² Strictly speaking, the notion of preference is comparative as the notion of desire is not. A person prefers one thing to another. But in most instances, a desire can be recast as a preference of one among at least some small class of alternatives, and a conflict of desires is, in this respect, also a conflict of preferences. For this reason, I follow what I take to be common practice in using the terms ‘desire’ and ‘preference’ for the most part interchangeably.

³ I assume, of course, that we are not talking about aims (or desires or preferences) that one has only insofar as one is concerned about the requirements of morality. I roughly follow Rawls in treating a conception of the good as an ordered scheme of final ends, together with a story about what makes those ends appropriate or worthwhile, though Rawls' idea has seeming moral elements which I want to leave to one side. See Rawls, John, ‘Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory: The Dewey Lectures 1980,’ Journal of Philosophy 67 (1980): 515–72, p. 544Google Scholar. I explore the ideas in this paragraph in greater detail in ‘Mortality, Agency, and Regret’ (forthcoming, Sergio Tennenbaum, ed., New Trends in Philosophy: Moral Psychology, Rodopi, Amsterdam). For extended discussion, of practical reason and the need for intrapersonal coordination of aims and activities, see Bratman, Michael, Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).Google Scholar

⁴ See, e.g., Elster, Jon, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Sen, Amartya, On Ethics and Economics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987)Google Scholar; and Sumner, Wayne, Welfare and Happiness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 162–171Google Scholar. See also Nussbaum, Martha C., ‘Adaptive Preferences and Women's Options,’ Symposium on Amartya Sen's Philosophy: 5, Economics and Philosophy 17 (2001): 67–88.Google Scholar

⁵ Barring intervention, of course.

⁶ I will talk throughout in terms of parents, but my points should be understood to pertain to any primary caregiver.

⁷ Throughout this essay, my interest will lie with the good, welfare, or well-being of individual persons—what I will most often refer to as ‘personal good.’ The value at issue in talk about a person's good is nonmoral, relational value, where our concern is with what makes a person's life go well for her. So when I talk, as I have been, about leading ‘good lives,’ I mean lives good for the persons living them, as opposed to lives good for others. I have elsewhere explained my preference for the expression ‘personal good’ over more common expressions like ‘welfare,’ ‘well-being,’ and ‘flourishing’ and have also made a preliminary stab at providing an analysis of the good for relation. See Rosati, Connie S., ‘Personal Good’ Timmons, Mark and Horgan, Terry, ed., Metaethics After Moore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 107–131.Google Scholar

⁸ I leave mainly to one side the moral and social dimensions of raising us well—that is, raising us reasonably to conform our behavior to the requirements of morality and to social roles and expectations—so as to focus on the relationship between preference-formation and personal good. I briefly address this incompleteness in my account later in the text.

⁹ My own view is that while preferences may have some interesting role to play in fixing our welfare, personal good does not consist merely in satisfaction of well-formed and well-ordered preferences. For criticisms of informed-desire theories of personal good, see, e.g., Velleman, J. David, ‘Brandt's Definition of ‘Good,” Philosophical Review 97 (1988): 353–371Google Scholar; Sobel, David, ‘Full Information Accounts of Well-Being,’ Ethics 104 (1994): 784–810Google Scholar; Loeb, Don, ‘Full-Information Theories of Individual Good,’ Social Theory and Practice 21 (1995): 1–30Google Scholar; and Rosati, Connie S., ‘Persons, Perspectives, and Full-Information Accounts of the Good,’ Ethics 105 (1995): 296–325Google Scholar, ‘Naturalism, Normativity, and the Open Question Argument,’ Nous 29 (1995): 46–70Google Scholar, ‘Brandt's Notion of Therapeutic Agency,’ Ethics 110 (2000): 780–811Google Scholar, and ‘Agency and the Open Question Argument,’ Ethics 113 (2003): 490–527.Google Scholar

¹⁰ I will often talk simply in terms of parenting rather than good parenting, but it should be understood that I mean throughout to articulate a normative account.

¹¹ Stephen Darwall has recently suggested that welfare just is what one ought to want for a person insofar as one cares for her or for her sake. On this analysis, the direct object of care or concern for another is the person herself. See Darwall, Stephen, Welfare and Rational Care (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002)Google Scholar. I have argued elsewhere that Darwall's rich and appealing theory does not in fact offer us an analysis of welfare. See Rosati, Connie S., ‘Darwall on Welfare and Rational Care’Google Scholar (forthcoming, Philosophical Studies). But I believe something is deeply right in what I take to be the insight that underlies Darwall's analysis, namely, that goodness for a person is importantly related to the goodness of persons.

¹² Again, I leave out the component of producing morally decent agents. See note 8. I explore the deep connection between autonomy and personal good and the role of parents in simultaneously seeing to it that we fare well and function well in ‘Autonomy and Personal Good: Lessons From Frankenstein's Monster’ (manuscript). My use of the word ‘happy’ should not be construed hedonistically. Rather, I use the word merely to connote a positive or flourishing state of existence, however we should best understand what that is for a person.

