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The Human Good and the Ambitions of Consequentialism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

James Griffin
James Griffin
Affiliation:
Philosophy, University of Oxford
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Extract

I want to look at one aspect of the human good: how it serves as the basis for judgments about the moral right. One important view is that the right is always derived from the good. I want to suggest that the more one understands the nature of the human good, the more reservations one has about that view.

I. OneRoute toConsequentialism

Many of us think that different things make a life good, with no one deep value underlying them all. My own list includes: enjoyment, accomplishing something with one's life, deep personal relations, certain sorts of understanding, and the elements of a characteristically human existence (autonomy, liberty).

Most of us also think that moral right and wrong are based, in some way or other, in how well individual lives go, and that the moral point of view is, in some sense or other, impartial between lives. Utilitarianism is a prominent, but not the only, way of spelling out this intuition. There is no reason why an account of the human good needs to be confined, in the classical utilitarian way, to happiness or to fulfillment of desire (on the usual understanding of that notion). Nor is there any reason why impartiality has to be confined to maximizing the good, counting everybody for one and nobody for more than one. We may generalize.

Let us broaden the notion of the good. We might say, for instance, that though happiness is a good, so are the other items on my list. But though broadened, this notion of the good stays within the confines of individual goods; it still has to do with human well-being, with what promotes the quality of one person's life.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , Summer 1992 , pp. 118 - 132
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1992

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References

1 I start where other discussions finish. See, for example, my book Well-Being (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pt. 1, and a more recent article, “Against the Taste Model”, in Interpersonal Comparisons of Well-Being, ed. Jon, Elster and John, Roemer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).Google Scholar

2 Parfit, Derek, for instance, takes this step in his definition of ‘consequentialism’ in Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 26.Google Scholar

3 Slote, Michael does this in his book Common-Sense Morality and Consequentialism (London: Routledge, 1985)Google Scholar, ch. 3. He there develops Herbert Simon's ‘satisficing’ model of rational strategy. On this model, one should: (1) fix an aspiration level, (2) enumerate one's options, (3) evaluate them as one proceeds, and (4) accept the first option to meet one's aspiration level. See, for example, Simon, Herbert, “A Behavioral Model of Rationality” in his Models of Bounded Rationality (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982).Google Scholar

4 This step takes us beyond what a lot of our contemporaries say about ‘consequentialism’: it is common to make optimizing part of the word's definition. See, for example, Scheffler, Samuel, The Rejection of Consequentialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 1Google Scholar; and Parfit, Reasons and Persons, p. 24. However, Michael Slote argues for including the ‘satisficing’ standard within the bounds of consequentialism. See his Common-Sense Morality and Consequentialism, pp. 36–37. But these authors are unlikely to resist my broadening of the standard of the right; it contradicts nothing important in what they say.

5 See, for example, Parfit, Reasons and Persons, section 10; Scheffler, The Rejection of Consequentialism, pp. 1–2; Kagan, Shelly, The Limits of Morality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. xi, 7Google Scholar; and Pettit, Philip, “Consequentialism”, in A Companion to Ethics, ed. P., Singer (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).Google Scholar This is a big change from what Elizabeth Anscombe meant when she coined the term in 1958 in “Modern Moral Philosophy”, Philosophy, vol. 33 (1958). On her account, nonconsequentialists hold that certain acts are ruled out morally whatever the results; on the current use, they hold merely that some acts are ruled out morally on grounds other than their results.

6 I borrow Philip Pettit's handy way of summarizing the distinction. See his “Consequentialism”.

7 I prefer summarizing the distinction between consequentialism and nonconsequentialism in terms of ‘promoting’ and ‘honoring’ values, rather than in the more widespread terms of ‘agent-neutral’ and ‘agent-relative’ obligations. Derek Parfit suggests that consequentialism gives to all agents common moral aims and is, thus, agent-neutral, while nonconsequentialism gives different agents different aims and is, thus, agent-relative (see his Reasons and Persons, p. 27). But some nonconsequentialist do's and don't's, such as “Do no murder”, are also given to all agents. What Parfit means, of course, is that for me that prohibition is statable as “Griffin, do no murder”, and for him it is statable as “Parfit, do no murder”. This merely brings out a feature of do's and don't's. The feature in question, however, does not go morally very deep. Consequentialists, too, may hold that agents must be xgiven do's and don't's; they may even hold that our decision procedures will be largely constituted by do's and don't's. The important difference is that for a consequentialist these do's and don't's derive from the promotion of the good, while for a nonconsequentialist some of them do not. A nonconsequentialist says that some do's and don't's are not the creatures of the promotion of the good and, thus, are not challengeable merely by its more efficient promotion, even though they may be overrideable by it when a sufficient amount of it turns out to be at stake.

8 Amartya Sen thinks that there are two “traditional meanings of utility”, namely “happiness” and “desire-fulfillment”, and he gives narrow interpretations to both. See his On Ethics and Economics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), p. 3. I do not think that it does violence to the term ‘utilitarian’ to let it cover pluralist and objective value theories. But for our present purposes, my suggestion is that we let the class of the good contract to individual goods, on any account of what they are. We may leave open whether that means that the notion of the good will be reduced to the notion of utility.

9 Should ‘consequentialism’ encompass even an interpretation of equal respect that allows partiality — for example, the view that equal respect requires only that agents render to others what is ‘due’ them (my children, say, are due more from me than strangers, and so on)? There is a problem with this interpretation: does ‘due’ mean something other than ‘right,’ in which case it is not, after all, a function for deriving the right from the good. Still, the doubts about consequentialism that I am in the process of raising apply as well to nontrivial versions of this view; this view regards what is ‘due’ as an expression of the moral notion of equal respect, and I shall argue that what is ‘due’ others is often determined by a partly arbitrary picture of human agency. I shall, however, concentrate on interpretations of equal respect that require some sort of impartial promotion of the good: maximizing, equalizing, and so on.

10 See note 3.

11 See my Well-Being, ch. 9.

12 See ibid., ch. 10, section 2; see also my paper “On the Winding Road from Good to Right”, in Value, Welfare, and Morality, ed. R. G. Frey and C. Morris, forthcoming, section 1a.

13 Shelly Kagan denies this in his book The Limits of Morality. See my review of the book in Mind, vol. 99 (1990); the views expressed there are developed further in my “On the Winding Road from Good to Right”, section 1c.

14 See my Well-Being, ch. 10, sections 1 and 2; see also my “On the Winding Road from Good to Right”, section 1d.

15 One finds this question asked, for example, by Brandt, R. B., A Theory of the Good and the Right (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979)Google Scholar, chs. 9–10.

16 See my “On the Winding Road from Good to Right”, section 1e.

17 We should have found further support for this conclusion if we found irresolvable conflict between moral norms. In another paper, I work out the consequences for moral conflicts of the four forces I have been talking about here; see “Mixing Values”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 65 (1991), section 4.