New revisions

I finally found the time to revise two posts that needed it badly, namely:

"Why Dworkin thinks there must be volitional well-being?"

(http://michele-journal.blogspot.com/2007/03/why-thinking-there-must-be-volitional.html)

and

"Dworkin: challenge and impact"

(http://michele-journal.blogspot.com/2007/03/dworkin-challenge-and-impact.html)


I have revised the latter substantially. In this post I wanted to shed some light on Dworkin's distinction between the "impact" and the "challenge" model of critical well-being. I had had the right intuition, but the post was totally confusing and impossible to follow. Now I think that I have managed to express my point clearly.

Dworkin: challenge and impact

In "Sovreign Virtue", Dworkin distinguishes two kinds of "metric" or "model" of ethical value, which he calls the impact model and the challenge model. The two models are so defined

"The model of impact [...] holds that the value of a good life consists in its product, that is, in its consequences for the rest of the word [...]
The model of challenge [...] argues that the goodness of a good life lies in its inherent value as a performance." (Sovreign Virtue, p. 251)

My impression is that here Dworkin collapses two distinctions which are logically independent and could prove more useful if kept separate:

1. On one hand, the model of impact differs from the model of challenge in terms of what we may call the perspective in which we understand the value of the actions it includes (or is made of). Namely: the value of a life according to the impact model is measured in "agent-neutral" and global terms, while the value of a life according to the challenge model is measure in "agent-relative" and local terms (more explanation to come).
   
2. On the other hand, the distinction between the two models appears to have to do with the distinction between a consequentialist perspective and a non-consequentialist ones.
   

These two distinctions, I shall now show, do not coincide. In fact, they are ortogonal.

Dworkin argues that the impact of a person is "the difference his life makes to the objective value in the world" (ibid, 251.). So far this only tells us that in order to know the ethical value of a life, we need to be able to make some evaluation of value on a global scale: we must look at the total change of value in the world brought about by a life. This evaluation is conceived by Dworkin in terms of "agent-neutral" terms, even if in order to notice this one must look at the way the opposition between the two models is defined. The other aspect of the model of impact is that the value it ascribes to a life is a reflection of the value of the consequences which follow from it. Although Dworking does not state this clearly, they way he speaks about the model of impact suggests that value resides, ultimately, upon the consequences of action, and that the actions of the individual are valuable only instrumentally or at most have a "derivatively" that is to say, they have some value "in themselves" which is the "reflection" of the consequence they produce. This is expressed clearly by several passages:

"A life can have more or less value, the model claims, not because it is intrinsically more valuable to live one's life in one way rather than another, but because living in one way can have better consequences" (252)

and

"The model hopes to dissipate the mysteries of ethical value by tying it to another, apparently less mysterious, kind of value: the value that objective states of affairs of the world can have." (252)

"The model of impact [...] holds that the ethical value of a life [...] is parasitic on and measured by the value of its consequences for the rest of the world."
(252)

According to the model of challenge, on the contrary:

"a good life has the inherent value of a skillful performance.[...] The idea that a skillful performance has an inherent value is a perfectly familiar as a kind of value within lives. We admire a complex and elegant dive, for example, whose value persists after the last ripple has died, and we admire people who climbed Mount Everest because , as they said, it was there. The model of challenge holds that living a life is itself a performance that demands skill, that it is the most comprehensive and important challenge we fact, and that our critical interests consist in the achievements, events, and experiences that mean that we have met the challenge well." (253,)

The model of challenge differs from the model of impact in two dimensions. First of all, it differs from it in terms of the criteria of evaluation of a life's worth. According to the model of challenge the criteria of evaluation we adopt are agent-relative and local , while according to the model of impact they are agent-neutral and global. According to the model of impact the worth of an individual performance or act is a function of an agent-neutral value, the value of the (global) state of affairs that the individual performance produced. On the contrary, according to the model of challenge, it is also a function of circumstances in which that performance took place. The measure of worth is - in a sense - indexed with respect to local aspects of the world, such as the proximate situation in which the performance takes place.

Notice that the difference between the two models does not coincide with the difference between valuing a life in virtue of only its "intrinsic" vs. also "extrinsic" properties. On both models, the worth of a life depends from features that are extrinsic to it: in the model of impact, it is a function of the total change of value brought about in the world, while in the model of impact, it is also a function of the circumstances in which the performance takes place. What really changes is, rather, the dimension of the reality which contributes to determine the worth of an individual life: according to the model of impact the worth of a life depends on features of the world at large, while according to the model of challenge it depends on local features of the world.

The other dimension involved by Dworkin's discussion concerns what we might call as the primary bearer of value. According to the model of challenge the primary bearer of value is the life understood as a performance itself, rather than its consequences. This thought it expreseed by comparing the value of a life to the value of an elegant dive, by saying that it is value "within" a life, and by connecting it to our admiration for people who climbed a Mountain just because "it was there". This aspect of the model of challenge is also stated by the following quote:

[...] a good life has the inherent value of a skillful performance. So it holds that events, achievements, and experiences can have ethical value even when they have no impact beyond the life in which they occur." (253)

Since even according to the model of challenge, the value of a life is not uniquely a function of its intrinsic properties, as we have seen, the suggestion seems to be that lives, according to the model of challenge, have some sort of final or non-instrumental value; this fits the comparison with the activity of climbing Mount Everest, performed because it was perceived to be good in itself, and not as means to a further end.

