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WHEN, IF EVER, DO WE AGGREGATE? AND WHY?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2008

Jan Narveson
Jan Narveson
Affiliation:
Philosophy, University of Waterloo
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Abstract

Aggregation in moral philosophy calls for the summing or averaging of values or utilities as a guide to individual behavior. But morality, it is argued, needs to be individualistic, in view of the evident separateness of persons, especially given the great disparities among individuals who nevertheless interact with each other in social life. The most plausible general moral program is the classical liberal (or “libertarian”) one calling for mutual noninterference rather than treating others as equal to oneself in point of demands on our action. Why, then, would we ever aggregate? The reason is that we are affected by behavior that has general effects, especially unintended side effects, on all sorts of people among whom we ourselves are often to be found. When we are randomly situated among such groups—as we sometimes are and often are not—minimizing aggregate harm is the plausible strategy, and sometimes promoting aggregate benefit as well.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , January 2009 , pp. 48 - 75
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2008

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References

1 The title of Hardin, Russell's book is Morality within the Limits of Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988)Google Scholar. Much of the book is concerned with utilitarianism, philosophical treatment of which has suffered due to the assumption that we know most of the things utilitarianism appears to require that we know, such as how to measure welfare (or, indeed, just what welfare is) and how to determine what the social effects of one's actions actually are. (See ibid., xv–xx.) Hardin plausibly dubs me a “backsliding utilitarian” (privately); I hope, however, that it is nearer to the truth that I am a libertarian, downing, where appropriate, what comes close enough to being a dose of utilitarianism.

2 See Moore, G. E., Principia Ethica (1903; Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004), secs. 18–22Google Scholar.

3 Among those who perhaps think it too easy are Waluchow, Wilfrid, The Dimensions of Ethics (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2003), 154Google Scholar; and Finnis, John, Fundamentals of Ethics (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1983), 80–108Google Scholar. Those who perhaps don't think it too easy, but reject it anyway, include Rosen, Bernard, Ethical Theory: Strategies and Concepts (Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1993), 99–130Google Scholar; and Feldman, Fred, Introductory Ethics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978), 16–79Google Scholar.

4 Sidgwick, Henry, The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1907), chap. 13, pp. 379–84Google Scholar. I have previously made a similar argument, more or less following in Sidgwick's footsteps; see Narveson, Jan, Morality and Utility (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), chap. 9Google Scholar.

5 Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 380, 381.

6 Ibid., 382. “Pushpin” refers to a simple game played with pins on the crown of a hat.

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8 Ibid., 108.

9 Ibid., 110.

10 My argument in Morality and Utility is guilty of a similar shortcoming, alas. That is why I gave up on utilitarianism.

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16 Ibid., 181. Gauthier's quotation contains an internal reference to the passage from Rawls quoted above.

17 Kant, Immanuel, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Beck, Lewis White (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959), 37Google Scholar (for the characterization of practical law). See also ibid., 38 n. 9: “A maxim is the subjective principle of acting and must be distinguished from the objective principle, i.e., the practical law…. [which is] the objective principle valid for every rational being, and the principle by which it ought to act, i.e., an imperative.”

18 At least one of Kant's translators uses the term ‘virtue’ to refer to the set of moral directives that are of “broad” rather than “strict” obligation: Ellington, Jamestranslates the second part of Kant's Tugendlehre as The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961)Google Scholar. But that is a different distinction from the one intended here.

19 For further discussion, see Narveson, Jan, entry on “Egoism and Altruism,” in The Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1998), 2: 15–20Google Scholar.

20 David Gauthier, “Reason and Maximization,” in Gauthier, Moral Dealing, 223.

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23 See Narveson, Jan, “We Don't Owe Them a Thing!” in The Monist 86, no. 3 (July 2003): 419–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a further (though nondefinitive) working-out of this line of thought. The observations at the end of the paragraph to which this note is attached are in response to useful criticisms from some of the other contributors to this volume.

24 Among the followers of Henry George in this respect, see especially the work of Peter Vallentyne. A major essay along these lines is Vallentyne, , “Equality, Brute Luck, and Initial Opportunities,” Ethics 112 (2002): 529–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 See Narveson, “We Don't Owe Them a Thing!”

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28 Ibid., 295.

29 Ibid., 297.