¹³ It is thus an example of what Darwall has recently called a ‘valuing activity.’ See Darwall, ch. IV. See also Anderson, Elizabeth, Value in Ethics and Economics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 8–16Google Scholar, for discussion of how goods differ in kind and of how different modes of valuing are appropriate to different goods.

¹⁴ For exploration of this and related ideas, see Schapiro, Tamar, ‘What is a Child?’ Ethics 109 (1999): 715–738, p. 716.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁵ Throughout, I use the terms ‘worth’ and ‘value’ interchangeably.

¹⁶ In this regard, the distinction between self-esteem and a sense of one's worth corresponds to the distinction Darwall has drawn between ‘appraisal respect’ and ‘recognition respect.’ See Darwall, Stephen L., ‘Two Kinds of Respect,’ Ethics 88 (1977): 36–49Google Scholar. I explore the parallel a bit more in ‘Autonomy and Personal Good: Lessons From Frankenstein's Monster.’ As Darwall explains the distinction, whereas appraisal respect rests on a person's perceived merit—her apparent possession of features which are excellences of persons, recognition respect, where its object is persons, does not rest on merit and is owed to all persons as such. Kant refers to recognition respect, Darwall says, when he writes of persons that ‘Such a being is thus an object of respect and, so far, restricts all (arbitrary) choice.’ See Kant, Immanuel, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Beck, L. W. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1959), p. 428Google Scholar. Darwall discusses this passage and further connections to Kantian ethics at pp. 45 ff. A sense of one's worth or value, in my view, inclines one toward recognitional self-respect but also to a variety of other self-directed attitudes, including self-concern. In the text this note accompanies, I have expressed the contrast between a sense of worth and self-esteem in a way that draws on Darwall's suggestions regarding the connection between self-esteem and merit in Darwall, Welfare and Rational Care, p. 96Google Scholar. See also Rosati, , ‘Personal Good.’Google Scholar

¹⁷ And, perhaps, with all valuable beings. Complex questions arise, to be sure, about what it means and how it is possible for persons (or other beings) to have value, and theoretical efforts to untangle and defend this essentially Kantian idea have not fared especially well. For recent critical discussion, see Regan, Donald, ‘The Value of Rational Nature,’ Ethics 112 (2002): 267–91Google Scholar. See also Sussman, David, ‘The Authority of Humanity,’ Ethics 113 (2003): 350–366Google Scholar, replying to Regan. I make no attempt here to address these, questions.

¹⁸ My notion of a sense of one's worth has affinities with the notion of self-respect. For helpful discussion and useful references to the substantial literature on self-respect, see Dillon, Robin S., ‘How to Lose Your Self-Respect,’ American Philosophical Quarterly 29 (1992): 125–139Google Scholar, ‘Respect and Care: Toward Moral Integration,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 22 (1992): 105–131Google Scholar, and ‘Self-Respect: Moral, Emotional, Political,’ Ethics 107 (1997): 226–249Google Scholar. Like Dillon, I have found Darwall's distinction, in ‘Two Kinds of Respect,’ helpful in isolating the notion I take to be of most interest. And my characterization of a sense of one's value or worth comes close to Dillon's characterization of self-respect: ‘reflection on fine-grained descriptions of self-respecting individuals urges that self-respect is not a discrete entity but is rather a complex of multiply layered and interpenetrating phenomena that compose a certain way of being in the world, a way of being whose core is a deep appreciation of one's morally significant worth.’ Dillon, , ‘Self-Respect: Moral, Emotional, Political,’ p. 228Google Scholar. Dillon in fact distinguishes a number of senses of self-respect, and corresponding ways of losing it. The sense of worth that interests me seems most closely related to what Dillon calls ‘recognition self-respect.’ As Dillon, drawing on Darwall, describes it, recognition respect ‘is a matter of taking appropriate account of the fact that something is a person. It involves (a) recognizing that something is a person; (b) appreciating that persons as such have intrinsic moral value; (c) understanding that the fact that this being is a person morally constrains our actions in connection with her; and (d) acting or being disposed to act only in fitting ways out of that recognition, appreciation, and understanding. Recognition self-respect, then, is responding appropriately to one's own personhood.’ See Dillon, , ‘How to Lose Your Self-Respect,’ p. 133Google Scholar. Still, a sense of one's worth is not, I think, the same thing as self-respect. Rather it is an orientation that underpins a great many attitudes one can take toward oneself—love, sympathy, and concern, as well as respect. I suspect that Dillon's characterization of self-respect may incorporate too theoretical a view of one's worth, a view that ordinary agents may lack and that many otherwise self-respecting agents might reject, however mistakenly.

¹⁹ This claim depends, of course, on the truth of the claim that persons have value. Those who reject this idea will need to account for features of moral discourse that presuppose that persons do have value, as well as for the basic psychological phenomena connected to talk about a person's value. As I go on to explain, people certainly tend to see themselves and those they care about as having value, and a host of psychological maladies reflect a basic absence or erosion of a person's sense of her own worth. I discuss the latter point in ‘Autonomy and Personal Good: Lessons From Frankenstein's Monster.’ See also Darwall, , Welfare and Rational Care, p. 6.Google Scholar

²⁰ Wittgenstein, Ludwig, On Certainty (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1972/1969).Google Scholar

²¹ For related ideas, see Schapiro.

