A problem with an argument by Hume.

I started to re-read part 2 of Book 3 of Hume's “Treatise”, the beginning of the section entitled “of justice and injustice”. The first argument on Sect 1 (477-480 of the Selby-Bigge (SBN) edition, p. 307-308 of the Norton and Norton Edition (NN)) strikes me as wrong, in so far as it is based on a conflation of two senses in which moral actions could be said to be morally "good".

Hume argument seems to be the following:

1. what confers the moral quality to an action (its moral admirability) is the moral quality of its motive

2. therefore the first motive of the action cannot be a regard to the virtue of that action.

In HUME's words:

premise 1:

'tis evident, that when we praise any action, we regard only the motives that produc'd them, and consider the actions as signs or indications of certain principles in the mind and temper. The external performance has no merit. [...] And the ultimate object of our praise and approbation is the motive, that produc'd them. (p. 477 SBN,p 307 NN)

the argument:

It appears therefore, that all virtuous actions derive their merit only from virtuous motives [...]. From this principle I conclude, that the first virtuous motive, which bestows a merit on any action, can never be a regard to the virtue of that action, but must be some other natural motive or principle.

This argument seems to me based upon the conflation of two ways in which the moral quality of an action can be understood. If we distinguish them neatly, it is clear that (2) does not follow from (1).

What (1) says is that the moral goodness of the motive is the only thing that confers moral goodness to the action, in the sense of making it admirable or praiseworthy. But this is compatible with thinking that what makes person's p motive to do F a morally good motive is the fact that p F-ed because, in his light, F-ing appeared as just, honest, courageous, or morally required.

Hume's argument seems to require the conflation between:

A. the moral goodness of the action, understood as what makes the action F (or better, the action -type F) just/honest/corageous/required, in the perspective of the agent who F-s

from

B. the moral goodness of the action, understood as the fact which makes p's F-ing morally admirable, in the perspective of a spectator.

(B looks like a judgment or reaction towards the performance of a particular action, but is really a judgment or reaction towards the character of the agent, grounded in that agent's performance of a particular action. The evaluation of action here is a mere proxi for an evaluation of character, as Hume clearly recognizes.)

We can think (and, I believe, should think) that the moral goodness of an action F, understood as A (what makes the action of type F, in that circumstance, just/honest/courageous), derives at least in part from the circumstances of action, features of the reality outside the agent. At the same time, we may think - without contradiction - that the goodness of the action in the sense of B (what makes admiration or praise towards the the fact that p's F-ed appropriate) is solely a fact concerning p's motive for F-ing, the fact that he chose to F because F appeared to him as what justice/honesty/ or courage required.

Hence the two types of judgment, one concerning the appropriateness of an action, given the circumstances, in the perspective of the agent, and the other concerning the fact that an agent behaved in a praiseworthy way, in the perspective of a spectator, are clearly distinct, and we do not run in a circle, contrary to what Hume argued, by saying that we admire p's performance of F (or p on the ground that he F-ed) because of p's motive, and that what makes p's motive in F-ing a virtuous one, is the fact that p F-ed because he saw F as what virtue required. That is to say, the first motive of a virtous action can be, contrary to what Hume argued, a regard to the (conformity to) virtue of the action itself.

Given that Hume is such a great philosopher, and that he cannot have failed to see this point, could anyone of you explain what is wrong in my distinction or in my interpretation of the argument?

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.

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).

Hot not to be a consequentialist/2

...If my picture of the difference between consequentialist and non-consequentialist forms of reasonings is right, the real difference between the two relies in judgments about the scope of the variables that should enter into “moral calculation”.

According to certain forms of act-consequentialism, (taken both as an agent theory and as an act theory) all good and bad facts ought to be included in this calculation. According to others, only foreseeable good and bad consequences ought to be included in this calculation.

A non-consequentialist theory of "what is right", will limit the range of facts that should be assessed in order to perform the right action, compared to both types of consequentialist theories (meaning both tipes of act-consequentialism), in a specific way.

The fact that certain good or bad events take place ought not enter into moral calculation. A non-consequentialist theory would argue that I cannot kill an innocent to prevent another one to be killed, (or that I cannot kill an innocent in order to prevent another person to kill an innocent in order to prevent another innocent to be killed.) A think what a deontological requirement should be seen as doing is ruling out from view considerations on what good my killing the innocent should achieve as irrelevant from practical reasoning. For another example, a non-consequentialist theory will deny me the right to kill an innocent now in order to avoid killing another one in the future. Facts about what I shall achieve by killing an innocente are excluded from the calculation.

