Draft of 10-15-03
PHIL 13: Ethics; Fall 2003
David O. Brink; UCSD
Handout #4: Subjectivism about the Good and Happiness

We need to distinguish among

  1. goodness or the good,
  2. a person's good or well-being, and
  3. a person's happiness.
Some people think that something might be good (e.g. beauty) without being good for anyone.  Certainly, something might be good, because good for someone else, without being good for me.  Let's concentrate on what is good for someone.  So our focus is (2), rather than (1).  We could also characterize our inquiry as concerning a person's well-being, welfare, self-interest, or quality of life.  x's good is what we care about insofar as we care about x for his own sake.  On some views, a person's good or well-being can also be equated with his happiness.  This will be plausible if we equate a life well lived with happiness.  But, as we will see later, well-being and happiness may come apart.

Subjective conceptions of a person’s good makes it consist in or depend importantly upon her subjective and variable psychological states, whereas objective conceptions identify certain character traits, activities, and relationships as improving the quality of a person’s life independently of their being a source of pleasure or an object of desire.

One familiar conception of the human good is the hedonistic claim that pleasure is the one and only intrinsic good and that pain is the one and only intrinsic bad.  Pleasure might be thought to be a particular kind of sensation or feeling, or it might be understood as any mental state or sensation such that the person who has it wants to prolong.  Alternatively, one might understand the human good in preference-satisfaction or desire-satisfaction terms, as consisting in the satisfaction of actual or suitably informed or idealized desire.  Hedonism is a form of extreme subjectivism about the good, because it says that a person's good consists in psychological states alone.  A desire-satisfaction view of the good is a form of moderatesubjectivism about the good, because while it makes the good for a person depend upon her subjective psychological states, it also makes it depend on what in the world actually satisfies her desires.

Hedonism and preference-satisfaction views construe the human good as consisting in or depending upon an individual’s subjective and variable psychological states.  By contrast, one might understand the good in more objective terms, either as consisting in the perfection of one’s essential capacities (e.g. one’s rational or deliberative capacities) or as consisting in some list of disparate objective goods (e.g. knowledge, beauty, achievement, friendship, or equality).

Subjectivism has at least two apparent attractions.  Many people would be inclined to think that a person’s own judgments about the quality of her life ought to be accorded some special authority in deciding whether she has had a good life.  Also, many people are inclined to be pluralists about the good, according to which there is no single kind of good life but, rather, many different kinds of valuable lives.  These contrasts between subjectivism and objectivism about the good are likely to be reinforced to the extent that we associate a person’s good or well-being with his happiness.

EXTREME SUBJECTIVISM
It is difficult to maintain, as hedonism requires, the extreme subjectivist claim that happiness or value consists in psychological states alone.

Consider the case of the Deluded Schoolboy.  A lonely and miserable schoolboy develops an all-consuming desire to be the most popular boy in school.  His classmates, who despise him, orchestrate a cruel hoax to stage a mock contest in which he is elected the most popular boy in school.  Deceived by the hoax, the boy is euphoric.  But noting how his euphoria rests on false beliefs, we are unlikely to judge his state good.  Indeed, we might think that the boy’s contentment makes his state more contemptible.

Or, consider Robert Nozick's Experience Machine, which gives people whatever experiences they desire.

Suppose there was an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired.  Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book.  All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain.  Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life's experiences?
The answer, as Nozick notes, seems clearly to be No, at least in part because, as Nozick also notes, one wants to be a certain kind of person and do certain sorts of things and not merely have experiences as if one were such a person, doing such things.

MODERATE SUBJECTIVISM
These thought experiments raise problems for extreme subjectivism, but they do not directly threaten moderate subjectivism or the desire-satisfaction view.  Though the schoolboy and the client of the experience machine are (ex hypothesi) satisfied, neither has his desires satisfied.

