Philosophy

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I

UTILITARIAN ACCOUNTS: STATE

OF MIND

OR STATE OF THE WORLD?

How are we to under sta nd 'well-being'? A,i 'utility', say the utilit a rians, aware that this t hnical t ·rm it elf needs exp lai n- ing.' Wh a t i 'utility'? 'Pleasure a nd the ab s n e f pain', the classical utilitarians said,~ n ot r alizing how mu h the words 'pl easure' and 'pain', es p ecia lly ln th 11tretchecl s nsc they attnched to them, needed explaining.

Two main traditiom about ' utility' hav e grow n up . One sees it as a state of mind, th e other as a sta te o l' the world . h 1 ' utility' mental s tates (e.g. plcasur , pain) or slate s of lhc world which fulfil desires (e .g. cco n o mi Kts' ' pr efi rcnce')? If mental s tates, is it only one sort, or m a ny? lfm a ny, what linkH them? If fulfilment of d esires, desire s as th ey h appe n Lo be , or in some way improved? If improved, how ? W e ca n forget morality for the moment. Utilitarians use ou r rou gh , everyday notion of ' we ll-being', our notion of what it is for a single life lo go well , in whi c h morality may have n pla e but not the dominant one. This docs not me a n that our job i11 merely to de sc ribe the everyday use. It is too shadowy and in complete for that; we still have to be ready for stipulation.

1 , Mmtal stale accounts

When so me utilitarians have spo ken of mental sta tes such as ple as ure and pain, they have m ea nt these terms so widely that their accounts get very near desire accounts of ' utility' . So we cannot always take thi s verbal difference as marking any real difference.

Still, the difference is often real enoug h . Bentham and Mill arc, with ample reason, taken to be offering a psychological

8 MEANING

cco un t o f 'utility'. Pleasure or happiness is presented as a sta tc of feeling', an d pain or unhappiness as a feeling on the

:.amc scale as, an d the o pposite of, pleasure or happiness. And the utilities of all our ex pe riences are supposed to be determin- able by measuring the a mount of this homogeneous mental stat e that th ey co n tain.

The trouble with thinking of utility as one kind of m ental state is that we cannot find any one state in all that we regard as having utility-eating, reading, working, creating, helping . What one mental state runs through them all in virtue of which we rank them as we do? Think of the following case. At the very end of his life, Freud , ill and in pain, refused drugs except aspirin. 'I prefer', he said, 'to think in torment than n o t to be ab le to think clearl y'. 3 But can we find a single feeling o r mental state pr esent in both of Fr eud 's options in virtue o f which he ranked them as he did? The truth seems, rather, that often we just rank options, period. Some preferences-Freud's seems to b e one-are basic. That is, preferences do not a lways rest upon other judgments about the quantity of some homogeneou s mental state found in , or produced by, each option. When, in these cases, one speaks of one thing's yi e lding greater satisfaction than another, this seems best understood as saying that having the first is the fulfilment of a greater desire than having the second would be. One wants the first more than the second . But these desires are not ranked by independ- ent quantities of satisfaction.

So, if the mental state account takes this simple form, the objections to it are insurmountable. And if we do not want to go over to a desire account, there are two ways we might now move . We might accept that utility is not one mental state but many, and then look for an explanation of how th ey are linked. Or we might, on the other hand , decide that utility is neither a matter of mental states nor of desire-fulfilment but of something . in a way, in between; we might say that it is a matter of finding en ·o ment in various things, where 'e nj oy - ment' is what we might call an attitude or u o __ nsciou ~;_state or a state of a person. I wa n't to eave the second move until later; it is not easy to grasp, and it will be easier after we have looked at both the mental state and the desire accounts . So let us go back to the first move.

