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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 January 2021
Many philosophers find welfare perfectionism implausible because it is arguably underinclusive, as it fails to count as good certain acts, events, and things that intuitively improve one's quality of life. Likewise, philosophers intuit that the experience of pleasure directly contributes to well-being. The problem for welfare perfectionism is straightforward: neither desire-satisfaction nor the experience of pleasure seem to perfect (or be perfections of) one's nature.
This leaves two options for the welfare perfectionist. He can “bite the bullet” and argue that these intuitions are mistaken and that pleasure and desire-satisfaction don't impact well-being. Alternatively, he can explain how such intuitive goods can directly contribute to well-being, despite initial appearances. I advance the latter approach.
I argue that at least for some perfectionists, desire-satisfaction and pleasure both directly contribute to well-being. One cannot argue that welfare perfectionism necessarily neglects the intuitive importance of desire-satisfaction and pleasure.
1 See Hurka, Thomas, Perfectionism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 4–5Google Scholar. See also Lauinger, William, The Strong-Tie Requirement and Objective-List Theories of Well-Being, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 16 (2013), 953–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dorsey, Dale, Three Arguments for Perfectionism, Noûs, 44 (2010), 59–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 See Dorsey, Three Arguments, p. 61. See also Dorsey, Dale, Subjectivism without Desire, Philosophical Review, 121 (2012), 61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sumner, L. W., Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 39–41Google Scholar; Lauinger, William, Well-Being and Theism (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 4Google Scholar; Sobel, David, From Valuing to Value: A Defense of Subjectivism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 See Hurka, pp. 9–10; Brink, David, The Significance of Desire, in Oxford Studies in Metaethics Volume 3, ed. by Shafer-Landau, Russ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008), pp. 5–46 (pp. 33–36)Google Scholar.
4 See Dorsey, Three Arguments, pp. 62–63.
5 The arguments that I examine here are not the only arguments raised against perfectionism. Daniel Haybron raises an argument that is similar – like the general thrust of the argument here, Haybron points out that perfectionism delivers counter-intuitive results when evaluating the lives of certain people. Haybron, Daniel M., Well-Being and Virtue, Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 2 (2007), 5–10Google Scholar. Instead of criticizing perfectionism's ability to accommodate things like pleasure and desire-satisfaction in general, Haybron focuses on situations in which certain kinds of experience seem more appropriate for someone given his or her life situation. While I do not intend to combat this criticism here, I think that perfectionists certainly have tools at their disposal to respond to such objections. See, e.g., Kauppinen, Antti, Working Hard and Kicking Back: The Case for Diachronic Perfectionism, Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 3 (2009)Google Scholar.
6 Sumner, p. 24.
7 Dorsey, Three Arguments, p. 59.
8 Arneson, Richard, Human Flourishing Versus Desire Satisfaction, Social Philosophy and Policy, 16 (1999), 120CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 This article assumes that a perfectionist theory is preferable to an objective-list theory insofar as perfectionism can (by reference to human nature) provide a unifying explanation of the goodness of various things. Objective-list theory, by definition, provides no such explanation. This is not an objection against objective-list theories per se (after all, perhaps there simply is no explanation for why things are good for us), but generally speaking, we tend to favor theories with more explanatory power over those with less.
12 Hurka would be unbothered by this prospect, as he offers perfectionism as a moral theory and not a theory of well-being.
13 Hurka, p. 3.
14 Ibid., p. 11.
15 Ibid., p. 51. Other contemporary Aristotelian perfectionists include Philippa Foot and Richard Kraut. Richard Kraut, What Is Good and Why: The Ethics of Well-Being (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Foot recognizes that pleasure (or enjoyment) may play a role in the good life, although it does not play a critical role in determining what is prudentially good. Ibid., p. 98. Kraut recognizes that the presence of pleasure might be a necessary condition for something's prudential goodness, but rejects the stronger claim that pleasure itself counts as prudentially good. Kraut, pp. 126–30.
16 Hurka, p. 149.
17 Ibid., p. 183.
18 Ibid., p. 190.
19 Ibid., p. 59.
20 Ibid., pp. 132–33.
21 See Ibid., p. 170. I take this to be a shortcoming in Hurka's theory. To unfairly characterize it only slightly, Hurka's theory suggests that love is valuable only insofar as it requires brainpower, planning, and coordination.
