A short question about reasons

Actually, two questions:

A. Is the following inference valid, according to your view on reasons?
B. Is the following inference valid, according to Scanlon's view on reasons?


Does:

1. X= Y

eg. talking to Maffettone = talking to the biggest expert on J. Rawls in Italy)

+

2. I have a reason to X

e.g I have a reason to talk to the biggest expert on J. Rawls in Italy. (Suppose I am writing a thesis on J.Rawls

entail

3. I have a reason to Y

(I have a reason to talk to Maffettone)

even if I do not know, and I cannot possibly know that X = Y,

e.g. because I do not know whether Maffettone is the biggest expert on J.Rawls in Italy, and (let us suppose, even if it sounds odd) there is no way to know this.

Do people value their own well-being? 2

Some updates. I talked this morning with my friend Francesco Orsi about Scanlon's view about well-being and about whether he provides a buck-passing account of the value of well-being. Here is a brief summary of the discussion.

1.
Francesco: First of all, it would be odd (prima facie) to buck-pass the concept of well-being. Well-being is "a" good, while the buck-passing account should be used for thin concepts like right or good.
Michele's answer: this may be true if we are dealing with a thik notion of well-being. But SCanlon defines well-being as "what makes a life a good life for the person who lives it" or as a concept at the same level of generality. This concept is quite thin, almost as thin as the concept of good.


2.
Francesco: Second problem. Well-being is constituted or made of of other goods. This may be understood as an identity relation. For example, let us assume that hedonism is right, i.e. well-being is made of pleasure (and only of pleasure). In this case we might have :

property A (X non-derivatively contributes to well-being)
property B (X is pleasurable)
A = B

In the case of good, if a buck-passing account applies, we would have:
(let us assume pleasure is the only good thing)
Property B (X is pleasurable)
Property C (X is good)
Buck-passing (for properties)
C (X is good) = X has a property which gives us a reason to respond to it in a certain way
Hence
C not = to B

3.
Francesco notices that the buck-passing view is sometimes understood as a claim about concepts, and sometimes as a claim about properties.

4.
Michele: It sounds fine that the relation between pleasure and well-being need not be symmetric to the buck-passing relation between good and good things. Even if Scanlon does not provide a "buck-passing account" of the value of well-being, I want to know whether it follows from the buck-passing view and the fact that well-being is an inclusive and transparent good that well-being is valuable.

5.
Michele: moreover I would like to understand if the facts that appear in reasons are intentional or extensional (I do not know really how to use these terms, but here is what I mean:)

"does the conjunction of the following two facts:
1. X=Y
2. I have a reason to desire X

entails

3. I have a reason to desire Y

even if I do not know, and I cannot possibly know that X = Y,

(at least in so far as Scanlon's view of reasons is in question)?"

if the answer is "yes" , it seems that we might have something like the following:

(let us assume, for the sake of the argument, that:
0. A is pleasurable
0a. "X is pleasurable" entails "X constitutes my well-being", or equivalently "X is a part of my well-being")

1a. A = a part of my well-being (follows from 0 and 0a)
2a. I have a reason to desire A (because A is pleasurable)
hence
3a. I have a reason to desire (a part of) my well-being

this holds even if I do not know that 0a, even if I never think about 0a, and even if there is no way in principle for me to know 0a.

6.
Francesco notices that we must distinguish between non-derivative and derivative reasons for something. For example if

X=Maffettone
and
Y= the biggest Italian expert on Rawls

and I am writing a thesis on Rawls, I have a non-derivative reason to visit Y (the major Italian expert on Rawls) and a derivative reason to go to talk with Maffettone.

Michele replies that the buck-passing view seems to apply to non-derivative and derivative reasons as well. In fact, if I have a derivative reason to go to talk with Maffettone, I can say that Maffettone is valuable (has a property, that of being the biggest Italian expert on Rawls) which gives me a reason to respect his opinions about Rawls.


6.
Conclusions:
As Francesco notices, we do not have to interpret the claim that well-being is a transparent good as entailing the claim that we can apply the buck-passing view to well-being. Well-being can be said to be constituted by things that are good for me; or we may have something like (contingent? a-priori but non trivial?) identity among properties.

Michele agrees and adds that, given that Scanlon does not claim to provide a buck-passing account of well-being, we must take his silence at face value and suppose that the relation between well-being and the goods that make it up is one of constitution or something else.

Michele also notices that, if this is true, Scanlon's claim about the transparency of well-being should be read as claims about the uses of concepts in the first-person point of view, claims that may lead, but do not explicitly lead to metaphysical conclusions about properties. On the contrary the buck-passing view can be read as a claim about properties.

