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.

Virtue Ethics

Virtue ethics is a very weird thing and difficult to define. [If you want to read a good introduction of virtue ethics, I suggest you "virtue ethics" by Rosalind Horsthouse. I'm giving my own thoughts about it.]
In its most extreme form it would be the thesis that every moral and evaluative concept can be reduced to the concept of a good human being, or a good character. I think no real philosopher held something so implausible except maybe Nietzsche, and some contemporary analytical philosophers who thinks themselves as Aristotelians: Geach and Foot.. Do not quote! (Here is why I classify Nietzsche as a virtue ethicist in this sense: a possible interpretation of the first essay of the Genealogy is that the concept of "good" and "bad" person is prior (genetically prior) to both the concept of "good" and "evil" character, and to the concept of the moral good. "Good" is to be understood an attribute of "good people"; that it, the term that people belonging to ruling class - the good, the noble, the strong, the powerful - started to use to refer to themselves. Everything else is said to be good as in relation to this: good acts are those acts that emanate from noble people, good tastes are tastes of noble people, etc...) (If I am right, Geach and Foot's view, which denies that there is a meaning of good different from the attributive sense, seem to imply something like Nietzsche's view. This is all a very personal theory; while what I'm going to say from now on is much less controversial.)

There is a more moderate view of what virtue ethics is, which I think it makes little sense to see in opposition to deontology or consequentialism, even if it differs from the two, especially in terms of approach. The model of this sort of virtue ethics is especially Aristotle. According to this view, the central concept of virtue ethics are the concepts of a good human being, of a virtue, and of eudaimonia or fulfillment, that is, the good life. Virtue ethics differs from the other two approaches primarily (I would say exclusively) in that for virtue ethics the focus of moral theory should not be the evaluation of norms of conduct and actions (taken as atoms of behavior) but the three aforementioned concepts. The difference, therefore, is in what virtue ethics, against both consequentialism and deontology, sees as the business of moral theory and as having a proper understanding of morality.
Let's make an example. It is crucial for the success of both a consequentialist and deontological morality, that they provide some philosophical method to discriminate good and bad actions (or right and wrong, if you prefer), usually (I would say exclusively) conceived as a general rule.
Consequentialism, in fact, is nothing but a class of formally analogous general rules, in the sense above. A rule is consequentialist if it has the following form: action F is good iff its outcome (which may even coincide with the action itself!!!) is good (or better than any other possible outcome, in some versions.) So if you want to ascertain whether a certain action is good your consequentialist instruction manual tells you the following: look at the consequences of the action (which may include the action itself), evaluate their goodness, and if you produced more good than bad, well, boy, you did a good thing. (In some versions, if you did what produced more good than bad than any other action you could have done you did the right thing, otherwise you did the wrong thing.)
Deontology is also a class of formally analogous general rules. A deontological morality may even contain some consequentialist principle, but, on a whole, it will be different from a consequentialist one because it will contain rules forbidding you to do certain actions whatever the consequences in terms of the goodness produced. (So for example, you may not break a promise even if you know that, if you don't, 1000 promises will be broken.) But fundamentally it also consists in providing you with an instruction manual: if you want to ascertain whether a certain action is good or bad (or better, right or wrong) you take your deontological instruction manual, which will contain some list of actions you are not allowed to do, whatever the circumstances. (Some manuals are just a set of rules, like the 10 Commandments. Other, like Kant's cathegorical imperative, consist of one rules from which all other rules can be deduced.)
Now, notice that virtue ethics presents itself as something really different. The virtue ethicist would argue that the proper business of ethics is not to produce instruction manuals. The basic tenet of this sort of virtue ethics are:
1. the Aristotelian idea that rules in ethics obtain only "for the most part"; and that you need experience and a good upbringing to be able to judge the goodness of an action
2. the idea that it is more reasonable to start by evaluating a person's character, and judge her action only on the background of the character it came from.
A virtuous agent will certainly have in mind something like a list of actions that are standardly wrong. I will see the fact that a certain action the breaking of a promise as a good reason not to do it. But the morality of the virtuous agent is far from exhausted by sticking to the rules that forbid breaking a promise, or lying, and we may also conceive of situations in which he will assess the consequence of maintaining a promise or telling the truth and decide that he has reasons not to do it.
A virtuous action therefore takes consequences in great account. But he is not concerned, first and foremost, with the production of the highest quantity of good. A virtuous person is supposed to be able to perceive the moral quality of an act, for example, it's being corageous, charitable, sensitive act, as a reason to do it, and this of course is connected to its consequences (a corageous act is an act done in the presence of danger, in view of a greater good), but there is nothing like a calculation of the overall goodness of the outcome. The attitudes of a virtuous agent could be more similar to those of the adherent to deontology: he will not make an uncharitable act for the sake of increasing the moral perfection of that person's life.


