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AGGREGATION WITHIN LIVES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2008

Larry S. Temkin
Larry S. Temkin
Affiliation:
Philosophy, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
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Abstract

Many philosophers have discussed problems of additive aggregation across lives. In this article, I suggest that anti-additive aggregationist principles sometimes apply within lives, as well as between lives, and hence that we should reject a widely accepted conception of individual self-interest. The article has eight sections. Section I is introductory. Section II offers a general account of aggregation. Section III presents two examples of problems of additive aggregation across lives: Derek Parfit's Repugnant Conclusion, and my Lollipops for Life CaseSection IV suggests that many may have misdiagnosed the source and scope of anti-additive aggregationist considerations, due to the influence of Rawls's and Nozick's claims about the separateness of individuals. Accordingly, many leave Sidgwick's conception of self-interest—which incorporates an additive aggregationist approach to valuing individual lives—unchallenged. Section V suggests that the separateness of individuals may have led some to conflate the issues of compensation and moral balancing. Section VI argues that an additive aggregationist approach is often deeply implausible for determining the overall value of a life. Section VII discusses a Single Life Repugnant Conclusion, first considered by McTaggart. Section VIII concludes with a summary, and a brief indication of work remaining.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , January 2009 , pp. 1 - 29
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2008

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References

1 Parfit's Repugnant Conclusion is presented and discussed in part four of Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 381–90.

2 Temkin, Rethinking the Good. See author note.

3 The slightly amended quotation is from my book Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 6. Sidgwick's methodological approach is developed in Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1907).

4 Prioritarianism is roughly the view that one wants each person to fare as well as possible, but the worse off someone is, in absolute terms, the greater priority is given to improving his or her position. I first introduced and discussed this view, which I then called “extended humanitarianism,” in my 1983 Princeton University Ph.D. dissertation, “Inequality.” Derek Parfit later discussed this view, which he called the Priority View, in his essay “Equality or Priority?” which he first delivered as the Lindley Lecture at the University of Kansas in 1991, and which was copyrighted by the University of Kansas Philosophy Department in 1995. Parfit's essay has been reprinted in Matthew Clayton and Andrew Williams, eds., The Ideal of Equality (London: MacMillan Press Ltd., and New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), 81–125. I first introduced the term “prioritarianism” and its cognates in my essay “Equality, Priority, and the Levelling Down Objection,” which also appeared in The Ideal of Equality, 126–61.

5 Parfit, Reasons and Persons, 388.

6 This strategy for dealing with such cases was made famous by the total utilitarian Richard M. Hare. See, for example, his “Ethical Theory and Utilitarianism,” in Hywel D. Lewis, ed., Contemporary British Philosophy, IV (London: Allen and Unwin Press, 1976), 113–31. I should add that it is not only strict total utilitarians who make such moves. Fred Feldman made similar moves and claims in correspondence he sent me about these issues. Likewise, John Broome has made such claims in response to my arguments; see Broome, Weighing Lives (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

7 The quote is attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his Essays: First Series: Self-Reliance. It is reprinted in John Bartlett, Familiar Quotations, 10th ed., revised and enlarged by Nathan Haskell Dole (Boston: Little, Brown, 1919).

8 See Parfit, Reasons and Persons; James Griffin, Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement, and Moral Importance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Frances Kamm, Intricate Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Kamm, “Health and Equity” (unpublished manuscript); John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974). I have argued against additive aggregation in many places, including my essay “A ‘New’ Principle of Aggregation,” but most extensively in my manuscript Rethinking the Good.

9 For some of the disturbing implications, including problems of iteration, and threats to the transitivity of all-things-considered better than, see my “A ‘New’ Principle of Aggregation”; my “A Continuum Argument for Intransitivity,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 25, no. 3 (1996): 175–210; and my “Rethinking the Good, Moral Ideals, and the Nature of Practical Reasoning,” in Jonathan Dancy, ed., Reading Parfit (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1997), 290–344.

10 See note 3 above.

11 Sidgwick, The Method of Ethics, 124n1.

12 Ibid., 381.

13 Ibid., 382.

14 Ibid.

15 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 24.

16 Ibid., 26.

17 Ibid., 27.

18 See the following note.

19 At this point Nozick has a note (note 5) citing Rawls on the separateness of persons—specifically, sections 5, 6, and 30 of A Theory of Justice.

20 Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 32–33 (italics in the original).

21 Ibid., 33.

22 I discuss this principle, and numerous other anti-additive aggregationist principles, in much more detail in chapters 2 and 3 of my manuscript Rethinking the Good.

23 This principle is presented and discussed in my “A ‘New’ Principle of Aggregation,” 219–23.

24 It is possible that Rawls and Nozick merely grant Sidgwick his conception of rational self-interest for the sake of argument. Still, I think it is fair to claim that Sidgwick was expressing the conception of individual self-interest that has dominated Western thought since Plato. A notable challenge to this conception is presented by Derek Parfit in part two of Reasons and Persons.

25 Interesting arguments against always optimizing, and in favor of the rationality of satisficing, can be found in Michael Slote, Beyond Optimizing (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1989).

26 See especially Parfit, Reasons and Persons, 336–39.

27 Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 32–33 (italics in the original).

28 A much lengthier discussion of the issue of compensation versus moral balancing is contained in chapter 4 of my manuscript Rethinking the Good.

29 Readers familiar with Parfit's work will recognize that I borrow the expression “drab life” from Parfit, though I characterize such a life a bit differently than he does.

30 I am not claiming here that no two lives that differ starkly in certain respects could be equally good, all things considered. Rather, my view is that for the particular lives in question the difference between them is stark in ways that have significant implications for the two lives' overall goodness, such that it is implausible to believe they might, in fact, be equally good, or even almost equally good.

31 After I had written a draft of this essay, someone pointed out to me that David Velleman also made this point, and other similar ones, in his essay “Well-Being and Time,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 72 (1991): 48–77. This does not surprise me. I believe that many people have seen this point, as well as some of the other points noted in this section. Unfortunately, however, the full implications of incorporating these points into one's theory of the goodness of lives has not always been recognized. See note 9 for some of these implications, and for references to essays where I explore these implications more fully.

32 See the following note.

33 I am grateful to Thomas Hurka, who first brought McTaggart's claims to my attention, and then subsequently sent me these passages. They are from J. M. E. McTaggart, The Nature of Existence, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921), 452–53 (note omitted). (The main passage comprises sections 869–70 of ibid., book VII, chap. 67, “The Total Value in the Universe.”)

34 Griffin, Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement, and Moral Importance, 85.

35 Ibid.

36 See, for example, my essays “A ‘New’ Principle of Aggregation”; “A Continuum Argument for Intransitivity”; and “Rethinking the Good.” See also my “Worries about Continuity, Transitivity, Expected Utility Theory, and Practical Reasoning,” in Dan Egonsson, Jonas Josefsson, Björn Petersson, and Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen, eds., Exploring Practical Philosophy (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2001), 95–108; and my “Intransitivity and the Mere Addition Paradox,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 16, no. 2 (1987): 138–87.