PEA Soup

Workshop: Good Life: Theory and Practice

A group of our PhD students here at Birmingham asked me to email details of a workshop on the conceptions of a good life which they are organising here in June. This should be of interest for graduate students following this blog as there is also a call for abstracts for them included. Here's the announcement:

Call for abstracts and registration

Workshop at the University of Birmingham, Department of Philosophy
The Good Life: Theory and Practice
8th June 2012

Confirmed speakers
Beverley Clack (Professor in the Philosophy of Religion, Oxford Brookes University)
Chris Megone (Professor of Interdisciplinary Applied Ethics, University of Leeds)
Mozaffar Qizilbash (Professor of Economics, University of York)
Stephen Wilkinson (Professor of Bioethics, Keele University)
James Wilson (Lecturer in Philosophy and Health, University College London)

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.

Animal welfare and Kant's unconditioned/conditioned good distinction

Inspired a bit by Ralph's post critiquing Kant's view of unconditioned or fundamental goods, I've been investigating why Kant arrives at his (in my opinion) dissatisfying view that we have only indirect duties to non-human animals. Here's my tentative analysis and conclusion.

The Two Desire-Satisfaction Views

I've recently been mulling over what seems to be a disagreement between desire-satisfaction view theorists about the proper way to formulate a desire-satisfaction view about well-being.  (This thought has been inspired by discussions I've had on this blog with Chris Heathwood and Doug Portmore, and my recent unhealthy obsession with Ben Bradley's book "Well-Being and Death" which I recommend to any and all.)  Briefly, I thought I'd lay out the two proposed options and the plusses and minuses of both and ask everybody for some input: which one do you prefer?  Are there other arguments in favor of either side that I'm missing?

Does Benatar's asymmetry argument generalize?

Coming to exist is always a harm. Or so argues David Benatar in his provocative book, Better Never to Have Been.

A central pillar of Benatar's defense of this offputting 'anti-natalist' thesis is what he calls the asymmetry argument (BNHB, p. 30):
Pleasure benefits us and pain harms us.
(1) The presence of pain is bad.
(2) The presence of pleasure is good.
So far, pleasure and pain are symmetrical in their goodness and badness. But they are not symmetrical with respect to their absence.  More specifically:
(3) The absence of pain is good, even if that good is not enjoyed by anyone, but
(4) The absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody (an actual somebody) who is deprived by its absence.

Kant, Well-being, and Happiness

I’m intrigued by Kant’s remarks on happiness and well-being. I’ve been thinking of the traditional understanding of his view and a passage we’ve discussed in a reading group on the Second Critique. I’m left with jigsaw puzzle where I cannot seem to make all the parts fit. I would be thankful for any help.

 

Well-being and Coherence

I'm attracted to a view of well-being with (roughly) the following structure: x is intrinsically good for y if and only if y believes that x is intrinsically good for y (under the right conditions, such as a coherent belief set).  In other words, there is nothing more to something's being good for x than for x to believe that it is good for her.  The closest cousin of this view is a desire-satisfaction view, which holds (again, very roughly, and leaving out all sorts of bells and whistles) that x is intrinsically good for y if and only if y desires x (under the right conditions, such as full-information, say).  I think the belief formulation can plausibly respond to several worries that plague desire accounts (such as the so-called "paradox of desire" and the problem of welfare-irrelevant desires, etc.).  But the view to which I'm attracted (call it, for lack of anything better, "belief-ism") faces an immediate and substantial hurdle: semantic circularity.  It looks as though the analysis of "intrinsically good" or "prudentially valuable", etc., is given in terms of the concept it purports to be analyzing.  Below the fold, I want to try out one possible response to this worry.