Summing up, the two models differ along two distinct dimensions. On one hand we have the difference between

A. a "neutral" and "global" standard of value (impact), VS a local and "indexed" one (challenge).

on the other hand we have the distinction between:

B. valuing activity as a means to further consequences and as having at most secondary and dependent intrinsic worth, VS viewing activity as a skillful performance or adequate response, and therefore as an end in itself.

The question we should ask is, therefore, whether these two dimension are independent and orthogonal, and if this is true, why Dworkin thought that they had to go together in the way he envisaged.

In order to discover whether these two dimensions are logically independent and orthogonal, we should attempt to construe a table of this sort:

standard primary locus of value	1. local	2. global
a. activity	a1	a2
b. consequences	b1	b2

We therefore obtain the following four cases:

• a1. the value of one's life, considered as an end in itself, as the quality of a performance or of a response, is measured in relation to local parameters. The amount of worth of a life does not depend from how every other subject in the world has or will react to analogous challenges. So if your artistic performance (regarded as worthy in itself, life diving) is mediocre in a global scale, you do not have to worry about that.
• a2. the value of one's life, considered as an end in itself, as the quality of a performance or of a response, is measured in relation to global parameters. The amount of worth of a life depends from how every other subject in similar circumstances has or will react to analogous challenges. So if your artistic performance (regarded as worthy in itself) is mediocre in a global scale, you have to worry about that.
• b1. the value of one's life, considered as a sum of acts, is only instrumental or at most a reflection of the value of the consequences of those act. However the value of those consequences is evaluated in terms of an indexed or local parameter. So if you do not produce great works of arts and your life did not contribute to the world's cultural heritage, you do not have to feel bad about it.
  
• b2. The value of a life, considered as an activity or sum of acts, is only instrumental or at most a reflection of the consequences of those acts. The value of those consequences is evaluated in terms of global and neutral parameters. So if you do not produce great works of arts and your life did not contribute to the world's cultural heritage, you do not have to feel bad about it.

Dworkin's model of challenge corresponds to A1, while Dworkin's model of impact corresponds to B2. But this choice appears to be quite arbitrary in the light of the fact that he did not even considers model A2 and B1.

Why Dworkin thinks there must be volitional well-being?

As we have seen in my previous post, Dworkin distinguishes critical and volitional well-being. But volitional well-being does not seem to be well-being at all. Volitional well-being is the satisfaction of desires, but the fact that something affects our well-being always gives us reasons, other things equal, to take it into account, while the fact that we have a desire for something does not (the desire might be irrational), unless that affects our ability to enjoy life or gives us pain.

Why did Dworkin felt compelled to introduce and admit the existence of volitional well-being? The idea of identifying well-being with simply getting what one wants is a historically important concept. After the rejection of mentalistic definitions of utility, “volitional” or “preference based” definitions took their place in standard neo-classical economics. (For a brief history and explanation of this process, and of the emergence of an opposite tendency I recommend the following paper by Erik Angner < http://ssrn.com/abstract=957148>.)

A second reason - which is much less apparent, is - I believe - Dworkin's difficulty in accounting for objective values. There must be something like a person's critical well-being, according to Dworkin, because the value of exercizing certain activities and engaging in certain relations does not derive from the fact that someone wants or desires them. Rather one ought to want or desire certain things in so far as they are valuable (or valuable for a person, as Dworkin would put it). This offers a general account of the relation between desire and value: desired because valuable. Philosophers like Scanlon endorse this model of the relation between desire and value in general, and apply it to . But Dworkin does not do that. Why?

Dworkin is impressed by the fact that while certain activities are considered to be valuable for most humans, or for humans in general, other activities seem to be valuable only for particular people, e.g. who have an interest in them. (See the previous post). For example fishing is valuable, but only if you are interested in it What Dworkin did not see, was the possibility of explaining the subject-relativity of these cases without abandoning the "valuable, therefore desired" model of explanation. However, this is pretty simple. You can say that fishing is valuable, but only for some people, because fishing is valuable only in so far as it is enjoyable. But "enjoyment" is valuable in general: and we can say that enjoyment is valuable, and therefore people have reasons to desire it. In terms of its relation to desire, the good which we call "enjoyment" belongs to "critical" well-being, just like parenthood or a minimal grasp of contemporary science (the examples of critical well-being Dworkin often cites). It also follows that going out fishing is part of our critical well-being when it is a realization of enjoyment, even if some people do not have a reason to desire to go fishing, because they cannot enjoy it. Enjoying something is not the same as desiring it: one can desire to do something that one does not enjoy (e.g. going to a medical check), e.g. to get rid of the stress and tension following from some doubts about one's health.

If it seems too strange to you that a person's enjoyment might be part of his critical interests, imagine a person who has a certain "blindness" towards every aspect of enjoyment. (I developed this example in the previous post.) This person goes on through life without really enjoying anything. We might think that this person should rationally revise his life-plan to find some room for this aspect of human experience, whether he desires it or not. (It does not follow that we think that this person should be forced to enjoy his life. Any such attempt would be self-defeating.)

There might be another reason why Dworkin felt he had to distinguish these two species of well-being. For the idea of critical well-being captures those ideas about the human good that are of traditional concerns in perfectionist moral theories. According to a perfectionist theory of the good, there are certain traits, capacities or activities that people should develop. Typically, the fact that someone develops such traits, capacities and activities is regarded by perfectionist as both good in itself and as good for the person whose capacities they are. A perfectionist theory might hold, for example, that humans can have a fulfilled life only if they develop their rational part, for example by participating in some way to the most advanced forms of knowledge of their time. One of the traditional characteristic of perfectionist conceptions is that they tend to find a subordinate or at most dependent place for pleasure. (E.g. in Aristotle pleasure completes an activity which is good, and is not valuable when experienced apart from them.)