This may be too strong a way to characterize what is for a view to be non-consequentialist. If all facts about what I shall achieve by killing a person are irrelevant, then the deontological prohibition says that I shall never kill an innocent even when doing so would prevent a massacre.

In order to avoid this result, we simply have to think deontological constraints as a sorts of partial filter, that gradually lets facts about consequences become relevant to our calculations, as we reach a certain threshold (it can be thought that, once a certain threshold is reached, it becomes morally wrong to ignore the consequences.)

According to this view, the difference between consequentialist and non-consequentialist moralities (moralities that include some deontological prohibitions) consist in the fact that non-consequentialist moralities limit the range of considerations that can count in determining whether one is acting rightly or wrongly.

This is coherent with what psychologists call “bounded rationality” approach to human reasoning, and with evolutional reconstruction of moral sense.
Psychological evidence suggests that human beings must use heuristics in order to act optimally given the practical limitations that human decision making is subject to, such as a time limit, and finite processing capacities.

A non-consequentialist ethics is the only kind of ethics that makes sense to agents , because it is appropriate for agents whose decision procedures are subject to empirical limitations, such as those of which theorist of bounded rationality talk about.

This account seems to provide no justification for the remorse that deontological or virtue theory views should attach to killing an innocent even when this is (supposedly) what must be done in order to prevent a massacre from occurring.

But I think that the justification that it provides is sufficiently good. We can describe this remorse as tracking down the loss in moral integrity, that is, as a loss in one's confidence about being able to live up to the standards morality requires. As I said a deontological view of morality is THE moral view an agent should have, and an agent with a deontological view must be an agent feeling remorse over the killing of an innocent, even when he has overwhelming reasons to do this.

The reason why this is so is that having any other attitude toward killing means having an attitude that is guaranteed not to produce the best results in the long terms. When I write "best results" I am not affirming a consequentialist views of rightness, but I am referring to agent's own take of the goodness of the outcomes, that is, an assessment of the goodness of the outcomes of having a certain attitude in the long run, as viewed from the point of view of the agent, which is something any sensible non-consequentialist theory must allow. (Alternatively, one can rely upon a contractualist framework and sya that the attitude in question is not the sort of attitude that could reasonably be accepted by agents looking forward to find universal attitudes to guide human behavior.)

Both when the agent is , and when he is not, aware of this relation between remorse and his long term attitudes towards morality, this justifies feeling remorse for having to kill an innocent even when this is morally justified. Remorse, that is to say, is exactly what he ought to feel if one is the sort of agent that has the right, that is to say the virtuous, attitude towards killing.

This way of looking at things can be justified by considering what it would signify, for a person that engages in philosophical reflection, to find out that one has no remorse after having killed an innocent (when the consequences granted that it was the right thing to do.) Finding out that one feels ok about the actoin, that having a rational justification for an horrible act estinguishes any sense that something terrible had appened, means finding out that one does NOT have the disposition that is requried in order to live a morally irreprensible life, and that one's repulsion againt killing innocent people may not be enough to counterweight the forces of selfish considerations on a different occasion. It is, in Aristotelian terms, to find out that one did not receive the right kind of moral upbringing.

How to be a non-consequentialist.

Context of the discussion: what Dancy ('Moral reasons') believes a fully fledged non-consequentialist theory must account for:

In the context of this discussion, Dancy considers the sort of defence of a non-consequentialist theory that implies explaining the existence of deontological constraints. There can be theories that are not consequentialist but neither recognize deontological constraints. Assuming that consequentialism has no space for agent-relative values (a thesis criticized by Sen), non-consequentialism can (arguably) be refuted by arguing that there are "agent-relative" reasons or values, that is to say reasons (or values) that justify the agent's relative lack of committment for realizing the aim of the morally best state of affairs, when accomplishing this aim entails too big a sacrifice of the agent's own special concerns (such as projects, friendships, respect of non - moral ideals, etc). It would represent already a significant departure from (neutralists) versions of consequentialism to argue that a person has the right to give more weight in one's moral calculation to sacrifices regarding one's own projects or frienships, than the analogous sacrifices faced by another person. (This is the kind of view defended by Scheffler, who cannot find a rationale for deontological constraints, while can find a rationale for resisting the demands of the sort of impersonal morality in question.)