STATE OF MIND OR STATE OF THE WORLD? 9

2. Sidgwick' s compromise

Suppose we said that utility consisted of several different mental states. What then would make them into a set? The obvious candidate would be desire; we could say, following Henry Sidgwick in borrowing something from each of the competing accou n ts, that utility combines a psyc h ological element and a preference element. 'Utility', we could say, is 'desirable consciousness', meaning by 'desirable' either con- sciousness that we actually desire or consciousness that we would desire if we knew what it would be_ like to have it. 4

The trouble with this eclectic accoupt is that we do seem to desire things otheir than states of mind, even independently of the states of mind they produce. This is the point that Robert Nozick has forcefully made with some science fiction.~ Imagine an experiience machine programmed to give you any experience you want; it will stimulate your brain so that you think you are living the most ideal life, while all the while you float in a tank with electrodes in your brain. Would you plug in? 'What else can matter to us', Nozick asks, 'other than how our lives feel from the inside?' And he replies, surely rightly, that we also want to do certain things, to be certain things, and to be receptive to what there is in life beyond 'what humans make. The point does not need science fiction; there are plenty of examples from ordinary life. I certainly want control over my own fate. Even if you convince me that, as my personal despot , you would produ .ce more desirable consciousness for me than I do myself , I shall want to go on being my own master, at least so long as your record would not be much better than mine. I prefer, in important areas of my life, bitter truth to comfortable delusion. Even if I were surrounded by consummate actoirs able to give me sweet simulacra of love and affection , I should prefer the relatively bitter diet of their authentic reactions . And I should prefer it not because it would be morally better, or aesthetically better, or more noble, but because it would make for a better life for me to live . Perhaps some: such preferences, looked at with a cold eye, will turn out to be of dubious rationality, but not all will. This fact presents a serious challenge to the eclect -ic account of utility. If not all desirable things are mental states, yet they

10 MEANING

m atter to our well-being, the eclectic account is fissile. Which n rt of it should we retain: desire or mental states? It is hard to ·e tain mental states; for if we did, we should the~v ~ u zzlingly, to accept that when, with eyes wide open, I prefer

,;nmething not a mental state to a mental state and so seem to ,alue the former more than the latter, I get greater utility

from what I value less. 6 Of the two, it is better to retain desire. 7

Of course, 'mental state' is a vague expression. Perhaps Sidgwick and others use it broadly enough to include, say, knowledge. However, that does not seem to be Sidgwick's intention, and in any case it would stiJJ not be broad enough. I also want to be my own master, and it would take more broadening to include that. It seems more promising _ tq_ abandon 'mental state' altogether and to try defining 'utility' solely in terms of desire: utility consists, we might try saying, in the fulfilment of desire.

3. The actual-desire account

The simplest form of desire account says that _1:1tility is tl!_e fulfilment of actual desires. It is an influential account. Economists have been dra~n to it .because actual desires are often revealed in choices and 'revealed preferences' are observable and hence a respectable subject for empirical science. 8 Also the same account of utility can then do service in both moral theory and theory of action; explanation of action has to appeal to what we in fact want rather than to such ideal notions as what we ought to want or would want if well-informed. And both philosophers and social scientists have been powerfully drawn to it because it leaves no room for paternalism; if actual desires determine distributions, con- sumers are sovereign and agents autonomous .

Yet, notoriously, we mistake our own interests. It is depressingly common that when even some of our strongest and ·most central desires are fulfilled, we are no better, even worse, off. Since the notion we are after is the ordinary notion of 'well-being', what must matter for utility wiJJ have to be, not persons' actual desires, but their desires in some way improved. The objection to the actual-desire account is overwhelming.

STATE OF MIND OR STATE OF THE WORLD? II

In any case, considerations of autonomy are, on reflection, no recommendation of it. Well-being and autonomy, no doubt, both matter morally. It is even likely that living autonomously would be part of any enlightened person's conception of a good life. But it just confuses two quite different ideas to adopt the actual-desire account of well-being just because it makes autonomy prominent. One consideration to keep in mind is that the question, 'What is the best account of "utility"?', should be kept distinct from the question, 'What is the account of "utility"-perhaps highly artificial and ad hoc-that yields a one principle, utility maximizing, moral theory that comes closest to adequacy?' It is wrong to try to I 1/ 1 ; build into the notion of 'utility' all the restrictions that morality needs, if they fit more naturally elsewhere in the theory.