Michele also notices another Scanlon's oddity:

Why does Scanlon NOT analyze the relation between well-being and the goods that make it up IN THE SAME WAY as the relation between the good and good things?

After all, the intuition behind the thesis that well-being is a transparent good is very similar to the intuitions that motivate the buck-passing account of good.

In fact what justifies transparency is the idea that

the property "X is/constitutes/ my well-being" does not give me an (extra) reason to respond to X, beyond the reasons that derive from other properties of X.

and what justify the buck-passing account of the good is the idea that

the property "X is good" does not represent a reason to respond to X, beyond the reasons that derive from other properties of X.

Do people value their own well-being?

Scanlon never explicitly explains how the buck-passing account of value he develops in ch.2 of "what we owe to each other" applies to the value of well-being. Yet, it is almost irresistible to use the buck-passing view to understand his symultaneous defence of the claim that it would sound absurd to say that people are NOT concerned with their own well-being AND of the claim that well-being is a transparent good, (see beyond).

I am deeply puzzled by the question how to interpret the application of the buck-passing account of value to the claim that well-being is a transparent good. Here I try to give my own understanding of it. Please leave your own opinion or correction if you have one.

Scanlon's account of what it means for something to be valuable (the famous or infamous buck-passing account) is the following one:

“being good, or valuable, is not a property that itself provides a reason to respond to a thing in certain ways. Rather, to be good or valuable is to have other properties that constitute such reasons” (1998: 97)

Scanlon therefore should claim that well-being is something valuable, in so far as it has some properties that provide people with reasons to respond to it in certain ways. For example, my well-being has to property of being constituted by my playing tennis and my spending time with my girlfriend. Playing tennis and spending time with my girlfriend have the additional property of being enjoyable, which provides me with reasons to spend time with my girlfriend and to play tennis; since my well-being is constituted by these activities these count also as reasons to promote my well-being.“It is certainly true that we have reasons, in everyday decisions about what to do, to aim at things that contribute directly to our well-being intuitively understood”, as he writes (1998: 126). Hence well-being has the further property of “being constituted by states and activities which provide me with reasons to promote it”, and is therefore valuable.

What Scanlon denies is the “importance of the concept of well-being in [any] given mode of thinking” (1998:126). In the mode of thinking of an agent who is trying to decide how to live the concept of well-being is transparent [an idea I present in this post], i.e. the fact that something contributes to my well-being does not give me a reason to desire it or value it. In a more general formulation, the fact “that X results into an increase of p's well-being” cannot be considered in p's perspective as a reason to pursue X. Hence transparency entails well-being has no further properties, besides the properties of the goods that make it up, that can provide people with reasons to respond to it in certain ways. Transparency does not entail that well-being has no properties providing people with reasons to respond to it in certain ways. Well-being is therefore good and valuable, even if transparent.

Scanlon: Well-being as an inclusive and transparent good.

Scanlon argues the concept of well-being is that of a transparent and inclusive good. Well-being is an inclusive good because it

“is made up of other things that are good in their own right, not made good by their contribution to it” (1998: 127),

Well-being is made up, for example, by things that can be abstractly described as forms of enjoyments and accomplishments. Such things are valuable in their own right:

“If you ask me why I listen to music, I may reply that I do so because I enjoy it. [...] [In order to explain why I strive to succeed in philosophy] it would make [...] sense to say that I work hard at philosophy because I believe it is worthwhile, or because I enjoy it, or even because I long for the thrill of success.” (1998: 126-127)

(Notice that what is in question here is the notion of a reason, taken as the sort of thing that can make sense of a choice, an action, or a desire. A reason can make sense of an action by showing it to be called for; for some actions this can be done by showing that the action brings about a desirable consequence. The reason for an action is not a desire, unless the latter is supported by a correct “evaluation of the desired object as good – as, for example, pleasant, interesting, advantageous, stature-enhancing, decent, and the like” as Quinn (1998: 200) writes. The justification of an action or a choice requires facts belonging to the latter category, that is, facts such as that something is pleasant or interesting, not the facts about what a person desires. According to Scanlon, whenever a desire can be said to provide a reason, it does only as a further consequence of these other class of facts See this post.)

According to Scanlon, the concept of well-being is also evaluatively transparent, meaning that “the things that contribute to it are valued primarily for other reasons” (1998: 129). What Scanlon means is that, even if a valuable accomplishment (i.e. climbing the Himalaya) increases our well-being, that fact that it does cannot be the reason for which I took it up to do it.