Dancy refuses this characterization of a non-consequentialist outlook. Dancy sides with Foot's claim that a rational defence of a good (non-consequentialist) moral theory should explain what may be called "options" and "constraints" with equal ease.

Notice that this discussion with proceed upon the assumption that a consequentialist theory is an act-consequentialist one, that is to say, a theory giving each agent the same moral aim, that of producing states of affairs with the greatest ethical value, and identifying the act the agent ought morally to do with the act that would, in each instance, and among the ones the agent is not prevented to perform, bring about that aim.

(I am not considering rule or motive utilitarianism here, for the following reason. Rule or motive utilitarianism can be seen as either an act theory or an agent theory- that is to say, either as a criterion for the wrongness or rightness of actions, or as the theory saying what act an agent ought morally to perform. If rule utilitarianism is conceived as an act-theory, then it seems undermined by its own justification. In fact, if what makes a rule a good rule is its leading on the whole to the achievement of the best state of affairs, how can an act be right that fails to reach this very objective? If, on the other hand, rule utilitiarianism is conceived as an agent theory, and act-utilitarianism as the act-theory, there will be many cases in which the act that is right (in virtue of the act theory) will not be the one that the agent ought morally to perform, according to the agent theory.

I have doubts that this picture is coherent, for it seems that a committment to act-utilitarianism as an act-theory and a committment to follow the dictates of rule-utilitarianism in practical deliberation can hardly coexist in the same agent. )

Let us consider what may justify the existence of deontological constraints. According to Dancy, deontology oblidges me to choose A2 over A1 in the following case:


A1. I allow J to be killed by K
A2. I kill N.
(N and J are innocent human beings)
I have to choose between A1 and A2: (¬(A1) → (A2)) & (¬(A2) → (A1)),


We are supposing that both A1 and A2 are facts I am aware of. I am, that is, is wholly conscious that by failing to kill J I will let K be killed.
This leads to a whole host of difficulties explaining how can A2 have more value than A1 from my point of view; it brings to the introduction of agent-relative reasons and agent-relative value. It leads to talk about "moral cost to the agent" (what explains the difference in value between A1 and A2 from my point of view.)
I have suspects about calling the violation of a constraint as "a moral cost". If it would be a moral cost, then our theory should imply that the agent has the right to discount this cost. (If the cost of killing an innocent is one that I should pay, I should be praised, not blamed, if I choose to pay it.)

The wrongness of violating a deontological constraint is conceived as a "cost" to the agent, we cannot make sense of a similar deontological restriction, like the following.

I believe that, just as an agent should morally choose not to kill an innocent even when this would lead to let another innocent be killed, a person should choose morally not to kill a person now, even when this would certainly lead to kill another person in the near future.

Moreover, I am not sure that the best understanding of a morality containing deontological restriction is that of a morality saying that we should prefer A1 over A2, that is to say, letting die to killing.

Letting someone die can be as bad as killing, when letting die qualifies as an agent act in some sense. What is required in order for an omission to count as an agent's act is something difficult to tell. But we clearly have the sense that when we have full power and control over letting someone die (say, when we have the technical means and we could prevent this at an insignificant cost to ourself) letting someone die can be as much a morally objectionable act as killing. We do not make the best sense of deontological prohibitions, I think, by conceiving them under the rule that omissions are always to be preferred to acts.

In order to gain some meaningfulness to the idea deontological perspective, I think, one must asks what deontological prohibitions are for. The answer, I think is something like the following:
if we did not perceive that there would be something morally problematic in killing a person for the sake of saving another one, we would be morally allowed to take on ourself the responsibility of deciding the life of death of many individuals. This is risky, because there are all sort of factors that may militate against this sort of self-ascription of responsibility to myself, such as personal biases.

Moreover, a person must have a strong disposition against killing innocents in general in order to refrain from this when his own interest is at stake; and a person with the right sort of disposition will have troubles killing an innocent even when a. the state of affairs that would result from his failing to do so will be equally bad in consequentialist terms, and b. the state of affairs that would result from his failing to do so will be worse in consequentialist terms.

What follows from the idea that what appear in first-person thinking as deontological constraints is objectively the effect of a moral outlook, acquired from a good moral upbringing, that takes away from the agent the responsibility of performing the sort of moral calculation that act-consequentialism requires from him?

