Welfare

Rougher notes from planning an essay

• The three main accounts:
  • Hedonism: wellbeing is the balance of pleasure over pain, adjusting for intensity and duration. This balance of pleasure over pain is the only good-making property.
  • Objective list.
    • Most objective list theorists would put pleasure as among the intrinsic goods.
  • Desire satisfaction.
    • Pleasure matters only incidentally, because people (as a psychological fact) tend to desire it.
• Substantive vs explanatory questions: you could say that wellbeing consists in the balance of pleasure over pain; or make the further claim that the only good-making property is pleasantness.
  • Someone might think that pleasure constitutes wellbeing, but what makes it good is some further property, e.g. the fact that it fulfils human nature.
  • This is an important difference between hedonism and a singleton objective list theory: hedonists think that pleasure is just a brute good, whereas someone might be an objective list theorist admitting only pleasure, but arguing the good-making property is e.g. that it completes human nature.

Hedonism

• Note that you can cash out pleasure in two different ways:
  • Attitudinal account: pleasure is whatever experiences the subject wants to continue; hedonism is closer to a restricted desire-satisfaction theory.
  • Objective account: pleasure is some particular state of affairs identifiable independently of the subject’s attitudes; hedonism is a monist objective list theory
• Objection to hedonism: oyster vs Haydn (Crisp).
  • Mill tries to invoke higher/lower pleasures to address this.
    • But really he is bringing in a new quality dimension, which is a non-hedonic good-making property.
  • A better reply: transitivity argument (Huemer)
    • P1: If you make every day of a person’s life better and then add new days of their life which are good at the end of their life, you make the person’s life better.
    • P2: If one life has a million times higher average utility per day than another, a million times higher total utility, and more equal distribution of utility, it is a better life.
    • P3: Transitivity
    • C: It’s better to be the oyster than Haydn.
      • Because suppose you slightly increased Haydn’s utility every day to 1.1e3, then added a huge number of days at the end with miniscule utility 1e-100. That does improve his life by (1)
      • But even better than that, would be to be the oyster with constant utility 0.1, over a sufficiently longer period that total utility is higher, by (2)
    • One way to reject this argument is to deny P2.
      • E.g., on Velleman’s view that the narrative structure of a life matters for overall wellbeing, not just the integral of welfare wrt time.
• Nozick’s experience machine is another attempt to provide intuitive force to non-hedonism.
  • The thought is that pleasure isn’t sufficient for the good life; we’d like real achievements etc.
  • Note that it’s wrong to think of the experience machine as wire-heading / direct pleasurable stimulation.
    • If that weren’t pleasant, then the experience machine would do something else that maximises pleasure (e.g. allowing me to immerse myself in activities like reading, which reliably generate pleasure).
  • One way to deflate those intuitions: we have strong status quo bias.
  • Also, hedonists can point to the “paradox of hedonism”: the pursuit of pleasure is in practice self-effacing (to maximally attain it you must do so indirectly), so we’ve developed heuristics according to which attempting to obtain pleasure directly seems very unattractive.

Desire satisfaction

• For desire satisfaction, you need to be precise about which desires are to be satisfied.
• Recall the present-aim theory. That seems incorrect: intuitively, we ought to sometimes go against our present desires for maximal lifetime wellbeing (e.g., going to dentist)
  • (You could claim that we always want what is best for us, just are misguided, cf Protagoras and akrasia. But this makes the theory rather undistinctive.)
• What about summative comprehensive desire, where what matters is the total amount of desire-fulfilment over a lifetime?
  • But then, this suggests I should deliberately become addicted to a drug which gives me no pleasure from taking it, but I can reliably fulfil the desire to consume (Parfit)
• Perhaps global comprehensive desire, where we put additional weight on preferences about the shape and content of my life.
  • Then, if I prefer not to become a drug addict, that’s a reason to not take Parfit’s drug.
  • But there’s a different, habituation-based counterexample: suppose I were brought up in a monastery and as a result desire only to live there. Is that the best life for me, as opposed to going outside?
• Informed desire account: X promotes my welfare if I would desire it when fully informed about all non-evaluative facts, and actually do desire it now.
  • Objection from Rawls: the grass-counter’s life doesn’t seem like it’s good for her, even if she is perfectly informed about the options available.
  • Note that the informed desire account cannot talk about welfare in terms of the satisfaction of hypothetical desires I would have were I fully informed – because then there’s no actual desire being satisfied.
    • In that case the theory would collapse into an objective list theory with a desire-based epistemology (i.e., we discover what’s on the list via our desires in a maximally-informed state)
• Parfit’s preferred view is that X is good for S if it fulfils some of her desires about her own life.
  • This includes global desires about the shape and content of my life as a whole, in addition to local ones.
• But all these desire satisfaction theories seem to fail for the same reason: they are reversing the explanatory priority between value and desire.
  • It’s not very plausible that desire is a good-making property. Surely the good is prior to our desire for it!
  • Cf Aristotle: we desire things because they seem good to us; their seeming good isn’t constituted by our desiring them.
  • Raz makes the point similarly: for X to be good for S, it must be choiceworthy in some non-relational sense.
• So perhaps the real debate is between hedonism and objective list theories.

