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Headaches, Lives and Value

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2009

DALE DORSEY
DALE DORSEY*
Affiliation:
University of Kansasddorsey@ku.edu
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Abstract

Consider Lives for Headaches: there is some number of headaches such that the relief of those headaches is sufficient to outweigh the good life of an innocent person. Lives for Headaches is unintuitive, but difficult to deny. The argument leading to Lives for Headaches is valid, and appears to be constructed out of firmly entrenched premises. In this article, I advocate one way to reject Lives for Headaches; I defend a form of lexical superiority between values. Based on an inquiry into the notion of human well-being, I argue that no amount of headaches is sufficient to outweigh the disvalue of the loss of a good life. Though this view has been thought subject to devastating objections, these objections are not dispositive against the form of value superiority I advance here.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , March 2009 , pp. 36 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

1 Alastair Norcross has led the way. See his ‘Great Harms from Small Benefits Grow: How Death can be Outweighed by Headaches’, Analysis (1998), pp. 152–8; ‘Trading Lives for Convenience: It's Not Just for Consequentialists’, The Southwest Philosophical Review 13 (1997), pp. 29–37; ‘Speed Limits, Human Lives, and Convenience: A Reply to Ridge’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 27 (1998), pp. 59–64. See also Broome, John, Weighing Lives (Oxford, 2004), pp. 55–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 One might think that, insofar as Lives for Headaches is a claim about value theory rather than morality, Lives for Headaches has little intuitive traction. Imagine, however, that through some twist of fate, you end up in a room with two buttons, one that will cure millions (billions!) of headaches, the other that will save one person from death. You can press only one button and there are no other morally relevant features of this situation. If Lives for Headaches is true, this seems to imply that one ought to relieve the headaches; in this case, what could be relevant beyond how much good one does in pushing either button? Many people respond that this is an unintuitive response to this case. If so, the puzzle in value theory implies unintuitive normative consequences.

3 Thomson, Judith Jarvis, The Realm of Rights (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), p. 169Google Scholar.

4 Some have denied that this conclusion is indubitable, see Taurek, John, ‘Should the Numbers Count’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 6 (1977), pp. 293–316Google ScholarPubMed. I propose to leave this form of skepticism aside.

5 See e.g. Rachels, Stuart, ‘Counter-examples to the Transitivity of Better Than’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 76 (1998), pp. 71–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Temkin, Larry, ‘A Continuum Argument for Intransitivity’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 25 (1996), pp. 175–210CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 There is a wealth of puzzles that surround the intransitivity of betterness, only one of which I will mention here. On virtually any moral theory, betterness impacts rightness: sometimes it is morally required to promote the good. But if betterness is intransitive, this means that at least in some cases, ‘ought to do rather than’ is intransitive. But this is puzzling! Assume that I ought to do A rather than B, B rather than C, and C rather than A. Assume now that I have all three options, A, B or C. A is illegitimate, because one ought to do C rather than A. B is illegitimate, because you ought to do A rather than B. C is also illegitimate because you ought to do B rather than C. This is an extremely puzzling result – surely it is a defect of moral/evaluative theory that in a given morally relevant choice scenario, everything you do is wrong. Norcross proposes additional counterexamples (‘Contractualism’, pp. 308–9).

7 Broome, Lives, pp. 50–2.

8 This is a variation on James Griffin's famous ‘kitsch’ example. See Griffin, James, Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement, and Moral Importance (Oxford, 1989), pp. 83–9Google Scholar.

9 See, for instance, Temkin, Larry, Inequality (Oxford, 1993)Google Scholar; Derek Parfit, ‘Equality or Priority?’, Lindley Lecture, University of Kansas, 1991. For a somewhat more complex view, see Roemer, John, ‘Eclectic Distributional Ethics’, Philosophy, Politics, and Economics 3 (2004), pp. 267–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 For instance, a leximin view or a very strong egalitarianism might have additional resources to respond to Lives for Headaches.

11 The terms ‘value monism’ and ‘value pluralism’ might refer to very different things depending on context. For instance, some have claimed that desiderative accounts of human well-being are pluralist given their ability to support many particular activities as good for persons. I do not use the term in this way. By ‘value monism’, I simply mean that there is one index of things that are good and things that are bad, and that this index, if it includes different objects, activities, etc., is composed of things that are similar in kind. Thus, on my view, a desiderative view is value monist, as is a hedonist view, as are a number of other views.

12 See Brandt, Richard, A Theory of the Good and the Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 113Google Scholar, and Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), pp. 416–24Google Scholar. The notion of full awareness of all information as important in an account of the good goes back at least to Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7th edn. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1981 [1907]), p. 111.