The effect of having a deontological constraint as a part of one's moral outlook produces a shrinking of the "deliberative sphere" (the range of considerations that are relevant for the choice of action). This must not be understood as implying that, if one adopts a deontological morality, certain facts about the consequences of an act would become irrelevant (say because that act is prohibited and nothing else can be said in his favor)

Rather, according to my theory, deontological constraints are rules directing the agent's search of facts that bear upon the morality of an action. Having a deontoligical constraint about killing means, first of all, reaching the conclusion that the action is wrong in a straighforward manner, without interrogating oneselves too much about what shall be the other consequences of forgoing that act.

This explains why talking about an act /omission asymmetry is not the best way to understand a deontological outlook. When the possibility of causing the death of an innocent by omission has already entered the deliberative sphere, the agent cannot pretend that the omission causing the death of this person is somehow less wrong qua omission.

.... To be continued....

Can the worst life be the one I have most reasons to desire?

The good life is different from the life X has most reasons to desire.

A general argument.

If Bernard Williams's “internal reasons” claim is right, and if the good life is the life that virtuous people typically desire, then a life can be the life that X has most reason to desire, and yet not be a good life, because X's reasons depend from X's desires, and X desires may be different from the desires of the virtuous. So if the good life is by definition the life that the virtuous desires, then X, having different desires from the virtuous, X has also reasons to desire a different life than the good life.

(I take Williams' claim that all reasons are internal as a claim about what reasons we have. This is perfectly compatible with a Nagelian, Dancyian or Scanlonian view of what reasons are)

Williams' internalism is highly controversial (but I am becoming increasingly convinced that he is right.) So an argument with Williams' internalism as its premise does not provide a stringent argument.
Let us consider examples and intuitions.

Examples.

1. Frank

Frank's virtue is not that strong. Frank is a decent person, but is not the kind of guy that would be able to resist certain temptations. If Frank becomes an important politician, Frank will be offered bribes so tempting that he would not be able to forgo them. He will take the bribes and regret it afterwards. And Frank does not desire that kind of life.

It is not incoherent to think that a life in which one has important political responsibility is a better life objectively than a life in which one does not, and that the latter, not the former is the life Frank has most reason to choose.

2. John.

John is sexually incontinent. He is unable to live a loving relation with a stable partner. What John desires most, is to have sex with as many beautiful women as possible. John has also tried his best to live a stable monogamous relation but he could not help feeling depressed and finally cheating his wife. John has most reasons not to form a stable monogamous relation. John has most reasons to have sex with as many beautiful women as he can, and to provide himself with the means that can help him achieve this goal. John has reasons to live a life in which he buys expensive clothes, that make him more successful in his conquers. So John has reasons to work some extra hours to buy more expensive clothes. There is clearly conceptual room to claim that marring and avoiding the extra working hours necessary to buy the expensive playboy outfit is the best life, between the two, and that the life as a single with the extra working hours necessary to buy the expensive playboy outfit is the life John has most reason to live.

DOES this WORK? IT CAN ALWAYS BE CLAIMED THAT, GIVEN THE WAY JOHN IS, THE LIFE THAT THE LIFE JOHN HAS MOST REASON TO LIVE, IS ALSO THE BEST LIFE open to him (GIVEN HIS PECULIAR PSYCHOLOGICAL NATURE,) [John's choice is not as wide as the virtuous's choice of possible lives. His choice is between: (BEING MARRIED AND CHEATING HIS WIFE) and(LIVING AS A SINGLE CONQUERING A LOT OF WOMEN). It may be CLAIMED THAT THE BEST LIFE AMONG THESE TWO IS IN FACT THE LIFE A VIRTUOUS PERSON WOULD CHOOSE TO LIVE IF HIS CHOICE WAS RESTRICTED TO THE TWO OPTIONS.

Addition: that is to say, the life a virtuous person would choose for John to live, assuming the virtuous person puts himself in John's shoes. Ok, what I had discovered was nothing but the difference between the advisor and the example model of idealization. (Used for example by Michael Smith.)

Can I prove the further claim, that someone can have reasons to choose a life, among the ones he can choose to live, that a virtuous person would not choose, even if placed in analogous circumstances? (that it to say, can John have a reason to choose a life that does not correspond to the life he would choose under the ideally virtuous advisor model?)

3

Benjamin.

Benjamin is an amoralist, and he is sadic. Benjamin's view of morality is the one of Trasimachus. He has no conscience, no pang of remorse. Benjamin finds himself in the situation in which he can either stab a colleague in the back and get a promotion, or not do it and let his colleague get a promotion.