Summing up. well-being is not only an inclusive good – meaning constituted by things that are good or choiceworthy in their own right – but also transparent, because, for agent p, knowing that some choiceworthy things constitute his or her own well-being does not make them more valuable in p's eyes.

In other words the transparency of well-being derives from the fact that facts.

A. “A life that includes enjoyment is a better life”

or

B. “My life will be more successful if I am successful in my main aims, insofar they are rational”

do not give the agent any further reason to play tennis or strive to succeed in philosophy;(in addition, that is, to the fact that playing tennis is enjoyable and that a job as a philosopher is prestigious, or that philosophy is intrinsically rewarding).

Scanlon: desires and reasons/ Justification.

Scanlon's discussion of the relation between desires and practical reason (in "What We Owe...) is complex and nuanced.Here I will sum up what I take to be its most important elements. Scanlon argues that our reasons derive, at the most fundamental level, from facts about the objects of our desires.

(Which facts? Typically, facts including some kind of evaluation of the desired object as, for example, pleasant, interesting, advantageous, stature-enhancing, decent, and the like.)

Sometimes those facts include our “subjective reactions”. For example, “a large part of the point of eating ice cream or taking a vacation is doing something that I will enjoy, so one's “subjective reactions” are obviously of prime significance to the reasons one has for doing these things one way rather than another.” (1998: 42). But notice that these subjective conditions are not facts about a person's desires but facts about what a person enjoys.

Other times subjective reactions have no importance and they should be corrected to fit the worth of their object; so for example the fact that I have a reason to prevent the destruction of some great building, it has nothing to do with how I feel about it. (1998: 42)

There might be cases in which it appears that desires provide additional reasons for actions. Scanlon argues that, appearances notwithstanding, this is mistaken. There are at least two roles that desire can play, which are worth mentioning (none of which corresponds to being an independent source of reasons for actions):
(1) desires provide evidence of future enjoyment (44-45);
and
(2) there are states - that we may vulgarly call “desire” - which involve, in addition to the recognition of a certain fact as a good reason, the agent's decision to take those facts as grounds for action. (p. 46)

The latter fact expresses a desire or intention, understood as a provisional adoption of a plan of action. Facts about the agent's intentions (understood in this way) make a difference to what the agent has most reasons to do, since at every moment there are many goals that are worth considering, and some plans of action must be selected. Following Bratman, Scanlon holds that there is a reason to carry out a plan that has been already adopted unless there is some reason to reconsider it. But such plans are not independent sources of reasons, since their adoption is justified, at the end of the chain of justifications only by reasons of the more usual kind (1998: 46).

Scanlon: why well-being evaluations do not matter /1

In this and the following posts, I will reconstruct Scanlon's argument (in "What We Owe To Each Other, Harvard University Press, 1998) about why well-being evaluations do not matter. Scanlon addresses this issue in Ch.3 of the aforementioned book. I believe his reflections in this book are extremely profound, as they call into questions the main presuppositions of those philosophers that work within the boundaries of the utilitarian tradition. If you are interested in understanding the nature of well-being, from the philosophical point of view, then you just cannot afford to ignore his arguments.

Scanlon's arguments are such that, if you accept them, you will probably stop asking yourself questions as

• "can the quality of my life be affected by an even which I cannot experience ?"
• "is there such a things a posthumous harm?"
• "Shall I count an altruist act as something which increases my well-being?"

Reading ch.3 of Scanlon's book is therefore strongly recommended to anybody who has been hounted by such questions. He calls into question the idea that such questions are even meaningful!

For me, the fist step of Scanlon's argument, consists in some apparently innocent claims: the conceptual distinctions about different conceptions of the "quality of life" that he asks his readers to accepts. I have dealt with the meaning of Scanlon's "conceptual topology" in this post, (also this, and this). If you accept his distinctions, you are assuming that well-being can be characterized as:

"an idea of the quality of a life for the person who lives it that is broader than material and social conditions, at least potentially broader than experiential quality, different from worthiness or value, and narrower than choiceworthiness all things considered". (112-113)

No philosophical distinction is trivial or evaluatively neutral. I have argued in the preceding posts that the cases in which it is less question-begging to say that picking up the most choiceworthy life entails “a sacrifice of well-being”” are those in which moral worth and moral reasons are called into question.

Let us now turn to a point in which there is more flesh.

SCANLON'S GOAL

His goal is to deny that well-being, conceived as a teleological value, is a “master” value, the ultimate moral value to which all other values can be reduced. In order to prove his point, Scanlon has to show that well-being is not a value, or that, if it is a value, it is either a non-teleological value or not a master value.

