Two kinds of organic unity

Journal of Ethics

Volumn 2, Issue 4, 1998, Pages 299-320

  Hurka, Thomas ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY   (Canada)

Author keywords

Desert; G. E. Moore; Holism; Intrinsic value; Pleasure; Value; Wholes

Indexed keywords

EID: 0005074458     PISSN: 13824554     EISSN: 15728609     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1009795120631     Document Type: Article

References (61)

1. G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), p. 28.
2. G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica. Ibid., pp. 189,202,203.
3. G. E. Moore, Ethics (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 107.
4. William K. Frankena, Ethics, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973), pp. 89-92
5. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 501- 502
6. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, ed. Oskar Piest (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), pp. 12-16. A similar view has been discussed in political philosophy under the heading the "endorsement thesis"
7. see Ronald Dworkin, "Foundations of Liberal Equality," The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Vol. 11 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1990), pp. 1-119
8. Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 203-204.
9. Some presentations of this view conflate two distinct questions. One is whether a pleasure intentionally directed at a perfectionist state such as knowledge is better than a pleasure with no such object, for example a bodily pleasure such as that of eating ice cream. The other question is whether the combination of a pleasure directed at a perfectionist state and the real existence of that state is better than the pleasure alone. Only the second of these questions involves the principle of organic unities (see the end of Section 2 below). The conflation is evident, for example, in Parfit's suggestion that there is a symmetrical dependence between pleasure and perfectionist states, so that just as knowledge without pleasure lacks value, so pleasure without an object like knowledge lacks value. But the pleasure that is necessary for knowledge to have value is not just any pleasure; it is pleasure in knowledge and not just, say, an accompanying pleasure of eating ice cream. And if we ask whether pleasure in knowledge has value in the absence of knowledge, the answer seems to be "yes". Aristotle's pleasure in what he falsely believed was his knowledge of biology seems every bit as good as pleasure in real knowledge of the same value. The pleasure that lacks value on Parfit's view is pleasure without an object like knowledge, but that pleasure is not the condition for knowledge's having value. And the pleasure that is the condition for that value does not lack value on its own.
10. G. E. Moore, "The Conception of Intrinsic Value," in his Philosophical Studies (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922), p. 260.
11. See also Moore's use of a "method of isolation," whereby we test for intrinsic value by asking whether a world containing only a given state and no other to which it could be related is good Principia Ethica, pp. 93, 95, 187-188;
12. Ethics, pp. 24, 68.
13. The strict definition is also adopted in Christine M. Korsgaard, "Two Distinctions in Goodness," Philosophical Review 92 (1983), pp. 169-195
14. Roderick M. Chisholm, Brentano and Intrinsic Value (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 52-53
15. Noah M. Lemos, Intrinsic Value: Concept and Warrant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 8-11.
16. Lemos, Intrinsic Value: Concept and Warrant,p.11.
17. Moore, Principia Ethica, p. 30.
18. Moore, Principia Ethica. Ibid., pp. 214f.
19. Korsgaard, "Two Distinctions in Goodness," p. 170. Korsgaard's claim may be true for the view that states are good whenever they are the object of desire, or of rational desire. But that view is very different from the views I am expressing using the principle of organic unities.
20. It is logically possible for a mixed view to deny the generic principle of organic unities. Thus, it is logically possible to hold that whenever the value of a part changes when it enters a whole, there is a compensating value in the whole as a whole that restores the overall value to the sum of the values the parts would have alone. But surely this is just a logical possibility. Surely anyone who makes conditionality claims will want them to have some effect on the overall values of wholes.
21. Note that there is not this reason to favour the conditionality interpretation of Moore's earlier view, on which beauty on its own does have intrinsic value. On this earlier view A's admiration is always of something good in itself, and its appropriateness as an attitude can be equally well explained by a holistic interpretation.
22. Parfit, Reasons and Persons, p. 151;
23. I discuss this view on what is implicitly a conditionality interpretation in Perfectionism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 110-111.
24. A different account of these issues is proposed by Shelly Kagan. He holds that when the value of a person's life is affected by a relation between himself and a state of the world such as the preservation of Venice, that relational fact and perhaps also the state of the world are internal to or parts of his life, even though they are not internal to him
25. (Shelly Kagan, "Me and My Life," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 94 (1993/94), pp. 318-323).
26. But if we can use the looser definition of intrinsic value, as Kagan himself allows, I see no reason to make this claim. We can equate a person's life with a sequence of states or events within his body and mind and still say that the value of that life is affected by relations to external states even though neither those states nor the facts relating him to them are internal to his life.
