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OBJECTIVISM AND RELATIONAL GOOD

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2007

Connie S. Rosati
Affiliation:
Philosophy, University of Arizona

Abstract

In his critique of egoism as a doctrine of ends, G. E. Moore famously challenges the idea that something can be “good for” someone. Donald Regan has recently revived and developed the Moorean challenge, making explicit its implications for the very idea of individual welfare. If the Moorean is right, there is no distinct, normative property good for, and so no plausible objectivism about ethics could be welfarist. In this essay, I undertake to address the Moorean challenge, clarifying our theoretical alternatives so that we may better decide what to admit into our moral ontology and better assess what may be at stake in whether objectivists treat good or good for (or neither) as fundamental. I compare the Moorean and welfarist pictures of value, providing an account of the form and function of good for. According to this account “good for” expresses a distinct relational value that has its source in the value of persons. Good for value is thus a form of extrinsic value that provides agent-neutral reasons for action, and it plays a pervasive normative role in regulating child rearing, guiding individual life choices, and shaping social policy formation.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2008

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References

1 Moore, G. E., Principia Ethica (1903), revised edition, ed. Baldwin, Thomas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), sec. 59Google Scholar.

2 Ibid. (Moore's emphasis).

3 See Hurka, Thomas, “‘Good’ and ‘Good For’,” Mind 96, no. 381 (1987): 7173CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hurka, who agrees with Moore in rejecting talk about the good for, makes the analogy to “true for” explicit. In canvassing the sundry meanings of ‘good for,’ none of which he finds unconfused, Hurka considers uses which treat what is good for a person as what she believes good, either in relation to herself or impersonally. He remarks, “If someone falsely believes that p we do not say that p is ‘true for her.’ That would go too far toward endorsing her belief, and we should have the same worry here. If we mean only that someone believes a thing good, that is all we should say, leaving issues of truth or acceptability wide open” (73). I am suggesting that a related, if not identical, parallel underlies Moore's thinking.

4 Moore, Principia Ethica, sec. 59. Jan Narveson has asked why we should bother to consider seriously Moore's challenge when the claim he makes—that everyone has as much reason for aiming at my good as I do—is, as Narveson sees it, so implausible. If X satisfies one of my desires, Narveson claims, it doesn't follow that anyone else has a reason to help me secure X. Because Narveson's puzzlement might be shared, perhaps it would be helpful to highlight at least two points on which he and I evidently part company; our differences with respect to these points help to explain our differing reactions to Moore's challenge. First, whereas Narveson is inclined to accept a desire theory of welfare, I believe we have pretty conclusive reasons to reject any such theory. I have argued against certain desire theories of personal good elsewhere. See Rosati, Connie S., “Persons, Perspectives, and Full-Information Accounts of the Good,” Ethics 105, no. 2 (1995): 296325CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rosati, , “Naturalism, Normativity, and the Open Question Argument,” Noûs 29, no. 1 (1995): 4670CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rosati, , “Agency and the Open Question Argument,” Ethics 113, no. 3 (2003): 490527CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For other critical discussion of desire theories, see, e.g., Velleman, J. David, “Brandt's Definition of ‘Good’,” Philosophical Review 97 (1988): 353–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sobel, David, “Full Information Accounts of Well-Being,” Ethics 104, no. 4 (1994): 784810CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Loeb, Don, “Full-Information Theories of Individual Good,” Social Theory and Practice 21, no. 1 (1995): 130CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sumner, Wayne, Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)Google Scholar, chap. 5. Second, Narveson apparently maintains what I would deny, namely, that good for can (or does?) give rise only to agent-relative reasons. See note 33 below. I am inclined to take Moore's challenge seriously, because I think we still need an analysis of good for, as well as a better understanding of the sorts of reasons a person's good might give to her or to anyone else.

5 Michael Smith has argued that Moore's challenge also has implications for the very idea of agent-relative value. See Smith, Michael, “Neutral and Relative Value after Moore,” Ethics 113, no. 3 (2003): 576–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 That would include the broadly Kantian view I favor, a view that makes central the proper valuing of persons and that regards proper valuing of persons as constituted in part by an appropriate regard for their welfare.

7 Regan, Donald H., “Why Am I My Brother's Keeper?” (hereafter “Brother's Keeper”), in Wallace, R. Jay, Pettit, Philip, Scheffler, Samuel, and Smith, Michael, eds., Reason and Value: Themes from the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 202CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Hurka, “‘Good’ and ‘Good For’.”

8 I say that these theorists may give normative primacy to good for, because one can believe that being good for P is a distinct normative property or concept without believing that personal good or welfare has primacy from the standpoint of moral theory. My interest in this essay lies just with whether good-for talk concerns a distinct normative property, though what I say on this score no doubt bears on the question of whether good or good for (or neither) is fundamental to morality and moral theory. I explain my preference for the expression ‘personal good’ in Rosati, Connie S., “Personal Good,” in Horgan, Terry and Timmons, Mark, eds., Metaethics after Moore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 108–9Google Scholar.