I tend to think that Benjamin has most reasons to choose the life in which he stabs a colleague in the back and gets the promotion. This is clearly not the life that the virtuous would choose for him, if he could choose between the two cases. And this is also, I think, what would make Ben's life a better life.

How does Williams defend this claim? He says that a reason must be able in principle to explain action. And since desires are required to explain action, a reason must have some connection with a person's desires. What kind of connection? Something is a person's reason, says Williams, only if that person would arrive at the conclusion that he had that reason by reasoning upon his desires, their entailments, their nature, their fundation.

The crucial point is that it is that person that must do the reasoning.

As McDowell writes, this rules out something like conversion. Something would not count as a reason for Benjamin, if it woud require a conversion for Benjamin to recognize it as such.

The idea of a conversion seems important to me. Not because William's claim about motivation is right, which gives priority to desires, but because we want to say that a person's reasons are his reasons. And if someone would need a conversion in order to recognize something as a reason, and therefore, in order to offer it as an explanation of his action, there is a sense in which we are allowed to aks ourselves: are we still speaking about what would be a reason in that person's perspective? Conversion seems to be a sort of limiting parameter for personal identity.

Can one have no reason to choose to live a better life?
(The strike of Dostoevskiy)
Some preliminary points:

• Geach and Foot: good is only descriptive. A good life is like a good knife.

• All others: there is another sense of good. Some things can be simply good (Moore: books are good.)

• Buck-passers: x is good = "X has the properties that make it reasonable to have a certain (pro)attitude towards it" (Pro-attitude:= admiring it, respecting it, desiring it.)

• A good life: a life that is good as a life. A good specimen of its kind. (Like a good knife)
  

• The choiceworthy life: life L is the most choiceworthy life for person S. It means that life L is the life that person S has most reasons to choose (to live)

Notice:

• Agent-relativity: notice that, if there are agent-relative reasons, then, L1 can be more choiceworhty that L2 from S's point of view, and at the same time L2 can be more choiceworthy than L1 from S' 's point of of view. A life in which one sees John becoming the best student in his class can be the most choiceworthy life for Peter, who is John's father, but not for Frank, who is not.
• LIFE-tokens and LIFE-types: in the former claim L1 and L2 represent life "types," not tokens. The subject-relativity of choiceworhiness depends from the way life-types are described. So if L1 is described as "the life in which one sees his son becoming the best student in his class", then L1 turns out to be more choiceworthy then L2 for both Peter and Frank.

• If we use L1 and L2 to refer to life-tokens, than everytime we talk about a life being choiceworthy, we talk about its being choiceworthy from the perspective of the person whose life it is.

The PROBLEM:
"A good life is a life that it is choiceworthy; that is, a life that is reasonable to choose/prefer": what is the status of this assertion ?

• according to buck-passers it is a conceptual(?) or metaphysical (?) necessity.
• this entails that we do not have an independent standard to measure the goodness of lives apart from our finding reasonable to desire them
• if so, then we may only say that a good life is a life having whatever properties a virtuous person would desires it to have
  
• On the contrary, what if we have an indipendent (naturalistic?) criterion to describe the goodness of lives? If this is so, then the claim "the good life is the life that it is most reasonable to desire to live" is substantive ethical claim, one that could turn out to be wrong.

Is it wrong?

• Maybe it makes no sense to speak about what is most reasonable for anybody. Maybe we should think that choosing the best life is reasonable only for virtues people.
  
• The latter can be explained in virtue of the following: Maybe virtuous people are those people who desire and manage to live good lives. What makes it reasonable for a virtuous person to choose a good life is his desire to live a good life. And it is a mark of virtue to have this desire (but also to be capable to accomplish it, at least in not particularly adverse circumstances.)
• even so: the claim that the virtuous always desire or choose to live a good life is a substantive ethical claim and it may turn out to be false, or alternatively:
• The virtuous are necessarily those who desire to live good lives, but by having this desire they can fail to be reasonable.
• I shall consider the second question: can it be unreasonable to choose the best life, and reasonable to choose the worst life?
  

Let us see if we can find an example of a life that can be better as a life than another one, but that one would have less reason to choose. Of course we need to presuppose that we have some intuition about "the good life" independent from the life one has most reason to choose.

