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Alienation, Deprivation, and the Well-being of Persons

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2014

BENJAMIN YELLE
BENJAMIN YELLE*
Affiliation:
University of Miami, [email protected]
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Abstract

While many theories of well-being are able to capture some of our central intuitions about well-being, e.g. avoiding alienation worries, they typically do so at the cost of not being able to capture others, e.g. explaining deprivation. However, both of these intuitions are important and any comprehensive theory of well-being ought to attempt to strike the best balance in responding to both concerns. In light of this, I develop and defend a theory of well-being which holds that our well-being depends, in part, on the nature of our well-being qua person, a class whose members are defined by their possessing certain cognitive and volitional capacities including those capacities constitutive of autonomy. I argue that this ‘person-centred’ theory of well-being is able to address concerns about alienation and deprivation, along with capturing the importance of autonomy to well-being, better than many popular subjective and objective theories of well-being.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 26 , Issue 4 , December 2014 , pp. 367 - 384
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

1 See, for example, Sumner, L. W., Welfare Happiness and Ethics (Oxford, 1996)Google Scholar and Griffin, J., Well-Being: Its Measure and Importance (Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar.

2 This orientation can be either actual or ‘hypothetical’ in that it might be suitably idealized, e.g. rational, informed, vivid, etc.

3 Fletcher, Guy offers such a view in his ‘A Fresh Start for the Objective-List Theory of Well-Being’, Utilitas 25 (2013), pp. 206–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this distinction.

4 This, for example, is the view advocated for by R. Arneson, ‘Human Flourishing versus Desire Satisfaction’, Social Philosophy and Policy 16 (1999), pp. 113–42.

5 In other words, we have the intuition that what is good for an individual ought not to be good for him regardless of his orientation toward it, i.e. an individual's good ought not to be alien to him.

6 Brandt, R., A Theory of the Good and the Right (Oxford, 1979).Google Scholar

7 Brandt, Theory, p. 11

8 Authors who discuss the importance of ‘idealization’ conditions include:Railton, P., ‘Facts and Values’, Philosophical Topics 14 (1986), pp. 5–29;CrossRefGoogle ScholarGauthier, D., Morals by Agreement (Oxford, 1986), ch. 2;Google Scholar Griffin, Well-Being;Kagan, S., The Limits of Morality (Oxford, 1989).Google Scholar

9 I.e. what is ‘good for’ that individual.

10 Accordingly, what is good for an individual must connect with what she would find ‘in some degree compelling or attractive, at least if [she] were rational and aware’. See:Rosati, C., ‘Internalism and the Good for a Person’, Ethics 106 (1996), pp. 298–9;CrossRefGoogle Scholar see also Railton, ‘Facts and Values’.

11 That is to say, one replete with the goods that, for example, humans typically enjoy.

12 Hurka, T., The Best Things in Life (Oxford, 2011).Google Scholar

13 Rawls, J., A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 432–3.Google Scholar

14 This criticism of Hurka's approach, and objective-theories like his, is inspired by some of Richard Kraut's comments in his review of Hurka's book. See: R. Kraut, ‘The Best Things in Life: A Guide to What Really Matters’ [Review of the book The Best Things in Life: A Guide to What Really Matters], Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Retrieved from <http://www.ndpr.nd.edu/news/24580-the-best-things-in-life-a-guide-to-what-really-matters/> [accessed 25 January 2011].

15 I.e. the standard set by either an individual's idiosyncratic make-up or the characteristics of a particular class to which an individual belongs.

16 See, for example,Frankfurt, H., ‘Identification and Externality’, in The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 58–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 When it comes to the nature of ‘valuing’ I follow Scheffler in holding that an individual's valuing X involves at least the following elements (Scheffler, S., ‘Valuing’, Reasons and Recognition: Essays on the Philosophy of T. M. Scanlon, ed. Wallace, Jay, Rahul Kumar and Samuel Freeman (Oxford, 2011), pp. 23–42):CrossRefGoogle Scholar

  1. 1.

    1. A belief that X is good or valuable or worthy.

  2. 2.

    2. A susceptibility to experience a range of context-dependent emotions regarding X.

  3. 3.

    3. A disposition to experience these emotions as being merited or appropriated.

  4. 4.

    4. A disposition to treat certain kinds of X-related considerations as reasons for action in relevant deliberative contexts.

18 See, for example, Rosati, C., ‘Personal Good’, Metaethics after Moore, ed. Horgan, T. and Timmons, M. (Oxford and New York, 2006), pp. 107–31.Google Scholar

19 Some now classic examples include: R. Brandt, A Theory of the Good and the Right, andRailton, P., ‘Moral Realism’, Philosophical Review 95 (1986), pp. 163–207;CrossRefGoogle Scholar ‘Naturalism and Prescriptivity’, Social Philosophy and Policy 7 (1990), pp. 151–74; ‘Facts and Values’, just to name a few.

20 Which, in this case, is a set of idealized desires.

21 For an excellent discussion of the problems associated with idealized desire-satisfaction accounts see:Rosati, C., ‘Persons, Perspectives, and Full Information Accounts of the Good’, Ethics 105 (1995), pp. 296–325.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 That is, these desires are putatively irrelevant to an individual's well-being.