4. The informed-desire account

At this point, an obvious move is to say that desires count I towards utility only if 'rational' or 'informed'. 'Utility', we might try saying, is the fulfilment of desires that persons would have if they appreciated the true nature of their objects . But we shall have to tone this definition down a bit. Althougr 'utility' cannot be equated with actual desires, it will not d e either, simply to equate it with informed desires. It is doubtl e true that if I fully appreciated the nature of all possible objec of desire, I should change much of what I wanted. But if I d o not go through that daunting improvement, yet the objects of my potentially perfected desires are given to me , I might well not be glad to have them ; the education, after all, may be , necessary for my getting anything out of them. That is true, for instance, of acquired tastes; you would do me no favour by giving me caviar now, unless it is part of some well-conceived . training for my palate. Utility must, it seems, be tied at least to desires that are actual when satisfied. (Even then we should have to stretch meanings here a bit: I might get someth i'lg I find that I like but did not want before because I did not know about it, nor in a sense want now simply because I already have it; or I might, through being upset or confused, go on _ resisting something that, in some deep sense, I really want.) It I

12 MEANING

is hard to get the balance between actual and infurmed desires quite right. But, to be at all plausible, the informed-desire account has to be taken to hold them in a balance something like the one I have just sketched.

The move to 'informed-desires' marks the first important break with the classical utilitarian tradition (we shall see several more in the course of the discussion). Bentham and · Mill used 'utility' both to explain action and to set a moral standard; they used its empirical role in arguing for its moral role. But now 'utility' has taken on a shape to fit it for a normative role (it need not be only in moral theory; it could also be in an account of one person's well-being or an account of practical reason), and it is of doubtful relevance to a purely empirical accoupt of motivation. So this account of 'utility' should no longer be seen to b<' attached, except historically, to certain theories of action. It is not committed to the view that action is the result purely of a vector of desire-forces. It is not committed to any Hume-like account of the role of reason and desire. We can no longer use historical connections as a guide to theoretical connections.

The informed-desire account starts with the recognition that actual desires can be faulty. What sorts of fault matter? Obviously, for one, lack of information. Some of our strongest desires rest on mistakes of fact. I make my fortune, say, only to discover I am no better off because I was after people's respect an along and mistakenly thought that making a fortune would command respect. Or I want an operation to restore me to health, not realizing that some pill will do just as well. What matters is the ultimate, not the immediate, object of my desire, and factual mistakes creep into matching the one to the other. 9 Or I develop one set of material desires not realizing that they are the sort that, once satisfied, are replaced by another set that are just as clamorous and I am no better off. The consumer-desires at the centre of the economists' stage can be like that. 10 Then another relevant fault is logical ~istake. A lot of practical reasoning is about adapting means to ends and, like any reasoning, it can be confused, irrelevant, or question-begging. Then there are subtler faults. 11 Some- times desires are defective because we have not g(!t enough, or the right, concepts. Theories need building which will

STATE OF MIND OR STATE OF THE WORLD? 13

supply new or better concepts, including value concepts. For instance, it is easy to concentrate on desires to possess this or that object, at the cost of the more elusive, difficult- to-formulate, desires to live a certain sort of life. And it is / almost impossible to strike the right balance between the two 1

main components of happiness-on the one hand, the dis- content that leads to better and , on the other, contentment with one's lot. 12 One needs more than facts and logic to sort those problems out: one needs insight and subtle, perspicuous concepts. And with information, more is not always better. It might cripple me to know what someone thinks of me, and I might sensibly prefer to remain in ignorance . 13 What seems most important to the informed-desire account is that desires have a structure; they are not an on one level. We have local desires (say, for a drink) but also higher order desires (say, to distance oneself from consumers' material desires) and global desires (say, to live one's life autonomously). The structure of

· desires provides the criterion for 'informed' desire: information is what advances plans of life; information is full when more, even when there is more, will not advance them further. So there is only one way to avoid all the faults that matter to 'utility': namely, by understanding completely what makes life go welJ.'4

This brings out another break with classical utilitarian tradition. Bentham, Mill, and Sidgwick an saw utility as having to enter our experience. But we desire things other than states of mind; I might sometimes prefer, say, bitter truth to comforting delusion. The informed-desire account has the advantage of being able to accommodate such desires. But the desire account does this by severing the link between 'fulfil- ment of desire' and the requirement that the person in some way experience its fulfilment, dropping what we might call the Experience Requirement. 15 If the delusion is complete, one believes that one has the truth; the mental states involved in believing something that really is true and believing a successful deception are the same. Or if a father wants his children to be happy, what he wants, what is valuable to him, is a state of the world, not a state of his mind; merely to delude him into thinking that his children flourish, there(ore, does not give him what he values. That is the important point; the

14 MEANING

I informed-desire account does not require that fulfilment of desire translates itself in every case into the experience of the person who has the desire, and that is what gives the account its breadth and attraction as a theory of what makes life valuable. This seems to me the way that the informed-desire account has to develop. The definition itself is short: '.utility' is the fulfilment of informed desires, the stronger the desires, the greater th e µtili t . The way that the account develops, however, shows that all of those key terms are to a fairly large degree technical.

