Welfare: the only ethical value?/2

There is a curious, but I think ultimately unsuccessful, strategy for defending welfarism, a strategy certain philosophers seems to be committed to in order to defend their views from some very intuitive objections. (An example is Sumner, in his lenghty defence of a welfarist theory of the good in Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics.) The strategy consists in the following:
1. acknowledging the existence of values that are different from welfare (ex. aesthetic, or perfectionists ones)
2. connecting the idea of value with that of practical reason
3. acknowledging that practical reason responds to this plurality of values
4. denying that the rational and the ethical should be symmetrical, that is to say "reasons can emanate fro distinct, independent, and possibly incommensurable points of view, of which ethics is but one" (Sumner, op.cit. 188)
5. denying that the unique status of welfare in ethics can be carried over to practical reason

Notice that
(1) is a position welfarist are forced to retreat into, since any view that denies the existence of any value beside welfare will be seen as an hopelessly limited representation of the human condition. (As I shall illustrate with some examples.)
(2) is required by providing some content to value talk, and is a standard move
(3) follows from 1 and 2
(5) is expedient to save welfarism from a typical criticism; for welfarism says that in ethics all reasons derive from the value of "well-being"; therefore, if ethics exhausted practical reason, they would have to claim that all reasons reflect the value of "well-being", which implies something like (1), the denial of all other values. With 5, the welfarist committ himself only to deny the importance of other values, in so far as ethics is concerned.

What would be the implications of the view that welfare is the only value in general, and not only when ethics is concerned? It would entail the truth of the following claims, that I consider false:
A. the value of the historical remainings of Rome is a function of their contribution to the well-being (say, by being sources of enjoyment, or aesthetical contemplation) of the actual or future individuals that will visit it.
B. the value of holocaust memorials is a function of the contribution they make to human well-being (say, by preventing similar tragedies to happen again.)
C. the value of the tomb of a famous person, or of a rest, is a function of the well-being of other people
D. the value of all non sentients living beings (say plants and certain animals) - assuming, as some welfarist do, that they don't count as welfare subjects in their own - is a function the attitudes towards them of real welfare subjects (say people and other animals.)
E. the value of non sentients beings, say mountains or rivers, is completely exhausted by their contribution to the well-being of welfare subjects.
F. that the value of a work of art derives from its contribution to human well-being
G. that the value of our memories derives from their contribution to our well-being

I take all of the former statements to be false. But notice that it is enough to agree with one of them to have troubles with the former statement, namely, that only welfare is a value. For to deny that other things, beyond welfare, are valuable, means to deny that such things as a mountain or a river, a cow, an ancient Roman shard, a Holocaust memorials, or a Picasso statue, provide us, simpy by being what they are, with reasons to act in certain ways and to avoid acting in certain other ways (such as by respecting them, honouring them, avoiding their destruction, and so on).

(And this is found by many people an utterly unacceptable conclusion.)

The distinction between the realm of ethics and the realm of practical reason allows a welfarist to accomodate the human concern with nature's or art's value as a value in itself, with the basic intuition behind welfarism, nicely summarized by the following quote:

"If something will improve the conditions of no one's life, make no one better off, then what ethical reason could be given for recommending it? And conversely if something will harm no one, make no one worse off, what reason could be given for condemning it?" (Sumner, op.cit. 192)

The attempted synthesis therefore offers the following solution: there are values different from welfare, but well-being is the only foundational value so far as Ethics is concerned. The existence of different values beside well-being only shows that there are more valuable states of affairs than there are ethically valuable states of affairs, or more generally, that our reason responds to a wider set of considerations than the narrowly ethical. This is what (4) says.

The above stated view (4), seems both commonsensical and "liberal" at the same time. Williams, among others, has reminded us about the dreadful consequences of forgetting that a human life is shaped by an heterogeneous set of concerns, different from what we may see as ethical concerns. To deny this would be to assume at the outset that man's rationality is exhausted by his sticking to the ethical point of view. This goes against the "liberal" self-conception of a human being as an individual who has emancipated himself from the commands of any unilateral code of conduct (ethical views are considered such codes by many people) and who has recognized the existence of a plurality of viewpoints from which the world can be legitimately be evaluated.

Sumner's distinction between practical reason and ethics, beside expedient for his project, seems also to be independently plausible, for a host of good reasons. Yet, I will argue that Sumner's use of the distinction, and the consequences that he draws from it, are not compatible with William's defence of it.

How reasonable is it to claim that there is clear-cut distinction between ethics and other values? First of all, one need distinguish between different sorts of values among the non-ethical ones. Epistemic correctness, or logical coherence, important as they are, do not seem to call for the same sort of response as ethical ones. That is to say, even if we admire people who are logically cogent and well-informed, we do not blame them in the same way as a person who knowingly violates a moral duty, unless, at least, that lack of logical cogency or information was itself due to some substantial moral failing, such as the lack of care or intellectual dishonesty, and carried dreadful consequences, for example by harming other people. We also may find it valuable to promote epistemic correctness or attitudes to logically correct reasoning in the world, but I doubt whether those values engage our motivation in abstraction from other values.

On the contrary, think about ideals isuch as self-expression, self-realization, aesthetic value, understanding or the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Williams' point is that such values shape our lives to the point that we would not be living a valuable and authentic life if we didn't attach to them the importance we do. The realization of a perfectionist ideal can make us do actions that are bad from the viewpoint of ethics, as shown in Williams' example of Gauguin. Gauguin deliberately rejects a whole host of moral obligations (to his family, for instance) because he finds it more “important”, in this sense, to be a painter. I'm not assessing here whether what Gauguin did the right thing, or was justifiable, nor whether Williams is right that the ideal of "self-expression" can legitimately trump concerns such as one's moral obligations. I just want to point out that, in Williams'view, the failure of the ethical standpoint to absorb all other normatively relevant points of view goes hand in hand with the affirmation of the importance of such alternative standpoints.

In contrast with Williams, Sumner defines the realm of ethics as a realm of special importance:
" We outlined above four desiderata for any value capable of seving in a monistic theory of the good: it must be intrinsicc, generic, important, and ethically salient..." (ibid. 193, my emphasis)

The reason why aesthetic evaluation should be kept separate from ethical one, is that the concerns of aesthetic value are not as deep and serious as those of ethical value:
"Suppose that with eyes wide open you choose a plan of life which you expect to be worse prudentially - worse for you - but better from some other evaluative standpoint... let this standpoint be aesthetic. In order to dedicate yourself exclusively to the pursuit of your artistic vision and bequeath your immortal work to posterity, you sacrifice family, fortune, and health. ... But in that case, it is not at all clear why ethics should be concerned with the assumed gain in aesthetic value which compensates for the loss of your well-being. Aesthetic value is the concern of, well, aesthetics. This is ethics; why should it take aesthetic value on board?" (ibid, 189)

Clearly, Sumner's attitude towards the importance of aesthetic and other non-ethical values has nothing in common with Williams'. This claim, (4), seems intuitively plausible when associated with Williams' view that there are other highly valuable concerns beside ethics. But this is not the reading of (4) that Sumner can adopt, because according to him the distinction between ethical and non-ethical value coincides with the distinction between things that are especially important and things that aren't.

Is welfare the only ethical value?/1.
Sumner's co-opting strategy
A clever and stenuous defensor of Welfarism, Sumner, argues against value pluralism in the following way:

"I will divide rival goods into two categories. The first consists of personal goods: valuable states of activities realized within the lives of individual persons. ... The second category consists, naturally enough, of impersonal goods, which belong to entities other than persons. ... For personal goods the co-option strategy [co-opting it as a welfarist good] is the most promising. For consider: any personal value which could plausibly be advanced as basic or foundational for ethics will also be a standard intrinsic source of well-being." (Welfare, Happiness and Ethics, 201-202)

What kind of strategies do we have to argue against the co-opting strategy? We may try to show, when two different goods are concerned, that no sense can be made of their being two "sources" of the same thing, namely well-being. We do this by pointing out their incommensurability, for example. Examples may involve the value of autonomy vs. well-being, or the value of accomplishments vs. well-being etc, when the two values in questions (well-being and the other value) conflict. Intuitively, we say that there is a conflict between well-being and another value in those cases in which it is natural to say that the agent is making a personal sacrifice for the sake of one of his values. For example, imagine that Molly the matematician could choose one of the two options in the example (for example, God offers to her the possibility to make this choice, and is able to make her forget about it.) We would say that Molly made a sacrifice for the sake of the value of accomplishment , if she chooses 1.