22 Ibid., pp. 27–28. As we will see, I think perfectionism is capable of taking satisfaction into consideration, at least to a certain extent.
23 Ibid., p. 25, quoting Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II, Q.94, art. 3. I do not see why this needs to be an “accretion” to perfectionism. It may be more than Hurka finds necessary, but within the Thomistic analysis, such claims are part of the metaphysical framework that justifies perfectionism in the first place.
24 Ibid., p. 26.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid., p. 27. Hurka gives an example of a research scientist who desires to advance knowledge, but may never satisfy that desire – but nevertheless she lives a good life. He also points out that “If a strong desire or pleasure doctrine were true, pursuing excellence would be easy. Once we knew where our greatest good lay, achieving it would be just a matter of following our strongest want or enjoying our greatest pleasure.”
27 Ibid., p. 23.
28 This apparently being a departure from Aristotle.
29 Brink, p. 18.
30 Ibid., p. 32.
31 Ibid., p. 33.
32 Ibid., p. 32.
33 Ibid., p. 33. This definition appears often throughout the literature, but I have my doubts about its appropriateness. It is not at all clear to me how one can go about perfecting one's nature. One's nature is a given, fixed thing – not the kind of thing to be perfected. Rather, I have always been under the impression that one's nature generates the norms of prudential goodness and badness itself; thus one is better off perfecting himself in accordance with his nature, not “perfecting [his] nature.” Perhaps this is what is meant by the phrase, but if so, the phrasing could be improved.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid. Scholars within the “New Natural Law” school often try to find a middle ground between traditional Aristotelian-Thomistic perfectionism and Kantian perfectionism; they argue that rationality, and not biology, generates the norms of well-being, but some of those norms involve bodily health, and so on. See John Finnis, Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
36 Brink, p. 6.
37 Ibid., p. 30.
38 For more on why some theorists prefer objective-list theory over perfectionism, see, e.g., Arneson; Bradford, Gwen, Problems for Perfectionism, Utilitas, 29 (2017), 344–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
39 Lauinger; Robert Merrihew Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
40 Fred Feldman, Pleasure and the Good Life: Concerning the Nature Varieties and Plausibility of Hedonism (New York: Clarendon Press, 2004).
41 Kauppinen.
42 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1956), vol. 3, ch. 48.
43 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (New Advent, 1920), I-II Q.5, art. 3.
44 For a defense of the proposition that desire depends on appearances of the good, see Sergio Tenenbaum, Appearances of the Good: An Essay on the Nature of Practical Reason (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). See also Ralph McInerny, Ethica Thomistica: The Moral Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, rev. edn (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997), p. 2.
45 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II Q.77, art. 2; Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, vol. 3, chs. 3–4.
46 David Oderberg explains the Thomistic approach by saying that an appetite is simply a tendency or disposition towards or away from certain ends, and the term “good” can rightly be applied to all cases in which that appetite is fulfilled. That is – something is good to the extent that it fulfills an appetite. David Oderberg, Being and Goodness, American Philosophical Quarterly, 51 (2014), 346–47. It is also worth noting that philosophers working within the Thomistic meta-ethical framework take as a given that goodness means “perfective of or fulfilling of the agent.” McInerny, p. 2.
47 Robert C. Miner, Thomas Aquinas on the Passions: A Study of Summa Theologiae: 1a2ae 22–48 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 17.
48 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II Q.90, art. 2; Q.94, art. 2.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid., I-II Q.8, art. 1; Q.2, art. 8.
52 Finnis, for example, explains how our reasons for action are grounded in human perfection (whether we know it or not): “The goods to which practical reason's first principles direct us are not abstract, ‘ideal’ or ‘quasi-Platonic forms.’ They are perfections, aspects of fulfillment, flourishing, completion, full-being, of the flesh-and-blood human beings (and the palpable human groups or communities) in whom they can be instantiated.” Finnis, Aquinas, p. 91.