(a) 'Desire'. In the present technical sense, desires clearly do not have to have felt intensities; they need not be linked exclusively with appetitive states (some are, but others are aims we adopt as a result of understanding and judgement); they need not have existed before fulfilment. Rather, desiring_ something is, in the right circumstances, going (or j _t, or not !!Voiding or being indifferent to getting it.

(b) 'Informed'. In its technical sense, 'informed' 16 is the absence of all the faults that I listed just a moment ago. There is a historically important account of practical reason that goes roughly like this: reason alone can never determine action. The end of action must be something fixed on, in its own reasonless way, by desire; we reason, but deliberation is only of means. 17 It is hard to see what is at issue between those who say, with Hume, that reason alone cannot supply a motive and those who say, with Kant, that it can. But those of the latter pursuasion are right to this extent: in deciding how to act, we must try to understand what properties things and states of affairs have, and we must put our desires through a lot of criticism and refinement to reach this understanding. 18

In this sense, deliberation may be of ends, and important deliberation often is. So an 'informed' desire is one formed by appreciation of the nature of its object, and it includes anything necessary to achieve i t. 19

(c) 'Fulfilment'. Being 'fulfilled' cannot be understood in a psychological way, or we should be back with mental state accounts. A desire is 'fulfilled' in the sense in which a clause in a contract is fulfilled: namely, what was agreed (desired) comes about.

(d) 'Strength'. 'Strength of desire' has several senses,

STATE OF MIND OR STATE OF THE WORLD? 15

appropriate to different theoretical settings. The 'strongest' desire can be the winner, or it can be the most intensely felt. But strength of desire, in its technical sense here, has to be understood in connection with the structure that informed desires have. One does not most satisfy someone's desires simply by satisfying as many as possible, or as large a proportion. One must assess their strength, not in the sense of felt intensity, but in a sense supplied by the natural structure of desire. The desires I feel most intensely could be satisfied by your constantly imperilling my life and saving me only at the Jast moment, 20 whereas I should clearly prefer peace to peril; anyway, felt intensity is too often a mark of such relatively superficial matters as convention or training to be a reliable sign of anything as deep as well-being. That I prefer peace to peril suggests that global desires provide, in large part, the relevant notion of strength of desire: I desire the one form of life more than the other. True, sometimes we form global desires only on the basis of having summed local desires (for example, the global desire for a way of life based on a reckoning that day-to-day pleasures will be maximized that way). But even then we must rank that way of life against others that it excludes, and our preference between them will, it seems, be basic-that is, a global judgment not based on any other quantitative judgments. This means that the relevant notion of aggregation cannot be simply that of summing up small utilities from local satisfactions; th!! structure of desires already incorporates, constitutes, aggregation. It means also that the relevant sense of 'strength' is not simply the desire that wins out in motivation. If my doctor tells me that I shall die ifl do not lay off drink, I shall want to lay off it. But I may later crack and go on a binge, and at that point my desire to drink will, in a perfectly clear sense, be strongest. If strength were interpreted as motivational force, then 'utility' would lose its links with well-being; what would be good for me would then be fulfilment not of my informed desires but of what I 'ought to desire' or 'have reason to desire'. So to retain the links with well-being, the relevant sense of 'strength' has to be, not motivational force, but rank in a cool preference ~rdering, an ordering that reflects a~E!eciation of the nature of the objects of desire. 21

16 MEANING

5. Troubles with the informed-desire account

There are strong objections to such an account. _Is it even intelligible? 22 If our desires never changed with time, then each of us would have a single preference order, by reference to which what most fulfilled his desires over the course of his life could be calculated. However, life is not so simple; preferences change, ~nd not always in a way that allows us totally to discount earlier ones. Suppose that for much of his life a person wanted his friends to keep him from vegetating when he retired but, now that he is retired, wants to be left to vegetate . Is there any intelligible _ programme for weighing desires that change with time and hence for maximizing fulfilment? If not, we may be driven back to a happiness or mental state account.