13 There are a number of objections made to the Brandt/Rawls strategy of full information and full awareness. See, for example, Velleman, J. David, ‘Brandt's Definition of “Good”’, The Philosophical Review 97 (1988), pp. 353–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Gibbard, Allan, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), pp. 18–22Google Scholar. I wish to sidestep this debate, except to say that the problems to which Velleman and Gibbard point are likely solved by formulating the account of the good as considering one's life as a whole, rather than relying on cognitive psychotherapy or deliberative rationality for a complete ordering of the goodness of one's preferences or desires. In addition, I have eschewed reliance on desires here, but rather insisted on the notion of informed valuation. This, it seems to me, provides me with additional resources in this matter, although I will not pursue this line of inquiry here.

14 The notion of a ‘global’ element is vague and permits of many possible sharpenings. One possibility might be Derek Parfit's distinction between global and summative desires, see Parfit, Derek, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984), p. 497Google Scholar. Alternatively, one might give a structural account of global elements as those elements that explain and unify the activities over the course of one's life. Other accounts are proposed, for instance, by Velleman, J. David in ‘Well-Being and Time’, The Possibility of Practical Reason (Oxford, 2000), ch. 3Google Scholar.

15 Here I follow Velleman's proposal in ‘Well-Being’. It seems to me right that the value of one's whole life is irreducible to the individual momentary elements – there is a distinction in kind. My proposal: this distinction in kind is best captured by the distinction between one's deliberative projects and various other momentary goods.

16 There are a number of possibilities, each with its own costs and benefits. Raz, for instance, suggests that projects entail a reliance on ‘social form’, either the adoption of a social form or the rejection of such a form. Other possibilities include a ‘unity of activities’ account – a global project is one that unifies one's activities across time, rather than having certain activities involved in a good temporally isolated (of course, ‘across time’ and ‘temporally isolated’ are vague terms; many cases will involve judgment and intuition).

17 Rawls, Theory, p. 411.

18 Raz, Joseph, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford, 1987)Google Scholar, ch. 12.

19 Scanlon, T. M., What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, Mass., 1999)Google Scholar, ch. 3.

20 Keller, Simon, ‘Welfare and the Achievement of Goals’, Philosophical Studies 121 (2004), pp. 27–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Keller's account is similar to mine in many respects, except that he refuses to take a stand on the relative weight between one's goals and various other, momentary, achievements. Furthermore, he seems to accept the value of certain projects that would get ruled out via my ‘sound mind’ requirement.

21 Notice that this form of subjective genuine endorsement is enough to get us almost to a lexical priority thesis, but not all the way. It can establish that deliberative projects are worth ‘whatever the cost’ in headaches. (Incidentally, this is enough to solve Lives for Headaches.) But it cannot establish that a deliberative project is always better than any amount of headaches. This further claim requires a counterfactual disposition to never trade off that which you value given its actual consequences. Thus the lexical priority thesis is not fully subjective. Nevertheless, the claim that deliberative projects possess this form of priority is not wholly out of congruence with one's subjective attitudes.

22 Griffin, Well-Being, p. 83. It is worth noting, however, that Griffin supports something more like pretty strong superiority.

23 Broome, Lives, pp. 24–5. My emphasis.

24 Richard Arneson, ‘Egalitarianism’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2002 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2002/entries/egalitarianism/>.

25 Norcross, Alastair, ‘Comparing Harms: Headaches and Human Lives’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 26 (1997), pp. 138–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Arrhenius, Gustaf, ‘Superiority in Value’, Philosophical Studies 123 (2005), p. 109CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Arrhenius, ‘Superiority’, p. 107.

28 Arrhenius, ‘Superiority’, p. 109.

29 This possibility is considered in a different context by Kagan and Vallentyne in ‘Infinite Value and Finitely Additive Value Theory’, The Journal of Philosophy 94 (1997), pp. 7–9.

30 Norcross, ‘Comparing Harms’, p. 159.

31 Norcross himself responds to the suggestion that anti-paternalism is driving the intuition. His argument notes that we allow children on the freeway even though they are incapable of determining their own course of action vis-à-vis the highway. Again, however, if I were to accept an anti-paternalist justification for high speed limits, it does not seem to me beyond the pale to require children to be transported in the least dangerous manner possible.

32 Broome, Lives, p. 57.

33 Broome, Lives, pp. 58–9.

34 Broome, Lives, pp. 27–8.

35 See Arneson, Richard, ‘Human Flourishing versus Desire Satisfaction’, Human Flourishing, ed. Paul, Ellen Frankel, Miller, Fred D. Jr., and Paul, Jeffrey (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 113–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 See e.g. Hurka, Thomas, Perfectionism (Oxford, 1993)Google Scholar.

37 Scanlon, What We Owe, p. 240.

38 Norcross, ‘Contractualism’, p. 307.

39 Thanks are due to Charlie Kurth for helpful conversations about Scanlon.

40 I'd like to thank Richard Arneson, David Brink, Gerald Doppelt, Charlie Kurth, Sam Rickless, David Sobel, Adam Streed, Steve Wall, and audiences at the University of California, San Diego, the University of Alberta, Bowling Green State University, the University of Minnesota at Duluth, and the University of Redlands for helpful feedback.