Subjectivism and Idealization

Ethics

Volumn 119, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 336-352

  Sobel, David ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 63449123591     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/596459     Document Type: Note

References (51)

1. While my focus here is with the case of subjective accounts of well-being, what I say can, I believe, be unproblematically extended to speak to similar issues concerning subjective accounts of reasons for action.
2. Traditionally such accounts have allowed, as Mill did, that some of an agent's desires, even informed desires, need not be connected to the agent's good. This helps make conceptual room for informed self-sacrifice. But the issue of exactly what subset of one's desires is connected with one's well-being has proved difficult. For discussion of this topic, see my "Well-Being as the Object of Moral Consideration," Economics and Philosophy 14 (1998): 249-81. A natural view is that an agent's own well-being provides a significant source of an agent's practical reasons but still only a subset of such reasons. Subjectivist accounts of reasons have typically not felt the need to circumscribe the (informed) concerns which are connected to reasons for action. Thus the combination of subjectivist accounts of well-being and reasons for action accurately reflect the thought that not all of our reasons need be self-serving but that our well-being, at least in ordinary agents, provides a powerful source of our reasons for action.
3. Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), 111-12
4. Richard Brandt, A Theory of the Good and the Right (New York: Prometheus, 1979), 10, 113, 329
5. John Harsanyi, "Morality and the Theory of Rational Behavior," in Utilitarianism and Beyond, ed. Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 55
6. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1971), 407-24
7. Richard Hare, Moral Thinking (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), 101-5 and 214-16.
8. See also Douglas Senor, N. Fotion, and Richard Hare, eds., Hare and Critics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 217-18
9. Peter Railton, "Facts and Values," Philosophical Topics 14 (1986): 5-29
10. David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), chap. 2
11. James Griffin, Well-Being (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 11-17
12. and Shelly Kagan, The Limits of Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 283-91.
13. Comparable accounts of practical reasons have been influentially championed by (albeit sometimes in a Kantian rather than Humean spirit) Bernard Williams, "Internal and External Reasons," in his Moral Luck (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 101-13
14. Stephen Darwall, Impartial Reason (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), pt. 2
15. David Lewis, "Dispositional Theories of Value," suppl. ser., Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 63 (1989): 113-37
16. Michael Smith, The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
17. David Enoch, "Why Idealize?" Ethics 115 (2005): 759-87
18. Arthur Ripstein, "Preference," in Value, Welfare, and Morality, ed. Raymond Gillespie Frey and Christopher W. Morris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 93-111
19. and reprinted, with a new conclusion, in Practical Rationality and Preference, ed. Christopher W. Morris and Arthur Ripstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 37-55
20. H. L. Lillehammer, "Revisionary Dispositionalism and Practical Reason," Journal of Ethics 4 (2000): 173-90
21. Elijah Millgram, "Mill's Proof of the Principle of Utility," Ethics 110 (2000): 282-310, esp. 304-6
22. and, in explicit agreement with Enoch, Derek Parfit, "On What Matters" (unpublished manuscript, Department of Philosophy, University of Oxford, April 2008), 79 and n. 82. Some of these critics focus on the case of reasons for action, but their complaints, if accepted, would undermine subjective accounts of well-being as well. Further, if my reply in the case of well-being is persuasive, this would undermine their criticisms as well.
23. Smith, Moral Problem, 144-47, in a similar vein, argues that Humean accounts of practical reason have no rationale for appealing to second order desires rather than whatever desire is stronger.
24. Enoch, "Why Idealize?" 780.
25. Otherwise unattributed references in the rest of the article will be to Enoch's article. Enoch critiques "idealized response" theories generally but tends to focus on idealized desire accounts as these are the most widely defended version of the former. I follow suit.
26. Although I am focused on Enoch's arguments here, I believe my arguments also tell against the arguments of Ripstein, Lillehammer, Millgram, and Parfit.
27. Lewis, "Dispositional Theories of Value."
28. Some dispute that even in this context desires have authority. I have argued that such authors have provided no plausible alternative to granting authority to desires in matters of mere taste in "Pain for Objectivists: The Case of Matters of Mere Taste," Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 8 (2005): 437-57.
29. Lewis, "Dispositional Theories of Value";
30. Brandt, Theory of the Good and the Right
31. Williams, "Internal and External Reasons";
32. Railton, "Facts and Values," and "Naturalism and Prescriptivity," Social Philosophy and Policy 7 (1989): 151-74.
33. Bernard Williams, "Internal Reasons and the Obscurity of Blame," in his Making Sense of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 37, offers a rationale for the idealization (in the case of reasons) which differs from any urged here. He claims the idealization is justified because "any rational deliberative agent has in his S a general interest in being factually informed."
34. I criticize this justification in my "Explanation, Internalism, and Reasons for Action," Social Theory and Practice 18 (2001): 218-35.