But notice that this is not how Sumner would describe this case. Sumner will say that in such cases the subject has to balance two different sorts of sources of well-being against each other, namely enjoyment and accomplishment, or enjoyment and autonomy.

According to Sumner, pointing out the incommensurability and the impossibility to solve conflicts between different values does not amount to an argument in favor of pluralism. In fact, nothing prevents a welfarist to rephrase this alleged conflict between well-being and another value as a conflict between different local welfare goods. Moreover, nothing prevents a welfarist to say, about different local goods, what pluralists are fond to say about different values, namely that they may conflict, and such conflicts can be irreconciliable. As he puts it:

"As agents we must face these conflicts continually, and they do not get any easier if we think of these goods as so many components of our well-being. Welfare is not some overridding or higher-order value to which we can appeal in order to resolve conflicts among more local goods; rather, it is the outcome when we have settled our priorities among such goods." (ibid. 206)

But this raises the questions about what motivates the welfarist philosopher to say that "well-being" is a value in the first place. When you call something a value you thereby imply that it plays a certain role in our thinking. The role can range from the most practical role in shaping our day-to-day deliberations, to the abstract role in making up an ethical theory. But these two roles, different as they are, still have something in common: the fact that the concept does some work. What is the work done by well-being according to Sumner?

The former quote shows us that Sumner agrees with Scanlon (a strong critic of welfarism) that the concept of well-being does not play an important role in first-person deliberation about a life's intrinsic ends. Well-being is neither "significant in everyday decisions about what to do" nor it plays "a role in larger-scle decisions about how one's life is to go", to use Scanlon's words ("What do we owe to each other", 126.) By Sumner's own admission, the concept of well-being is useless in those respect. In the first-person perspective, well-being is so to say "transparent": thinking about our well-being always consists in thinking about the goods or the values that we deem important. In this sense, thinking of different personal values as different intrinsic sources of well-being does not seem to play any role in so far as practical deliberation is concerned.

If conflicts among goods "do not get any easier if we think of these goods as so many components of our well-being" when viewed in the first person perspective, why should the same conclusion not apply to a benefactor? If it is useless for Andrea to think of different goods as component of his well-being, why should it make sense for Giulia, who wants to help Andrea, to consider good things as component of Andrea's well-being? We should think that Giulia has, if any, less chances than Andrea to "get it right" in assessing the relative contribution of different intrinsic goods to Andrea's well-being.

So what does the claim of welfarism amounts to, the claim that well-being is the only value, whose promotion exhaustively explains what ethics is about? If the promotion of well-being amounts in the first-person and in the benefactor's perspectives to the promotion of that or another good, isn't more reasonable to say that ethics is about the promotion of such different goods? What is the umbrella term "well-being" doing here? What does one gain in seeing this contribution to the good as a contribution to people's well-being?

The only option left to Sumner is therefore to claim that the role of well-being in an ethical theory is played at a different level. The concept of well-being provides us with a formal criterion to distinguish those things that can be part of a subject's own good to those things that cannot possibly be. But when we are talking about those things that cannot possibly be part of a subject's own good, we are talking about what Sumner called impersonal goods, to which the co-opting strategy is not pertinent. As far as the co-opting strategy is concerned, it seems to bring us nowhere.

WELL-BEING AND PERFECTION, a meaningful dychotomy?/2

This post is just an addition to my previous post.

NOTICE that at the end of his example quoted in this post Sumner writes:

"What you are now doing may develop your capacities less, but it leads to a more satisfying and fulfilling life for you."

Should we take this as an possible interpretation of the story Sumner tolds us earlier or as a summary of it true of it by stipulation?

As an interpretation it is wrong because I don't see the second part of the story as an illustration of a person whose capacities are less engaged than before (more capacities may be thought to be engaged in the second kind of life than in the first.)

If it is a summary, true by stipulation, it would only prove that a particular ideal of perfection (developing one's capacities) is wrong. If one takes it to suggest that the second part of this person's life contains less perfection then the first, it becomes question begging.

Why is it question begging? Think about what the author says, it is in virtue of, that this guy finds his new life satisfying and fulfilling. The writer characterizes the new life as being peaceful and relaxing. But "peaceful" and "relaxing" are just objective features of a life, (just as "engaging rational thought" or "rewarding in terms of career"), and I cannot see why they should not be included into a perfectionist ideal. (Which would explain what makes the new life a more fulfilling and satisfying one for this guy to live.)

WELL-BEING AND PERFECTION, a meaningful dychotomy?/1

This is my first post on an issue that will make me busy for a long time. I will begin with criticism of what other people have said, before advancing my own view. My intuition is that it is more difficult that it seems to distinguish these two aspects of a good life (or maybe we should say these two criteria to evaluate it?)
In this post, I only write my gut reaction to an example by L.W. Sumner, that was purported to to illustrate the conceptual distinction between prudential value (or well-being) and perfectionist value:

"... imagine that you possess unusually acute philosophical skills. As an undergraduate you stumble into philosophy by accident and, once having sampled its wares, decide to pursue it seriously, both because you quickly discover how good you are at it and because you find this exercise of your intellectual capacities intrinsically satisfying. As a prodigy you progress rapidly, formulating dazzling new theories of truth and reference, and eventually taking a position at a prestigious university. For a while all is well, until you begin to discern a nagging feeling of unease. Your talents have not abated, indeed you are just now beginning to hit your stride, but you are no longer certain that this is the activity to which you wish to dedicate your life. Other possibilities now begin to seem tempting: perhaps organic farming or building yourself a cabin in the north woods. For a while you persist in your career, but your mood gradually darkens into irritability and depression, and you begin to feel trapped and driven by your own talents. Finally you leave the academic life to pursue an alternative direction. One discovery you find saddening: you do not have the talent for farming or cabin-building that you have for philosophy. You therefore do not feel challenged in quite the old way, but by way of compensation, you do feel relaxed and at peace with yourself. What you are now doing may develop your capacities less, but it leads to a more satisfying and fulfilling life for you."
(Two Theories of the Good, 4-5)

This example should convince us that perfectionist value and well-being are two distinct concepts, since a life that contains the former and a life that contains the latter, for the same person, can be radically different lives. The guy in the example (that is you - not me!) pursues perfection in the first part of his life (believing that it would has also brought well-being, I guess) and well-being in the second part.

How much should we feel satisfied with this? I think the example can be interpreted in different ways:

1. a possible interpretation is: "yes, you're right. The well-being of this guy consist in A, while his perfection consists in B, therefore the two concepts are different."
2. but a different reply is possible: "no, this only shows that the concept of perfection you are using is not good. It is wrong to conceive the perfection of a human life as the sort of thing that this guy reaches in the first part of the story, and as its extension in the future. The example may show as well that the idea that "perfection of a life = developing some species specific abilities / especially the ones that one possesses in the highest degree" is wrong.

I don't think that answer 2 is ad hoc. A life deprived of the sort of the activity of self-questioning that led this guy to change his career may just turn out to be a worse life even from a perfectionist point of view.

Sumner's perfectionist straw-man is a pseudo-Aristotelian standard of the goodness of a life: something like "perfection = reaching excellence in one's species-specific abilities". But even from the standpoint of this standard it is questionable whether this guy's choice entails a sacrifice of perfectionist value.The story Sumner tells us is compatible with thinking that, in the first part of his life, this guy has only developed one or two abilities, namely philosophical thinking, or the ability to build a solid career, which does not exhaust the species-specific abilities.

I would define the kind of excellence this guy develops in the first part of the story as "excellence in the ability that one can develop most easily, given one's genetic make-up." This doesn't seem an ideal of perfection, but rather as one of specialization. And no perfectionist ethical theory that I can think of (Aristotelian, or Stoic, or Nietzschean) contains this perfectionist ideal.

