I’m interested in defending consequentialism against allegations that it represents an inherently perverse perspective, or that the consequentialist agent would have a morally bad character. For example, critics allege that the consequentialist agent would have ‘one thought too many’, that they would treat others as replaceable ‘value receptacles’, that they would be cold and calculating, untrustworthy, and incapable of genuine personal relationships. I aim to rebut these charges.

The Virtue Responsive Evil Demon

Suppose you are an ordinary virtuous agent. Up until now, you haven’t lived the kind of life that involves making any huge life or death decisions, but you are kind to your friends and acquaintances, charitable to distant strangers in need, honest to everyone except those you can’t trust etc. Now an evil demon comes to you and tells you that, for the rest of your life, he will kill 5 people (randomly selected strangers in another country) every time you act virtuously, and won’t kill any people every time you act non-virtuously. He makes it impossible for you to commit suicide (if this were an option, you might think you should immediately take it – although doing so would, quite plausibly, lead to the death of 5 people, the killing would stop there). (Alternatively, one could simply specify that the demon tells you that whenever you happen to die, but not before, he will move on to present some other ordinary virtuous person with the same problem.) On the assumption that the evil demon will keep his word, what are you to do? Given that you start off virtuous, what might we predict you do in this situation? And what might we predict the demon does in response to your subsequent acts?

Objective Consequentialism and Deliberation

I’m starting to warm up to the objectivist form of act-consequentialism (partly because I think it lacks content) which Doug defended in the previous post. One worry people have is that this kind of a view severs the connection between what is right/wrong and how ordinary, good people deliberate and advice one another. This argument has recently been made forcefully by Uri Leibowitz in his ‘Moral Advice and Moral Theory’ paper (Phil Studies). So, I want to explain this objection first, and then why act-consequentialism (and many other monistic views) do not actually suffer from this problem.