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Sumner On Desires and Well-Being

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Krister Bykvist
Krister Bykvist*
Affiliation:
Jesus College, Oxford Oxford, UKOX1 3DW
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Extract

A person's welfare or well-being concerns what is good for him, what makes his life worth living. It therefore depends crucially on facts about the person and his life. As William James once remarked, whether a life is worth living depends on the liver. How this dependency should be spelled out is a controversial question. Desire theorists, or as I shall call them well-being preferentialists, claim that a person's well-being depends on his desires and preferences.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 32 , Issue 4 , December 2002 , pp. 475 - 490
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2002

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References

1 William James, The Will To Believe, Human Immortality and Other Essays on Popular Philosophy (New York: Dover 1956), 32

2 To be exact, there are two forms of well-being preferentialism: the object version and the satisfaction version. According to the object version, something is good for me if it is an object of one of my desires. According to the satisfaction version, in contrast, something is good for me if it consists in the satisfaction of one of my desires. This distinction can be brought out by the following example. Suppose that Eric wants to drink pink champagne and in fact drinks pink champagne. The satisfaction preferentialist assigns value to the whole state of affairs that consists of Eric's preference for pink champagne and his drinking pink champagne, whereas the object preferentialist assigns value only to the part of the state that consists of his drinking pink champagne. This is an important distinction, but for the purposes of this paper I think it can be safely put aside. For more on this distinction, see Krister Bykvist, Changing Preferences: A Study in Preferentialism (Ph.D. Dissertation, Uppsala University 1998); and Wlodek Rabinowicz and Jan Osterberg, ‘Value Based on Preferences. On Two Interpretations of Preference Utilitarianism,’ Economics and Philosophy 12 (1996) 1-27.

3 Wayne Sumner, Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1996)

4 Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1992), 171

5 Bengt Brulde also points out that Sumner's concept of desire is unusually narrow, in The Human Good (Ph.D. Dissertation, Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis 1998), 176, n.40.

6 Richard Hare, Moral Thinking (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1981), 101-2

7 James Griffin, Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement, and Moral Importance (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1986), 315 n.

8 Brulde also stresses that there is negative counterpart of wanting, in The Human Good, 160, 161, and 170.

9 A similar constraint is proposed by Mark Overvold, ‘Self-Interest and the Concept of Self-Sacrifice,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 10 (1980), 117-18. However, his constraint is inferior to mine in two respects. To begin with, it requires that the agent exists at the time of the desired state of affairs. So, my desire for p is relevant to my well-being only if I exist at the time of p. This would exclude too much. It would, for instance, exclude my desire to be buried in my home village on a certain day, and my desire to donate my organs after my death. The second flaw is that Overvold treats his constraint as a sufficient condition for well-being. He thinks that all preferences that fulfill his constraint directly concern the preferrer and, therefore, are in his interest. But this cannot be right. Any preference of mine whose object is of the form I exemplify feature F, would then count, even if F is a mere Cambridge-property, e.g., the property of living in a world in which it is true that snow is white.

10 One could object that Sumner's desire does range over a fact that entails that Sumner exists, since the state of affairs that Sumner's brother is cured entails that Sumner exists (at some point of time). But I assume that Sumner's desire should be read de re. Assuming that Fred is Sumner's brother, what Sumner desires is that Fred is cured, not that whoever is Sumner's brother is cured. I will not take a stand on whether the satisfaction of this latter de dicto desire improves well-being. Jan Osterberg made me aware of the relevance of this distinction.

11 Strictly speaking, there is yet another possibility: welfare facts may exist eternally. But this option will entail that I am better off both before my death when I am holding the desire and after my death when the desired state obtains.

12 For a similar point, see Dorothy Grover, ‘Posthumous Harm,’ Philosophical Quarterly 39 (1989) 334-53, and Shelly Kagan, ‘Me and My Life,’ Proceeding of the Aristotelian Society 93 (1993/94) 309-24.

13 An object preferentialist would instead locate the value at the time of the preference object.

14 Griffin, Well-Being, 23

15 This theory is not without its problems (as the editor of this journal suggested). To be a pure preferentialist theory, it will have to say that any ambition or aim confers meaning to a life. But, intuitively, not all ambitions are on a par. We would, for instance, want to say that a desire to count blades of grass confers less meaning to a life than a desire to contribute to nuclear disarmament. But this important objection does not affect my main point. For the objection does not show that a true preferentialist cannot capture our intuition that posthumous satisfactions have some significance. It shows, at most, that a pure preferentialist might have no plausible way of deciding the relative importance of different preferences, whether or not their satisfaction will be posthumous.

16 This distinction and the examples given to illustrate it are found in Martin Fischer, ed., The Metaphysics of Death (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1993), 17. However, Fischer does not use it to explain the nature of aims and goals.

17 Joel Feinberg also stresses that my well-being depends crucially on who is bringing about the desired states of affairs, in ‘Harm and Self-Interest,’ in Law, Morality, and Society: Essays in Honour of H.A.L. Hart, P.M.S. Hacker and J. Hax, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press 1979). Feinberg says that ‘[my] interest in producing an excellent book, or a beautiful object is not fully satisfied by another person's creation of such objects. My interest is not simply that such objects exist, but that I b r i n g t h e m into existence’ (60; italics in original).

18 I am assuming here that Russell’s, Sagan’s, and Sumner's desires are intrinsic. It matters intrinsically to all of them who brings about the desired states of affairs. More specifically, each one desires intrinsically that he plays an active part in bringing about the desired state. This is not the only possibility, however. Sometimes our aims and goals are only extrinsic. We want to do something just because we think it will bring about something we desire intrinsically. In these cases, we may not mind at all who is bringing about the states of affairs. So, if another person happens to be in a better position, we might want her to bring about the desired state of affairs. But I strongly doubt that the satisfaction of these extrinsic desires necessarily makes us better off. It will not make us better off if our underlying intrinsic desires are not in any way about ourselves and our lives. Also, the lifetime projects and ambitions that make our lives meaningful are not extrinsic in this way. My life cannot be meaningful if I do not intrinsically want to take any active part in it.

19 Sumner mentions the possibility of narrowing the preferentialist theory by focusing only on preferences that function as aims or goals (Sumner, Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics, 132-3). But he rightly points out that this theory would exclude too much. It would, for instance, exclude pleasant surprises, and more generally, all agreeable things that happen to us without us planning for them. He fails to recognize, however, that we could still think, as I do, that the success in achieving our aims is a sufficient condition for our well-being.

20 These implications are pointed out by, among others, Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books 1974); Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1979); and Griffin, Well-Being.

21 In the movie, Truman comes to realize that his life is an illusion. At this point, of course, the experience requirement will not rule out that Truman is harmed

22 The same point is made in Wayne Sumner, ‘Welfare, Preference, and Rationality,’ in Value, Welfare, and Morality, R.G. Frey and C.M. Morris, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993), 82, and Sumner, ‘Something in Between’ in Well-Being and Morality: Essays in Honour of James Griffin, B. Hooker and R. Crisp, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press 2000), 10-11.

23 This is also stressed by Briilde, The Human Good, 35-7.

24 For many valuable comments, I would like to thank Bengt Briilde, Andrew Moore, Wayne Sumner, an anonymous referee for CJP, and the responsible editor.