(I'd rather think that it is the structure of the market economy that suggests this canon; so the choice of developing of one's most evident ability may be a prudential rather than a perfectionist one, after all.)

REPLY to REPLY by GIANFRANCO/3

In this reply, I shall write the last and I think final objection to the idea that we can make a valuable use of theories that

1. differ from Mental Statism, but
   
2. accept some form of the Experience Requirement
   

( as I call them, G-theories.) Here I claim G-theories do not offer a solution to Kagan's challenge.

Kagan's challenge:
Kagan claims ("The Limits of Well-Being", p.186, original italics):

If something is to be of genuine (ultimate) benefit to a person, it must affect the person; it must make a difference in the person. That is, it must affect the person's intrinsic properties. Changes in merely relational properties cannot be what is of ultimate value for the person... What benefits the person must make some intrinsic difference in the person. Otherwise there would be nothing in it for him.

Notice that accepting this definition of the limits of well-being, amounts to accepting what someone has called "good life internalism". (NOTE1) Good life internalism is denied, for example, by the unrestricted desire-fulfilment theory of welfare.

Kagan's constraint is a powerful constraint. But according to Kagan it is necessary because it is needed to satisfy the following EXPLANATION REQUIREMENT:

"A theory of well-being attempts to specify in general terms the set of facts that comprise the good for the individual. An adequate theory of well-being would have to meet several conditions... a third condition - the benefit condition - ... [says that] the specified fact must be good for the person who is well-off: the well-off individual must benefit from being well-off." (ibid, 185)

It can be proved that:

1. G-theories do not comply with Kagan's constraint
2. The Experience Requirement, as used in G-theories, does not satisfy Kagan's explanation requirement.

Let us start with 1. Let us consider the following example (discussed at Desert Landscapes and at Philosophy et cet.):

• Jeffry dies believing that he is loved and successful, while in reality his colleagues despise him, his business is in shambles, and his adulterous wife holds him in utter contempt. Richard, on the contrary, dies believing that he is loved and successful, but his beliefs are all true.

A G-theory will allow us to say that Richard's life is better than Jeffry's. Notice also how a G-theory ensures this result: it says that what makes Richards's life good for him is an "external state of the world", composed by the love and faithfulness of Richard's wife's, the esteem of his collegues, and the good state of his business.

Let us call DELTA what accounts for the difference between the value of Jeffry's life for Jeffry and the value of Richard's life for Richard. Suppose moreover that "Jeffry" and "Richard" are just two names for the same individual in two different possible words. DELTA does clearly NOT consist in an intrinsic difference in this individual (whom we call Jeffry or Richard.) Therefore the G-theory does not satisfy Kagan's contraint.

Let's now consider whether the Experience Requirement included in G-theories satisfies Kagan's explanation requirement. In order to satisfy the explanation requirement, a theory of welfare should provide an explanation of why a state's goodness qualifies as a particular person's goodness or as something that is good for this person.

It seems that the Experience Requirement in a G-theory can't do this. In a G-theory, the Experience Requirement should be considered an enabling condition. You must admit this if you don't want to reduce a G-theory to a form of Mental Statism (see this post, and Gianfranco's reply.) As Gianfranco writes in his reply:

"That Italy is still here functions as a general enabling condition of [the] causal explanation [that the light bulb did not explode], a condition that does not have to be mentioned in the explanation, but that is a condition. What is important is that an enabling condition is something that must be there so that something else happens, but it is not what makes it happen.

Moving this in the field of value: an enabling condition is something that must be there so that something else has value, but is not what it is in virtue of which that something has value."

An enabling condition is, by definition, not part of the explanation of why a certain state of affairs is good for a person (just like the fact that Italy is still here is not part of the explanation why the bulb exploded.) If the fact that Richard has an experience (of a state) is only an enabling condition of that state having value for Richard, then the fact that Richard has an experience is not part of the explanation of why that state is good for him. Therefore, the experience requirement does not meet Kagan's challenge: "tell me in virtue of what that state of the world is good for a person in particular, tell me what makes it good for him."

Notice how the argument works using Gianfranco's defence of a weak version of the Experience Requirement: we want to say that being loved by his wife is intrinsically good for Richard, and not in virtue of the experience it produces. Therefore we must say that the fact that Richard experiences his life's love cannot be (part of) the explanation of why that love contributes to Richard's welfare, and is only an enabling condition.

There is no way out from this: one either denies that the experience requirement is an enabling condition, or G-theories do not satisfy Kagan's explanatory requirement in that they have an experience requirement.(Of course, a G-theory of a certain kind could meet the explanation requirement in another way. But from this point of view it is on a par with desire fulfilment or other "externalist" theories.)

Summing up what I've done until now, there are four main objections to G-theories:

1. The behavior of an agent committed to maximize his own well-being defined by a G-theory looks particularly ackward, like a sort of value dyslexia. Given the way the agent behaves, it seems impossible to understand what the agent means by "intrinsically", when the agent claims that (external) "states of the world" contribute INTRINSICALLY to his own good.
   
2. Here I argue that if someone accepts the Experience Machine as an ultimate objection to Mental Statism, a very similar objection applies to G-theories, the Attention Diversion Machine objection.
3. The allegation behind G-theories is that a theory can include prudential goods different from mental states and at the same time endorse the Experience Requirement. But this does not seem true at least for accomplishments.
   
4. The forth and last objection, that I discuss here, is the following: one could think that G-theories are superior to "externalist" theories of well-being, in that they provide a solution to Kagan's problem. But they don't.
   

NOTES
1.Notice that this definition of internalism includes a broader set of states of the world as being relevant for well-being than the forms usually discussed in the literature, which only regard mental states as suitably "internal" to the person.

The Attention Diversion Machine.

Consider the following EXAMPLE:

• George suffers from great anxiety. One day he sees the advertisement of the the "Experience Machine" program, by the M.A.T.R.I.X corporation. He understand that they may offer him an alternative to his painful life, namely a life connected to a virtual reality lacking situations that could unleash his anxiety. He finds himself faltering about the perspective of connecting himself forever to the machine, so the experts of M.A.T.R.I.X. recommend him a different product, the Attention Deflection Machine. The Attention Deflection Machine consist in a scanner and a sound-synthetizer. The scanner examines the world around George looking for situations that may unleash his anxiety. The synthetizer creates sounds that are able to deflect George's attention away from the potential source of distress.
  
• George finds this device much more agreeable than the Experience Machine. After all, he will be able to carry on in his life almost as before, inhabiting his own body, perceiving it, and perceiving reality. The only thing that differs is that this reality is not the whole reality, but who knows everything anyway?
  
• George goes home, and the machine enables him to ignore the fact that his cat is dying, until he finally forgets about it (the maid brings away the dead body of the cat.) He also stops thinking about the fact that he was recently fired and had to find a job less paid than the previous one. He does not care anymore about signs that tell him that in his new work environment people don't like him. And he feels happier than before. Not that he positively believes his cat is healthy, his new job is good compared to the old one, and his collegues love him. He just fails to realize that the opposite is true.
  
• Something similar happens with respect to George's perception of his own body. Of course, he does not get the sensations that he would get if he possessed a younger, stronger and more beautiful body. He does not cease feeling his body and the painful or annoying sensations that it produces. But he cannot understand their very existential meaning. For example, he does not realize his body is aging, getting weaker and less beautiful, also because he does not look at himself in mirrors. When pains are too strong, he cures the problem and forgets about them as soon as the pain is over.
  

1. Would you use the machine if you were George?
2. Would you use it if you don't suffer from a severe form of anxiety?
3. Would you also plug to the Experience Machine?
4. Do you find the Attention Diversion Machine more agreeable than the Experience Machine?

Experience Requirement and accomplishments are incompatible. Short version.
(Click here for the long version of the argument.)