Yet all the problems that we have just seen with mental state accounts remain; defects in one account do not obligingly disappear with the appearance of defects in another. How do we determine how happy a person is? Is happiness a single mental state? If many, how are they linked? Mental state accounts are hardly a refuge from troubles. Moreover, there may be an acceptable programme for handling cases where preferences change with time. The notion of an informed desire needs still further development and may eventually be able to supply the weighting of desires that we need in these troublesome cases. Has our retired friend simply forgotten the satisfactions of a busy life? If so, his later desire has much less weight. Is it just a change in taste, on the model of no longer liking ice cream? If so, his earlier desire has much less weight. We shall have to come back to these problems when we discuss measurement, but for now I have to be content with suggest- ing that the prospects of making the informe"d-desire account work are certainly not less rosy than those of making a mental state account work. 23

The other troubles are much more worrying. The breadth of the account, which is its attraction, is also its great flaw. The account drops the Experience Requirement, as we called it. It allows my utility to be determined not only by things that I am not aware of (that seems right: if you cheat me out of an inheritance that I never expected, I might not know but

l L--~ ----

STATE OF MIND OR STATE OF THE WORLD? 17

still be worse off for it), but also by things that do not affect my life in any way at all. The tr::9J1ble is that one's desires spread themselves so widely over the world that their objects extend far outside the bound of what, with any plausibility, one could take as touching one's own w~ll-being ...: The restriction to inform,ed desire is no help here. I might meet a stranger on a train and, listening to his ambitions, form a strong, informed desire that he succeed, but never hear of him again. And any modeirately decent person wants people living in the twenty- second century to be happy and prosperous. And we know that Leonardo had an informed desire that humans fly, which the \t\Tright brothers fulfilled centuries later. 24 Indeed, with- out the Experience Requirement, why would utility not include the desires of the dead? And would that not mean the account had gone badly awry? And if we exclude these desires that extend beyond the bounds of what affects well-being, would! we not, in order to avoid arbitrariness, have to reintroduce the Experience Requirement, thereby losing the breadth that makes the informed-desire account attractive? The difficulty goes deep in the theory . In fact, it goes deep, one way or other, in any account of well-being.

Another attraction of the account is that desires have to be shaped by appreciation of the nature of their objects. Without that restriction, the account is not even a starter. But with it, do desires even matter any longer? It may be somewhat too simple to say that things are desired because valuable, not valuable because desired. Yet the informed-desire account concedes much of the case for saying so. What makes us desire the things we desire, when informed, is something about them--their features or properties. But why bother then with informed desire, when we can go directly to what it is about objects that shape informed desires in the first place? If what really matter are certain sorts of reason for action , to be found outsidle desires in qualities of their objects, why not explain well-being directly in terms of them? It does not seem that it is fulfilled desire that is the basis of well-being, but certain of its Qbjects. And that points us, depending on what we decide those objects are, either back towards mental states or beyond utility altogethe i-C~

, 7

1

l ronrANCE equality except when gain is

6. quA.‘

Two general points emerge from thinking about distribu. tion. One is the multi-level structure that its principles display, Property rights, for instance, are high storey and cannot be used, as some conservative political theorists use them,“l to restrict what is on the ground floor. If, say, a freak storm wipes out your crop and not mine, then even though you had as much and as good as I,since the point of the .Uockean Proviso is to recognize your equal claim to a good life, Imust help you. Property rights have to be limited by such considerations, because no rights are so powerful as to override these central values. The only way to miss this point is to have no sense of what a substantive theory of rights is like. The second point is a specific instance of the first. There is no one principle of

equality; principles of equality crop up on many levels. What we need in moral and political philosophy more than anything else is to identify them and to plot their relations to one another.

snaua- nvuvn

NOTES

CHAPTER ONE

Bentham’s precursors generally spoke of ‘pleasure‘ or ‘happiness'. Hume used ‘utility’, though more narrowly than Bentham. See the discussion in Sidgwick 1907, bk. 4, ch. III, sect. 1, n. 2. Bentham seems to have given ‘utility’ its wide modern sense. Mill claims the dubious credit for the term ‘utilitarian’; see Utilitarianism, ch. 11, n. to para. 1. 1t avoids, he says, ‘tiresome circumlocution’; but that hardly justifies its own bulk, ugliness, and inaccuracy. It could have been bulkier; Bentham once thought of proposing ‘eudaimonologian’; see Baumgardt 1952, p. 505.