9 Regan says, more precisely, that on the “best versions of each theory of value, ‘the good’ and ‘the good for’ may have the same extension” (Regan, “Brother's Keeper,” 209; final emphasis added). But he sometimes seems to think it likely that they will have the same extension. In particular, he seems confident that at least his own view of the good, which includes pleasure as a part of every state that ought to be promoted, will capture everything that good-for theorists deem a good for (210). Indeed, he later considers as a challenge to his view the suggestion that by treating the good as consisting only in pleasurable experiences of worthy objects or activities, the Moorean shows himself really to be interested in the good for (value for an individual) after all (221). As I have expressed it in the text, what is important is that the extension of good, even if broader than that of good for P, is likely to encompass all of the good for. On Regan's view of the good, the extension of good may in fact be no broader than that of good for P. But whether or not this is so will depend on how Regan ultimately spells out the details of his view, as well as on the correct analysis of good for P.

10 Ibid., 202.

11 Ibid., 203.

12 In the context of Moore's critique of egoism as a doctrine of ends, his claims about “my own good” are preliminary to showing that egoism involves a contradiction. Moore construes egoism as the view that each of us “ought rationally to hold: My own greatest happiness is the only good thing there is.” He claims, as we have seen, that the good of a thing cannot be private; the only reason a person can have for aiming at “her own good” is that it is good absolutely that she possess it, but if it is good absolutely, then everyone has reason to aim at it. So when the egoist holds that a person's happiness or interest ought to be her sole end, this can only mean that it is the sole good and the only thing at which everyone ought to aim. “What Egoism holds, therefore, is that each man's happiness is the sole good—that a number of different things are each of them the only good thing there is—an absolute contradiction” (Moore, Principia Ethica, sec. 59). For criticism of Moore's critique of egoism, see Broad, C. D., “Certain Features of Moore's Ethical Doctrines,” in Schilpp, Paul Arthur, ed., The Philosophy of G. E. Moore, 3d ed. (La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing Co., 1968), 4350Google Scholar.

13 Of those who have offered what they claim to be analyses of personal good, only Stephen Darwall, as far as I have been able to discover, has said anything that would bear on Regan's question. See Darwall, Stephen, Welfare and Rational Care (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, in which he offers an analysis of a person's good as consisting in what one ought to want out of concern for her or for her sake.

14 For a discussion of Moore's challenge in the context of providing a fitting-attitude or “buck passing” analysis of personal value, see Rønnow-Rasmussen, Toni, “Analysing Personal Value,” Journal of Ethics 11, no. 1 (2007)Google Scholar. As I understand it, the notion of personal value that Rønnow-Rasmussen has in mind is not identical to the notion of personal good or welfare.

15 For preliminary work in this direction, see Rosati, “Personal Good.”

16 Regan, more than once, tries to enlist in support of his challenge to the “usefulness” of good for Joseph Raz's claim that we do not pursue our goals because doing so will further or enhance our welfare. Regan, “Brother's Keeper,” 203–4, 219. See Raz, Joseph, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 316–17Google Scholar. I think the claim is false. I would go this far with Raz: we often undertake the goals we do because we believe them to be valuable, and when asked why we undertake them, our explanation often appeals to their value rather than to the benefit to us. But I believe these facts are compatible with what I also think is clearly true, namely, that we pursue the goals we do because we believe that they will (or may, where we are uncertain) enhance our welfare. The ordinary person tends not to talk in terms of his or her welfare or well-being, but that is because the terms ‘welfare’ and ‘well-being’ are mainly philosophers' terms. Suppose we ask any ordinary person not “Why do you pursue X?” but, rather, “Of the many things you believe to be valuable and worth pursuing, why do you pursue X rather than Y?” I conjecture that a typical response would be something along the following lines: “I enjoy X more” or “I believed that, in the long run, X would make me happier.” Of course, a person might also tell us that X would give her a life she found more meaningful, but we often think of the best lives for us as lives that we will find meaningful.

17 Here I express another disagreement with Regan, who suggests, in acknowledging that there is something to the good-for theorist's position, that “We come to the idea of value through our experiences of wanting and desiring and feeling needs, and so it may seem that when we ascribe value to something, we are necessarily ascribing value ‘for’ ourselves.” Desire, he indicates, seems to him to be “implicated in the aetiology, and to some extent the continuing plausibility, of the idea that value is essentially ‘value for’” (Regan, “Brother's Keeper,” 209). Although our desires and felt needs may have something to do with the aetiology of “good for,” I think a more plausible account would appeal to our experience of loving people (including ourselves) and seeing them, apparently, suffer or thrive.

18 See, e.g., Thomson, Judith Jarvis, Goodness and Advice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

19 Larry Temkin argues persuasively against this view in “Harmful Goods, Harmless Bads,” in R. G. Frey and Christopher W. Morris, eds., Value, Welfare, and Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Temkin cites for this view Bernard Williams, “The Point of View of the Universe: Sidgwick and the Ambitions of Ethics,” Cambridge Review (1982), reprinted in Williams, , Making Sense of Humanity and Other Philosophical Essays, 1982–1993 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; and Foot, Philippa, “Utilitarianism and the Virtues,” Mind 94, no. 374 (1985): 196211CrossRefGoogle Scholar.The view Temkin criticizes should not be confused with what Christian Coons has called the “dependence thesis,” which is the view that the value of states of affairs depends on the value of individuals. See Coons, Christian, The Value of States and the Value of Individuals (doctoral dissertation, University of California, Davis, 2006)Google Scholar. On Coons's view, states can be good—that is, they can merit promotion—only for the sake of valuable individuals, and states can be promoted for the sake of an individual either out of respect or concern for her. Coons here exploits Darwall's suggestion that concern and respect are the basic normative attitudes we bear toward persons in order to defend a broader thesis about the structure of value. See Darwall, Welfare and Rational Care.