[Consider the difference between the two definitions, or if you want, between Aristotle and Nietzsche. I think so. Aristotle, for example, would have never dreamed of assuming "a good person" as the primitive and only authentic sense of moral goodness. And, in opposition to Nietzsche (in the Genealogy) he has never think of it as a mere (unconscious) reflection of positions into a social hierarchy ("the good" as the best, the noble, the powerful, the ruling class). It is true that he uses the understanding of a good man, that is to say, of a man of his social class, as a method to define the good, or choiceworthy life. But the focus here is on what makes a life choiceworthy. It is true that, for Aristotle, we can discover what is a choiceworthy life only by looking at what sort of life the nobles prefer to live. But I think we can infer from his writings that his reason for doing that is that he is sincerely convinced that such people are better than other men (and of course, incomparably better than woman and slaves) at perceiving the real value of things. In other words, the concept of a good man plays and epistemic, not an ontologically constitutive role.
Notice the difference with Nietzsche. Nietzsche can be read as arguing in the Genealogy that there are no real values, or at least no real moral values (moral values are no values at all); and that moral language should be understood along lines different from the promotion of moral goodness, or happiness. For Nietzsche, when the Greek called an act, or a life, "good", all that they meant by the word "good" as that it was an act that it was typical for a noble man to perform, or the life that it was typical for a noble man to live, or simply that it was an act of a noble person, and the life of a noble man. After the "slave revolt in morality" things changed a bit; which is to say, the noble started to look at themselves, and at their most typical actions, with a sense of guilt. (Which was a psychological reflection of the hate they received from the people of the inferior class.) So "good" - that is, "noble" - was turned into "evil"; and "bad", that is "slavish", was turned into (morally) good.]

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.

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."

Welfare, the only ethical value?/3

The value of mountains, artworks, and plants.

For what regards the intrinsic value of non-sentient organisms, welfarism denies it exists or is part of the ethical realm. The only ethical reason one has for protecting and preserving non-sentient organisms (or things), are welfarist reasons, that is to say, reasons that derive from the impact of such organisms and things on sentient organisms.

I find this view unattractive. It implies that we should assent to the following propositions:

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

I don't agree with any of these statements; I am afraid that it is difficult to argue for such intuitions, and that at this point one has reached bedrock. I just find it impossible to deny the value of an ancient rest, of a memorial place, of an artistic creation, derives from its contribution to the well-being of others.

One could argue that one should not deny that such things have value, but only that they have ethical value. Picasso's "Guernica" obviously has aesthetic value, but in so far as we have ethical reasons to preserve this work, it only derives from the aesthetic enjoyment that it produces in people that value aesthetics.

Among other things, this entails that if there is nobody who values Picasso's art, and if it can be know for certain that Picasso's art will never be the source of aesthetic enjoyment for some future individual, or that its existence cannot give any contribution, say, to the lives of historian of arts, etc..., there would be no ethical reason not to destroy the painting. I do not think that this is the case.

I think this point can be proved with some example of everyday life, in which it is clear that we have doubts of an ethical nature, on whether we should preserve or protect things that are valuable apart from their contribution to people's well-being. In Rome, for example, people would not agree to be taxed in order to extract from the ground further Roman rests of no significant interest (it is known that, by drilling a bit in the Roman soil, one can find ancient Roman rests, among which rests of ancient craftwork, most of which of no special historical or aesthetic value. By "special" historical or aesthetic value, I mean that the discovery of this stuff will very likely not change our knowledge of ancient Roman art and craftwork. They may be rests of the same type as the ones that are already in our museums. Yet, I think, these things have some value. I do not see any reason to deny that they have at least as much intrinsic value as analogous pieces that we can already admire in museums.)

But people agree to be taxed in order to build a new subway line. This can be taken to show that the Roman people's prospective enjoyment in having the possibility to use a new subway line is greater than their prospective enjoyment in admiring new ancient Roman rests. (I assume the preference for the subway relative to the Roman rests does not reflect the urgency of the former, because people do not just intend to postpone the extraction of further Roman rests. Roman people just feel that they do not need to uncover more ancient rests, as the community possesses enough of this stuff, so they will not really enjoy having more of it. )

If welfarism was correct, there should be no doubt that, given the assumptions, the ethically right thing to do would be to build the new subway line, even if this implied the destruction of the ancient rests. On the contrary, it is an open question whether the subway line should be build, when this implies the distruction of some ancient rests. This shows that we recognize that there is more that matters, beyond people's well-being. (I assume that the point here has nothing to do with future generations, in the sense that future generations can also be assumed to benefit more from the building of a new subway line, than from the other alternative. I also take the preference for the subway line to be informed, that is to say, based upon a correct evaluation of the impact of this good on anybody's well-being. So I take this preference to reveal future enjoyment accurately.)

These are just my intuitions, what do you think about it?

Welfare: the only ethical value?/2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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