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An Analysis of Prudential Value

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 July 2013

STEPHEN M. CAMPBELL
STEPHEN M. CAMPBELL*
Affiliation:
Coe College, s.campbell80@gmail.com
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Abstract

This essay introduces and defends a new analysis of prudential value. According to this analysis, what it is for something to be good for you is for that thing to contribute to the appeal or desirability of being in your position. I argue that this proposal fits well with our ways of talking about prudential value and well-being; enables promising analyses of luck, selfishness, self-sacrifice and paternalism; preserves the relationship between prudential value and the attitudes of concern, love, pity and envy; and satisfies various other desiderata. I also highlight two ways in which the analysis is informative and can lead to progress in our substantive theorizing about the good life.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , September 2013 , pp. 334 - 354
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

1 Since conceptual analysis is a controversial enterprise these days, two disclaimers should be made. First, there may be alternative ways to represent or rework the proposal, perhaps as a linguistic or metaphysical analysis. I will not explore this possibility here. Second, my proposed analysis of prudential value is, in all likelihood, revisionist in at least some respects. It is only intended to preserve certain core features of our concept of prudential value – not every feature that has been associated with it.

2 According to hedonistic accounts, the only things that are good or bad for individuals in the most direct and fundamental way are states of pleasure and pain. According to desire-fulfilment accounts, it is the fulfilment or frustration of one's desires, or the desires she would have if she were in ideal conditions. According to objective list accounts, it is a plurality of things (e.g. pleasure and pain, the success and failure of one's relationships with others, knowledge and false or unjustified belief, achievements and failures), some of which are good or bad for individuals whether or not they have a favourable or unfavourable attitude towards them.

3 My focus on subjects is not without a point. In ordinary language, we speak of what is ‘good for’ or ‘bad for’ a shockingly wide range of things: trees, companies, the environment, the ozone layer, hammers, automobiles, one's health, one's kidneys, one's complexion, one's reputation, etc. I doubt that talk of what is good for you or me and what is good for, say, the economy or one's lawn admits of a unified treatment. For discussion and defence of the view that our ‘good for’ talk is not unified, see Rosati, Connie, ‘Relational Good and the Multiplicity Problem’, Philosophical Issues 19 (2009), pp. 205–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Fletcher, Guy, ‘The Locative Analysis of Good For Formulated and Defended’, Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy 6 (2012), pp. 1–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 9–12. It should not be problematic to make use of the ‘good for’ and ‘bad for’ locutions provided that sufficient attention is paid to other features associated with prudential value.

4 I draw this characterization from Sumner, L. W., Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics (Oxford, 1996), p. 23Google Scholar.

5 This famous example comes from Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York, 1974), pp. 42–5Google Scholar.

6 Darwall, Stephen, Welfare and Rational Care (Princeton, 2002), p. 14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 See, for example, Darwall, Welfare; Annas, Julia, The Morality of Happiness (Oxford, 1993), pt. IIIGoogle Scholar; and Kraut, Richard, What is Good and Why (Cambridge, Mass., 2007), pp. 48–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Some maintain that envy always involves a malicious wish that the envied party lose the goods in question. I will assume that envy need not be malicious, though my claims can be adjusted to accommodate the contrary view.

9 Three clarifications should be made. First, another sense of the term ‘luck’ applies to the achievement of context-specific goals. If I am passing the time by trying to toss coins into a bucket, I might think ‘I got lucky’ if I have a string of successful throws without thinking that this is good for me. But an important sense of ‘luck’ does pertain to what is good or bad for an individual. This is the relevant sense for present purposes. Second, epistemologists sometimes claim that ‘knowledge excludes luck’ and that, in Gettier cases, beliefs are ‘true by luck’. Unless those who engage in such talk are committed to thinking that it always benefits a person to have beliefs that happen to be true, they are not using the prudential sense of ‘luck’ that concerns me. Third, it is tempting to think that luck includes another element: a non-negligible objective or subjective probability that the lucky or unlucky event will not occur. Yet, we also talk about luck in cases where there is no indeterminacy or uncertainty at all. One can admire the lives of hawks and count herself unlucky that she can only lead a human life. This is a belief about constitutive luck, luck in the kind of person or being one is. Cf. Nagel, Thomas, Mortal Questions (Cambridge, 1979), p. 28Google Scholar.

10 This is loosely based on the analysis in Overvold, Mark, ‘Self-Interest and the Concept of Self-Sacrifice’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 10 (1980), pp. 105–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Paternalism is commonly thought to involve the further condition of restricting or interfering with an individual's liberty or autonomy. It might also be thought that an action qualifies as paternalistic if it promotes what is good for another, by that person's lights, against his or her wishes.