2. J. S. Mill, Utilitan'anism, ch. II, para. 2. See also j. Bentham, An

3.

l0.

Introduction to the Principles of Moral: and Legislation, eh. I, sects. 2 and 3. Neither of them was aware that the words ‘happiness’ and ‘pleasure' are too vague and slippery to be much of an explanation. And Bentham, having used ‘pleasure' and ‘pain‘ to explain ‘utility', immediately turned around and undid whatever specificity the ordinary use of those terms lent in adding, ‘By utility is meant that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness . . .‘ (sect. 3).

Jones 1964, pp. 655-6.

Sidgwick 1907, esp. pp. 111—12, 127—9, 396—8. For a good discussion of Sidgwick's account see Schneewind 1977, pt.2, esp. chs. 11—12.

Nozick 1974, pp. 42—5. I talk here in terms of Iseeming to value‘, which is enough to make the retention of mental states look puzzling, but Ishall go on to argue that this appearance is not misleading; see ch. 1sect. 6; ch. ll sects. 3, 4, 6; ch. Ill sect. 7; ch.IV sects. 3, 5, 6. Sidgwick is well aware of this line of thought, but his objection to it is

uncharacteristically thin. See Sidgwick 1907, pp. 398—402. . But for acute criticism from economists, see Vickers 1975; Sen 1980—1,

sects.3 and 6; Hahn and Hollis 1979, lntrod. See Morton 1980, pp. 135—8, where, following Freud, he contrasts the ‘objcct‘ and the ‘aim' of a desire: ‘It isn't as if the desire says “I want that", and then to satisfy it one has to produce just that. Rather, it says, “I want something, and here’s what it must do for me" ’ (p.139.)

Hobbes sees something like this as characteristic of desire generally: '. . .there is no such jinx} ultimiu, utmost aim, nor :ummum bonum, greatest 800d, as is spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers Felicity is a continual progress of the desire, from one object to another;

3'4

12. i3. 14.

I7.

I8.

NOTES TO PAGES l2—l4

the attaining of the former, being still but the way to the latter. The cause whereofis, that the object ofman’s desire, is not to enjoy onec only ...but to assure for ever I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.‘ (Hobbes Leviathan ch.Xl.) Tibor Scitovsky discusses this feature of consumer desire in Scitovsky 1976.

'l‘hat is, Ido not think that we can stop with faults of fact and logic, Richard Brandt disagrees. See his account, worked out with exemplary

rigour, of rational desires as desires that ‘survive maximal criticism by facts and logic'; Brandt 1979, p. l0, but see chs. Il-VII pasn'm. What he says about the criticism of desires seems to me correct as far as it goes but incomplete, and thus it puts too much stress on information, as if all that criticism ofdesires needs, besides logic, is facts, the more the better.

See e.g. Kenny 1973, p. 6|. Iowe the example to Derek Parfit. Criticizing desires is not far short of what we mean by making sense of life. There has been a long tradition of complaint against utilitarianism that it puts happiness where the meaning of life belongs. The latest is David Wiggins, in Wiggins 1976, esp. p. 332. But he takes the notion of‘utility' to be more closely tied to Humer‘ike accounts of action and deliberation than it need be. And he overlooks the role that global desires and plans of life play in ‘utility’; they shift the concept far closer to what Wiggins

means by ‘meaning' than to what he means by ‘happiness'. See Glover 1977, pp. 63—4. Iprefer 'informed’ to ‘rational’, a word sometimes used with much the

same qualification in mind. ‘Rational’ is often used ofadapting means to ends, and seems to me to fit less well both simple tastes and deliberation about ends. ‘lnformed’ seems to me to have more scope. (But, then, ‘rational‘ would also become a technical term, and one could stipulate a broad sense for it too.)