Objective list

• One attraction of the objective list is that it can appeal to a perfectionist justification.
  • Perfectionist theories identify states of affairs, activities, and/or relationships as good in themselves and not good in virtue of the fact that they are desired or enjoyed by human beings.
  • There are two main kinds of perfectionism:
    • Human nature perfectionism – perfectionist goods are those which develop/complete human nature.
    • Objective goods perfectionism – puts forward a list of perfectionist goods without reference to human nature.
• Trouble with the objective list: seems elitist (it’s about the noble, to kalon!)
  • It claims that things are good for people even if they will not enjoy them, or even actively dislike them.
    • But why should knowledge be good for me if I care not at all about it?
• Resonance view: non-hedonic goods genuinely are good for you, but only when you take some pleasure/satisfaction in them.
  • The resonance view agrees with Moore (ideal utilitarianism/pluralist consequentialism) that non-hedonic intrinsic goods exist. It just imposes a subjective restriction on when they contribute to prudential wellbeing.
  • Vs pure hedonism, the difference is that resonant objective list theorists believe that there are good-making properties besides pleasure – e.g., knowledge.
• Structurally, the resonance view is very similar to Aristotle’s position.
  • The person who attains eudaimonia not only performs right & fine actions, but also takes pleasure in the fineness.

Posthumous effects?

• Pitcher (1984), “The Misfortunes of the Dead”
  • Distinguishes between the live, antemortem person from the postmortem corpse.
  • Defenders of posthumous harms aren’t claiming that the corpse is benefitted; rather they’re saying the antemortem person is.
    • This benefit is attributable either tenselessly or as a fact about their life-as-a-whole.
• Feinberg also talks about the antemortem person, arguing that posthumous harm is a setback to their interests.
• A strong counterargument to this is about the existence requirement.
  • Claim: X is good for S only if S exists.
  • But the dead don’t exist. So there’s no X that could be good (or bad) for them.
  • Now, the proponent of posthumous effects might use Pitcher to reply. But that’s quite dubious. When is the antemortem person actually harmed?
    • If it’s when she existed, then we have backwards causation (since the event hadn’t happened yet).
    • If it’s when the event happens, then we’ve violated existence.
    • If it’s tenselessly, then we need an account of what tenseless harm involves.
• Nagel: one intuition pump is that misfortunes can befall someone without their being aware of them.
  • E.g., if an adult suffers a stroke that reduces them to infant cognition, the loss is a misfortune even though it’s not experienced as such.
    • Hmm, I think there’s a decent reply open to us here to vindicate the intuition but reject Nagel’s explanation, whether hedonist or perfectionist.
    • It is a loss, but because of deprivation. Specifically, infants have lower intensity of pleasure than adults; or they have less autonomy/etc. Compared to the status quo, they, as an existent person, are objectively worse-off.
  • Another example: betrayal-without-discovery.
    • But here, just bite the bullet and say that they were not in fact harmed; you can try to debunk the intuition.
    • While it’s certainly true that the betrayer acted wrongly, we’re confusing that with the betrayee being harmed.
    • Also, we’re probably thinking about a counterfactual setting: that person would manipulate me if they had the chance. Or, put differently, ex ante they harmed me (i.e. in expectation), because there was some probability of me discovering it.
    • More simply, we might just be reflecting on the class of all betrayals, where the vast majority we are aware of are, by definition, discovered. Obviously those harm, so it’s not surprising that when reasoning about betrayal we jump to the view that all harm.