20 Regan goes to some efforts to explain why he thinks that the concept of welfare faces the same epistemological and metaphysical difficulties as Moorean good, perhaps because some welfare theorists have suggested otherwise. But whether good for faces the same difficulties as Moorean good surely depends on what we may yet learn about what it is for something to be good for someone. So I do not think that the matter can be settled at this juncture. In any event, no part of my efforts to understand good for depend on the claim that good for is less problematic than Moorean good. Regan's claims assume that the concept of welfare is “irreducibly normative.” He seems to think that means that the concept does not admit of analysis, and, at least, that it could not be a natural property. He invokes an argument of Stephen Darwall's which he takes to show that the concept of welfare is irreducibly normative. See Darwall, Welfare and Rational Care, 11. But Darwall thinks that the concept does admit of analysis, and he thinks he has provided the correct analysis: on his view, what is good for P is what one ought to want for P out of concern for her or for her sake. Darwall has indicated to me, in an e-mail exchange, that he does not mean to preclude the possibility that the “ought” which figures in his analysis of good for and renders it normative could be a natural property, in the fashion of the Cornell realists; but it cannot be given a definitional reduction and is in that sense irreducibly normative. Regan appears to have a number of related targets in his essay: the idea that good for is better off epistemologically and metaphysically than good, the idea that good for has normative primacy, the idea that good for is fully normative, and the idea that good for is independent of (not parasitic on) Moorean good.

21 Regan himself (“Brother's Keeper,” 207) seems to allow that the good-for theorist could take the position that good-for is unanalyzable, though he thinks this would reveal a point he means to press, namely, that good for “has no metaphysical and epistemological advantage over Moore's good.” See note 20.

22 See Rosati, “Personal Good.” Good for is, strictly speaking, a relation, and this is, as I explain later, important to understanding the nature of personal good; those items that stand in the requisite relation to P have the property of being good for P. For ease of discussion, I sometimes talk simply in terms of good for when I have in mind the property rather than the relation, but the context should make clear when I have the property in mind.

23 Mackie, J. L., Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (New York: Penguin, 1977)Google Scholar.

24 Mackie's skeptical argument is, as has been pointed out in varying ways, premised on an implausible idea of what objective normative properties would have to be like and of what we are committed to in talking as if there were such properties.

25 See Harman, Gilbert, “Moral Relativism,” in Harman, Gilbert and Thomson, J. J., Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 35Google Scholar. Harman likens his claim about moral relativity to Einstein's claim about the relativity of an object's mass. He contends that Einstein's Theory of Relativity does not involve the claim that people are mistaken about the meaning of their judgments about an object's mass; rather, the truth conditions for their claims are not as they suppose, “because the only truths there are in the area are relative truths” (ibid., 4). Harman, in discussing evaluative relativity (ibid., 14–16), treats good for as relativistic, but if he means ‘good for’ in the welfarist sense, then the good-for theorist would contend that he confuses relativism with relationalism.

26 See Boghossian, Paul, “What Is Relativism?” in Greenough, Patrick and Lynch, Michael P., eds., Truth and Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)Google Scholar. I here follow Boghossian, who rejects Harman's ideas about how to characterize relativism in the context of his own effort to develop a model for how to understand the discovery that truths in a particular domain are relativistic. Boghossian first rejects a model according to which the discovery of relativism in a domain is the discovery that the propositions expressed by sentences in that domain are unexpectedly relational. This model, he claims, would not account either for classic cases of relativistic discoveries in physics or for relativistic claims about morality. He then rejects Harman's model, which would treat the discovery of relativism not as a discovery about the propositions expressed by typical sentences in a domain but as a discovery about their truth conditions. As Boghossian explains, the model would have speakers misunderstanding the truth conditions for their claims and would amount to abandoning the platitude expressed in (f). He finally arrives at a model that treats discoveries of previously undetected relativism as “correcting our view of what the facts are.” Boghossian's conclusion regarding how to model relativistic claims treats relativism about a domain, in this regard at least, as akin to Mackie's skepticism insofar as it corrects for a view about the facts that was “in error.” Of course, the situation I explore in this essay is just the inverse of the one that interests Boghossian: the “discovery” the Moorean means to press is not that truths about value are unexpectedly relativistic but that truths about value, contrary to our good-for talk, are never relational in the way we suppose.

27 In “What Is Relativism?” Boghossian treats the relativist as urging us to substitute for our claims about monadic properties those relational truths that are the “closest truths in the vicinity.” I am here suggesting that the Moorean should be understood as urging a reform in the opposite direction.

