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On the Importance of Well-being

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Abstract

Many among philosophers and non-philosophers would claim that well-being is important in moral theory because it is important to the individual whose well-being it is. The exact meaning of this claim, however, is in need of clarification. Having provided that, I will present a charge against it. This charge can be found in the recent work of both Joseph Raz and Thomas Scanlon. According to the latter the concept of well-being plays an unimportant role in an agent’s deliberation. As I will show, to claim this much is to undermine our initial claim; and to do that is to undermine some of the most central theories in normative ethics. I will focus on Scanlon’s discussion in particular because it affords us with two criteria for the assessment of the importance for a person of a value-concept such as well-being. I will claim that much of Scanlon’s case rests on the idea that well-being is an inclusive good, a good constituted by other things that are good in and for themselves. Then, I will put forward a case against Scanlon’s challenge by (1) showing that inclusiveness, when properly understood, does not lead to the conclusion Scanlon is led to and (2) showing that on at least the reading Scanlon prefers, his criteria are inappropriate.

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Notes

  1. See Raz (1999), Ch.13 and Scanlon (1998), Ch.3.

  2. Scanlon (1998), 108–109. The emphasis is mine.

  3. To be entirely faithful to Scanlon’s text, (5) should have looked like this: “Well-being is important in moral argument as the basis on which an individual’s interests are taken into account because well-being is important to the person whose well-being it is as the basis for those rational decisions in which she alone is concerned.” Many philosophers, though not Scanlon, would not be happy with this statement of (5) because they take a “person’s well-being” to be synonymous to a “person’s interests”. On this reading, the beginning of (5) would be a tautology. Claim (5) can however be reformulated as I proposed in the text with no loss of meaning.

  4. Henceforth, any reference to the importance of well-being in moral theory, will have to be read as the theoretical importance of the notion or concept of well-being in moral theory. Omissions of ‘notion’ or ‘concept’ will be merely stylistic.

  5. Henceforth, reference to “the importance of well-being to an individual” should always be understood as a short for the more cumbersome “the importance of well-being to an individual in her rational decisions when she alone is concerned.”

  6. Frankfurt (1988), p.82 and (1999a), p.92.

  7. Frankfurt (1999b), note 7, p.163.

  8. To say that ‘harm’ and ‘injury’ are intimately linked to well-being does not mean that I am here presupposing that they are reducible to it. I am not excluding that there may be harms and injuries that do not decrease well-being. Even if we did not assume that, however, the intimate link between ‘harm’ and ‘injury’, on the one hand, and well-being, on the other, is still hardly debatable.

  9. See for example Scanlon, Chapter 3, 1998. But see also pp.158–160 and pp.72–76.

  10. Frankfurt (1988), p.83.

  11. Scanlon (1998), 126.

  12. There is a third, rather odd, possibility: to endorse the same methodology as (5′) but claim that there is no x such that x is important to an individual.

  13. Scanlon (1982), pp.108–110.

  14. See Moore (1903)

  15. Scanlon (1998), 109–110. Claim (d) is reproduced partly from p.110 and partly from p.132.

  16. The buck-passing account of value takes “goodness and value to be non-natural properties, namely the purely formal, higher-order properties of having lower-order properties that provide reasons of the relevant kind....it is not goodness or value itself that provides reasons but rather other properties that do so.” Scanlon (1998), 97.

  17. Of course, one could disagree with Scanlon in three ways. (1) Well-being never affords any reason to desire or do anything. But I can’t see how anyone would defend this thesis. (2) Well-being never affords any reason on its own. A version of this thesis has recently been defended by Darwall (2002) who claims that, only if we care about ourselves does our well-being afford us with any reason. Finally (3) there may be a more subtle disagreement as to the kind of reason each agent would have to be concerned with his or her own well-being. Scanlon takes well-being to afford agent-relative reasons; more controversially, however, Darwall (2002) takes well-being (and care) to afford agent-neutral reasons even to the agent whose well-being it is.

  18. Scanlon (1998), 110.

  19. Raz (1999), 315.

  20. Raz (1999), 317–318.

  21. Scanlon (1998), 126.

  22. Scanlon (1998), 126–127.

  23. Scanlon (1998), 129.

  24. Scanlon (1998), 132. Let me make clear that the distinction between standard of rightness, on the one hand, and decision-procedure, on the other, is not at issue here, nor is the distinction between immanent- and transcendent-perspective theories (see Rabinowicz and Österberg 1996). One should not take Scanlon’s claims here as an attempt to show that a theory of well-being has to say, for whatever reasons, that our well-being is whatever motivates an agent under certain circumstances. Such a claim would in effect imply that the immanent-perspective is the correct one, something which would need extensive argumentation. Rather, at this point, the question is “How do we know whether well-being is something that matters to agents?” and the answer is “Look at the role the concept of well-being plays in agents’ first-personal thinking.” This is an epistemological question not the semantic question underlying theories of well-being. That is why this discussion is largely neutral with regard to the distinctions mentioned above. Many thanks to an anonymous referee for bringing to my attention the possibility of confusing these two questions.