The notion of the good (and of well-being, or the good life) that perfectionist philosophers adopt is radically different from the notion of well-being or utility developed in the utilitarian tradition. It seems that Dworkin saw something valuable in both traditions and wanted to account in his theory for the intuitions that support each of them. Clearly, if Dworkin's account of critical well-being was also meant to capture what Dworkin thought it was valuable in the perfectionist tradition of the good life, Dworkin had to define an alternative category of well-being in order to preserve the intuitive distinction between perfectionist theories of the good life and the notion of well-being which corresponds to the intuitions of utilitarian writers. But because of his liberalism, he did not want to conceptualize the "perfectionist" aspect of the good life by appealing to the controversial notion of "human nature". This led him to identify the "perfectionist" aspect of good life in terms of what Griffin calls the "perception model" of value: the theory according to which value precedes desire. Having done this, he had to identify the other aspect of well-being - the one which corresponds to the intuitions of utilitarian philosophers - with the opposite of that model, namely what Griffin calls "the taste model" of value: "desire precedes value". And this explains why he postulated such an odd beast as "volitional well-being."

The distinction between volitional and critical well-being

In his "Sovreign Virtue" Ronald Dworking distinguishes two fundamental species or senses of well-being

Volitional well-being:

“Someone's volitional well-being is improved, and just for that reason, when he
has or achieves what in fact he wants.” (242)

Example:

“Sailing well and freedom from dentistry are part of my own volitional
well-being: I want them both, and my life therefore goes better, in the
volitional sense, when I have them.” (242)

AND Critical well-being:

“[someone's] critical well-being is improved by his having or achieving what it
makes his life a better life to have or achieve.” (242)

Example:

“having a close relationship with my children, for example, securing some
success in my work, and [...] some minimal grasp of the state of advanced
science of my era. These I regard as critical interests because I believe
that my life would be a less successful one if I failed to have, or wholly
failed to achieve, these goals.” (242)

Dworkin argues that we must suppress the reductionist impulse of these philosophers who think that “the success of different lives can be measured and compared in respect of a single elemental carrier of ethical value” (242). There is complexity and structure in the idea of well-being. In fact, Dworkin argues, we must distinguish volitional well-being from critical well-being as two irreducible categories. Dworkin denies that the categories of volitional and critical well-being ought to be considered as “components of a larger, more inclusive category that we might call well-being all things considered” (244). Dworkin argues that this idea makes no sense: “there can be no standards for judging whether the right mix or trade-off has been achieved between volitional and critical well-being except the standards of one of the two modes of well-being themselves.” (244)

Now there are several problems with what Dworking says. I agree with him that there are different senses in which a life can be said to be good for a person, or plain good. But I deny that being good “in the volitional sense” is a way for a life to go well or to be good at all. I doubt, that is to say, that there is any meaningful sense of good life or well-being that corresponds to getting what one most wants, no matter how crazy one's wishes and desires are.

What elements does Dworkin use to justify the existence of volitional well-being? He writes that

“Though I do want to sail well, and am disappointed because I do not, I cannot
think that my life would be a worse one if I had never conceived that desire. It
is important for me to sail well because I want to sail well, not vice-versa”
(243).

Well-being in the volitional sense is the sort of well-being which follows from the mere fact that one gets what one most wants. But this statement can be understood in different ways. It could be understood as the claim that certain activities or conditions, e,g, sailing well, can be turned into goods, or valuable activities and conditions, by the mere fact that I want them. But this argument seems to presuppose the sort of humean picture of the relation between desires and reasons, or desires and value that has attracted so much criticism in the last two decades and that is growing (I believe) increasingly controversial. Fewer philosopher than in the past would now endorse the claim that the mere fact of wanting X turns X into something valuable, or valuable for a person. (See this post)

But why then does the last quote by Dworking sounds so natural in our ears? This claim is made up of two claims. The first claim, that my life would not be a worse one if I had never conceived that desire, is right, but what follows from it? It clearly follows that “desiring to sail” does not make a life better, even if sailing improves the quality of my life only if I desire to. Of course, my life could have been as good without sailing as it is with it, meaning that I could have develop a fondness for, or developed the ability to appreciate, another activity. Or in other words it is both conceptually possible and quite likely that, counterfactually, if had I made different choices, now I would enjoy different things.

But this does not show that my enjoying my life makes my life better in a sense that can only be accounted by postulating the existence of volitional well-being. Imagine a person who is unable, for constitutive reasons, to enjoy good wines, good foods, with a severe physical handicap and no talent for intellectual hobbies like reading or chess, or any other activity except sailing and who has a definite predisposition to find sailing enjoyable. Suppose ignorance about the existence of the sea and of every activity connected to it prevents this person both to form the desire to sail and to satisfy it. For a person with such an improbable psychology, the failure to form a desire to sail, and to practice it, would entail a severe and important loss of well-being, in so far as it would deprive this person with the only form of enjoyment in life that, for some reason, was accessible to her.

The second claim “It is important for me to sail well because I want to sail well, not vice-versa” is also plain common sense, but what does it show? It is important to sail well, of course, only if one has a previous reason to sail. And clearly, most people do not have a reason to sail, and a fortiori, one to sail well. But this is only because a person who can find many different things enjoyable does not have a reason, in general, to try out any possible form of enjoyment. But this, as well, is only because as Scanlon reminds us, there are many valuable activities that we can undertake at any moment in time, but since our lives are finite, some goals must be selected. A person who has elected, as it were, playing chess as the main hobby in her life and is quite successful player may not have a reason to take up the hobby of sailing, especially since this is an expensive one. This person may think that she has most reasons to spend the money devoted to leisure to finance her participation to chess competitions and travel costs. So this person does not have any reason to sail well.