The Experience Requirement says that the impact of our well-being of some state of the world is entirely determined by features of the world the subject is conscious of, more formally:

if X is a state of the world, and X is good/bad for A, and the (dis)value of X for A derives from P being the case, and if P being the case is not a mental state of A, X must include A's experience of P being the case. Consider the following EXAMPLE:

Suppose that Brutus wants to kill Ceasar; he stabs Ceasar who dies. Immediately after he is put in prison, where he stays 10 years in complete isolation. One year after Caesar's death, Jesus comes and resurrects him.

Intuitively, we would say that Caesar's resurrection deprives Brutus of his main accomplishment in life. (The resurrection seems to undo the killing, or whatever good thing was achieved through it.) So a theory that acknowledges the prudential value of accomplishments cannot exclude the relevance of the resurrection. On the other hand the Experience Requirement says that the resurrection cannot make Brutus' life worse because it lies outside his experience.

In general, what we may call the "success" of an agent's action lies outside the scope of prudential values constrained by the Experience Requirement. By "success" I mean what it is in virtue of that an action fulfils the goal set by the agent in doing that action.In general, facts beside those the agent is conscious of determine the success of an action. According to the Experience Requirement, those facts cannot influence an agent's well-being, which implies that success cannot influence a subject's well-being (as success is determined by those facts.)

Since success is not an optional feature of accomplishments, and since success is excluded by the experience requirement, a view of prudential good that endorses the experience requirement must exclude accomplishments from the list of things that are intrinsically good for a subject's life.

Can we adopt the Experience Requirement and take accomplishments seriously?

(For a more succint version of this argument, click here.)

I will argue that any theory with the Experience Requirement cannot acknowledge the prudential value (or value for the subject or intrinsic contribution to a subject's well-being) of accomplishments. The Experience Requirement says that something (some state of the world) can be good for A only if it is experienced by A, more formally:

if X is a state of the world, and X is good/bad for A, and the (dis)value of X for A derives from P being the case, and if P being the case is not a mental state of A, X must include A's experience of P being the case

Consider the following EXAMPLE:

1. Suppose that Brutus wants to kill Caesar; he stabs Caesar who dies immediately. Soon after that, Brutus is brought to a prison, where he lies in complete isolation. One year after the stabbing, Jesus comes to Rome and resurrects Caesar.

We want the Experience Requirement to imply that Caesar's resurrection cannot make Brutus' life better/worse, as this is not a state of the world Brutus is conscious of. This creates a problem for any theory that, beside the Experience Requirement, wishes to include achievements, or accomplishments, among the states of the world that contribute intrinsically (when experienced) to a subject's well-being. (A theory that purports to make both claim would be a particular type of G-theory.)

Intuitively, we would say that Caesar's resurrection deprives Brutus of his main accomplishment in life. (The resurrection seems to undo the killing, or whatever good thing was achieved through it.) So a theory that acknowledges the prudential value of accomplishments cannot exclude the relevance of the resurrection. On the other hand the Experience Requirement says that the resurrection cannot make Brutus' life worse (it lies outside his experience.)

(If you think that a killing is not the sort of event that can be undone by a resurrecting, simply assume that Brutus' goal – his accomplishment-defining goal - was that of getting rid FOREVER of the man who was the greatest danger for Rome's republican institutions.)

Can one defend the Experience Requirement from the charge of contradicting the value of accomplishments? A possibility could be to show that there is a theory in which both objective accomplishments and the Experience Requirement determine what is good for a subject. That such a theory exists is suggested by the fact that Experience Requirement does not collapse necessarily into a form of Mental Statism (only the mental states of a subject determine his welfare.) In fact, the Experience Requirement still permits to distinguish "authentic" and "inauthentic" experiences of accomplishments. What I mean by "authentic" I shall now explain:

Brutus' experience of killing Caesar is an "authentic" experience of an accomplishment. It is authentic because the killing of Caesar was, at the time of the experience, a real accomplishment. It was not an illusory getting-rid-of-a-dangerous-dictator. In that minute in which Brutus experienced the dying of Caesar, this dying was real, and through it Rome was really gotten rid of a dangerous dictator.

One way to make sense of the notion of authentic experience is in terms of what I shall call the law of "TEMPORAL ATTRIBUTION" of accomplishments to lives: whether someone accomplishes something at t, is uniquely determined by the state of the world at that time, t.

According to this definition, Brutus accomplished something when he stabbed Caesar, in that he really killed him, and (for some time) got rid of a dangerous dictator. Notice the difference between this authentic experience of an accomplishment and an experience as of an accomplishment, such as one Brutus could have had by using the Matrix. The Experience Requirement allows us to distinguish among the two kinds of experience, since the Matrix one does not correspond to anything that is a real accomplishment even at the time of the (experience as of a ) killing. Is this a reasonable middle way between Mental Statism and, as it is sometimes called, welfare "externalism"?

This middle position does not stand. The principle of Temporal Attribution implies that, in establishing whether Brutus' killing of Caesar was good for him, we should consider the state of the world at the time of the killing (which determines whether the killing is an accomplishment or not.) The state of the world at that time of the killing includes a lot of facts of which Brutus was not conscious of. Suppose that it includes the following FACT.

A mad scientist made a Caesar clone, that we shall call ErsatzCaesar. ErsatzCaesar has the same intentions as the original one, and is potentially able to convince everybody in Rome that the man killed by Brutus was not the man who had lead Rome's victorious army till that point.

In this scenario we cannot consider Brutus' killing of Caesar as an accomplishment, even at the time it takes place. (I take it for the moment that the accomplishment consists in protecting republican institutions against its enemies.) Because of the clone, Brutus' experience of the killing of Caesar does not count an authentic experience of an accomplishment, and is not good for him. The existence of the clone is bad for Brutus, even if it is not part of that portion of the world that Brutus experiences. So the principle of temporal attribution goes against the Experience Requirement.

Even if you do not accept this example as relevant, you still have to admit that the theory we get if

1. we count authentic experience to be better for a subject than illusory ones and
   
2. define authentic experiences through the principle of temporal attribution

is entirely ad-hoc. It includes many events of which Brutus is not conscious of, but it excludes all future events.

This only shows that the concept of "authentic" experience of an accomplishment must be built in a different manner in order to fit with the Experience Requirement. The focus must not be on the state of the world corresponding to the instants of time in which the experience of the accomplishment takes place, but on the state of the world made up by those real features of the world that are part of the subject's awareness of reality. So authentic experiences of accomplishments must be defined by something along the following lines

EXPERIENCE CONDITION: "an agent has an authentic experience of an accomplishment if

1. he experiences a (real) state of the world (e.g. Caesar dying)
2. this state of the world is brought about by him, and
3. it qualifies as an accomplishment from the standpoint of all the (true) facts the agent is aware of."

A theory that prizes authentic experiences of accomplishments (in the sense defined by the Experience Condition) is not a form of Mental Statism. The Matrix-experience as of killing Caesar would still not count as an accomplishment because in that case there is no state of the world that could qualify as an accomplishment from the standpoint of all the true facts the agent knows. In the Matrix case the subject simply is aware of no true fact.

Does the latter view (authentic experiences of accomplishments are better than inauthentic ones) amount to recognizing the value of accomplishments for well-being? No: because what we defined as "authentic experiences of accomplishments" lacks the essential element that makes accomplishments what they are.

The property of an action that we may call its being an accomplishment does not supervene – as a rule - on those features of the action and of the action's context the agent is conscious of. To see why, consider that particular aspect of accomplishments that is the action's success: what it is in virtue of that an action fulfils the goal set by the agent doing that action. The idea of success is constitutive of the concept of accomplishment.

Given that the success of an action is only accidentally, if ever, determined by only those facts that enter the agent's experience, the Experience Condition simply excludes too much and does not leave us with anything that would resemble a theory that takes seriously the value of accomplishments.

Therefore, we cannot buy any meaningful notion of accomplishments if we buy the Experience Requirement. The Experience Requirement and the prudential value of accomplishments are simply mutually exclusive.

A slippery slope argument against G theories.

