RESONANCE, THE GOOD, AND WELL-BEING

• Not clear that impersonal goods (cf. Moore on beauty) satisfy the resonance constraint.
• As Railton claims, the personal good should satisfy a non-alienation (resonance) constraint.
• It does seem to me to capture an important feature of the concept of intrinsic value  to say that what is intrinsically valuable for a person must have a connection with what he would find in some degree compelling or attractive, at least if he were rational and aware.  It would be an intolerably alienated conception of someone’s good to imagine that it might fail in any such way to engage him ["Facts and Values," p. 9].
• Mill at least suggests an idealized desire conception of happiness when he explains the intrinsic, and not just instrumental, superiority of higher pleasures by appeal to the preferences of a competent judge.
• If I am asked what I mean by difference of quality in pleasures, or what makes one pleasure more valuable than another, merely as a pleasure, except its being greater in amount, there is but one possible answer.  If one of the two is, by those who are competently acquainted with both, placed so far above the other that they prefer it, even though knowing it to be attended with a greater amount of discontent, and would not resign it for any quantity of the other pleasure which their nature is capable of, we are justified in ascribing to the preferred enjoyment a superiority in quality so far outweighing quantity as to render it, in comparison, of small account [Utilitarianism ii 5].
• At one point in The Methods of Ethics Sidgwick proposes that we understand a person’s overall good to consist in
• What he would now desire and seek on the whole if all the consequences of all the different lines of conduct open to him were accurately forseen and adequately realized in imagination at the present point in time [Methods 111-12].
• In A Theory of Justice John Rawls adapts Sidgwick’s proposal and identifies a person’s good with a rational plan of life.
• It is the plan that would be decided upon as the outcome of careful reflection in which the agent reviewed, in light of all the relevant facts, what it would be like to carry out all of these plans and thereby ascertained the course of action that would best realize his more fundamental desires.
• In A Theory of the Good and the Right Richard Brandt identifies a person’s well-being with what it would be rational for her to desire, and he understands rational desire as desire that would survive a process of cognitive psychotherapy that requires full and vivid exposure to logic and the relevant facts.
• Recognizing that even in a more idealized state we might have desires that we do not endorse or identify with, David Lewis proposes that something is good just in case one would, under conditions of full imaginative acquaintance with the alternatives, desire to desire it ("Dispositional Theories of Value").
• Railton notices that an ideal appraiser is likely to be very different from the actual self that it idealizes and that, consequently, what my idealized self may want for himself may not be appropriate for me.  For instance, education appears to be a good for my actual self, but because my idealized self is already fully informed, he may not desire (or desire to desire) to get an education.  To remedy this source of potential alienation, Railton proposes that we appeal to what the ideal appraiser would want his actual self to want (A's good = what A+ would want A to want).
• [A]n individual’s good consists in what he would want himself to want, were he to contemplate his present situation from a standpoint fully and vividly informed about himself and his circumstances, and entirely free of cognitive error or lapses of instrumental rationality ["Facts and Values," p. 17].
• Rosati thinks that to avoid alienation one's actual self must be prepared to care about the way in which one's idealized self is different from one's actual self -- A must care about the + that separates him from A+ ("Internalism and the Personal Good").

• Desiderative conceptions of well-being explains diversity or pluralism about the good.  This will be true of idealized desire conceptions as well, provided that the idealization is content-neutral.
• By contrast, objective conceptions of well-being (e.g. perfectionism and objective lists) are restrictive.

• Desiderative conceptions of practical reason and the good identify the reasonableness or value of something with its tendency to produce a certain sort of response in an agent or appraiser.  As such, they represent a kind of dispositional and response-dependent approach to practical reason and value.
• Most desiderative conceptions involve a reductive form of dispositionalism and response-dependence, reducing normative notions of reasonableness or value to non-normative facts about desire.
• Some forms of dispositionalism are explicitly non-reductive.
• Some appeal to a response that is a normative belief.
• Some make the idealization normative.  For instance, McDowell claims that something is valuable just in case it is such as to merit approval ("Value and Secondary Qualities").
• Some forms of dispositionalism are implicitly non-reductive.
• The response may be implicitly normative.  For instance, if the response is a normative emotion, such as guilt, shame, resentment, pride, because such emotions involve affect predicated on evaluative belief.
• The idealization may be implicitly normative.  For instance, Wiggins proposes that something is valuable just in case it is such as to produce approval in the appropriate sort of appraiser.   Though one could have a reductive conception of an appropriate appraiser, Wiggins makes clear that he thinks that an appropriate appraiser is a good judge and that a good judge is one who is apt to get things right ("A Sensible Subjectivism?").
• The response may be be non-normative, but it may be selected on normative grounds.  For instance, if we understand appeal to an ideal appraiser or advisor as an impartial and sympathetic appraiser whose desires are formed on the basis of an equally sympathetic identification with the interests of all affected parties, then our conception of idealization is not content-neutral; it stacks the deck in favor of some normative outcomes.   Such a view would not be genuinely reductive, because it explains normative notions in terms of a class of psychological states that has been selected on normative grounds.
• It is a philosophical virtue of dispositional views to be reductive.  Non-reductive dispositional views are often true, but they threaten to have one of three vices.
• Some non-reductive dispositional views are circular if they analyze X's being valuable in terms of an appraiser judging X valuable under ideal conditions.
• Often the real explanatory work is done by the idealization of the appraiser or her responses, with the result that desire appears to be an idle wheel (cf. how voting does little real work in explaining the outcome of a rigged election).
• Even if non-reductive forms of dispositionalism are not circular and desire plays a real explanatory role, such views are likely to remain comparatively uninformative, in the sense that they constrain the content of practical reason, the good, and well-being fairly little.  Cf. the abstract character of the Reason-Value and Reason-Well-being Links.