But for the man in our previous example, who can only enjoy sailing, it is important to sail well, at least under the assumption that he can enjoy sailing only if he does it well. If we drop this assumption, we can still say at least that it is important for him to "enjoy himself well", or to look for the "right" amount of enjoyment, and since sailing is the only way in which he can enjoy himself, it is important for him to sail "well" in that sense. (That is to say: it is important for him to devote sufficient attention to his boat and sailing friendships, to exercise those virtues which allow him to put up nice sailing trips, e.g. cooperation, etc, and to be able to refrain from sailing when he has something more important to do.)

Since, I am assuming, some people have sometimes a reason to sail and to sail well, and since everybody has a reason to enjoy himself and to enjoy himself "well" (in the sense explained above) it makes perfect sense to say, of a person who has a reason to sail and enjoy himself well, that the life of this person is made a better life by sailing and enjoying himself "well", in the sense I have explained. So it seems a little arbitrary to draw a neat boundary between activities that we do for the sake of enjoyment, such as sailing, and those goods, like children or some minimal grasp of the state of advanced science of our era, which according to Dworkin contribute to our critical well-being.

What intuitions support the idea that volitional well-being represents a distinct category of well-being evaluations or evaluations of the goodness of a life? Dworkin also writes

“a life in which someone wanted only what he thought was in his critical interest to want would be a sad mess”.

But why should this be the case? It may be the case if enjoying oneself were considered, by definition, outside the possible critical interests of a person. But why should this be assumed? The first definition of a person’s critical well-being is “[someone's] critical well-being is improved by his having or achieving what it makes his life a better life to have or achieve”. It is of course plausible that nobody's life is made a better life by practicing any other activity that other people find enjoyable, but this is compatible with thinking that no one's life can be a good one if one does not find at least one activity within it enjoyable.

In conclusion, it seems very odd to me to consider volitional and critical well-being as two species of well-being. But then why did Dworkin thought that there are these two types of well-being? I shall try to answer to this question in the next post.

GRIFFIN: 3 well-being and morality/3

Griffin's idea of the relation between morality and prudence is complicated. He wants to allow both the existence of a sense in which lives can be said to be good which is prior to the moral sense and the "penetration of the prudential by the moral", namely the fact that being virtous or acting morally can be intrinsically prudentially valuable; in addition to this a deflationist view about "dualism of practical reason". I believe that it is very difficult to come up with a coherent notion of well-being, compatible with these ideas.

The penetration of the prudential by the moral. (p. 131)

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“What I have in mind is this. One has not got a specification of the prudential at all without a pretty full account of what moral demands there are on us and how they are to be accommodated. Prudential value does not stop at the edges of an individual’s own private life. Some persons may see their self-interest in a narrow, crabbed way. But anyone with a defensible idea of prudential values can see what he cares about not just as what as a matter of fact he now cares about, but as what he ought to care about or what he will care about after subjecting his concerns to full deliberations. He will find it hard, therefore, to keep moral and prudential values apart. One of the things he will want is a life of point and substance. What he will see as prudentially valuable, valuable to his own personal life, will to some extent coincide with what he will see as valuable morally. Our understanding of ‘a good life’ cannot be parcelled into ‘good prudentially’ and ‘good morally’. The very phrase ‘ a good life’ may seem ambiguous (good prudentially? good morally?), but at any deep level there are not two senses to be distinguished. Part of having a life of point and substance is having a life in which moral reasons take their place, along with other practical reasons, in motivation.” (131)

[He endorses this for the sake of the argument. Apparently this conception seems to be rejected by those other arguments. But he does not appeal to the previous arguments. Rather, Griffin endorses this claim for the sake of the argument, and shows that even if it is true, in this way one cannot attempt to reduce morality to prudence, since prudence is already defined in moral terms.].

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“And since we want to live a life of value or weight, we have to decide what a valuable life is. This is a point, among many others, at which prudence and morality will not stay apart. A valuable life, in the sense that we are now trying to understand, cannot just be a life filled with prudential values conceived in fairly narrow self-interested terms. A valuable life, in the sense we are after, consists importantly in doing things with one's life that are themselves of sufficiently substantial value to turn back on the life itself and make it valuable. And we cannot see what we do in those necessary terms if we have no regard for, or if we damage, values generally, including the value of other persons' lives.[...] Prudence cannot be kept in narrow confines. What is prudentially valuable must, at various points, spread out into areas that do not look like a part of prudence at all. The boundary defining prudence cannot, along this frontier, really be fixed.” (156-157)

Thus, Sigdwick's dualism of practical reason has to be rejected:

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“Furthermore, the penetration of prudence by morality, in particular that it penetrates it in a way that shifts serious deliberation on to the level of abstraction where the categories 'prudential' and 'moral' are left behind, makes dualism an unlikely model for their relation. This is not to say that ethical push and ethical pull eventually meet; so far as I can see it points to the opposite conclusion.” 160

Why does Griffin thinks that the rejection of dualism does not favor the idea that ethical push and pull eventually meet? Here is what he writes.

Griffin also makes a point that is anaologous to the one made by Scanlon in “what we owe...”, about the idea that there is type of deliberation in which reasons of prudence are evaluated together with reasons of morality.