A theory is a G-theory iff:

1. states of the world outside the subject's mind make a subject's life better, in the sense that the fact that they obtain explains why it is that one is better off. They can be the ground of prudential value. (More formally, if X is a state of the world = [the obtaining of P which is not a mental state of A; A's experience of P] and X is good/bad for A, then it can be in virtue of the obtaining of P that X is good for A)
2. the theory endorses the Experience Requirement, namely: the impact on our well-being of some state of the world is entirely determined by features of the world the subject is conscious of.(More formally: if X is a state of the world, and X is good/bad for the subject A, and it is in virtue of P obtaining that X is good/bad for A (where P obtaning is not a mental state of A), then the state of the world X must include A's experience of P)
   

I think that although G-theories can be logically coherent, they cannot represent an authentic ethical alternative between Mental Statism (the view according to which the only things that are good for A are A's mental states) and welfare "externalism" (the view according to which states of the world of which the subject is not aware cannot intrinsically make a subject better or worse off.) I will argue that, whatever its details, a theory that qualifies as a G-theory boils down to a view that has, at most, the same ethical attractions of Mental Statism.

A defender of a G-theory will argue that one of the strongest arguments against Mental Statism is Nozick's Experience Machine argument. Since a G-theory may include goods that are not mental states (ex. agency, a functioning body, real achievements), a G-theory can stand the Experience Machine objection. (As I show at the end of this long post.)

First of all, like Mental Statism, the Experience Requirement imposes a strong constraint upon which things can be good for a subject and which cannot. For example, the Experience Requirement implies that accomplishing something in one's life does not make one's life better intrinsically (as I argue here). NOTE 1. But there is a bigger problem. The Experience Requirement produces a practical "far from the eye, far from the hearth" attitude that is responsible for the ethical convergence of G-theories and Mental Statism. Here is a SLIPPERY SLOPE for this claim.

Consider selective memory and biased perception (of the opinion of other people, of our strenghts and weaknesses, etc.) Psychologists tell us that our minds regularly indulge in these process, to a certain extent; and it may be a good thing that they do for the sake of our well-being. Selective memory and selective attention fall into the psychological cathegory of "self-deception." I think that "self-deception" is a good term for them, because to my eye it is clear that selective attention or memory can be as deceiving as real delusions.

A G-theory implies that one ends up better off by forgetting or failing to perceive facts that are bad for him (when the subject can be sure that the strategy will not be counterproductive.) This is because the Experience Requirement says that something cannot make us worse off if we don't know about it. But if we push this strategy too far, the subject ends up in a world that is not too different from a delusion. Consider the following EXAMPLE:

• George suffers from great anxiety. One day he sees the advertisement of the the "Experience Machine" program, by the M.A.T.R.I.X corporation. He understand that they may offer him an alternative to his painful life, namely a life connected to a virtual reality lacking situations that could unleash his anxiety. He finds himself faltering about the perspective of connecting himself forever to the machine, so the experts of M.A.T.R.I.X. recommend him a different product, the Attention Deflection Machine. The Attention Deflection Machine consist in a scanner and a sound-synthetizer. The scanner examines the world around George looking for situations that may unleash his anxiety. The synthetizer creates sounds that are able to deflect George's attention away from the potential source of distress.
  
• George finds this device much more agreeable than the Experience Machine. After all, he will be able to carry on in his life almost as before, inhabiting his own body, perceiving it, and perceiving reality. The only thing that differs is that this reality is not the whole reality, but who knows everything anyway?
  
• George goes home, and the machine enables him to ignore the fact that his cat is dying, until he finally forgets about it (the maid brings away the dead body of the cat.) He also stops thinking about the fact that he was recently fired and had to find a job less paid than the previous one. He does not care anymore about signs that tell him that in his new work environment people don't like him. And he feels happier than before. Not that he positively believes his cat is healthy, his new job is good compared to the old one, and his collegues love him. He just fails to realize that the opposite is true.
  
• Something similar happens with respect to George's perception of his own body. Of course, he does not get the sensations that he would get if he possessed a younger, stronger and more beautiful body. He does not cease feeling his body and the painful or annoying sensations that it produces. But he cannot understand their very existential meaning. For example, he does not realize his body is aging, getting weaker and less beautiful, also because he does not look at himself in mirrors. When pains are too strong, he cures the problem and forgets about them as soon as the pain is over.
  

In this example we have extreme forms of "selective attention", which from the point of view of G-theories are certainly good for him. (We may assume that George had no hope to improve his job situation, and the cat could not be helped.) I think that many of the reasons one can have not plug to the Experience Machine apply to the Attention Deflection Machine as well. The result of using both machines are very similar: one way or another, you end up living in a dream.

My own position is that, just as the Experience Machine, the Attention Deflection Machine would make a normal person's life a worse life for him, intrinsically, in that it fakes reality. In the case of the Experience Machine this is just more evident. (Moreover, one may dislike in particular the idea of loosing the control of one's body. But this is not all that is wrong with the Experience Machine.)

(Of course the Attention Deflection Machine can be overall in the interest of a person like George; in pathological cases, the advantage gained by depriving the person of full awareness of reality may compensate this loss, as it is the case with the drugs that are usually prescribed in pathological cases.)

Therefore the ethical objections against G-views and Mental Statism are analogous. Both theories deny the prudential value of living an authentic reality.Therefore I would conclude that, even if Mental Statism and G-views differ formally, from the ethical point of view they are substantially the same. G-theories do not deserve to be distinguished from Mental Statism as a relevant alternative in the ethical domain.

Notes
1. Summing up what I argue there: the notion of accomlishment has to be reworked to such an extent in order to be coherent with the experience requirement that we end up talking about something completely different. Although I have not examined the issue in detail, I guess that something similar is true of other "externalist" goods, such as truth, or control.

REPLY to REPLY BY GIANFRANCO/2: the Experience Requirement, G-theories and value dyslexia.

To sum up a bit, I shall call a "G-theory" of welfare any theory 1. according to which what makes a state (of the world) good for the subject A is something different from its implying the occurrence of (certain sorts of) mental states in A; and 2. accepts the experience requirement.

There are at least two forms of the experience requirement:
STRONGER FORM:
the impact on A's well-being of some state of the world is entirely determined by features of the world A is conscious of.
WEAKER FORM:
all states of affairs that are good for person A include necessarily at least both something valuable and A's awareness of it.


Here I shall be discussing the weaker form.

My point is that, even if all G-theories are different from Mental Statism (the view according to which the only things that are good for a person are his or her mental states), G-theories still exclude too many states from contributing intrinsecally to welfare, and this is pretty much in the spirit of Mental Statism.
Consider the following example I 've read in Richard's blog.

Molly the Mathematician
Suppose Molly spent her whole life trying to prove a fiendishly difficult theorem. She finally thinks she's achieved it, and has some other mathematicians check her proof. Molly receives their answer, believes it wholeheartedly, then dies the next day. It is later discovered that she was told the wrong answer.

Which of the following scenarios is better for Molly?
1) The mathematicians (mistakenly) tell her the proof is flawed, when in fact it is correct.

2) The mathematicians (mistakenly) tell her the proof is correct, when in fact it is flawed.

I think that 1 is better for Molly given her convictions and her values. Molly achieved something valuable, namely giving an enduring contribution to human knowledge, both from her point of view and objectively. (Notice that in case 1 the proof's validity is eventually recognized, and therefore it contributes to human knowledge.)

Yet, if somebody agrees with my intuitions about Molly, he cannot accept the Experience Requirement. The Experience Requirement says that Molly's achievement of something valuable cannot make her life better, because her achieving the (valuable) aim she has striven for is not a fact of which she is aware.

Therefore in a G-theory in which (let us suppose) achievement is intrinsically prudentially valuable but pleasure is not , 1 and 2 come out as indifferent: 2. has no value because it lacks the achievement, 1 has no value because it lacks experience.

Or take this other example, that I also read in Richard's blog (who read it somewhere else)

Imagine a mad scientist kidnaps you and your family, and offers you the following two options:

(1) He will let your family live in a pleasant but secluded captivity, but you will be made to believe (eg through hypnosis, or whatever) that they were all tortured and killed.

(2) He will torture and kill your family, but you will be made to believe that they are safe and well in a pleasant but secluded captivity.

After making the choice, all recollection of the bargain will be erased from your memory.