(We shall later see what Scanlon means by the concept of "teleological value".)

[See p. 108, op cit.]

Scanlon does not want to deny that that it is, in some sense, a valuable things that people have well-being. This is also because, in Scanlon's perspective, we can say that the well-being of an individual results from his or her achieving goals that he or she values. So he wants to leave room to our intuitions that the fact that people are well-off is valuable.

What Scanlon wants to do, is trying to show that, even if well-being is a value, in some sense, a conception of personal well-being does not appear as a source of reasons for the agent. In order to achieve this result, Scanlon offers an account of the concept of well-being as that of a transparent and inclusive good.

In the next post, I will explain Scanlon's idea that well-being is a transparent inclusive good.

Scanlon: the idea of moral self-sacrifice and its justification

The possibility of distinguishing moral worth from well-being, as I have argued in the previous post, presupposes that the following principle or something like it is true:

M1: there can be cases in which morality requires from person p that she Fs, even when F-ing decreases p’s well-being or fail to maximize it, p desires to F (despite her awareness of well-being cost) and she is committed to respect values which justify the requirement in question.


We can see that this principle can be justified in terms of two principles that are - taken singularly, at least - more widely shared than M1 itself. The first being:

M: morality can require from p the performance of an act F that decreases p’s well-being or fails to maximize it

M, by itself, does not grant the possibility of self-sacrifice in the full, i.e. the voluntary, sense. M only says that some people, maybe very wicked people who would never do a moral act voluntarily, that is to say, people who could not be brought to desire - in the sense involving only the having of a pro-attitude - to act morally, would end up worse off if they were to do what they morally ought to. It leaves open the possibility that the rest of us, i.e. people who can choose do what is morally good do not loose any well-being by performing such acts.


M is therefore still compatible with a range of theories about well-being that have what is usually considered a vice: the vice of turning every action into a self-interested one, that is, the vice of turning self-sacrifice as a conceptual impossibility. Unrestricted desire theory may entail, for example, that if we decide to sacrifice our life in order to save the life of all other citizens in our country, because we love our country more than we love ourselves, we end up better off, since we get what we most wanted.

It is another relatively uncontroversial and widely shared claim about theories of well-being that they should allow us to talk consistently about self-sacrifice as a voluntary sacrifice of well-being. But once this much is allowed, it seems that those cases in which someone is committed to a higher goal than the maximization of her own well-being, and performs voluntarily an action that he knows being such as to involve a loss of well-being, are the ones to which we shall attribute the highest moral worth. So the most plausible rendering of Scanlon's idea that sacrifices of well-being can increase the moral worth of our lives is given by M1.

Scanlon and well-being - 2. Moral worth and self-sacrifice

Can we characterize more formally the idea Scanlon's distinction is meant to capture?
Certainly, Scanlon's idea presupposes two ideas:

1. the moral worth of a life (or of the choices that the agent makes when he lives) is one of the aspect of a life's "total" worth, or its "choiceworthiness all-things-considered"

2. the moral worth of a life can be augmented by a sacrifice of well-being.

Claim 1 could be regarded as true ex-costructo : it is part of the way the concept of choiceworthiness is introduced that it includes what we may call "the moral worth of a life". But the claim also follows from the meaning of "choiceworthiness" and our intuitions about what has"worth". Many philosophers (Nietzsche being a relevant example of the opposite) think that acting morally gives our life some sort of objective worth.

Claim 2, is, I believe, really fundamental. Saying that self-sacrifice can have moral worth, I believe, entails the truth of the following claim:
(that I shall call M1, because there is an even more basic principle that I shall call M)

M1: there can be cases in which morality requires from person p that she Fs, even when F-ing decreases p’s well-being or fail to maximize it, p desires to F (despite her awareness of well-being cost) and she is committed to respect values which justify the requirement in question

The axioms of "well-being" usage.

The axioms of "well-being" usage:

Griffin's point, Mill's clause and Scanlon's definition of the distinction between well-being and choiceworthiness are based upon the same - very un-Aristotelian - insight: the idea that acting morality can require a sacrifice of the well-being of the agent, even if acting morally is, and is recognized by the agent as being, the most rational thing to do all-things-considered.

My first aim, is therefore, to characterize a set of actioms that are true, by definition, of the concept of well-being as it appears in the discussions of a class of philosophers. I believe that a couple of actioms regards the independence between moral evaluations, and evaluations of rationality all-things-considered, and well-being evaluations, namely the principles M and (more controversially) M1, whoe importance I defend here and here.