The unrestricted desire-satisfaction view appeals to both self-regarding and other-regarding desires.  But this seems to confuse two things.

what interests me/what is in my interest
and
what I value/what is valuable for me
Another concern is that we sometimes judge that people who are satisfying their deepest desires nonetheless lead impoverished lives, because their desires are for unimportant or inappropriate things (cf. Huxley's Brave New World and Rawls's blade-counter).  While a certain amount of realism in one’s ambitions and desires is sometimes a good thing, we do not (in general) increase the value of our lives by lowering our sights, even if by doing so we increase the frequency of our successes.

We could appeal to what our idealized selves would want.  But either the idealization is inadequate or it proves too much.  It is inadequate if it fails to represent intellectually and emotionally rich lives as unconditionally good and intellectually and emotionally shallow lives as unconditionally bad.   It proves too much if it builds substantive evaluative commitments into the idealization; suitably idealized desire, understood this way, presupposes, rather than explains, the nature of a person’s good.  (Cf. the Euthyphro problem.)

OBJECTIVISM
These worries about extreme and moderate subjectivism give some plausibility to objective conceptions of the good.  One form of objectivism is a list of objective goods, such as knowledge, beauty, achievement, friendship, and equality.   Such a list may seem the only way to capture the variety of intrinsic goods.  But if it is a mere list of goods, with no unifying strands, it begins to look like a disorganized heap of goods.

One promising objective conception of the good that goes beyond a mere list of goods is perfectionist.  There is a venerable perfectionist tradition, common to Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, and T.H. Green, among others, that identifies a person’s good with the perfection of her nature.   The basic idea is that what is good for x ought to reflect the sort of thing that x is.  This might suggest that a perfectionist should base her conception of the good on claims about what is distinctive or essential about human nature.  Many perfectionists identify rationality as essential to human nature.  One version of this view appeals to practical reason  as essential to persons.  On this view, persons are responsible agents. Non-responsible agents, such as brutes and small children, act on their strongest desires; if they deliberate, it is only about the instrumental means to the satisfaction of their desires.  By contrast, responsible agents must be able to distinguish between the intensity and authority of their desires, deliberate about the value or authority of their desires, and regulate their actions in accordance with their deliberations.  Only agents who are responsible in this way are persons.  On this view, what is essential to persons are these capacities for practical deliberation and regulation of the will that mark one as a responsible agent.  This kind of perfectionist view claims that a person’s good consists in activities that exercise and express her capacities for practical deliberation.

Objective conceptions of well-being can explain our reservations about extreme and moderate subjectivism.

AUTHORITY, PLURALISM, AND HAPPINESS
First, we might ask whether we should equate well-being and happiness.  That may depend on whether we think that a happy life must be a valuable life.  We can understand the deluded schoolboy looking back, after the hoax has been unmasked, and thinking that his false euphoria was one of the worst points in his life.  I think we can understand the Delta or Epsilon or Rawls's blade-counter making a similar judgment about his past.  Insofar as we make sense of these judgments, we can sympathize with objectivism about well-being.  Can we similarly make sense of these characters looking back on their pasts and judging that this was the most miserable point in their lives?  If so, then we are entertaining objective conceptions of happiness, as well as well-being.  Those who think that these characters can doubt the value of their earlier activities but do not think that they can doubt their happiness may think that happiness is inescapably subjective, even if happiness is not.  They should set aside their conception of happiness and focus on welfare or value.  For what importance would happiness have if it is not valuable?

To the extent that objectivism is true, we must deny that individuals enjoy special authority about their own well-being or happiness.  The plausibility of objectivism about well-being threatens authority about well-being.  If happiness is tied to well-being, then we also have reason to question authority about happiness.  If we separate happiness and well-being, then we may reject authority for well-being but accept it for happiness.

Subjective views are not just pluralist.  They are content-neutral -- they place no constraints whatsoever on what might count as a good-life.  Objectivism denies content-neutrality.  Our thought experiments suggest that content-neutrality is problematic.  But one can be a pluralist without embracing content-neutrality.  In particular, objectivism need not threaten pluralism about well-being.  The objectivist can recognize many different kinds of good lives as long as there are many different combinations of objective goods (objective list) or there are many different ways of exercising our rational or deliberative capacities (perfectionism).  The creative artisan or athlete can realize objective goods every bit as much as the poet or cosmologist.