28 Compare Mark Kalderon's discussion of “revolutionary” fictionalism in Kalderon, Mark Eli, Moral Fictionalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 136–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Boghossian, “What Is Relativism?” On Boghossian's construal of relativism, the relativist is engaged in a “reforming project” which would urge us to “abandon the absolutist discourse we currently have in favor of a discourse which accommodates [the relativist's] conviction that the only facts in the vicinity of that discourse are certain kinds of relational facts.” Of course, we would expect the impact of such abandonment to vary. It is one thing to give up talk about absolute motion in favor of motion relative to a frame of reference; it is quite another to give up talk about absolute moral requirements in favor of moral relativism. In the former case, we still have motion, just better understood; in the latter, we (arguably) no longer have morality. But then, if the relativist is right, we never had it. Still, there may be pragmatic effects of absolutist moral talk that we would want to retain, even if we became convinced that the relativist was right about the facts.

29 Regan, “Brother's Keeper,” 218.

30 Ibid., 211 and note 22.

31 Ibid., note 22.

32 I am prepared to say, then, that the fact that something is good for a person gives agent-neutral reasons, but I am not prepared to say, as Regan seems to, that we can be required to care about something. Care is, after all, a conative state, and it is uncertain to what extent we have control over our carings. Even if it does not make sense to say that we ought to care, we can still reasonably say both that it is appropriate to care and that one ought to behave as would someone who did care. On the latter idea, see Darwall, Welfare and Rational Care.

33 These last few sentences are intended to provide what I acknowledge to be an all too quick reply to the surprising resistance I have encountered to the suggestion that facts about what is good for a person provide agent-neutral reasons. David Sobel has suggested, for instance, that it is optional whether the good-for theorist treats good for as of great moral significance and as giving rise to agent-neutral reasons. I doubt this, at least if the good-for theorist is interested in whatever property ‘good for P’ expresses and whatever facts there may be about what is good for persons. I doubt it for the reasons I have gestured toward in the text. Ordinary moral thought and talk seem to presuppose that the good of other people makes at least some claim on us, and not merely the good of those with whom we have special relationships or to whom we have special obligations. Of course, a theorist can stipulate a notion of good for that treats it as purely prudential. But it is unclear what interest such a notion could have or how it could be normative. What might it capture that is left out by the notion of good for that figures in our ordinary talk and in the work of most welfare theorists? And why should the individual herself be interested in her own purely prudential good for unless it captures something otherwise missed? Sobel has also suggested that my position may rule out egoism. I am not convinced that it does. Egoism, in my view, is not properly classified as a moral theory; rather, it is a theory of what individuals have most reason to do that competes with morality. The egoist can allow that any person's good gives one a reason to act, while maintaining that one's own good alone gives overriding reason to act. It seems to me, then, that the egoist could take on board what I have to say about good for; any difficulties in doing so are internal to egoism itself. Richard Kraut has correctly taken my remarks to imply that we each have reason to promote the well-being of every other person. But we each only need the help of certain others, he has reminded me, and so why suppose all moral agents should help? I am inclined to think that this sort of resistance to the idea that personal good gives rise to agent-neutral reasons can be overcome by further reflection on what that might involve. P's good, for example, can give everyone a reason to act, even if each of us still has overriding reason to do something other than act to promote P's good. We have reason, for example, to support some division of labor with respect to promoting other people's good; it makes sense to attend to those we know well and whom we are best positioned to aid. Not all of us will be equally well-positioned to aid P. Moreover, we have reason to leave it to P, ordinarily, to promote her own good without our aid or interference. After all, P is an autonomous agent, and her good will partly consist in her own active pursuit of a way of life. Except in the case of children or adults who are unable to act on their own behalf, acting so as to promote another's good involves some risk of subverting her autonomy. Third parties tend, in any case, to be less well positioned to promote an individual's good than the individual herself. For these reasons, and not because good for gives rise only to agent-relative reasons, the reason third parties have to promote another's good may be overridden or conditional. The fact that good for gives anyone a reason for action is consistent with recognizing differences among individuals in their obligations to promote someone else's good. A parent does not have exclusive reason to promote his child's welfare, but he has special obligations that the rest of us may lack, so the duty of seeing to his child's welfare ordinarily falls, in the first instance, on him. Moreover, he may have, in addition to the agent-neutral reasons anyone has to promote his child's welfare, agent-relative reasons. Finally, much of what we do, and ought to do, in response to the claim that others' good makes on us takes the form of indirect support. We arrange for public financing or make charitable contributions; we support institutional arrangements that provide aid or otherwise support individuals in their self-development and pursuit of their own good. Kraut has suggested as a counterintuitive implication of my position that since, e.g., a disease is bad for the trees in the forest, we all have reason to ensure that trees do not acquire diseases. I do not believe that ‘good for’ in talk about what is good or bad for trees, artifacts, and so on expresses the same normative notion involved in talk about what is good for a person. For one thing, I do not believe that trees and artifacts are the sorts of things that have a welfare. An adequate response to Kraut would require explaining what things have a welfare and how nonwelfare good-for talk should be understood, but I cannot undertake to address these matters fully here, so I merely register my views. Mark LeBar has questioned my apparent assumption that only agent-neutral reasons can be fully normative. I do not mean to make any such assumption. For purposes of the arguments in this essay, I assume only that good for would be without much interest from the standpoint of moral theory were it merely to give rise to agent-relative reasons. And I claim that whether or not there are fully normative agent-relative reasons, and whether or not good for is also normative in this agent-relative way, good for is normative in the way the Moorean claims it is not.