In this case as well, any G-theory that can exist will force you to say that, if your choice should take into account only what is good for you, then 1 and 2 are either indifferent, or 2 is better than 1.

(A G-theory in which pleasure is intrinsically good, or in which certain effects of pleasure can be, would rank 2 over 1, one in which pleasure is not a good may rank the two as indifferent. But the point here is: no G-theory will ever rank 1 over 2).

What do I think about such G-views?
Taking it for granted that a G-view is coherent from the logical point of view, it fails to be coherent in a ethical sense. A G-theory will allow things other than mental states to contribute intrinsically to welfare or what is good for a person. But the ethical evaluations of a person who endorses a G-theory sound like the ones of a value-dyslexic!


For example:

A G-theorist rational egoist, that we shall call Gian, should choose to take a drug that allows her to forget the harm inflicted by her children, because the evil contained by that state of affairs cannot be bad for her unless she is aware of it. Yet she would say that what has value for her is the fact that her children's lives go well or badly- not how she believes those lives to be. This is logically coherent, but since Gian claims that the disvalue of the previous state of the world for her life derives from the feature < my children's life going badly > and not at all from the feature < my having awareness of my children's life going badly > her choice seems to be a very odd way to respect that value she recognizes!

Also, it seems strange that Gian, who would choose hypnosis in order to forget a fact that is potentially bad for her, should also not allow an ipnotist to make her believe in a fact that never took place, and that she should refuse to hook up to an Experience Machine!

This attitude seems to me to be lacking in coherence, the sort of coherence that we expect in an evaluator. We all know that the coherence of a theory, a view, of an attitude and of a character entails something more than mere absence of logical contradiction. Gian falls short of logical incoherence. But she looks like a value-dyslexic.
(A state similar to dyslexia, in the sense that she cannot manage to put together the deliverances of her "moral perception" in an orderly an integrated fashion.)

The attitude I have called dyslexic can be summarized by the two mottos:
1"x makes my life go better intrinsically, but not if I don't know about it"
2"x makes my life go worse intrinsically, but not if I don't know about it"

It seems to me that if we would ever hear someone say such a thing, we would ask him:
"what the hell do you mean when you say that X contributes to your welfare intrinsically?"
and
"Are you sure it is not the case that X makes your life go better/worse extrinsically, in proportion to its contribution to your experiences?"

The burden of answering to the first of this question, is on someone who would argue in favor of such a theory.

Another way to show the oddity of a G-theory, is by means of a slippery slope argument, that shows that it can reduce to something very similar to the Mental Statism. I'll deal with this in my next post.

Why the experience requirement is wrong.

Endorsing the experience requirement creates a problem with the common sense notion that we value the success of our actions, that we want to achieve something, and not merely to think we do.

The problem with achievements is a member of a wider family. Most people prefer their desire to be realized in facts than to believe they are desire. Consider the following thought experiment (quoted from Third Person well-being in Richard's blog)

Imagine a mad scientist kidnaps you and your family, and offers you the following two options:

(1) He will let your family live in a pleasant but secluded captivity, but you will be made to believe (eg through hypnosis, or whatever) that they were all tortured and killed.

(2) He will torture and kill your family, but you will be made to believe that they are safe and well in a pleasant but secluded captivity.

After making the choice, all recollection of the bargain will be erased from your memory. Which option would you choose? Most people say #1 - the desire fulfillment option. We want our families to be well in fact, and this is more important to us than whether we merely believe that all is well.

Something similar goes with accomplishments. A quote another nice example by Richard's blog.

Molly the Mathematician
Suppose Molly spent her whole life trying to prove a fiendishly difficult theorem. She finally thinks she's achieved it, and has some other mathematicians check her proof. Molly receives their answer, believes it wholeheartedly, then dies the next day. It is later discovered that she was told the wrong answer.

Which of the following scenarios is better for Molly?
1) The mathematicians (mistakenly) tell her the proof is flawed, when in fact it is correct.

2) The mathematicians (mistakenly) tell her the proof is correct, when in fact it is flawed.

Richard thinks that 1 is better for Molly, and I tend to agree with him.

What would we say if we accept the Experience Requirement?
Someone may claim that the Experience Requirement excludes a. from being good for Molly. The reason is that we take Mary to be convinced by other mathematicians, so although her life contains an accomplishment, she does not experiences the accomplishment in the sense that she does not know that her life contains an accomplishment.
So a. is not good for Molly, and b. is also not good (because it contains no accomplishment.) The view we are considering should regard the two possibilities as indifferent. This I take to be against the intuition of people who think that 1 is better than 2.
It seems to me that opting for indifference is equivalent, in spirit, if not logically, to the idea that only experience has value.

One may object that the experience requirement, taken the right way, would say that Molly is better off if we choose 1 for her.
In fact, we can say, even if it sounds odd, that Molly
1. has the experience of proving a difficult mathematical theorem
2. proves in fact a difficult mathematical theorem
We can say that Molly has the experience of proving a difficult mathemathical theorem because we may assume that Molly is conscious when she does it. And we can say that, since Molly experiences her proving a difficult mathematical problem, and since proving a difficult mathematical problem is an accomplishment, Molly experiences in fact her accomplishment. (We would treat "having the experience of an accomplishment" as an extensional, de re mode of thought, rather than as an intensional, de dicto one.)
So, 2 tells us that Molly 's life contains an accomplishment, which is a good, while 1 ensures that she has experience of it, hence satisfying the Experience Requirement.

But there are other cases in which the Experience Requirement implies results that are more similar to answering 2, than to answering 1, in the former case.

Let us consider Brutus, who wants to kill Caesar. Brutus sees this as what he should accomplish in his life. Ceasar is turning the Roman Republic into a dictatorship. I will assume that the cases of Molly and that of Brutus are very similar in terms of the values involved.

Now imagine a case such as the following:

Brutus kills Ceasar and
1. si supponga che un accomplishment sia l'uccisione di Cesare (non
l'accoltellamento) (l'uccisione di un tiranno è un accomplishment, non
il suo mero accoltellamento) e che Cesare muoia subito dopo la morte di
Bruto
2. abbiamo due possibilità: A. il fatto che Cesare muore rende ciò di
cui Bruto ha esperienza un accomplishment; B il fatto che Cesare muore
non rende ciò di cui Bruto ha esperienza un accomplishment (oppure " fa
si che Bruto abbia una esperienza veridica di un accomplishment")
3. se A, allora l'experience requirement non serve a niente (perché ciò
che accade dopo la morte di Cesare può rendere la sua vita migliore.)
4. se B, allora possiamo passare dal piano temporale al piano spaziale,
e creare un caso analogo che non ha niente a che vedere con l'aspetto
postumo
5. caso non postumo: Bruto accoltella Cesare e poi viene messo in
prigione dove viene tenuto in vita ma privato di ogni informazione.
Cesare muore. Questo non fa si che Bruto abbia esperienza del suo
accomplishment, dunque la vita di Bruto è tanto felice come se non
avesse un accomplishment.
6. ma se 5 è vero, allora sembra del tutto arbitrario negare che valga
il caso inverso: Bruto accoltella Cesare. Cesare muore. Bruto viene
messo in prigione nelle stesse condizioni in cui in 5. Bruto ha avuto
esperienza del suo accomplishment, dunque la vita di Bruto è più felice
che se non avesse ucciso Cesare. Dopo un anno, arriva Gesu Cristo e
resuscita Cesare. Naturalmente Bruto ignora questo. Può la sua vita
peggiorare? Non si vede come si possa dire di si a questo e allo
stesso tempo affermare la 5. Ma la nostra intuizione, se ammettiamo gli
accomplishment, è che se Gesù Cristo resuscita Cesare, la vita di Bruto
diventa peggiore (nel senso che perde un accomplishment.). Cioè negare
questo significa negare gli accomplishment, nel senso del successo.


> Questo ci consente di dire che l'experiency
> requirement non è vuoto, nel senso di ammettere desideri dei morti, ma
> - se assunto in maniera troppo forte - rischia di ammettere anche le
> esperienze non veridiche.

Esattamente questo è quello che ho mostrato.