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“But the most important point to make about the putative dualism of practical reason is that deliberation of a sufficiently global scope is not conducted in terms of ‘prudence’, ‘self-interest’, or ‘flourishing’ on the one side and ‘morality’ on the other. It is conducted in terms of strength of practical reasons. […] It is to say that values, neither expressly prudential nor expressly moral but values taken at a higher level of abstraction, are what we appeal to: the notion f what , all things considered, is worth our concern. Just as when with prudential values we deliberate not by appeal to any one substantive prudential value but to the notion of prudential value itself [when is it the case that we do this?], here too we step up another rung in the ladder of abstraction. There is nothing mysterious or suspect about this step; it is one more of the same sort that we have continually taken in deliberation.” (161)

The big difference between this view and the view argued by Scanlon is that Griffin thinks that the above described type of practical deliberation, which may be called "deliberation about the kind of life one should live" represents the next "step up" "in the ladder of abstraction", after one in which "with prudential values we deliberate not by appeal to any one substantive prudential value but to the notion of prudential value itself". Scanlon, on the contrary, argues there is no level of deliberation in which we appeal to the notion of prudential value itself, rather than to any one substantive prudential value.
Also Griffin seems almost to contradict himself, when he writes that " the most important point to make about the putative dualism of practical reason is that deliberation of a sufficiently global scope is not conducted in terms of ‘prudence’, ‘self-interest’, or ‘flourishing’ on the one side and ‘morality’ on the other. It is conducted in terms of strength of practical reasons." If this is true, how can he hold that there is a level in which we deliberate "by appeal to any one substantive prudential value but to the notion of prudential value itself" ? I think that Scanlon's argues his view much more convincingly than Griffin.

GRIFFIN: 3 well-being and morality/2

The question is:

“do ethical push and ethical pull eventually meet?”

this “meeting” is interpreted in terms of “moral reasons [being] generated out of prudential ones” ("if you behave well - morally speaking - is always going to be good for you”)

Griffin allows that:

• Moral reasons do trump purely prudential reasons.

But:

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“that does not mean [...] that moral reasons are generated out of prudential ones. It shows only that once our various reasons for action – prudence, morality, etiquette, and the rest – are brought together in a single hierarchy of reasons for action, moral reasons come out on top. But we want to know something different. When we organize the various things that make an individual life better into a hierarchy of prudential values, does morality then come out on top? Does it, in cases of conflict, trump, perhaps even extinguish all other prudential values?” (68-69) [This is identified with the idea of McDowell about prudential value. Griffin here follows the Foot/Hosthouse line rather than the McDowellian one.]

17
“So the strong argument we need, which indeed many will make, runs something like this. There is no coherent concept of good in conflict with right; right is prior to good; good has sense only within limits laid down by right. Therefore, it would make no sense to say that morality required a sacrifice of good. Suppose I come upon several children trapped in a blazing building. Suppose, too, I ought to try and save them (for whatever reason are strong enough to create an obligation: it is one life against many; I am risking fewer years than they have ahead of them; I am responsible for them.) [This is starting with a bad example. We do not know enough about the life of the person who is supposed to make the decision. Suppose you were studying a molecule that would provide a vaccination for AIDS. Or suppose you had children to care, etc... We could question whether you have, after all, most reason to do is to save the trapped children.] I might reason: I could well die in the attempt; my life – if I funk doing what I ought – would still be a lot better than no life at all; by funking it I would, of course, suffer terrible guilt and remorse, but I would eventually face up to them and go on living what altogether would be a good life. But this strong claim means that I cannot intelligibly reason like this. The moral failure would make it impossible for it to be a good life; it could not be a better life than one without the moral failure. It could not, no matter how small the moral failure, and how great the disaster to me. [How small the moral failure is a rethorical device. An act which can be called “a small moral failure” in terms of conventional morality may turn out to be no moral failure at all when seen in the light of the right moral theory. For example, I may be poor and steal a drug to save my life. This is a moral failure in conventional terms, but it may not be a moral failure in the stronger sense of “moral” for which it is sensible to say that moral reasons “come up on top”.] It is an extravagant claim, and one that again, I think, rests on a confusion. We need to split the notion of 'a good life' into two. There is a sense in which moral failure, being a failure to act for the best reasons, is a falling off from an ideal – and not just in the trivial circular sense that it is not the most moral or most rational life.[ What it means is that it is among the things that count in a good life.] It is not the finest life: the life one would hope to lead. But there is another conception of a good life, a life one would hope to lead. It is the sense that appears in judgments such as that it is better to be moral and alive than to be moral and thereby lose one's life, or that it is sometimes better to fail morally and stay alive than not to fail and thereby lose one's life. [Here I shall ask: better from which point of view? Are such claims really typical, ones whose meaning I am supposed to recognize? Are they really uttered? And does the concept of “moral” in question refer to conventional morality, or to what is truly moral and therefore ought to trump other concerns?] And it is this second conception that should be the base for judgments of well-being in moral theory. [But I find there is more than one sense in which a life can be meant to be better, when it contains a moral failure, than another. Example: it contains more subjective states of happiness, it contains more accomplishments, etc… Why shall we suppose that there is only one conception of what it means for a life to go well, apart from moral considerations?] This is not at all paradoxical. We want as the base for at least some moral judgment consideration of quality of life that are restricted to the prudential values on my list. [who is “we”. Why should we want this?] And being moral enters that list only in a limited way: only by being part of what it is to be at peace with one’s neighbour and with oneself. This sort of peace is a prudential value, and when morality enters consideration under that heading it takes on prudential weight. But as a purely moral consideration, not subsumable under one of these headings, it has no prudential weight. We do not want to lose this prudential notion of a good life by merging it altogether with morality. [Why?] And we do not for reasons of moral theory: it needs the notion.” (69)[Is this supposed to be a constraining assumptions? If yes, it puts the argument on weak grounds. One could claim that morality does not need the notion. (E.g. Scanlon.)]

