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Human Flourishing Versus Desire Satisfaction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

Richard J. Arneson
Richard J. Arneson
Affiliation:
Philosophy, University of California, San Diego
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Extract

What is the good for human persons? If I am trying to lead the best possible life I could lead, not the morally best life, but the life that is best for me, what exactly am I seeking?

This phrasing of the question I will be pursuing may sound tendentious, so some explanation is needed. What is good for one person, we ordinarily suppose, can conflict with what is good for other persons and with what is required by morality. A prudent person seeks her own good efficiently; she selects the best available means to her good. If we call the value that a person seeks when she is being prudent “prudential value,” then an alternative rendering of the question to be addressed in this essay is “What is prudential value?” We can also say that an individual flourishes or has a life high in well-being when her life is high in prudential value. Of course, these common-sense appearances that the good for an individual, the good for other persons, and the requirements of morality often are in conflict might be deceiving. For all that I have said here, the correct theory of individual good might yield the result that sacrificing oneself for the sake of other people or for the sake of a morally worthy cause can never occur, because helping others and being moral always maximize one's own good. But this would be the surprising result of a theory, not something we should presuppose at the start of inquiry. When a friend has a baby and I express a conventional wish that the child have a good life, I mean a life that is good for the child, not a life that merely helps others or merely respects the constraints of morality. After all, a life that is altruistic and perfectly moral, we suppose, could be a life that is pure hell for the person who lives it—a succession of horrible headaches marked by no achievements or attainments of anything worthwhile and ending in agonizing death at a young age. So the question remains, what constitutes a life that is good for the person who is living it?

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , Winter 1999 , pp. 113 - 142
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1999

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References

1 In this essay I use “intrinsically” interchangeably with “for its own sake.” What is good in these ways is distinguished from what is good as a means to some further goal. The distinction between what is intrinsically and extrinsically good, intended to mark a different contrast from the distinction between what is good for its own sake and what is good as a means, plays no role in this essay.

2 Sumner, L. W., Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 82.Google Scholar

3 Parfit, Derek, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 493.Google Scholar

4 Scanlon, Thomas, “Value, Desire, and Quality of Life,” in The Quality of Life, ed. Nussbaum, Martha C. and Sen, Amartya (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 185–200CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; see p. 188. My views defended here have been strongly influenced by Scanlon's essay.

5 Mill, J. S., Utilitarianism, in his Collected Works, vol. 10, ed. Robson, J. M. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), pp. 210–14Google Scholar; and Mill, , On Liberty, in his Collected Works, vol. 18, ed. Robson, J. M. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), ch. 3, pp. 260–75.Google Scholar

6 Hurka, Thomas, Perfectionism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 16.Google Scholar

7 Mill, , Utilitarianism, ch. 2.Google Scholar

8 Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), p. 42Google Scholar. The point is also well stated in Dworkin, Ronald, “What Is Equality? Part 1: Equality of Welfare,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 10, no. 3 (Summer 1981), pp. 185–246; see pp. 192–93.Google Scholar

9 Nozick, , Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. 43.Google Scholar

10 That is, a bottle of the old-fashioned variety that lacks a twist-off top.

11 Mill is so interpreted in Smart, J. J. C., “Outline of a System of Utilitarian Ethics,”Google Scholar in Smart, J. J. C. and Williams, Bernard, Utilitarianism—For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974).Google Scholar

12 Sumner, , Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics, p. 112.Google Scholar

13 Griffin, James acknowledges the circularity worry and suggests it might not constitute a decisive objection in his Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement, and Moral Importance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 22.Google Scholar

14 Views of this type are developed in Brandt, Richard B., A Theory of the Good and the Right (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), chs. 6–7Google Scholar; Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 417ff.Google Scholar; and Griffin, , Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement, and Moral ImportanceGoogle Scholar. Griffin's account is thorough in its examination of difficulties and creative in its attempts to resolve them, but the position he ends up defending is complex, and not unambiguously a full-information account.

15 Railton, Peter, “Facts and Values,” Philosophical Topics, vol. 14 (1986), pp. 5–31; see p. 16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 See Rosati, Connie S., “Persons, Perspectives, and Full Information Accounts of the Good,” Ethics, vol. 105, no. 2 (01 1995), pp. 296–325CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see pp. 307–13.

17 This difficulty is explored in ibid., pp. 299–314.

18 Railton, , “Facts and Values,” p. 9.Google Scholar

19 Sumner, , Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics, pp. 130–33.Google Scholar

20 See Velleman, J. David, “Brandt's Definition of ‘Good’,” Philosophical Review, vol. 97, no. 3 (07 1988), pp. 353–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Velleman develops criticisms of full-information accounts, with a focus on Brandt's proposal, beyond those this essay considers.

21 For criticisms along this line, see Sobel, David, “Full Information Accounts of Well-Being,” Ethics, vol. 104, no. 4 (07 1994), pp. 784–810CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rosati, , “Persons, Perspectives, and Full Information Accounts of the Good,” pp. 307–24.Google Scholar

22 Kraut, Richard accepts the claim that this dilemma poses an exhaustive choice and opts for the latter horn in “Desire and the Human Good,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, vol. 68, no. 2 (11 1994), pp. 39–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 For an opposed view on this issue, one which supposes that the badness of the sensation of pain resides in its being disliked, and that pain that does not evoke dislike is not intrinsically bad, see Parfit, , Reasons and Persons, p. 493Google Scholar. Broad, C. D. analyzed the notion of pleasure in a similar way in his Five Types of Ethical Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1930), pp. 237–38.Google Scholar

24 The objection discussed in this section is borrowed from Hubin, Donald C., “Hypothetical Motivation” Noûs, vol. 30, no. 1 (03 1996), pp. 31–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 Gibbard, Allan, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 20Google Scholar. It should be noted that Gibbard is discussing a specific full-information analysis by Richard Brandt, not an ideal-advisor theory.

26 Griffin, , Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement, and Moral Importance, p. 14.Google Scholar

27 Dworkin, Ronald, “Foundations of Liberal Equality,” in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. 11, ed. Peterson, Grethe B. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1990), pp. 1–119Google Scholar; see pp. 80–83.

28 Griffin, , Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement, and Moral Importance, p. 11.Google Scholar

29 Derek Parfit appears to affirm a version of the endorsement constraint in Reasons and Persons, p. 502Google Scholar: “Pleasure with many other kinds of object [those that lack objective value] has no value. And if they are entirely devoid of pleasure, there is no value in knowledge, rational activity, love, or the awareness of beauty. What is of value, or is good for someone, is to have both: to be engaged in these activities, and to be strongly wanting to be so engaged.” Richard Kraut asserts a somewhat similar view in his “Desire and the Human Good”; see p. 45 and footnote 13. Kraut holds that to be living a good life one must love something and what one loves must be worth caring about, but “that cannot be the whole story,” because in addition “one must be related in the right way to what one loves.” Sumner, 's Welfare, Happiness, and EthicsGoogle Scholar is an extended sophisticated argument for the weak endorsement constraint.

30 Acknowledging complementarity, I need not disagree with Stephen Darwall's analysis of how a person's life is enriched by engagement in activities that are truly valuable, that she appreciates as truly valuable, and that she enjoys in virtue of her appreciation of their value. See Darwall, , “Valuing Activity,”Google Scholar elsewhere in this volume.