  25. Scanlon (1998), 127.

  26. Note that Raz’s argumentation too seems to rest on the inclusive nature of well-being: “In most cases when people refer to their well-being or their interests they refer either to their chances of succeeding with worthwhile goals or relationships which they have, or want to have, or their possession of the means (money, education, etc,) which will enable them to pursue whatever worthwhile goal or relationship they may at some time come to want to pursue. Goals and relationships they have or may want to have are what people have reason to care about, not their well-being as such.” Raz (1999), 317–318.

  27. A terminological remark is in order at this point. Scanlon, and I with him, seems to take the notion of a person’s well-being to be the same as what is good for that person. I am aware that good for is sometimes used to refer to perfectionist goods. That is not how this term is used here. Scanlon also seems to think that well-being is a constitutive or inclusive good made up by other goods that are “good in their own right”, i.e., things “there is reason to desire and pursue for their own sake”. The various constitutive goods are referred to here as the parts of well-being. The relation between the parts of and the concept of well-being is further discussed in Section 5.

  28. This example might need further spelling out. Suppose, for example, that my friend is the bomber and knew that a bomb capable of disintegrating the whole block would go off at the time I intended to be at the cinema, just a few minutes before the session started. In this case there is no reason for me to desire to go to the cinema as nothing good for me would be obtained by going to the cinema. Next, consider the case in which the bomb would in fact go off just as the session reaches its end. In that case there would be some reason to desire to go to the cinema, as I would get to enjoy the movie, though there would be stronger reason to desire not to go, as that would not be overall good for me. This is the case I had in mind in the text above. It might be thought that the “bomb-threat” example is too extreme, though of course that would depend on what part of the world one lives in. The same point can be easily made with everyday type of cases. A child asks his parents: “Why do I have to go to school? I hate it!” The parents answer or think to themselves “Because that is good/best for you.” Or again, my friend is trying to convince me to try some hash/a new machine at the amusement park/to take a course in culinary arts. It would be appropriate and natural on my behalf to consider whether and how each of these things would be in my interest or good for me.

  29. Incidentally, note that if this conclusion is correct, then we can claim that the idea of one’s well-being is a normative idea. Darwall (2002), attacks the idea that the concept of well-being is itself normative.

  30. Most agency is non-deliberative in this sense and is rather what is sometimes referred to as ‘willed’ or ‘controlled’ or ‘voluntary’ agency (see e.g., Jahanshahi and Frith 1998; Shallice 1988; Perner 2003). One should also note the importance of automatic agency such as over-learned actions.

  31. Writers such as McNaughton and Rawling might not part of accept my argumentative strategy here. That is because they fail to notice that there is a conceptual distinction between well-being and perfection and hence between welfarism and perfectionism. They write: “[Welfarism] does not state that what determines whether some action or outcome instantiates some particular value is the bearing of that action or outcome on human welfare... [Rather i]n determining what constitutes an achievement we just are are, in part, determining what the good life for humans is.” McNaughton and Rawling (2001), 157-158: 158 n.2. McNaughton and Rawling seem to conflate two things: on the one side, what things can make a life a good life, and on the other, what things enhance a peron’s well-being or make his life go well for him. Contrary to what they seem to think, though determining an excellence may determine what it is for a life to be a good human life, it is possible for a good human life not to be good for the agent whose life it should be. To claim the contrary, would require a sustantive argument. At any rate, one cannot simply assume a conceptual identity between a life’s choiceworthiness and its level well-being. In the words of Sumner (1996), 24: “there is no logical guarantee that the most developed specimen will also be the best off, or that their underdeveloped rivals would not be faring better.”

  32. Hurka (1993), 3

  33. See Section 3 above or Scanlon (1998), 129.

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Acknowledgments

Many thanks go to Sarah Broadie, John Broome, Otto Bruun, Julien Deonna, John Skorupski, and three anonymous referees of Ethical Theory and Moral Practice for their helpful comments on earlier drafts. Work on this paper was supported by the Swiss NCCR on the Affective Sciences and a Senior Research Fellowship of the Swiss National Science Foundation.

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Correspondence to Raffaele Rodogno.

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Rodogno, R. On the Importance of Well-being. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 11, 197–212 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-007-9090-6

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