[Also: This shows that Griffin's conception of well-being as a particular sense of goodness invokes the self-sacrifice constraint: the concept of self-sacrifice must be coherent]

GRIFFIN: 3 well-being and morality/1

When Griffin wants to show the difference between the concept of well-being and other senses in which a life can be said to become good or go well, he often talks about the peculiar type of independence that obtains between well-being evaluations and moral evaluations.


This is note 38 at p. 38 of ch. II. In this note, Griffin is explaining why he can endorse a restricted version of the interest theory of value. What Griffin has troubles showing, here and in other passages dedicated to the distinction between the rational and the moral life, and prudential value, is that there is "a conception of a valuable life independent of, not subordinate to, right".

15
“I have followed the utilitarian assumption – actually is far more widespread – that we have a notion of good or valuable independent of our notion of what it is right or wrong to do. […] But there is a tradition that holds that good has status only in the context of a theory of right, or that the concept of right is prior to the concept of good. […] But the desire account qualifies the independence of good and right in certain ways. One thing that people with mature values take as an aim is acting morally. Ethical push comes to incorporate much of ethical pull. Moreover, when a person faces a conflict between his own interest and his moral obligation, the latter wins: moral reasons trump prudential reasons. But there still remains a conception of a valuable life independent of, not subordinate to, right.[What is the argument for this claim? Does the next sentence explain or justify it?] That immoral desires make no claim on fulfilment, that they have no authority in determining action, which seems to be the nerve of Rawls claim, does not mean that they cannot make one better off. [Apparently the synonimity between "being better off” and having well-being or a prudentially valuable life is assumed.

If this is right, the sentence with which Griffin distances himself from Rawls' position can be translated into the following claim: immoral desires have no authority in determining action, but they are relevant in terms of well-being. So Rawls' conclusion is resisted by arguing that even if the good - conceived in action guiding terms - is subordinate to right - this yet does not show that a different concept of value, which is not value in the action guiding sense, value as it is expressed in well-being evaluations, cannot exist when it opposes morality. Against this: if well-being is defined as prudential value, then, how is it possible for it not to be action guiding? After all the concept of prudence is related to action. It must be shown that some values can be acting guiding in a different sense from the sense in which morality is action guiding. But Griffin does not want to identify this difference with the difference between acting rationally and acting morally, since he, like McDowell, conceives the boundaries of rationality to be broad enough as to include receptivity to moral reasons (see here, esp . 20 and 21). So the difference he appeal to must be one between two recognizibly different ways of being guided by values, namely having goals of well-being, on one side, and living the most reasonable life, which includes obedience to moral reasons. Griffin holds that the objectives set by these two maxims can coincide, but do not necessarily:

[this is still endnote 38] And I doubt whether even an ideal person, whose values are perfectly developed, will find that ethical push and ethical pull entirely coincide. [This is also no argument.] But certainly with the mass of humanity they do not. [Most people's interests and subjective characteristics are such that, for them, doing what is best - morally speaking - and doing what will increase their well-being most represent two different courses of action. (So this is an appeal to principle M.)
This may seem obvious. It would be obvious if well-being were considered a function of people's actual desires. But it is not at all obvious that things should be so, if we start from Griffin's idea according to which well-being is a function of "rational" or "informed" desires, desires had in idealized conditions.] In thinking about others (say the inept sadist who can rise to no richer life), we might well decide that their welfare is greater for their acting wrongly. [What ground this assertion? It is not plain common sense, in so far as we are talking about welfare, and welfare is not a folk term. Maybe Griffin is claiming that when we think about the sadist fulfilling some of his desires, we may agree that the fulfillment of some of those desires makes the sadist life better in some sense. Clearly, there can be many senses in which a sadist life can be made better by the fulfillment of immoral desires. The sadist life can go better in experiential terms, meaning that it would contain more rather than less desirable experiential mental states. It can become better in material terms, etc... But how are we supposed to know in what sense Griffin means the life of the sadist life goes "better", when he opposes this sense to better in moral terms? Griffin needs to prove that there is a sense in which the sadist's life goes better by acting wrongly, which is more general than material conditions or pleasure, and less general than the concept of valuable life as it appears in this post (quote 19), that is, as a notion of choiceworthiness. ] Similarly, in thinking about our own lives, we may decide that, though we have no sufficient reason to act immorally, it would increase our well-being to do so. END OF ENDNOTE 38
For a rielaboration of those arguments, see also this post and this post.

Griffin: TASTE

14

“I have tasted both apples and pears. I like both but prefer pears. How do we expalin my attaching more value to having a pear? The only relevant desirability feature is that they taste good. [“tasting good” is invoked still as a value in the objective sense.] However, it is not a plausible explanation of tasting better that I perceive that pears possess this desirability features to a greater degree than apples. We need to explain my liking pears more in terms of my wanting them more. [...] [This is only a statement, not an argument. The argument comes next:] We have no reason to expect, with many tastes, that differences in valuing shows that there is any lack of perfection of understanding. My preference for pears is not open to criticism...” (28)

[ But why should we believe this? Suppose that the only reason why I prefer pears is that they unconsciously remind me the male genital organ... And suppose that nonetheless pears do not taste better, nor is the experience of eating pears is not made any more pleasurable by this unconscious aspect it has. Why should not this preference be revisable?]

