Online research in philosophy

This paper is a short review of Roger Crisp's book Reasons and the Good.

This paper examines some work in welfare economics based upon generalized social welfare function (GSWFs). Impartial welfarism consists in a set of apparently quite weak moral axioms concerning GSWFs. Using that framework, welfare economists have derived both utilitarian and Rawlsian doctrines. These results would seem to be of great importance to moral philosophy. I argue, however, that applying them presupposes a view of persons as mere place holders for preferences, thereby limiting the theorems' appeal for moral philosophers. I propose a more satisfactory view of impartial welfarism by replacing the term person by the more general welfare recipient, but this still fails to make the doctrine available to all moral philosophers.

When we speak of a “good life” there are several different things we might mean. We might mean a morally good life. We might mean a life good for others, or good for the world in general. We might mean a life good in itself for the one who lives it. This last may also be described as the life high in individual welfare.

Intrinsic goodness is a non-Ielational property, in that the worth of an intrinsically good thing does not consist in it standing in a beneficial relationship to anyone. Except for the non-relational intrinsic goodness, which if it exists must be acknowledged by all (rational) beings, the only relational good we humans can logically and plausibly deem good is the “human-related” good. Thus, only these two options exist: from our human viewpoint, either all good things are human-related goods, or some good things are also intrinsically good. Those theories that reject intrinsic goodness. and that declare that the only kind of good things there can be are the human-related goods, are all forms of feeling-consequentialism. if the (two) “default arguments” could refute all feeling-consequentialisms, they would thereby refute theories that deny the very possibility of intrinsic goodness. Hence they would establish that, so long as a theory holds that some things are indeed good, it must also hold that there exist (also) intrinsically good things. The default arguments do show that utilitarian calculations cannot account for all goodness, since no linkage exists between goodness and pleasure. But some “positive feelings” (let them be X, Y, and Z) can be inextricably linked to what is good. Hence theories that define the good in terms of X, Y. and Z, are not amenable to the criticisms that utilitarianism is. Thus, the default arguments do not establish the impossibility of there being a (non-utilitarian feeling-consequentialist) theory, which acknowledges only human-related good things, and denies intrinsic goodness altogether. The tenability of such a stance has not been ruled out. Moore’s inability to accept the consequences of things having intrinsic worth, further betrays the implausibility of the very concept of intrinsic value.

One kind of philosophical question about welfare is about the nature of the concept itself. We seek elucidation of the concept, perhaps by relating it to the concept of goodness or the concept of rationality. We do not seek to determine which lives have the property of a high degree of welfare, or why; we seek only to clarify what it means to ascribe this property to a life. Call this sort of question formal. There are also substantive questions about welfare. These too are abstract questions, but they seek a description or explanation of some sort—a description of the features of lives which constitute a high degree of welfare, or an explanation of why lives with those features have that property. These questions are logically downstream of the formal question: they presuppose some understanding of the nature of the concept, and pursue matters of its extension. This paper focuses on substantive questions, but I had better provide some answer, even if stipulative, to the formal question. I shall understand a person’s welfare as consisting of those things that are final goods for her. This formula combines two ideas: the idea that some things are ‘final goods’, and the idea that some things are ‘good for’ someone. Something is a final good just in case it is good for its own sake.1 Not everything that is good is a final good; some things are good merely as means. I assume that we should count only final goods as constituents of a person’s welfare—so that, for example, wealth is not properly a constituent of welfare. Second, I shall take the orthodox view that welfare is what is ‘good for’ a person. This expresses an admittedly imprecise and elusive idea, to the effect that welfare is goodness relative to each subject.2 What’s good for me may not be good for you. Turn now to substantive questions. Roger Crisp has drawn a helpful distinction between two such questions about welfare. On one hand is the enumerative question. This asks for a list of the constituents of a life with a high degree of welfare (‘constituents of welfare’ hereafter, for short)..

Welfarism says that the value of a possible world is got by taking the numbers that measures each person's welfare level---how good that person's life is for them---and adding them up. But welfarism is false. Instead, the value of a possible world should also depend on how deserving the people in that world are. But how are we to use facts about welfare and about desert to compute the values of possible worlds? There appear to be too many ways to do it, and no way to tell which is best. I isolate one way to do it and defend its superiority.

In this paper I argue for the following conclusions: 1. The widely shared beliefs that in utilitarianism and consequentialism (a) the good has priority over the right and (b) the right is derived from the good, are both false. 2. The most plausible components of utilitarianism that are used to present it as an intuitively compelling moral theory - welfarism, consequentialism and maximization - do not in fact support utilitarianism because they do not establish that the best state of affairs is the one with the highest sum total of the non-moral good. These components cannot determine which state of affairs is the best and therefore leave it entirely open whether one should opt for distribution-insensitive utilitarianism or a distribution-sensitive welfarist consequentialism. Since this is left open, it is not the case that distribution-insensitive utilitarianism is the default option and every deviation from it towards a more just distribution needs to be defended against utilitarianism. Rather, in light of our moral intuitions and the persistence of the objection from justice against utilitarianism, it seems to be the other way round, that distribution-sensitivity is the default option and any deviation from it bears the burden of proof.

(Forthcoming in Social Theory and Practice, 2002) Richard J. Arneson A notable achievement of T.M. Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other1 is its sustained critique of welfarist consequentialism.2 Consequentialism is the doctrine that one morally ought always to do an act, of the alternatives, that brings about a state of affairs that is no less good than any other one could bring about. Welfarism is the view that what makes a state of affairs better or worse is some increasing function of the welfare for persons realized in it. I shall argue that Scanlon’s critique, though containing much of interest, fails on its own terms.

Welfarism is the view that morality is centrally concerned with the welfare or well-being of individuals. The division between welfarist and non-welfarist approaches underlies many important disagreements in ethics, but welfarism is neither consistently defined nor well understood. I survey the philosophical work on welfarism, and I offer a suggestion about how the view can be characterized and how it can be embedded in various kinds of moral theory. I also identify welfarism's major rivals, and its major attractions and weaknesses.