One class of examples may be derived from the more usual examples of the "wrong type of reason" problem (see the examples provided by "the strike of the demon," (Rabinowic - Rasmussen) "the moralistic fallacy" -D'arms and Jacobson etc...)
In "the strike of the demon" what gives one a reason to have the attitudue A is that one would be killed otherwise. I must admit I cannot produce any analogous counterexample for human lives. Suppose that the demon tells me that he will kill me at the age of 21 if I start to live a life in which I will realize my full artistic potentialities. This gives me a reason to choose a life in which I will not realize them.

It seems to me that by making a life the most reasonable to choose, the Demon makes it automatically the best life. The wrong reason problem cannot arise with this kind of goodness.
In this case L1= the life in which I live until age 21 and start to realize my artistic abilities
L2= a life in which I live until my natural age (say 80) and I don't realize my artistic abilities
in this case, it seems that, provided that L2 is really the life I have most reason to choose, then L2 , that is, a life that is longer but contains no artistic development, is really a better life than the short life L1. (What makes it better, as a life, is that it last longers, and contains other sorts of goods.)
Something similar applies if the demon threatens to kill me if I do not betray a friend . Here
L1: betray a friend and live
L2: do not betray a friend and die now
here as well, people may think either that the "strike of the demon" makes it more reasonable to choose L1 or to choose L2. But those who think it would be more reasonable to choose L1, it seems to me, should also think that L1 (a life in which one betrays a friend but does not die) is a better life than L2 (a life in which one dies early but with a clean conscience)

One could argue that claiming that L2 is a better life than L1 involves some sort of "moralistic fallacy": the fact that we have moral reasons to choose L2 over L1 makes us say that L2 is more valuable (as a life) than L1. This would be as wrong as claiming a joke less valuable as a joke (that is to say, less funny) because it would be immoral to make it or think it.

But notice how little convincing the accusation of moralistic fallacy is for lives than for jokes. I think the reason can be easily told: in the case of jokes we have an independent standard to judge whether a joke is "good as a joke" (that is: funny , assuming a "functional/descriptive" reading of "good", and that the function of jokes is to be funny, not to edify). But in the case of
lives we have no clear intuition about what makes a life good, apart from its being a life one has reasons to live.

The failure to produce a "wrong sort of reasons" problem for lives suggests that we lack an independent intution of what makes lives "good", independent, that is to say, from the judgment of what makes it reasonable to desire to live it. So the buck-passing view of good may be false in general, but true for human lives.

But we shall consider a second type of examples, Dostoevskijan examples.
In the "notes from the underground" Dostoevskiy argues that there is something that all people desire in life, which obviously does not make their life better: this is simply the absolutely arbitrary act of the will, of making something against their interest. What Dostoevskiy means by "interest" is some sort of "objective idea" of what makes a person's life good: namely wealth, power, affections, morality. Dostoevskiy argues not that people do not do what is in their best interest, because they ignore it, but that even if people knew perfectly what was in their interest they would still desire to act otherwise, because they do not want to reduce their life to a mathematical object! In other words, people want to be unforeseeable, which entails being irrational, and unreasonable.

Dostoevskji's claim about motivation can be easily turned into a claim about "romantic goodness". It can be claimed that a life can be made better "in the romantic sense" by containing something unforeseeable and unreasonable. Now, an interesting claim about "romantic goodness" is that it seems to be - intuitively - the kind of goodness that can contribute to the goodness of an individual life, but not the kind of goodness that can give a reason to choose that life to the person whose life that is. Therefore: romantic goodness can make a life better than another without making it more choiceworthy for the person whose life that is.


Consider two lives in which a subject loses a lot of goods. In one life, it is because he is unlucky. In the other, it is because he does a Dostoevskjian act. The second life is better than the first (it contains more romantic goodness.) But is there anything in the second life that gives a person more reason to choose it or want it? It seems that there cannot be. For if agent S has a reason to choose the first life, this makes it reasonable for him to do a Dostoevskjian act. But becoming reasonable, the act ceases to become Dostoevskjian and to contribute to the romantic goodness of a life. (This applies even retrospectively. If the agent is in the position to see, retrospectively, his life as being made better by the Dostoevskjian act, he will see his act as reasonable and destroy its romantic value. The romantic goodness of a life must be thought as inacessible in the agential perspective.)

In conclusion: it may be claimed that the agent has no reason to choose a life containing romantic goodness, but has reasons to admire it. This can also be doubted. The equivalence between the good life and the choiceworthy life does not obtain, but a buck-passing account referring to an attitude of the spectator (not of the agent) may still be available.