Griffin: 2. Distinction between prudential value and perfectionist values

10

“The good, almost unavoidable, point in perfectionism is this. There are prudential values that are valuable in any life. There are not enough of them, nor is a specific balance between nthem prescribable universally enough, to constitute a form of life. They are the values on the list of the ends of life.” (70)

[but]

11

“Persons differ not so much in basic values as in their capacity to realize them. Some basic values (e.g. enjoyment) depend in part on persons’ individual, varying tastes, [Notice: an aspect of subjective variability is introduced via the concept of taste] but not many depend on taste.[…] This is the unavoidable form of prudential perfectionism.” (70)

[Now we shall ask: what distinguishes perfectinism pure from prudential evaluation, apart from the inclusion in prudential evaluations of matters of taste? What makes an objective account of well-being prudential as opposed to a theory of the good life in a perfectionist sense?]

12

“To get an account of well-being that would be of use in moral theory we have to move beyond forms of perfectionism (even my modest one) and on to what is valuable to the particular person affected in each case we judge. For special reasons about Jessica, autonomy might not be the thing for her to go for. For Nicholas, totally absorbed in his work, with no taste for day-to-day pleasures, enjoyment may count for little and accomplishments for a lot. For Edward, risk stimulates; for Sarah, it is off-putting. [In Jessica’s, Edward’s and Sarah’s case, the sort of subjectivity in question can be interpreted according to the notion of capacity to realize prudential values.] We cannot make any useful judgment about how to act so as to promote well-being without having a notion of well-being that captures these variations.” (72)

Summing up: he difference between the two type of value seems to consist in the following:

a. that prudential evaluation allows more subjective variability than perfectionist evaluation

b. that prudential evaluation includes matters of taste which are excluded from perfectionist evaluation

Griffin. How the concept of well-being is introduced: value and interest

Griffin is trying to show that there is a close connection between the concept of prudential value and the concept of interest. He shows that his theory is compatible with a weakened form of the Interest Theory of value.

9

“… the only form of the Interest Theory [of value] [i.e. ‘for a thing to be of value is for it to be the object of, or the satisfaction of, desire or interest.’ This is Perry.] that is plausible is one restricted to prudential value. There are two weighty doubts about it. It does not make value prior to desire […] And it does not allow the value we attach to our various ends ever to diverge from their place in the hierarchy of our informed desires, and there seem to be cases of such divergence.” 38

“So this restricted version [of the Interest Theory] seems to me right. There are, none the less, differences in tone between 'valued' and 'desired'. 'Valued' and 'valuable' are, like 'good' and 'interest', rather weighty words and do not sit altogether comfortably in cases where what one wants lacks importance. But these are minor troubles, the sort of linguistis strains that most theories involve." (38)

Griffin. How the concept of well-being is introduced. 3: Interest

The concept of well-being is sometimes considered to be analytically connected to the concept of what is in a person's interest. Griffin claims that his analysis of the meaning of well-being preserves this connection to a sufficient degree:

7
“The desire account has all along been designed to keep ‘utility’’ close to ‘ what is in a person’s interest’. It is not that the expression ‘fulfilling ones informed desire’ and ‘being in one’s interest’ come out meaning the same. They certainly do not mean the same in the usual sense of ‘desire’. [Moreover] I may desire Turkish delight simply through having a weakness for it, but to say that it is in my ‘interest’ applies a heavy word to an entirely light subject. None the less, these are all pretty minor differences, and the application of the two expressions is very close.” (37)

He also assumes that the concepts of good and interest are analytically connected:

8
"The link between ‘interest’ and ‘good’, however, is one of meaning. The word ‘good’ has associated with it ‘the condition of answering certain interests, which interests are in question being indicated either by the element modifying or the element modified by “good” or by certain features of the context of utterance’ [this is the semantic analysis of ‘good’ by Ziff , Paul, Semantic Analysis; Ithaca Cornell University Press.] [Here comes the important point:] The use of ‘good’ that we are especially concerned with is ‘good for such-and-such a person’. The relevant interests, therefore, are that person’s interests, and for something to be good is for it to satisfy those interests of his. And since utility is linked to satisfying a person’s interest, it must in the same way be linked to a person’s good." (37)

Griffin. How the concept of well-being is introduced. 2. well-being and "valuable"

GRIFFIN: well-being and valuable lives.

There are many places in which Griffin talks as if statements about what is valuable to a person and the concept of well-being could be used interchangeably:

5

“If a father wants his children to be happy, what he wants, what is valuable to him, is a state of the world, not a state of his mind; merely to delude him into thinking that his children flourish, therefore, does not give him what he values” (13)

“that is what gives the [present account of well-being] its breadth and attraction as a theory of what makes life valuable” (14)

6

“If the Experience Requirement excludes these values [accomplishments, close authentic personal relationships] from 'utility', then 'utility will have less and less to do with what these persons see as making their own lives good.” (19) “If either I could accomplish something with my life but not know it, or believe that I had but not really have, I should prefer the first. That would be, for me, for me, the more valuable life.

Finally, after the previous passage, he recognizes that there is a problem. The notion of valuable life can mean many things:

'Valuable life', of course, is full of ambiguity. It can mean a life that is valuable because of its value ot other persons. It can mean a morally valuable life, or an aesthetically valuable one, or one valuable in terms of some code, such as a code of chivalry. But my ground for preferring the first sort of life would not be any of these; I should prefer it because it would be, considered on its own, considered simply as a life I must lead [This introduces the criterion of “a life considered on its own” . I will show that it is impossible to distinguish the ground of preferring this life from a perfectionist one if not by committing oneself to a definition of what “a life considered on its own is” that entails a mental state account of well-being], a more fulfilling one. [“fulfilling” has both a perfectionist and a welfarist connotation. Griffin can be read as committing himself to the view that a valuable life, in the sense in question, is a a life that rates high in terms of perfection, when it is evaluated “on its own”. But this would be contentious for a definition: we can imagine counterexamples in which a life is made better in terms of perfection by realizing some feature, but not better prudentially." ] So it is a value that has to be found a place within the bounds of 'utility'.