This stark view still gets attributed to utilitarianism, e.g. in Wiggins 1976. 9-340-

This builds enough strength into the notion of ‘informed' for us not to need to resort to formulas such as ‘ought to desire’ or 'have reason to

desire'. For instance (to use an example Iam about to introduce) suppose my doctor tells me that Ishall die if] do not lay ofi‘drink. Well, Imight listen, agree, but not even desire to lay off it. Can Inot be

informed but foolish? So how could well-being be fulfilment merely of informed desires? ‘Informed' requires more than listening and believing. I should also have to realize fully what is at stake. Ishould have to appreciate what losing those extra years oflife means; and Ishould have to keep in mind just how pleasant a drink is. It is only desires formed in response to that amount of appreciation that are informed. Or take a different sort of case. Suppose a recluse accepts all the information that we give him about the joys of human companionship and even decides

19.

20.

2|.

NOTES TO PAGES l4—l5 3'5

that he would be better ofl‘ being more gregarious. Yet he might, because his desire for solitude is very stubborn, accept all the information and not change his desires. Again, informed, it seems, but foolish—or, rather, unfortunate. But we should describe the case more fully. What might make his desire so stubborn? A number of things could, so let us take one possible explanation: people frighten him and to avoid the anxiety he shuns company. Then, it is not that he does not desire companionship; it is just that he also desires not to be anxious. In his particular case, the two desires are incompatible and the second isgreater (and might remain greater when he is fully informed) than the first. Weakness of will is yet another kind ofcase, which Idiscuss in the text. See also ch. II n. 29.

The stress on ‘informed' desire may seem to make the desire account incurably anthropocentric, not extendible to animals, and so in that respect distinctly inferior to a mental state account. Indeed is any account of well-being acceptable in moral and political theory ifit isnot so extendible?

My concern is with the notion simply of human well-being. Still, Ido not see any obstacle to an informed desire account’s applying to animals too. It does not take human powers of intellect for a desire to be ‘informed’. It needs only that the desire be shaped by appreciation of the nature ofits object. Pains, even for animals, cover a wide spectrum, from physical (being stepped on) to psychological (being terrified). Pains get their status as pains not solely from their phenomenological feel but also

from their status in a life—that they are to be avoided, to be stopped, and so on. So part of their status as pains brings in desire and action. It may seem that it brings in desire only in a very extended sense of the term. But then no informed desire account limited only to humans will be plausible without also using a similarly extended sense ofdesire. The relevant sort of desire does not have to be held antecedently to its fulfilment (a human can enjoy something, want to have it continue or return, that he never knew he would enjoy, or even knew existed). The relevant sort of desire does not have to be conscious (one can be made better off by something, e.g. relaxation, that one has never focused sharply enough to form a wish for). And so on.

Iowe the example to Roslind Godlovitch.

If this is the best interpretation of ‘strength', then many objections to utilitarianism are wide of the mark—for instance, objections to its reducing all preferences, from ideals at one end ofthe spectrum to tastes at the other, to a single scale of ‘intensity' (see, e.g., Sen 1980, p. 211 and Sen and Williams 1982, p. 8). Utilitarianism is not committed to such reductions. And whether enough tastes can swamp ideals depends entirely upon the structure that informed desires display. There is nothing in the informed desire account either that commits one to a reduction of all prudential values to a single substantive super-value called 'utility' (see ch. 11 sect. 4) or even that rules out certain forms of incommensur- ability (see ch. V).

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NOTES TO PAGES l6—20

Richard Brandt thinks not, and he makes a strong case. See Brandt 1979, ch.VII, sect. 3, esp. pp. 146—8 and ch. XIII, sect. 1; also Brandt

1982, esp. sects.8—10. For discussion of Brandt's charge see Sen 1980-1, sect. 4. For a rich discussion of this and related issues see Elster 1982,

See ch. VII sect. 5. The trouble that Brandt has in mind arises from a person's having conflicting rankings over time with no super ranking to resolve them. But the intrapersonal case of two rankings, mine now and mine later, is formally similar to an interpersonal case of two rankings, mine and yours. There is no super ranking in the latter case either, but we need not fall back on a mental state account. Another way is to go beyond simple ordinal rankings, either, say, by appeal to the test of potential Pareto improvement or by the adoption ofsome sort ofcardinal

scale of utility, with comparability. Unless such ways are closed, which I think they are not, Brandt‘s worry may be met. These too are issues that Ishall return to when Italk about measurement (ch. VII).