• The main virtue of appeal to idealized desire is that the desire promises to ground motivation and the idealization promises to ground fallibility and so provide normative guidance.
• But providing guidance and providing the right guidance are not the same.  The main worries about desiderative conceptions are poor normative accommodation and lack of an adequate rationale for the normative authority of desire.
• Problems for the basic desiderative models of reason and well-being
• The basic model attaches normative significance to desires based on mistaken factual beliefs or faulty inferences.
• Temporal bias is a common sensibility but a paradigm of irrationality.
• An agent may not care about satisfying other-regarding moral duties of justice, fidelity, non-maleficence, or beneficence.  If such moral demands generate reasons for action, this presents a problem of normative accommodation.
• Because it is more plausible to suppose that a peron's well-being supervenes on her desires than to suppose that her moral duties do, perhaps we should restrict our attention to desiderative conceptions of well-being.
• Temporal bias is also a common constraint on well-being.
• Because the basic model does not constrain the content of desires, it runs together what interests me and what is in my interest (cf. Darwall, "Self-Interest and Self-Concern).  Is it good for me if my desire that a cure for AIDs be found is satisfied? It's hard to patch this problem (e.g. by focusing on what A+ would want A to want for A's own sake) without going non-reductive.
• Because the basic model does not constrain the content of desires, it encourages the extreme adaptive strategy of adpating one's desires so as to minimize risk.
• Because the basic model does not constrain the content of desires, it can't explain what's bad about satisfying inappropriate or unimportant desires -- the lint collectors and Deltas and Epsilons of the world.
• Not clear what the rationale for the normative authority of desire is.
• Perhaps idealized desiderative accounts fare better.  For we might expect inappropriate and unimportant desires to wash out when we launder preferences through an ideal advisor who represents all aspects of all possibilities fully and vividly in her imagination and makes no mistakes of fact or inference.  Moreover, idealization appears to be a normative notion.  So even if actual desire lacks normative authority, idealized desire appears to possess it.
• However, laundering preferences doesn't eliminate the problems with the basic model and introduces some new ones.
• Is it possible to combine wildly disparate lives and perspectives into one overall evaluative perspective?    The conditions that make a vivid appreciation of one perspective accessible may make a very different perspective inaccessible.  For example, the conditions that make a naïve or insular perspective accessible, such that one can appreciate its attractions, may make a cosmopolitan perspective inaccessible, and vice versa.  (Sobel and Rosati)
• One can’t rule out the possibility that full confrontation with the facts wouldn’t extinguish desire or shape it in ways that one would pre-theoretically identify as pathological (Gibbard).   Perhaps the weakness of altruistic impulses is typically due to an inadequate appreciation of the suffering of others.  But vivid exposure to the enormity of suffering involved in world hunger may overwhelm or de-sensitize appraisers so as to suppress, rather than elicit, sympathetic response.
• Content-neutrality means that idealized desire accounts still have problems explaining the difference between what interests me and what is in my interest.
• Content-neutrality also means that idealized desire accounts cannot explain the unconditional significance of tempol neutrality or intellectually, emotionally, and physically rich lives.
• The ideal appraiser theory faces a dilemma.  (1) If the idealization is content-neutral, then it cannot explain the unconditional badness of shallow and one-dimensional lives.  (2) If the idealization is not content-neutral, it can explain the unconditional badness of such lives, but not without sacrificing the explanatory significance of desire.  Cf. Mill's explanation of the superiority of higher pleasures by appeal to the preferences of competent judges and his explanation of their categorical preferences by appeal to their sense of their own dignity (Utilitarianism ii 1-6).
• Nor is it clear how idealized desire accounts explain the normative authority of desire if the basic desire model does not.  Garbage in, garbage, albeit clean garbage, out.