So here we have a further specification of what we mean when we use the concept of well-being or prudential value. What is in question is not what makes a life valuable, or good, simpliciter, but what makes it good or valuable on its own. I expected Griffin to the intuitive idea of what is "good for the person who lives it", as Sumner and Crisp do. Griffin does this here (see 8).

Griffin. How the concept of well-being is introduced.

A. There must be a connection between well-being evaluations and deliberation:

1

“our job is not to describe an idea already in existence independently of our search. Before we properly explain well-being, we have to know the context in which it is to appear and and the work it needs to do there. [...] One proper ground for choosing between conceptions of well-being would be that one lends itself to the deliberation that we must do and another does not.” (1)

The assumption that the concept of well-being can be connected to deliberative notions is reflected also in the choice of characterizing well-being and utility as prudential value. Being prudent, in fact, is an attribute of people taken as agents.
2

“The way to submit [a moral theory] to the test of correctness is harder to decide. [...] A good place to start on the search for standard of correctness in prudential and moral judgment is with developing as rich a substantive account of prudence and morality as one can. (I am using 'prudence' here in the philosopher's especially broad sense, in which it has to do not just with a due concern for one's future but with everything that bears on one's self-interest.)” (4)

He connects his discussion of well-being to the context of the utilitarian tradition:

3.

“How are we to understand 'well-being'? As 'utility', say the utilitarians, aware that this technical term itself needs explaining.” (7)

So the idea is not clear. But as I shall show in the next posts, the concept of well-being is defined negatively, often by explaining the difference between moral good and prudential value:

B. Griffin recognizes there is no particular folk usage of the word "well-being" that stands for the concepts he (and utilitarians philosophy) were trying to characterize:

4

“Utilitarians use our rough, everyday notion of 'well-being', our notion of what it is for a single life to go well, in which morality may have a place but not the dominant one. This does not mean that our ob is merely to describe the everyday use. It is too shadowy and incomplete for that; we still have to be ready for stipulation.” (7)

good for/for the sake of

What is the relationship between the two expressions?
When a welfarist talks about welfare he talks about things that are good "for" a person or a certain kind of creature, as opposed to good sempliciter or from the point of view of the universe:

"In the case of human beings the idea that we should promote their good surely owes at least part of its appeal to the fact that we can do so for their sake or on their behalf. In doing good for someone we are therefore not merely making the world a better place but also doing something for that particular person." Sumner "Welfare, Happiness and Ethics p. 211".

Sumner is using "good for" and "for the sake of", to express different but related ideas:

1. "individuation": when promoting people's good involves the virtue of benevolence, we are doing something for a specific individual, not for the sake of a more perfect universe.
   
2. "benefit": the particular individual in question must be intended to benefit from my action; he must be intended to be made better off by it; (and maybe) this is to say that we must intend to augment his well-being
   
3. "sake": the action must be done for the sake of the individual or something regarding him; not with a view to some further end.
   

What is the relation between those different ideas? It seems that it is part of the nature of a benevolent action towards a specific person that the agent is moved by a reason, as Scanlon writes "to do it because that person will benefit". Since our focus is on the individual person, it follows that a benevolent action is done for someone else or for the sake of someone else. But does the reverse holds? Is it always true that doing something "for someone", or "for the sake of somebody" means "doing something because that person will benefit?"; and must one think this benefit as improvement of well-being? What about "doing something for the sake of somebody else?".

Some people argue as if they presuppose that doing something for the sake of someone else implies doing something that is in that person's interests. I don't believe that this can be seen as an uncontroversial grammatical fact. The expression "for the sake of X" can cover different meaning; what it entails is a focus on a fact about X as the source of the reasons for this action, nothing further than that. Since very often, possibly always, when we value a person's life intrinsically we take that person's interests into account, we end up using the expression "doing somthing for the sake of X", where X is a person, to mean doing something that furthers his interests, doing something with a view to that person's good or to her advantage. Of course, folk theory regarding the grammar of "for the sake of" reflects common usage. So we shouldn't think of our intuitions about the "grammar" of "for the sake of" as carrying a special value.


Some people argue as if doing something for somebody's else sake (or for him) implies doing it with a view to improve their well-being. (This claim is different from the former since it is controversial that a person's best interest coincides with what furthers his well-being most.) But this must not be so. Doing something for the sake of someone else means doing something in function of someone else, that is, recognizing that person or a state of that person as the final value providing reasons for the action in question. (This also appears from the use of expressions such as "for the sake of the argument".) If one sticks to so-called "grammatical intuitions" doing something for the sake of another person is fully compatible with doing it with the aim of improving his level of perfection. (Notice that I do not believe that there are such things as "conceptual" or "grammatical intuitions", detached by what I prefer to call "normative claims.")

Of course, if you improve a person's level of perfection "for her" you must not see your action (simply) as a way to contribute to the perfection of the universe. This claim, that improving a person's level of perfection (as opposed to his well-being) does entail treating that person as a means (to improve the perfeection of the universe) is, even on the face of it, a substantive ethical claim about treating people as ends. This is the claim that welfarists shoud refuse, not a conceptual claim about the meaning of "doing something for the sake of someone else" or about the meaning of "good for."

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.

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.