34 Regan himself describes the dilemma argument as an argument against the “usefulness” of good for, and also as an argument for why good for cannot make a claim on people (other than the individual whose good it is), if it is “genuinely independent of Moorean good.” See Regan, “Brother's Keeper,” 213. Challenging the usefulness of a normative concept seems a peculiar criticism unless whether a concept plays a useful normative role bears on whether the concept is of a genuinely normative property. I argue later that judgments about good for play a certain normative role and that judgments about good (or good occurring in the life of) are not well suited to this role. The claim that good for cannot make a claim on other people is, I believe, best understood as a challenge to the existence of being good for P as a distinct normative property.

35 Ibid., 211.

36 After presenting the dilemma argument, Regan goes on to “consider how the dilemma manifests itself in connection with” certain contemporary theories of well-being. After discussing the views of Wayne Sumner and James Griffin, he remarks, “[T]he joint lesson of the discussion of Sumner and Griffin is that ‘good for’ is a chimera. If we take seriously the dependence on the agent's subjective evaluation, which Sumner plausibly claims is the best realization of the ‘for’, we get the very implausible conclusion that a life spent in trivial pursuits can be as valuable as Bach's life or Darwin's life if the subject is as satisfied, and that the life of trivial pursuits can make as strong a claim on others to be promoted, so far as intrinsic prudential value is concerned. This is not plausible; the ‘for’, in Sumner's account, undermines the ‘good’. In contrast, emphasizing the perfectionist element, as Griffin does, seems to attenuate the ‘for’ to the point where it is a mere empirical accident (‘occurring in the life of’) rather than an aspect of the normative concept. In Griffin's account, the ‘for’-ness is totally unrelated to the nature of the value” (ibid., 218). See Sumner, Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics, and Griffin, James, Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement, and Moral Importance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

37 Regan, “Brother's Keeper,” 211 (Regan's emphasis).

38 Ibid., 212.

39 Although disagreement exists as to how best to understand John Stuart Mill's moral philosophy, he claims to advocate a form of hedonism, which he offers as a theory of the good rather than as a theory of welfare. See Mill, John Stuart, Utilitarianism (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 1979)Google Scholar. Mill claims that the sole good is happiness, and he describes a happy life as one relatively free of pain and rich in enjoyments both in point of quantity and of quality. Although he offers hedonism as a theory of the good, or what he seems to think is the same thing, the sole end, Mill's emphasis on the importance of “experiments in living,” so that individuals may determine wherein their own happiness lies, at least suggests that his real concern was with individual good or welfare. See Mill, John Stuart, On Liberty (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 1978)Google Scholar. For a recent hedonistic theory, also offered as a theory of the good rather than as a theory of welfare, see Feldman, Fred, Utilitarianism, Hedonism, and Desert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For differing kinds of desire theories, according to which what is good for a person is, roughly, what she would desire, or desire for herself to desire, under more or less optimal conditions, see, e.g., Griffin, Well-Being; Railton, Peter, “Moral Realism,” Philosophical Review 95, no. 2 (1986): 163207CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Railton, Peter, “Facts and Values,” Philosophical Topics 14 (1986): 531CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Sumner offers helpful critical discussion of hedonistic and desire theories of welfare before presenting his own theory of welfare as autonomous or authentic happiness; see Sumner, Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics, chaps. 4 and 5.

40 See Darwall, Welfare and Rational Care. See also notes 13 and 20 above. For the idea of an objective list theory, see Parfit, Derek, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

41 See Sumner, Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics, chap. 6.

42 More fully, we might say that on the Moorean picture, being a normative concept just is being a concept propositions about the correct application of which provide or entail agent-neutral reasons; and being a normative property just is being a property facts about the instantiation of which provide or entail agent-neutral reasons. One might certainly challenge this idea. And that suggests a rather different route to addressing the Moorean, though one that will arguably rest on my diagnosis of his argument. That route would take on board something like the claims I shall make about how to understand the words ‘good’ and ‘for’ in ‘good for,’ while holding that personal good provides only agent-relative reasons. As I have made clear, however, I believe that facts about what is good for a person also provide agent-neutral reasons.

43 Alternatively, we might say that the proposition expressed by the sentence “X is good for P” does not have the logical form

(X is good) for P

but, rather,

x G p

(using ‘G’ to express the relation is good for). I have found Boghossian's discussion in “What Is Relativism?” helpful in clarifying the Moorean's mistake, as I see it. The Moorean sees the good-for theorist as making something like the move Boghossian attributes to the relativist, which is to offer “replacing” propositions for our old propositions about morality that are built up out of the old propositions. As Boghossian puts it, “the replacing proposition consists in the claim that the old proposition stands in some sort of contentual relation to a set of propositions that constitute a [moral] code.” My suggestion is that the good-for theorist should be understood not as asserting propositions with the sort of logical form the relativist supposes moral propositions to have—a view which is relativism's undoing—but, rather, propositions with the logical form Boghossian describes as operative in the physics cases. And propositions about what is good for a person take the latter form for a precisely parallel reason: namely, they express truths about a relational property the concept of which does not contain the concept good as a proper part.