> Ma di questo abbiamo a lungo parlato, e
> l'enabling condition assunta propriamente aiuta anche ad evitarlo.

No come vedi non funziona. Almeno, non riesce ad evitare che la teoria
ammetta qualcosa di molto simile alle esperienze non veridiche, cioè le
"vittorie di Pirro". L'experience requirement, preso in senso stretto,
esclude la rilevanza del fatto che Gesù resusciti Cesare. Ma
l'esperienza veridica (di Bruto, di uccidere Cesare) seguita dal
resuscitare di Cesare (di cui Bruto non ha esperienza) è qualcosa di
molto simile all'esperienza non veridica di uccidere Cesare. Per
escludere questo tipo di fatti, l'enabling condition deve funzionare in
modo molto strano: cioè, escludere i fatti fuori dall'esperienza che
aumentano il valore (come la morte di Cesare in 1)
e ammettere i fatti fuori dall'esperienza che diminuiscono il valore
(come il risuscitare di Cesare a causa di Cristo in 6).

Spero di averti convinto.

REPLY to REPLY BY GIANFRANCO/1: on the language used to express the thesis

Gianfranco's criticism is correct. It is true that X being a necessary condition for Y to be a value does not imply that X is what it is in virtue of which that Y has value, etc. It is also true that certain views that adopt the Experience Requirement do not reduce to Experientialism, because the Experience Machine scenario can be excluded by some of them. Yet there are problems for such a view as well, as I will show in the next post.

Now I want to correct the language used in the previous formulation of the Experience Requirement:

As I stated it, the Experience Requirement was
“1. Experience Requirement: something (some state of affairs) can be good for the subject only if it enters the subject’s experience.”

But what does it mean that an (obtaining) state of affairs enters a subject’s experience?
It seems that a much better formulation of the Experience Requirement should be something along these lines:
1’ (Experience Requirement) an obtaining state of affairs is good for the subject S only if it is a state of the world in which A. there is something intrinsically valuable, and 2. the subject has an experience of something intrinsically valuable.

Now some things follow from this formulation: what does it mean to say that in this world there is something intrinsically valuable (say, real friendship)? It means that the existence of some instances of friendships are good absolutely (they make the world a better, or intrinsically preferable, world.)
It certainly does not mean that the existence of friendship, in itself, is good for the subject S.
According to the experience requirement, the only states that can be good for a subejct are states that include subjects having experiences.

Thus one may say that according to the experience requirement all states of affairs that can be good for a subject are, or better, include experiences.

Does this view suffer from the Experience Machine objection? The answer is clearly no, as shown in "Can we use the experience requirement in a reasonable way?".

Is a theory of welfare that includes the experience requirement different from Mental Statism?

1. Experience requirement: something (some state of affairs) can be good for the subject only if it enters the subject’s experience.
2. Mental Statism: the only things that can be good are experiences, or the subject's (conscious) mental states.

Take a theory that purports to be different from “Mental Statism”, but contains the Experience Requirement. Such a theory may hold that, although there are other things beside experience that are good (e.g. accomplishments, real friendships, etc.), those things are good for a subject S¸ only if S has experience of them. Let us call this theory K.

Does K differ from Mental Statism?

I believe they end up saying the same thing; in fact what K says boils down to the following:

1. X (say, having a good friend) is good for S, only if X causes the experience of X in S
2. Thus it is natural to think that X is good for S in virtue of his power to cause a certain experience of S, an experience as of X.
3. Therefore, anything that has the same power (the power to cause the experience as of X in S) will be as good for S, as X itself.
4. But if X is good in virtue of his power to cause something, it is only instrumentally good. What is really good is X’s effect, namely S’s experience as of X.
5. So we are back to the theory that the only things that are good for a subject can be his experiences.

REPLY by Gianfranco to: is a theory with the experience requirement different from Experientialism:
Gianfranco sent me the following comment (in Italian, I translate):

Dancy's idea of an enabling condition is useful to avoid the step 1. Dancy explains that an enabling condition enables, but is not a ground of value in itself. An example with regard to causal explanation goes as follows: if I have to explain the the cause of an event that took place yesterday, for example that a light bulb exploded, I may mention causes and maybe laws. And I can say that all these things (laws are a problem, obviously) are grounds of the bulb's explosion. Obviously, if Italy had sinked in the Mediterranean See the day before, it would have not been true that the buld exploded. But it would be absurd to mention this as a cause of the fact that the bulb didn't explode. That Italy is still here functions as a general enabling condition of that causal explanation, a condition that does not have to be mentioned in the explanation, but that is a condition. What is important is that an enabling condition is something that must be there so that something else happens, but it is not what makes it happen.

Moving this in the field of value: an enabling condition is something that must be there so that something else has value, but is not what it is in virtue of which that something has value. Therefore in the objection, one who accepts the notion of enabling condition does not accept step 2. Something is not good for a subject *in virtue* of its power to cause an experience in him. But if something has not this power, two things follow: either it is not a good, or it is not a good of that subject.
Therefore you can refute 3: not all things that have the power to cause experiences of a certain sort in a subject are good for the subject, even if all goods are things that have the power to cause experiences, or they must be so to be good for a subject. The last conclusion seems to be what the experience requirements tries to capture, if I understand it well.

Accomplishments, posthumous harm, and the experience requirement.

It seems that a theory that says that accomplishing something is good for the accomplisher, must admit the possibility of posthumous harm and benefit. Why?Consider the following example:

Bernard Russell is said to have spent his last years trying to make the prospects of a nuclear war less likely. Most people would think that the extent to which he achieved something with his life depends to the extent to which he actually succeeded in decreasing the chances of war.

This seems to entail that Russell's life could have been made worse, that is to say, a worse life for him to live, by some event after his death, such as that there would be a nuclear war.

I cannot accept posthumous death, for reasons I explained in this other post. First of all, I find it utterly impalatable that my life can be changed in any respect after it had ended. Secondly, it seems that well-being of a subject has something to do with the properties that are in some profound sense properties of that subject, and "living in a world in which later on a nuclear war takes place" does not seem to qualify in any was as a property that is about that subject in the sense we want it to be.

One way to get rid of the impalatable conclusion of posthumous harm, is through imposing an experience requirement on one’s theory of welfare. Then we may say that accomplishing something for real is good for the subject, but only under the condition that it is experienced. So we can say that what happened after Russell’s death cannot make his life either better nor worse, because those are facts that cannot enter his experience.

The perfect theory of individual welfare

I think that the perfect theory of welfare must satisfy the following two desiderata:

1. it must deny that future facts can make a person better off retroactively. That is: what happens after my death cannot make me no harm, no good.
2. it must avoid the Experience Machine objection.

I take the denial of 1 to go against common sense. In the philosophical literature there is no consensus on whether posthumous harm (or benefit) is possible, but when I try to ask people outside philosophy if they think they can be harmed by something that happens after they are dead, they look at me as if I was talking non-sense.

And I believe that their reaction makes a lot of sense. Given that backward causation is impossible, how can I be made worse off by an event taking place after my death? How can that event cause my life to change in any way? And isn't "becoming better" (or worse) a way for something to change? The intuition that is driving our doubts is that what makes a subject's life go bad must do it in virtue of causing a change in that life. But what do we mean by "a life"? It is difficult to define what qualifes as a change in one's life, because it is difficult to define what is truly part of one's life, and what is only superficially so. Sumner writes:

"... it will be difficult ... to delimit the states of the world which are (also) states of me. It seems intuitively obvious that my age, gender, physical health, place of residence, and so on, are all states of me. But is it a state of me that my children fare well? Is it a state of me that I live in a crime-free nightborhood? That I am alive when human beings first reach the moon? That the world I inhabit also includes the Rocky Mountains?" (The Subjectivity of Welfare, 778, n.)

On a certain view of the self as the physical individual one is, it is reasonable to think that what makes one's life go worse must cause a change in "an intrinsic physical property of the individual"; notice that I use the expression "an intrinsic physical property of the individual" as a shorthand for "an intrinsic property of a physical state of the physical individual one is". (Note 1)

But in this case, clearly, no event that is taking place after one's death can be what makes one life go worse, because no such event can cause a change in one's "intrinsic physical properties" (in the sense above.) This view of the self makes sense of the intuition of the man in the street.

