Justice, Desert, and the Repugnant Conclusion*

Utilitas

Volumn 7, Issue 2, 1995, Pages 189-206

  Feldman, Fred ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60949142755     PISSN: 09538208     EISSN: 17416183     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S095382080000203X     Document Type: Article

References (15)

1. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons, Oxford, 1984, p. 381. Parenthetical page references in what follows are to Parfit's book.
2. I try to show how this can be done in my 'Adjusting Utility for Justice: A Consequentialist Reply to the Objections from Justice’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, lv (1995), forthcoming.
3. Parfit, p. 388. in his dissertation, 'Ethical Theory and Population’, University of Massachusetts, forthcoming, Kevin Moon points out that all the essential features of the puzzle of the Repugnant Conclusion appear in J. M. E. McTaggart, The Nature of Existence, Cambridge, 1927. McTaggart describes a pair of lives relevantly like those lived in A and Z, and points out that if the low quality life lasts sufficiently long, it would contain a total amount of value greater than that contained in the high quality life. He goes on to say that 'This conclusion would, I believe, be repugnant to certain moralists’ (pp. 452–3, emphasis added).
4. Parfit discusses averagism in various places in chs. 18 and 19. He focuses especially on averagism in § 143, 'Why We Ought to Reject the Average Principle’.
5. T. M. Hurka discussed several forms of averagism in 'Average Utilitarianisms’, Analysis, xlii (1982), 65–9, then discussed some more forms in 'More Average Utilitarianisms’, Analysis xlii (1982), 115-19.
6. See, for example, Thomas Hurka, 'Value and Population Size’, Ethics, xciii (1983), 496–507. Hurka's view was critically discussed by James L. Hudson, 'The Diminishing Marginal Value of Happy People’, Philosophical Studies, li (1987), 123–37.
7. For a critical review of an important collection of papers on the Repugnant Conclusion and related issues, see Jefferson McMahan, 'Problems of Population Theory’, Ethics, xcii (1981), 96-127; McMahan's article is a review of Obligations to Future Generations, ed. R. I. Sikora and Brian Barry, Philadelphia, 1978. A much more comprehensive and up-to-date review of the literature can be found in Moon's 'Ethical Theory and Population’.
8. Franz Brentano, 'Loving and Hating’, The Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong, ed. Oskar Kraus, English edn. ed. Roderick Chisholm, trans. Roderick Chisholm and Elizabeth Schneewind, London, 1969. Although Brentano does not cite the passage in which Aristotle draws the distinction, I suspect that he has in mind Nickomackean Ethics, V.l (1129b). It seems to me that Aristotle's point is not quite what Brentano takes it to be.
9. Brentano, p. 149.
10. I have not been able to find this view in Brentano, but G. E. Moore affirms something quite like it in Principia Ethica, Cambridge, 1962, in his discussion of retributive punishment. See pp. 214–16.
11. As I tried to show in 'Adjusting Utility for Justice'.
12. For more extensive discussion of the concept of desert, see Joel Feinberg, 'Justice and Personal Desert’, Nomos VI: Justice, ed. C. J. Friedrich and J. W. Chapman, New York, 1963, pp. 69-97; John Kleinig, 'The Concept of Desert’, American Philosophical Quarterly viii (1971), 71-8; Owen McLeod, 'On Being Deserving’, dissertation, University of Massachusetts, forthcoming; Wojciech Sadurski, Giving Desert Its Due: Social Justice and Legal Theory, Dordrecht, 1985; George Sher, Desert, Princeton, 1987.
13. I discuss some temporal features of this sort of desert in my 'Desert: Reconsideration of Some Received Wisdom’, Mind, civ (1995), 63-77.1 try to show that it is possible for a person to deserve compensation at a time in virtue of injuries he has yet to receive.
14. in n. 38, on p. 310 of A Theory of Justice, Oxford, 1972, Rawls quotes a passage from 'On the Ultimate Origination of the Universe’ in which Leibniz seems to say that moral worth is the sole basis on which a person might deserve anything.
15. For further discussion of views about the main desert bases, see Feinberg, McLeod, Sadurski, and Sher. For a comprehensive review of the literature on desert, see McLeod bibliography.