44 Notice that this would yield just the sort of incompatibility that Regan claims for good for. The sentence “The hammer is good” asserts a claim about the intrinsic value of the hammer; the added instrumental relation, “for driving nails,” undercuts the claim of intrinsic value. Lest instrumental uses of ‘good’ seem an aberration, consider occurrences of ‘good’ in judgments of something as an instance of a type. Consider the sentence “The Corolla is a good car.” No one supposes, to put the point differently, that the proposition expressed by that sentence is built up out of the proposition The Corolla is good (in Moore's sense) and a categorization as to the type of object, car. That there are distinctions in goodness and that these are not distinctions across a single monadic property should be evident, e.g., from Christine M. Korsgaard's classic discussion in “Two Distinctions in Goodness,” reprinted in Korsgaard, , Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 249–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar, originally published in Philosophical Review 92, no. 2 (1983): 169–95. The expression ‘good for,’ like ‘good,’ appears in a variety of contexts. As I hope is entirely clear, my interest lies solely with uses of the expression in the context of individual welfare or personal good, what is sometimes described as “intrinsic” “nonmoral” good for a person. See note 33 above.

45 Railton has explicitly described good for as relational goodness. See Railton, “Moral Realism,” 183: “It should perhaps be emphasized that although I speak of the objectivity of value, the value in question is human value, and exists only because humans do. In the sense of old-fashioned theory of value, this is a relational rather than absolute notion of goodness. Although relational, the relevant facts about humans and their world are objective in the same sense that such non-relational entities as stones are: they do not depend for their existence or nature merely upon our conception of them.” Treating being good for P as a distinct relational property might seem to invite greater problems down the road. In note 25, Regan remarks, “The need for good simpliciter seems even clearer when we consider the problem of how to balance the (reasons created by the) good for Abel and the good for Seth. Balance we must, and that seems to require a ‘good’ (explicit or implicit) which is not a ‘good for’” (“Brother's Keeper,” 213). If good is not a proper part of good for, we would seem to have no common value for weighing and balancing. In fact, I think the good-for theorist has plenty to say to address the worry, but here I merely flag the issue and leave questions about commensurability and balancing for another time.

46 Regan, “Brother's Keeper,” 210.

47 I think Regan hints at this worry when he raises doubts about the “usefulness” of good for, but he never articulates the point of the usefulness challenge as fully as would be desirable, and I believe expressing the problem simply in terms of “usefulness” obscures the fact that the underlying issue is ontological. See note 34.

48 Moore, Principia Ethica, sec. 18.

49 Ibid., sec. 22.

50 Ibid., sec. 18.

51 For excellent discussion of Moore's theory of organic unities, seeHurka, Thomas, “Two Kinds of Organic Unity,” Journal of Ethics 2, no. 4 (1998): 299320CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 Moore, Principia Ethica, sec. 50.

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid., sec. 69.

55 However problematic in other regards, this way of understanding good occurring in the life of would at least have the virtue of ruling out alleged cases in which a person benefits from events that occur after her death.

56 Moore remarks, “In any actual choice we should have to consider the possible effects of our action upon conscious beings, and among these possible effects there are always some, I think, which ought to be preferred to the existence of mere beauty. But this only means that in our present state, in which but a very small portion of the good is attainable, the pursuit of beauty for its own sake must always be postponed to the pursuit of some greater good, which is equally attainable” (ibid., sec. 50).

57 Moore himself at least seems to have thought consciousness to be of rather insignificant value. In his discussion of “the ideal,” Moore remarks, “By far the most valuable things, which we know or can imagine, are certain states of consciousness, which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects” (ibid., sec. 113). But in introducing the notion of organic unities, he tells us that because consciousness does not always greatly increase the value of a whole, “we cannot attribute the great superiority of the consciousness of a beautiful thing over the beautiful thing itself to the mere addition of the value of consciousness to that of the beautiful thing. Whatever the intrinsic value of consciousness may be, it does not give to the whole of which it forms a part a value proportioned to the sum of its value and that of its objects” (ibid., sec. 18). And in the case of the organic unity involving contemplation of beauty, Moore makes it clear that the most valuable cases of aesthetic appreciation involve not “bare cognition of what is beautiful in an object,” but also an emotional response appropriate to the kind of beauty in question (ibid., sec. 114). Moore later concluded that it is common to all intrinsic goods that they contain “both some feeling and some other form of consciousness.” See Moore, G. E., Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 107Google ScholarPubMed.

58 In a further challenge to the hedonist's claim that pleasure is the sole good, Moore asks, “Can it really be said that we value pleasure, except in so far as we are conscious of it? Should we think that the attainment of pleasure, of which we never were and never could be conscious, was something to be aimed at for its own sake?” Pleasure, Moore concludes, is “comparatively valueless without the consciousness,” and thus is not the sole good. “[S]ome consciousness must be included with it as a veritable part of the end.” Moore, Principia Ethica, sec. 52. But this is not, as Moore's later discussion of organic unities makes clear, because consciousness itself has much intrinsic value. See note 57 above.

59 Moore himself, in talking about the organic unity that comprises beauty and the contemplation of it, suggests something like this latter view. See Moore, Principia Ethica, secs. 115–21.

60 For one thing, TP does not allow us to capture common-sense ideas about when goods either do or do not make a difference to how an individual's life goes. It seems all the same to the permanently comatose patient's life, whether the walls of her hospital room remain bare or display a Picasso.