The first example is Derek Parfit's, the next two are L. W. Sumner's, in whose book, Abortion and Moral Theory, there is a very good discussion; see Sumner 1981, esp. p. 183.

Ishall not go on listing troubles for the desire account, though there are others. For instance, it has difficulty distinguishing between selfish and selfless action. An act ofself-sacrifice has to be intentional; so it will be the object of an informed desire; so it will, when fulfilled, increase the agent’s welfare. Self-sacrifice is transmuted, by this philosophers’ stone, into self-interest. See Overvold 1980, Overvold 1982, Brandt 1982. This is an instance ofthe more general trouble that Ihave mentioned: informed desirefleads to objects/outside the bounds of well-bjing. An adequate

solution to the general problem ought to solve thislone too.

Imodel this account on one defended in Sumner, 1981 ch. 5, sect. 21; but Ihave also benefited from long discussions with Sumner during his

leave in 1982-3, when he was a valuable addition to the Oxford philosophical community.

It is not that this is a utilitarian‘s only hope, though Ithink that it is the only good one. Amartya Sen has recently asked whether we really need regard these various accounts of ‘utility’ as exclusive alternatives (Sen 1980—1, pp. 2031). What instead we should do, he suggests, is to regard ‘utility' as a plural notion, a vector of many different considera- tions. Suppose someone prefers bitter truth to comforting delusion, but is

palmed off with the latter. We feel sorry for him. Then later he learns that it was all a deception. We feel sorrier for him. Why not take our sympathy as an indicator ofthe person’s utilities? Bare desire fulfilment and experienced desire fulfilment are both relevant, and to insist on a choice between them, Sen says, seems ‘arbitrary and uncalled for'. Similarly for the other hard choices we have been considering, for

example, the choice between actual and informed desires.

NOTES TO PAGES 22-23 3‘7

But the doubt about Sen’s eclectic approach is that ifone adopted it one would have to supply some weighting for these various vectors when they merge in decision, and the weighting would have to be neither arbitrary nor left to haphazard intuitions. In this respect, the non-eclectic approaches are superior. The infOrmed—desire account, for instance,

encompasses Sen’s various vectors and attaches weight to them in a manner motivated by the spirit of the notion of well-being. When the person we alluded to learns that it was all deception, his experienced hurt counts too, Sen says. But so it does on a desire account, because few want to be hurt. Similarly, for the choice between actual and informed desires; a plausible desire account gives weight to both. Ifthe lacuna in Sen’s notion of‘plural utility’ is properly filled, it is likely to lead in the end to one ofthe other accounts. It may not be that all elements that he has in mind for his ‘plural utility' will be accommodated, but perhaps all that the notion of ‘well-being’ should be made to carry will be.

CHAPTER TWO

The introduction of this restriction on the desire account marks a break with decision theory. F. P. Ramsey, in his famous paper ‘Truth and Probability‘ (in Ramsey 1931, p. [73), which laid the foundations of decision theory, cautioned: ‘It must be observed that this theory is not to be identified with the psychology of the Utilitarians, in which pleasure had a dominating position. The theory Ipropose to adopt is that we see things that we want, which may be our own or other people's pleasure, or anything else whatever ...’ The break with ‘the psychology of the

Utilitarians‘ seems to me right, but the ‘anything else whatever‘ seems to me to go too far in the opposite direction. See Feinberg 1980, esp. pp. 173—6.

Aristotle took the notion of posthumous harm seriously, even though his notion ofeudaimania is loftier and more immune to accidents offortune than ‘well-being' is. ‘ if we deny that a dead man is happy even this admits some dispute; for it is popularly believed that some good and evil—such as honours and dishonours, and success and disasters of his children and descendants generally—can happen to a dead man, in as much as they can happen to a live one without his being aware of them’

(Nicomachean Ethics, 1 1ooa15—22). For his own cautious, unclear conclus- ion, see bk. 1, ch. XI.

I borrow the example of slander as a posthumous harm from Joel Feinberg; see his excellent discussion in Feinberg 1980, ch. 3. So I believe now. But I began some years ago so convinced of the Opposite that Itook it as a test of adequacy that an account avoid this conclusion. Icannot find any conclusion on this subject that is entirely comfortable. A radical one that is tempting, but still not comfortable, is to decide that these issues (and the issues surrounding the Experience