23 Parfit, D., Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984), p. 494.Google Scholar

24 I.e. properly idealized.

25 In addition to Parfit's ‘ “terminally” ill stranger’ case, another popular example of an ‘irrelevant desire’ is one's desiring that there be an even number of prime numbers in the universe. Like the stranger's being cured, this desire is either satisfied or not, without one's having any awareness of such satisfaction or frustration.

26 Their frustration does not detract from it.

27 For an in-depth analysis of the many ways in which individuals might realize their values seeAnderson, Elizabeth's Value in Ethics and Economics (Cambridge, 1993).Google Scholar

28 Scheffler, ‘Valuing’. See n. 17, this article.

29 A structurally similar argument could be made against another popular example of an ‘irrelevant/distant desire’: an individual who desires that there be peace in, say, the Middle East, yet who does nothing to bring about such peace and who is not, and never would be, in a position to engage meaningfully in any of the activities constitutive of bringing about such a state of affairs. In cases like these, such a desire ought not to be considered to be one of one's values.

30 Kagan, S., ‘The Limits of Well-Being’, Social Philosophy and Policy 9 (1992), pp. 169–89, at 180.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31 See, for example, Sumner (1996) andRaibley, J., ‘Well-Being and the Priority of Values’, Social Theory and Practice 36 (2010), pp. 593–620.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

32 I.e. that individual's values.

33 See (to name just a few)Frankfurt, H., Taking Ourselves Seriously and Getting It Right (Stanford, 2006);Google ScholarThe Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge, 1988); Korsgaard, C., Self Constitution (Oxford, 2009);CrossRefGoogle ScholarBratman, M., Structures of Agency (Oxford, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 See Korsgaard's Self-Constitution, sect. 1.4.

35 Foot, P., Natural Goodness (Oxford, 2003);Google ScholarHursthouse, R., On Virtue Ethics (Oxford, 1999)Google Scholar.

36 I.e. the conceptual gap that exists between what the development, exercise and perfection of an individual's characteristic human capacities consist in and what the constituents of that person's idiosyncratic make-up are, i.e. what that person's values are.

37 I borrow this example fromHaybron, D., ‘Well-Being and Virtue’, Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 2 (2007), pp. 1–27, at 8–9.Google Scholar

38 That is, she has already given her country a great deal; no one would begrudge her the comfortable life she had begun to set before herself.

39 This is a time and manner of death that would have been the same had she not taken the job.

40 That is, she would have pursued those activities that would have realized her personal values.

41 More specifically, while a life of pleasant retirement has its own perfections, e.g. the cultivation of personal relationships, engaging in certain leisurely activities, etc., there is no credible sense, non-moral or otherwise, in which Angela or her activities would exhibit more excellence on the whole if she retired (Haybron, ‘Well-Being and Virtue’, pp. 9–10).

42 Specifically, she asserts that we evaluate living things’ parts, operations/reactions, actions, and emotion/desires, with respect to how they contribute to three ends: (1) the individual's survival, (2) the continuance of the species, and (3) the individual's characteristic pleasure or enjoyment/characteristic freedom from pain. ‘Social’ animals are also evaluated with respect to how they contribute to a further end: (4) the good functioning of the social group.

43 Copp, D. and Sobel, D., ‘Morality and Virtue: An Assessment of Some Recent Work in Virtue Ethics’, Ethics 114 (2004), pp. 514–44, at 534CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 More concretely, a veterinarian would negatively view a behaviour like alarm calling, because it puts the animal's life at risk, while Hursthouse appears committed to such an activity's being virtuous because it contributes to the good functioning or the survival of the group to which the animal belongs.

45 Relatedly, the classes ‘humans’ and ‘persons’ are distinct because they have different characteristic properties and persistence conditions.

46 My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for emphasizing this important distinction to me.

47 Borges, J. L., ‘Blindness’, Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Weinberger, E. (New York, 1999), pp. 473–83.Google Scholar All references to Borges are from this work. Bradford Cokelet suggested this example to me.

48 Borges, p. 474.

49 Borges, p. 478.

50 Following his account of going blind, Borges describes several prominent historical writers, e.g. Homer, Milton, Groussac and Joyce, for whom going blind was also neither a total misfortune nor deprivation, either because it allowed them new-found focus or improved their memory and/or productivity, and who credited their work to their blindness and its accompanying advantages.

51 Again, this loss could be either a pro-tanto worsening of his well-being or an overall loss to it.

52 I.e. the realization of one of his values, the quiet contemplation of God's nature, would be frustrated.

53 One of the main upshots of this has been that the more that the theories of human well-being pack into the idea of ‘human nature’, that is, the more that they posit is characteristic of human well-being and the more idiosyncratic this account is, the more they open themselves up to worries about alienation (and, correspondingly, deprivation). Consequently, the more robust a conception of ‘human nature’ that a species-based objective theory relies upon for defining human well-being, the more likely it will be that individuals may be alienated from what that theory posits as (the most likely idiosyncratic) necessary constituents of human well-being. By focusing on the nature of personhood, as opposed to ‘humanity’, or any other species, person-centred theory is able to avoid these worries.

54 While I was not able to explore the issue in this article, I suspect that just as worries about alienation arise in species-based objective theories of well-being in virtue of their packing a great deal into ‘human nature’, as one moves from a ‘thin’ or ‘procedural’ conception of autonomy to a ‘thicker’ or ‘substantive’ conception of it (and, correspondingly, personhood) the more worries about alienation will arise.