61 Moore remarks that “Pleasure does seem to be a necessary constituent of most valuable wholes” (Principia Ethica, sec. 55), which, of course, leaves open the possibility of valuable wholes that do not include pleasure. He later came to the view that pleasure is a part of every intrinsically good whole, though he rejected the idea that intrinsic value is always proportionate to the quantity of pleasure. See Moore, Ethics, chap. 7, pp. 103–7. The passage from Ethics quoted in note 57 continues: “and, as we said before, it seems possible that amongst the feelings contained must always be some amount of pleasure.”

62 Regan, “Brother's Keeper,” 221. I am not aware of any other place in his published work that Regan addresses the issue in full.

63 By a “normative relation,” I simply mean that the relation between the person and the thing gives rise to reasons and obligations or, more generally, that it entails a variety of normative judgments. That X is good for P entails, ceteris paribus, that we have reason to promote X for P, that we are obligated not to deprive P of X, that P's pursuit of X is rational, and so on.

64 Regan, “Brother's Keeper,” 225–30. See also Regan, Donald H., “The Value of Rational Nature,” Ethics 112, no. 2 (2002): 267–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also notes 67 and 69 below. Could a Moorean subscribe to the idea that persons have value? Perhaps he could, so long as he was not committed to the view that states of affairs are the sole bearers of intrinsic value, in which case the idea that persons have value would involve a kind of category error. If the Moorean could, then he could also allow that states of persons getting what is good for them have intrinsic value and even that such states are among the most valuable.

65 See Regan, Donald H., “How to Be a Moorean,” Ethics 113, no. 3 (2003): 651–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 651–57, where he seems to express some reservations about treating good as a property.

66 Some have, nevertheless, viewed themselves as engaged in providing an analysis of welfare. See, e.g., Sumner, Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics, ch. 6; and Darwall, Welfare and Rational Care.

67 In what does the value of persons consist? This is, in my view, one of the million-dollar questions in ethics, and I confess to having no especially interesting answer to it. Still, we can get a feel for the idea of persons as valuable beings by reflecting on some of the ways in which philosophers have been or might be tempted to answer it. One might say that the value of persons just consists in their being appropriate objects of certain attitudes, such as love, concern, or respect. (Coons, following Darwall's suggestions in Welfare and Rational Care about care and respect as attitudes we take up toward persons, adopts a view something like this. See Coons, The Value of States and the Value of Individuals, chap. 2.) Or for those who, like me, do not favor “fitting-attitude” analyses of value, one might point to features of persons in virtue of which certain attitudes are fitting. Perhaps the most common feature philosophers have adverted to is, roughly following Kant, their “rational nature.” (But see note 68.) I am tempted to say, as a first approximation, and will simply assert in the text of this essay, that the value of persons consists in their being intrinsic sources of legitimate normative demands. Cf. Rawls, John, “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory: The Dewey Lectures 1980,” Journal of Philosophy 77, no. 9 (1980): 515–72, p. 543CrossRefGoogle Scholar: “People are self-originating sources of claims….” But I have no illusions that this suggestion takes us very far in answering the question.

68 When I say that, in the case of good for, items are to fit the person, I mean to allow that this fit to the person can be achieved in various ways, some of which will involve changes in the individual. Either way, however, the direction of fit normatively speaking is toward the person—she is the center of normative gravity. I have talked about a person's nature as “calling for” certain items. But her nature includes her capacities as an autonomous agent, and this fact, I have argued elsewhere, has important implications for the nature of personal good. See Rosati, “Personal Good.”