12 Foot, Philippa, Virtues and Vices (Oxford, 1978), p. 149Google Scholar.

13 L. W. Sumner distinguishes preference in the behavioral sense, which ‘always (trivially) runs with choice’, from preference in the attitudinal sense, which involves ‘finding the prospect of [the preferred object] pleasing or agreeable, or welcoming the opportunity to do it, or looking forward to it with gusto or enthusiasm’ (Sumner, Welfare, p. 121). Likewise, Wayne Davis tells us that volitive desires are ‘a more reliable indication of action’ whereas appetitive desires are ‘a more reliable indicator of enjoyment’. ‘Objects of appetitive desire’, he writes, ‘are appealing . . . [and] are viewed with pleasure’ (Davis, Wayne, ‘The Two Senses of Desire’, Philosophical Studies 45 (1984), pp. 181–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 187 and 183). What Sumner calls ‘preference in the behavioural sense’ and Davis calls ‘volitive desire’ correspond to desire in the motivational sense. If Sumner and Davis allow that what one most ‘prefers in the attitudinal sense’ and ‘appetitively desires’ can be that which is least unappealing, they are talking about desire in the attitudinal sense. See also Lewis, David, ‘Desire as Belief’, Mind 97 (1988), pp. 323–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 323; Scanlon, Thomas, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), pp. 37–41Google Scholar; and Chris Heathwood, ‘Subjective Desire Satisfactionism’ (unpublished). I am indebted to Chris Heathwood for bringing many of these references to my attention.

14 Quinn, Warren, Morality and Action (Cambridge, 1994), p. 236CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 There is empirical research that supports distinguishing between desire in the attitudinal and motivational senses. Based on experiments involving addiction in mice and humans, psychologist Kent Berridge and his colleagues claim to have identified two core processes associated with human and animal motivation, which they call liking and wanting. See, for instance, Berridge, Kent, ‘Motivation Concepts in Behavioral Neuroscience’, Physiology and Behavior 81 (2004), pp. 179–209CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, and Berridge, Kent, ‘Wanting and Liking’ Inquiry 52 (2009), pp. 378–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As Peter Railton summarizes the distinction, liking is ‘a matter of the positive hedonic “gloss” a stimulus can have’ whereas wanting is ‘a matter of its “incentive salience” or power to produce effortful pursuit’ (Peter Railton, ‘Toward a Unified Account of Rationality in Belief, Desire, and Action’ (unpublished), p. 31). Liking and disliking are essential to desire in the attitudinal sense, though not to desire in the motivational sense.

16 Schueler, G. F., Desire (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), p. 1Google Scholar. Schueler is focusing on the term ‘desire’.

17 It is controversial how exactly to understand the idea of something's being desired intrinsically. I will not address this issue here, except to clarify that I am not assuming that a thing's intrinsic appeal is solely a matter of its intrinsic properties.

18 The parenthetical clause is inserted to avoid the so-called wrong kind of reasons problem. For an introduction to this problem, see Rabinowicz, Wlodek and Rønnow-Rasmussen, Toni, ‘The Strike of the Demon: On Fitting Pro-Attitudes and Value’, Ethics 114 (2004), pp. 391–423CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 To be clear, I am not claiming that it is possible in any sense for someone other than Aristotle to have Aristotle's life. That is not necessary, I take it, for one to think that being in his shoes has appeal, to wish fancifully to be him, or to desire that one's own life resemble his as far as possible.

20 I adapt this example from Kagan, Shelly, Normative Ethics (Boulder, 1998), p. 37Google Scholar, who asserts that this fact about prime numbers has ‘nothing to do with me or my life’. Kagan is invoking some more restrictive sense of ‘life’. If I say that I want you ‘out of my life’ or ‘to be a part of my life’, the relevant sense of ‘life’ might exclude states of affairs that fall beyond the scope of (i) my awareness, (ii) my day-to-day awareness, (iii) what I care about, (iv) what I care about most centrally, (v) what causally impacts me in significant ways, or (vi) the story that might naturally be told about me and my life. These notions of a life are too restrictive for our purposes. (These uses of ‘life’ resemble talk of ‘one's world’, as when Gladys Knight sings, ‘I'd rather live in his world | Than live without him in mine’.)

21 Granted, there are many exceptions. For instance, it is not intelligible to think that it is intrinsically good for a person that nothing is intrinsically good for her.

22 I borrow the phrase ‘welfare-regarding’ from Darwall, Welfare, p. 15.

23 It is commonly thought that ideal conditions will include having true beliefs, being vividly aware of the relevant facts, and not committing any logical errors.

24 This characterization of subjectivism and objectivism is drawn from Sumner, Welfare, p. 38. It appears to be the most popular way of making the distinction.

25 It would be a mistake to think that what we want for our loved ones corresponds perfectly to what we believe renders their lives more appealworthy. Love and concern for another are often counterbalanced by respect for the person, which often involves appreciating and honouring what the person wants for herself. When a young man is intent on pursuing a career in the military, his parents might actively support him out of respect for him and his wishes. But if they love him and also believe that this career choice will detract from the appeal of his life, their support of his decision will not be wholehearted.

26 With judgements about luckiness and unluckiness, the relevant party is the one making the judgement. With selfishness and paternalism, it is the agent's views about the appealing life that matter. In the case of self-sacrifice, both the agent's and evaluator's views about the appealing life are relevant.

27 For their extensive and insightful comments on earlier versions of this essay, I am especially grateful to Allan Gibbard, Liz Anderson, Peter Railton, Sarah Buss, Sven Nyholm, Jason Konek and Alex Sarch. I would also like to thank Ben Bradley, Johan Brännmark, Dale Dorsey, Billy Dunaway, Guy Fletcher, Chris Heathwood, Dan Jacobson, Shelly Kagan, Sheila Krishnan, Sarah Moss, Tina Rulli, Alex Silk, Dan Singer, Eric Swanson and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful feedback.