Another feature is the idea that well-being evaluations differ from perfectionist evaluations. This thought is the cornerstone of Sumner's analysis of the concept. This is an idea that I have tried to criticize here, here and here. Instead of criticizing it directly, I will assume that it is correct, for the sake of the argument, and explain the difficulties that follow from attempting to respect it. A brief statement of the distinction, based upon quotes by Sumner, appears here.

Those philosophers that talk about “well-being” without assuming that M and M1 must be true, or that identify well-being with an ideal of perfection, are not the target of my criticism.

Once we have defined well-being evaluations as something different from evaluations of perfection, moral evaluations, narrower notions of well-being (pleasantness, good feeling, good material conditions, etc...), and any wider notion of a life’s value that excludes moral worth as an intrinsic component of well-being – in the sense that is spelled out by M and M1, we can ask: does the notion of well-being make sense, meaning, of course, does this notion - the notion of which the previous statements are assumed to be true?

I want to show that there is no way to grasp intellectually the sort of value that philosophers identify with well-being. This is the aim, roughly.

Let us look at the details:

T. Scanlon (What we owe to each other, ch. 3)

Scanlon assumes that the concept of well-being and the concept of choiceworthiness are not the same concept.

Scanlon has many reasons to distinguish the two concepts. Some of these reasons are peculiar to his views about the relation about value and reasons. For example, choiceworthiness can be understood as the life "one has most reasons -all things considered - to choose". Scanlon argues in a different place (ch. 2) that some of our reasons are not teleological (i.e. not reasons to produce some thing or some more thing of value). If one assumes that well-being is a teological value - i.e. its being valuable gives the agent a reason to bring about some of it - it follows trivially from the hypothesis that some of our reasons are non-teleological, that the concept of the most choiceworthy life cannot be identified with the concept of well-being, at least lacking an argument that all the reasons that apply to our choosing to live a certain life rather than another must be teleological.

But I believe that there is one reason, why Scanlon resists the identification between well-being and choiceworthiness, that is available also to those philosophers who reject Scanlon's view about the existence of non-teleological reasons. The reason why it is incorrect to identify choiceworthiness and well-being is that the connection between "picking up the most choiceworthy life" and "having a moral reason to act" is different from the connection between "aiming at maximizing personal well-being" and "having a moral reason to act".

This fact can be expressed roughly as follows: the fact that a certain life is made better, from the moral point of view, by containing act A, can make it more worthy to be chosen or desired; the same fact does not make it necessarily reacher in terms of well-being, even when in fact it does make it more choiceworthy or desirable - all things considered. This is, I think, the fundamental idea grounding the distinction.

For a more formal rendering of this principle, look here, and here.

Griffin

In many of the previous posts, I analyzed the formulas used by Griffin in order to describe the object of his enquiry, which is, as the title of his book announces, "well-being". I found that well-being (or utility) is understood by Griffin as an aspect that make lives valuable. But lives can be valuable in different senses, as Griffin acknowledges.

Griffin does not identify the dichotomy "good life" vs. "well-being" with the "objective" vs. "subjective" dichotomy: we can be wrong about whether or not we have well-being, moreover well-being is constituted by states which are not a matter of perception, in the sense in which whether or not we are 1 m tall is not a matter of perception. (See this post.) Among such objective states there are accomplishments and authentic personal relationships, at least. The value of our life in terms of well-being is also determined by the fact that we have accomplished something or an authentic human relationship with someone else, taken as realities not as perceptions, i.e. as facts which we may not recognize or perceive distortedly. (This agrees with the view I try to argue for here and here)

If you look at the textual evidence I reported (here, here, and here), it seems that Griffin, like Scanlon, is able to distinguish the concept of well-being from other concepts of "the value of a life" by introducing in his conceptual framework the idea that we have reasons to behave morally, but even when we have such reasons, the fact that we do have such reasons does not make it necessarily in our interest to act morally, i.e. it does not necessarily increase our well-being. Stated with a Nozickian terminology, ethical pull "(“the pull exerted on our action arising from the moral demands of others" (Griffin, Well-Being, 133) and ethical push “the push to our own action arising from our living a prudentially successful life" (ibid) do not necessarily coincide (see here).

J.S. MILL:

Notice that the idea that well-being evaluations - evaluations of the good in human lives understood as an aim of action - must be independent from moral evaluations is a cornerstone of utilitarian thought. (Clearly, since utilitarians need an account of "good" as something prior to "right" since they want to define "right" in terms of "good".) For example Mill wrote, in Utilitarianism, that:

Of two pleasures, if there be one to which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure.

Notice the "irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation" clause.