35. Contrast Ripstein, in "Preference" (2001), 50, who writes, "Given the multiplicity of possible constraints, there is no way to choose between them [the different possible idealizations] without taking into account the results they issue. To do so, though, involves an independent standard of practical reason." Additionally, I deny the general thought that to take into account the results that a theory issues in this manner need involve an independent standard of practical reason. However, I cannot make this case adequately in this space and will not rely on this thought in what follows. I am grateful to Chris Heathwood and Jamie Dreier for very helpful discussion on this issue.
36. One might worry that the ice cream example provides little support for subjectivism generally because as we leave matters of mere taste it becomes far more contentious if a subjectivist analysis of various values is persuasive. This latter point is fair enough. But Enoch is offering an internal critique of subjectivism. His point is not that subjectivism cannot capture, for example, moral values but rather that even if we assess subjectivism on its own terms it fails. He claims that from the subjectivist point of view there is no good rationale for privileging idealized desires.
37. Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics, 110-11.
38. Indeed, many critics of informed desire accounts of well-being have presupposed that the point of the idealization was to provide a "perfect forecast" of what options would be like. A set of articles by David Velleman, Connie Rosati, Don Loeb, and myself criticized full information accounts of well-being on the grounds that we did not see how it would be possible to provide a perfect forecast of all the various options that might be part of a person's life. David Velleman, "Brandt's Definition of 'Good,'" Philosophical Review 97 (1988): 353-71
39. David Sobel, "Full Information Accounts of Weil-Being," Ethics 104 (1994): 784-810
40. Connie Rosati, "Persons, Perspectives, and Full Information Accounts of the Good," Ethics 105 (1995): 296-325
41. and Don Loeb, "Full-Information Theories of Individual Good," Social Theory and Practice 21 (1995): 1-30. For example, I argued that it is hard to see how to provide this perfect forecast of all of one's possible first kisses. After having experienced many, one would not be in a position to experience further such kisses such as one would have been had one never kissed anyone before. I think it fair to say that all these articles assumed that if there were no intelligible way of idealizing agents such that they have this perfect forecast of all available options, this would damage the full information account. This example highlights that there are numerous serious criticisms of idealized desire accounts, and this article does not aspire to respond to them all. While I think informed desire accounts of well-being remain the most plausible account on the table, removing all the legitimate concerns that have been raised against such theories is beyond the scope of this article. If I can disarm the concern that Enoch and others have articulated, however, that would be a significant step toward an ultimate vindication of such views.
42. Smith, Moral Problem, chap. 5, perhaps thinks of the rationale for the idealization in this way.
43. Lillehammer, "Revisionary Dispositionalism and Practical Reason," seems to assume that either the idealization is justified because it gets procedure-independent answers or it is justified on the basis of this argument. He argues that the justification above relies on normative notions in justifying the idealization and thus cannot completely vindicate the subjectivists' attempt to offer a view with modest metaphysical commitments.
44. Railton, "Facts and Values." L. W. Sumner, Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), sees subjective accounts of well-being as best positioned to explain the subject relativity of welfare. The appeal of subjectivism is felt even by those who distance themselves from idealized desire accounts, as the example of Sumner shows.
45. Williams, "Internal and External Reasons."
46. An anonymous referee pointed out this interpretation.
47. Donald Hubin, "Hypothetical Motivation," Noûs 30 (1996): 31-54.
48. Robert Noggle, "Integrity, the Self, and Desire-Based Accounts of the Good," Philosophical Studies 96 (1996): 303-31.
49. I think it fair to say that Enoch does not tell us enough about what he sees as the fundamental thought behind internalism such that we can see why he thinks the only way to capture this thought is in a radically different way than the way that champions of the view have found attractive.
50. Robert Johnson and I argued against more traditional and popular conceptions of existence internalism on the grounds that they looked to be too strong. See Robert Johnson, "Internal Reasons and the Conditional Fallacy," Philosophical Quarterly 49 (1999): 53-71; and my "Explanation, Internalism, and Reasons for Action." Enoch approvingly cites my concerns in this article as helping to vindicate his approach. But I am not aware of anyone who previously suggested that the best path for internalism to take in response to such worries is to grant authority to all actual desires.
51. Enoch sees Connie Rosati's "two-tier internalism" offered in "Internalism and the Good for a Person," Ethics 106 (1996): 297-326, as similarly motivated by the thought that a proper form of internalism must connect up an agent's good all the way to the actual agent, not merely with the idealized version of the agent. Yet it is important to see that the resulting two-tier view does not defer to all and only actual desires. Rather it looks to the idealized desires we would have under conditions that we find authoritative, at least when we are sober and aware. Enoch does not explain why we should prefer his way of connecting an agent's good to the actual agent to Rosati's and thus does not make a case that the default version of subjectivism should advert to the agent's actual desires rather than idealized desires even if we accept his (very) strong version of internalism. Although I would resist Rosati's proposal, I do think it clearly better able than Enoch's own proposal to ensure that a person's good is not alienating to the actual agent.