It may be more appropriate to call what I called "a certain view of the self" a theory about the substance of individual lives. On this view, someone's life contains only those events that are changes in one's "intrinsic physical properties" or changes in those properties that supervene narrowly on the latter.

One may refuse the latter view of what lives are. But we need some sort of limiting principle of what sort of state and events count truly as "about one's life", because failing to be so would imply that any change in the world can count as a change in our life, and hence may count as a a change in one's welfare. This has many counter-intuitive consequences, as we shall see.

For example, the fact that grammar does not provide a criterion for delimiting what belongs to my life and what doesn't represents a problem for desire-fulfillment theories (people who hold that what welfare is a function of the fulfilment of the desires one has, or would have under special circumstances.) The simplest form of such theories is what has been called an "unrestricted" desire-fulfilment theory. This theory faces a fundamental objection, nicely described by the following example by Parfit:

suppose I meet a stranger on the bus, who tells me about his illness, and I form the sudden desire that he recovers. Suppose that I leave this stranger and don't hear about him anymore. The unrestricted theory implies that when the stranger recovers from his illness some year later, my life is made better by this fact.

One way to avoid this conclusion is to consider only the fulfilment of those desires that are about one's life. But then we face the previous problem, that any state of the world can be described as a state of one's life. Parfit, pp.494-5, for example, argues that we should exclude desires that are only superficially about one’s own life – e.g. the desire to be someone whose children’s lives go well (independently of your own efforts) – whilst including similar ones such as the desire to be a good parent and so have given one’s children a good start in life. But is there a single valid criterion to distinguish which desires are really about one's life, and which are only superficially so? I am deeply skeptical that any such clear cut formal criterion can be produced.

In particular, I hold that any descriptive criterion that includes more states of the world than the physical one does, will be hopelessly expansive. By this I mean that, if we choose a criterion that is less restrictive than the physical one, I think we will be unable to limit it in such a way that it picks up only states that it is reasonable to consider as belonging to our lives. (Note 2)

So, in the absence of any meaningful wide theory of what "lives" are, the position of the man in the street, that events taking place after one's death cannot do one harm or good, seems very reasonable, for it is implied by the most liberal "non-expansive" criteria of what one's life consists in. (note 3)

Secondly, as pointed out by Kagan ("The limits of well-being") among others, the concept of welfare is the concept of what is good "for a" subject. What is good for a subject cannot simply be what is good in an impersonal way. A theory of welfare has to explain what it means for some state of affairs to be good for that subject, and not absolutely. So the state of affairs in question must relate in a deep way to the subject whose good it constitutes, but in what way? If we don't want to have a view that is hopelessy expansive, it seems we must adopt the physical criterion or something even stricter. (Kagan himself considers only mental states to "belong to subject" in the relevant sense.)

As for 2, we don't want our theory of welfare to have the consequence that the best life for you could be a life connected to something like Nozick's Experience Machine (also known as "The Matrix".) Most people's intuition is that they want their desires to be fulfilled, and not simply to have the experience as of the fulfilment of their desires. And most people's intuition is that a life hooked up to the Matrix would be of very little value for the person who lives it (in the sense that no one would choose to live such a life forever.)

In particular, most people want their actions to succeed; they want to accomplish things, and not merely to get the pleasing illusion that they have accomplished something. To say that the only thing that matter in one's life are one's experiences (states of the mind-with no a-priori connection to something external), amounts to say that success cannot be intrinsically valuable.
(The reason for this is that most of the times we aim to produce states of the world, not of states of our own consciousness.)

A moral theory that gives no place at all to success, except as cause of certain types of experience, is a theory that goes deeply against common sense. But a theory according to which the only things that matter are one's experience is exactly such a theory. Thus the perfect theory of welfare cannot say that one's experiences are all that matter.

(Notice that a theory that confines well-being to "one's intrinsic physical properties"(in the above defined sense) and to narrowly supervening properties faces similar problems with respect to the value of success. Thus, these two requirements push us in two opposite directions, and probably cannot be meet by any valid theory of welfare, as I will try to show in some other post.)


Notes
1. I use "physical states" in a way that is roughly equivalent to "physical configuration" or "structure" . "Being 1ooo miles away from Tokyo" is not an intrinsic property of the "bodily state", at a time t, of that physical individual that (at the time t) is Mark. On the contrary, a certain extension and a certain mass are intrinsic properties of this bodily state. Now, a property can be an intrinsic property of a physical state of a (physical) individual even if it is not an intrinsic property of that individual.
For example "having a mass of 80 kg" is an intrinsic property of a physical state of Marco's body (or better, of that physical body that at time t is Marco), but it is not an intrinsic property of Marco, as it is contingent that Marco's mass is 80 kg (or better, that the mass of that physical body that at time t is Marco is 80 kg.)
2. The criterion that can be extrapolated by Parfit's examples is that a state of the world is part of one's life if one had an active role in bringing it about (think about the desire to give one children a good start in life.) But there are so many causal paths that can be traced back to our actions, that this criterion also seems hopelessly expansive. One could prevent the criterion to expand in this way by including only the intentional consequences of one actions, but this has the following problem:

suppose that I desire to give my children a good start in life, but I actually end up producing just the opposite state of affairs: my children become psychologically fragile and as a result end up as drug addicts and serial killers. It would make no sense, in this case, to consider their psychological fragility and their social role as an intended consequence of my actions. Yet it would be absurd to say that these facts cannot make my life worse, if on the other hand my success as an educator can make my life better.

3.Another non-expansive descriptive criterion is that which identifies a life, a self or a subject with his or her own experience. And this criterion entails that posthumous harm or benefit is impossible, as well. The states of the world that count as making up an individual life, under the experiential criterion, are a subset of the latter set. (If experience supervenes on the physical properties of the individual.) Thus the experiential criterion is less liberal than the former. Any other non-hopelessly expansive descriptive criterion will be, if I am right, less liberal than the physical criterion.

Esteem and pleasure.

What do you think about this?
it gives us a bit of pleasure to think of ourselves as esteemed, even when we entertain this thought as a fantasy.

Value of future esteem.

What is the value of future esteem? I tend to deny that esteem has any intrinsic value for the esteemed. Thus I've got to explain why we can be rational and care about our future esteem. But I also think that it is impossible to have "posthumos harm" as it is sometimes called. There is a theory that produces an explanation of why we care about posthumous esteem that does not involve the idea of posthumous harm (or benefit).

Premises:
1. pleasure is always unconditionally good for the subject
2. pleasure is not the only (prudential) good. There is at least another good that is having true beliefs
3. we have reasons to want to have pleasure
4. we have reasons to want to have true beliefs
5. We take pleasure in contemplating a state of affairs in which we are esteemed, whether it is now or after our death.
6. having the belief that (at a certain time t) we are esteemed is more pleasurable than simply contemplating the mere possibility.
7. having the belief that (at a certain time t) we are not esteemed reduces or destroies the pleasure of fancying that we are esteemed

From these premises, it is possible to show that it is reasonable to care about one's future esteem.

When I think that after my death I will be esteemed, I am pleased by this thought. This pleasure increases when I believe that after my death I will indeed be esteemed.

Given 2, I have reasons to want myself to believe that I will be esteemed. For this reason, I also have a reason to make it probable that this will be indeed be the case. Its being reasonable to believe now that I will be esteemed after my death will normally cause me to believe that I will be esteemed after my death. I have no other way to make myself believe that I will be esteem except that. (Note 1)
(note 1: of course, I could find other ways to produce the belief that I will be esteemed in the future. For example, I could take a drug, hire a scientist to play with my brain, hire some skillful actors, etc... But all these ways will be inconsistent with the value I attach to true, so they are not open to me in a welfare maximizing strategy.)

This shows that it is rational in normal condition to provide for one's posthumous esteem. The reason for this is not that the posthumous state of affairs can affect my well-being, but that my present pleasure and my present having true beliefs can.