53 One might then ask what we are to make of the case in which someone fails to desire these objective goods. If these good things are nevertheless in his life, can they be good for him? Lauinger (p. 92) argues that such things cannot be good for someone in the absence of desire, although he argues that cases in which humans fail to desire the basic human goods are quite rare. I would maintain that we cannot fail to be inclined towards the objects of our natural inclinations, although impediments (such as psychological and physiological conditions, etc.) might prevent those inclinations from providing (sufficient) motivational force. To clarify, I do not take natural inclinations to be at the level of first-order conscious desires. But I do not think this makes my claim about desire-satisfaction and perfectionism any weaker, as many philosophers who defend desire-satisfaction theories of well-being recognize that well-being need not be constituted by the satisfaction of first-order conscious desires.
54 Ibid., p. 84.
55 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II Q.2; Q.8; Q.91, art. 2.
56 Ibid., I-II Q.91, art.1; Q.93.
57 Ibid., I Q.5, art. 1.
58 Ibid., I Q.5, art. 5.
59 I am not arguing that goodness is prior to being. But insofar as the question about well-being pertains to goodness, we can focus on the aspect of desirability in order to provide our answer. Ibid., I Q.5, art. 1–2.
60 Of course, under this approach, a Thomist could just as easily say that those objective-perfectionistic goods that fulfill us also constitute aspects of human well-being, full stop. But that does not mean that there are two separate elements necessary for something to count as an aspect of well-being. Rather, the meta-ethical and metaphysical framework ensure that the objects of our natural inclinations coincide with objective-perfectionistic goods, and do so necessarily (i.e., non-contingently).
61 See, e.g., John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Mark C. Murphy, Natural Law and Practical Rationality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Josef Pieper, Lesiure: The Basis of Culture (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2009); James V. Schall, On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2012).
62 Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights.
63 Arneson, p. 120.
64 It is not only theoretically possible for pleasure to be considered a good within perfectionism – such views have been defended throughout the history of philosophy. The ancient Epicureans believed pleasure to be good precisely because of the kinds of beings we are. Modern philosophers have made the same argument. Dorsey, Dale, Objectivity and Perfection in Hume's Hedonism, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 53 (2015), 245–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
65 Garrigou-Lagrange, Réginald, Beatitude: A Commentary on St. Thomas' Theological Summa, Ia Iiae, Qq. 1–54 (St. Louis: Herder, 1956), p. 68Google Scholar.
66 Renard, Henri, The Philosophy of Morality (Milwaukee, WI: Bruce Publishing, 1953), p. 42Google Scholar.
67 Reutemann, Charles, The Thomistic Concept of Pleasure (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1953), p. 21Google Scholar. From Aquinas himself: “That men desire pleasure for its own sake, and not for the sake of something else, [is not] enough to indicate that pleasure is the ultimate end . . . for although pleasure is not the ultimate end, it is, of course, a concomitant of this end, since pleasure arises out of the attainment of the end.” Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, vol. 3, ch. 26.
68 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II Q.34, art. 2.
69 Ibid.
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid., I-II Q.32, art. 1.
72 Ibid., I-II Q.31, art. 1; Renard, p. 40.
73 Miner, p. 181.
74 To use an analogy: A piano string is tuned to a certain key. If nothing obstructs the reverberation of the string after the hammer strikes it, a sound is produced. The sound attends – as a proper accident – the string's reverberation. All has gone well – we might say that the sound was successfully played. And to that extent, things are good. The string's object – to create a sound – has been realized and fulfilled. But it does not follow from this that, within the context of the piece of music being played, the note played was a good one. The string could have been tuned incorrectly – or perhaps the musician struck the wrong key. All the same, a note was successfully played, and the end – or good – of the string (as it was tuned at the time) was realized. Likewise, pleasure – considered in itself – is good, but experiencing pleasure might not always yield a net improvement in someone's well-being.
75 Reutemann, p. 11.
76 Ibid., p. 19.
77 Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, vol. 3, ch. 27.
78 Arneson, p. 120.
79 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II, Q.2, art. 8.
80 Ibid., I, Q.5, art. 6.
81 Ibid., I-II, Q.31–34.
82 Ibid., I-II, Q.2, art.6.