69 As I have explained in a commentary on Darwall's Welfare and Rational Care, I believe that the deep insight behind his rational-care theory of welfare is that a person's welfare is in some sense what one ought to want for her out of an appreciation of her value. See Rosati, Connie S., “Darwall on Welfare and Rational Care,” Philosophical Studies 130, no. 3 (2006): 619–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Of course, this is not precisely how Darwall formulates his own view, but I believe that the appeal of his view lies in how it reflects this idea. In advancing his rational-care analysis, Darwall is quite explicit that the direct object of care is the person herself, and he claims that concern for the person is “primitive” (Darwall, Welfare and Rational Care, 71). A few philosophers, including Darwall, have suggested that the normativity of welfare rests on the value of persons—our welfare matters because we matter. In addition to Darwall, see Anderson, Elizabeth, Value in Ethics and Economics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 26Google Scholar; Velleman, J. David, “A Right of Self-Termination?Ethics 109 (1999): 606–20CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and Rosati, “Personal Good.” Of course, the historical roots of this idea lie in Kant's distinction between conditioned and unconditioned value. See Kant, Immanuel, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Beck, Lewis White (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1995), 393–95Google Scholar (Prussian Academy pagination). I believe that the underlying insight, as well as the insight about the normativity of welfare, are best understood as indicating a feature of the relational property, what I have been calling its “direction of fit.” I have explained elsewhere why I do not think that Darwall's insightful account succeeds as an analysis of welfare. See Rosati, “Darwall on Welfare and Rational Care”; see also Rosati, “Personal Good.” For a reply by Darwall, as well as other commentary on his book, see Darwall, Stephen, “Précis of Welfare and Rational Care,” Philosophical Studies 130, no. 3 (2006): 579–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Feldman, Fred, “What Is the Rational Care Theory of Welfare?Philosophical Studies 130, no. 3 (2006): 585601CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hurka, Thomas, “A Kantian Theory of Welfare?Philosophical Studies 130, no. 3 (2006): 603–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Regan examines Darwall's theory in the course of making his case against good for. I do not address his discussion of Darwall, in part, because I do not fully agree with his characterization of Darwall's position; but, more important, I do not believe that most of Regan's criticisms of Darwall's view apply to what I say. The one claim he makes that would be relevant to assessing the position sketched in this essay is that he sees no special dignity or worth in persons. Regan has critically examined arguments for the idea that rational nature has value; see Regan, “The Value of Rational Nature.” Although I think he is right to find fault in extant arguments, I do not believe the shortcomings of those arguments by any means end the matter. In any case, my aim in this essay is not to argue for the value of persons but to explain how ‘good for P’ might express a distinct, fully normative property. For a reply to Regan, see Sussman, David, “The Authority of Humanity,” Ethics 113, no. 2 (2003): 350–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 For related reasons, Regan's view has a problem that is the mirror opposite of a well-known problem for desire theories. Whereas desire theories, as Mark Overvold has argued, seem to leave no room for self-sacrifice, Regan's view makes no room for self-interested action, because it recognizes no meaningful notion of self-interest. One could act on one's desires or what one values, contrary to promoting the good, but that would not be to act self-interestedly in the usual sense. See Overvold, Mark, “Self-Interest and the Concept of Self-Sacrifice,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 10 (1980): 105–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar. But see Regan's discussion of the self-sacrifice problem, which no doubt reveals how he would respond to my remarks in this footnote: Regan, “Brother's Keeper,” 224, note 52.

71 This assumes, of course, that the good-for theorist is correct in presupposing the value of persons.

72 See Korsgaard, “Two Distinctions in Goodness.” See also Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics, 26. Rae Langton provides helpful refinement of Korsgaard's distinctions in her excellent essay “Objective and Unconditioned Value,” Philosophical Review 116 (2007).

73 For a challenge to this traditional view, see Kagan, Shelly, “Rethinking Intrinsic Value,” Journal of Ethics 2, no. 4 (1998): 277–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

74 Here might be as good a place as any to acknowledge that it might also be good that persons have what is good for them. But the fact, if it is one, that some or even all valuable states of affairs are states of persons getting what is good for them would not show that being good for P is not a distinct normative concept or property.

75 I talk in terms of things that are directly good for a person rather than in terms of ends, because not everything that is good for a person plausibly counts as an end, at least in the sense of something she could undertake to pursue or promote.

76 I should add here an important qualification to the line of argument I have been pressing. The qualification is that the concept good for does not contain the concept good as a proper part if we understand good in the Moorean's sense. That leaves open the possibility that, on other understandings of the concept good, we might plausibly understand propositions about what is good for a person as, in some sense, built out of propositions about what is good.

77 See Rosati, “Personal Good,” for more discussion of the idea of ‘good for’ as expressing a relation of “fit.”

78 See note 67.

79 A third reason for my interest in the Moorean challenge is a suspicion that relational properties may figure more centrally in ethics than is commonly appreciated, and so a better understanding of such properties would be helpful. Perhaps, for example, actions are never right simply but always right in relation to a context and an agent at a time.

80 See Railton, “Facts and Values,” 11.

81 For extended discussion of effective parenting as a model for framing a theory of preference-formation, see Rosati, Connie S., “Preference-Formation and Personal Good,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 81, Supp. 59 (2006): 3364Google Scholar. See also Shapiro, Tamar, “What Is a Child?Ethics 109, no. 4 (1999): 715–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

82 Scanlon, T. M., What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar. Of course, my view of personal good and, in particular, my claims about the function of personal good, indicate some disagreement with the central claims of chapter 3 of Scanlon's book, which presents a revised version of Scanlon's 1996 Tanner Lecture, “The Status of Well-Being,” Michigan Quarterly Review 36, no. 2 (1997): 290–310.

83 True, we may be radically mistaken; we may not be valuable; there may be no normative property of being good for P. But, then, there may be no property of being good either.

84 Darwall's discussion of welfare, in Welfare and Rational Care, well reflects these sorts of ideas. See also Rosati, “Preference-Formation and Personal Good” and “Autonomy and Personal Good: Lessons from Frankenstein's Monster” (manuscript).

85 Thanks to David Sobel for urging me to stress this point.

86 This is assuming, of course, that there are any objective values at all.

87 Regan, “Brother's Keeper,” 222; see also 209.

88 Ibid., 223. See also Regan, “How to Be a Moorean,” sec. 1, for more discussion along the same lines.

89 Regan, “Brother's Keeper,” 223–24.

90 Ibid., 224–25. Regan says this in response to an objection which stresses that it is the agent, after all, who must decide what to do.

91 But see note 17.

92 For initial steps in that direction, see Rosati, “Autonomy and Personal Good: Lessons from Frankenstein's Monster.”

93 See Darwall, Welfare and Rational Care, chap. 4, for an intriguing discussion of the importance to individual welfare of what he calls “valuing activities.”