27. Korsgaard, "Two Distinctions in Goodness," pp. 192-193.
28. See Thomas Hurka, "Self-Interest, Altruism, and Virtue," Social Philosophy and Policy 14 (1997), pp. 295-298.
29. Chisholm, Brentano and Intrinsic Value, pp. 70-71.
30. Moore, Principia Ethica, p. 215;
31. W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), pp. 58, 72, 138-140.
32. Moore, Principia Ethica, p. 215.
33. Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 367.
34. Fred Feldman, "Adjusting Utility for Justice: A Consequentialist Reply to the Objection from Justice," in his Utilitarianism, Hedonism, and Desert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 151-174-p. 167.
35. Feldman's desert view differs from Kors- gaard's in holding that pleasure in the absence of desert has, not zero, but some positive value, and also in denying that virtue on its own has value. Like any conditionality view, Feldman's presupposes the looser definition of intrinsic value on which a state's value can be affected by its relations to other states. But in his "On the Intrinsic Value of Pleasures" (ibid., pp. 125-147), Feldman criticizes a "Sidgwickian" view of the intrinsic value of pleasure for being inconsistent with the strict definition. His own theory of desert seems to appeal to the very understanding of intrinsic value he denies to views that ground the value of pleasures in a relation to desires.
36. These philosophers hold that B is a proper part of A whenever A's existence conceptually implies B's but B's existence does not conceptually imply A's Chisholm, Brentano and Intrinsic Value, p. 73
37. Lemos, Intrinsic Value: Concept and Warrant, pp. 33-34
38. Michael J. Zimmerman, "Virtual Intrinsic Value and the Principle of Organic Unities," unpublished ms, p. 5.
39. This makes a person's feeling pleasure a part of his feeling pleasure in pain, they claim, since he cannot feel pleasure in pain without feeling pleasure but can feel pleasure without feeling pleasure in pain. But this analysis requires understanding parts and wholes as universals. It is not true that the person could feel the particular pleasure he feels without feeling pleasure in pain, since that is what his particular pleasure is. What is true is only that he could feel some pleasure or other without feeling pleasure in pain. But this treatment of parts and wholes as universals seems to me strained, as more generally does the claim that its being a pleasure is part of a pleasure in pain rather than an aspect or property of it.
40. Korsgaard ascribes the conditionality view of undeserved pleasure to Immanual Kant and endorses it herself; she would presumably endorse the parallel view about malicious pleasure. In the most extensive recent discussion of these views Lemos attributes both views to Ross
41. (Lemos, Intrinsic Value: Concept and Warrant, pp. 41-42)
42. but this seems to me on several grounds a mistake. First, Ross's explicit claims that undeserved and malicious pleasure are evil (The Right and the Good, pp. 136-138)
43. are open to three interpretations: (i) such pleasures are purely evil with no element of good; (ii) such pleasures are evil as undeserved or malicious, though perhaps also good as pleasures; (iii) such pleasures are evil on balance, with their evil as undeserved or malicious outweighing their goodness as pleasures. I see nothing in Ross's text that clearly favours (i) over (ii) and especially (iii), but only (i) expresses a conditionality view. Second, Ross accepts Moore's strict definition of intrinsic goodness (ibid., pp. 114-121)
44. which implies the universality thesis and logically prevents pleasure from changing value when undeserved. Third, a related argument of Ross's explicitly assumes a denial of the conditionality view. Ross holds that virtue and vice have infinite value compared to pleasure and pain, and one of his main arguments for this view concerns malicious pleasure. It claims that unless virtue has infinite comparative value, malicious pleasure could if sufficiently intense be on balance good, which Ross thinks is impossible (ibid., p. 151).
45. This argument presupposes that malicious pleasure remains good as pleasure, with that goodness always needing to be outweighed by a greater evil of malice.
46. See, e.g., Lemos, Intrinsic Value: Concept and Warrant, pp. 40-17.
47. Ibid., pp. 43-44.
48. See also Michael Slote, "The Virtue in Self-Interest," Social Philosophy and Policy 14 (1997), pp. 273-274
49. Robert Audi, "Intrinsic Value and Moral Obligation," The Southern Journal of Philosophy 35 (1997), p. 140.
50. Joel Feinberg, "Justice and Personal Desert," in his Doing and Deserving: Essays in the Theory of Responsibility (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 55-94.
51. It may be that different goods are called for by different forms of virtue. For example, if a person is dedicated and principled in his pursuit of knowledge, perhaps what he deserves is knowledge more than pleasure. But the general point remains. For any form of virtue only some goods are appropriate rewards, and for any form of vice only some goods make for an evil of undesert.
52. I also give this argument in Thomas Hurka, "How Great a Good is Virtue?" The Journal of Philosophy 95 (1998), pp. 181-203.
53. See Franz Brentano, The Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong, trans. Roderick M. Chisholm and Elizabeth Schneewind (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 22-23
54. Moore, Principia Ethica, pp. 204, 208-209, 211, 217
55. Ross, The Right and the Good, pp. 160-161
56. Nozick, Philosophical Explanations, pp. 429-433
57. Chisholm, Brentano and Intrinsic Value, pp. 62-67;
58. Lemos, Intrinsic Value: Concept and Warrant, pp. 34-37, 73-77
59. Thomas Hurka "Virtue as Loving the Good," Social Philosophy and Policy 9 (1992), pp. 149-168.
60. Zimmerman seems to propose this in "Virtual Intrinsic Value and the Principle of Organic Unities," p. 13.
61. See Hurka, "How Great a Good is Virtue?"