²² The idea that certain motives and capacities are either constitutive of or at least essential to agency has been suggested by a number of writers. Velleman has argued, that intrinsic desires for self-understanding and self-awareness, or more recently, an inclination toward autonomy, are constitutive of agency. See Velleman, J. David, Practical ReflectionGoogle Scholar, and ‘The Possibility of Practical Reason,’ Ethics 106 (1996): 694–726Google Scholar. In Practical Reflection, Velleman argues that the motives constitutive of agency are intrinsic desires for self-understanding and self-awareness, but he shifts to talk about an inclination toward autonomy in ‘The Possibility of Practical Reason.’ See Velleman, J. David, ‘Deciding How to Decide,’ in Ethics and Practical Reason, ed. Cullity, Garrett and Gaut, Berys (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 41Google Scholar, n. 20, on why these formulations are supposed to come to roughly the same thing. Michael Smith has argued that a disposition toward coherence is constitutive of rational agency. See Smith, Michael, ‘A Theory of Freedom and Responsibility,’ in Ethics and Practical Reason, pp. 293–320Google Scholar. Richard Brandt has argued that humans happen to have standing desires for their own long-term happiness and for desires that are consonant with reality, and these standing desires enable them to act (against a present desire) in favor of their longer-term interests. See Brandt, Richard, A Theory of the Good and the Right (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 156–57 and 85Google Scholar. See also Rosati, , ‘Brandt's Notion of Therapeutic Agency’Google Scholar, for discussion of this aspect of Brandt's views. Finally, Rawls has argued that the possession of certain moral powers (the capacity for an effective sense of justice and the capacity to construct, revise, and rationally pursue a conception of the good) and corresponding highest-order interests in exercising them is constitutive of persons on a Kantian ideal and renders persons autonomous in the original position. See Rawls, , ‘Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory,’ p. 525Google Scholar. Numerous philosophers have discussed the importance of capacities for self-reflection and the formation of higher order desires, while taking differing positions on their relation to free will or autonomy. See Dworkin, Gerald, ‘Acting Freely,’ Nous 4 (1970): 367–83Google Scholar; Frankfurt, Harry, ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,’ Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971): 5–20Google Scholar; Neely, Wright, ‘Freedom and Desire,’ Philosophical Review 83 (1974): 32–54Google Scholar; and Watson, Gary, ‘Free Agency,’ Journal of Philosophy 72 (1975): 205–220Google Scholar. See also Taylor, Charles, ‘What is Human Agency?’ in Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Nagel, Thomas, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar, ch. VII; and Buss, Sarah, ‘Autonomy Reconsidered,’ Midwest Studies in Philosophy XIX (1994): 95–121Google Scholar.

²³ We find expression of something akin to the idea that autonomous agents want to persist as such in John Stuart Mill's famous observation that a discontented Socrates wouldn't consent to become a happy fool. See Mill, John Stuart, Utilitarianism (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1979)Google Scholar. The other desires or dispositions we acquire, in having a motive to persist as autonomous agents, will likely be of greater or lesser strength, depending upon an individual's upbringing, aptitude, and personality.

²⁴ Darwall seems to rely on a fairly sharp distinction between care and respect in his efforts to address what he calls the ‘scope problem,’ which was first raised for desire theories by Mark Overvold. See, e.g., his discussion of the case of Sheila in Darwall, , Welfare and Rational Care, pp. 43–45Google Scholar. According to Darwall, what is good for a person is what one ought to want for her insofar as one cares for her. Both care and respect are attitudes toward a person, but whereas care responds to her as a being with a welfare, respect responds to her as a being with dignity. Darwall might suggest, in response to my remarks in the text, that among that things one ought to want for a person insofar as one cares for her is that she be treated with respect. This would be to count respect among the substantive goods for a person, while treating care as part of the analysis of goodness for a person. Because I find reason to doubt Darwall's analysis of welfare (see note 11), I'm not inclined to accept this response. I merely register here my sense that the interactions among care, respect, and welfare stand in need of much fuller exploration.

²⁵ A number of philosophers have recently suggested that the normativity of welfare depends on the value of persons, that what is good for us matters only if we matter. See especially Velleman, J. David, ‘A Right of Self-Termination?’ Ethics 109 (1999): 606–620Google Scholar and Darwall, , Welfare and Rational CareGoogle Scholar. See also Anderson. I here make the related point that one wouldn't see oneself as having reason to do anything, at least that part of what we do that is self-regarding, without a sense that one matters.

²⁶ See ‘Autonomy and Personal Good: Lessons From Frankenstein's Monster’ for more extended discussion and defense of this claim. Paul Benson has made an apparently similar claim about the relationship between autonomy and self-worth. See Benson, Paul, ‘Free Agency and Self-Worth,’ Journal of Philosophy 91 (1994): 650–668CrossRefGoogle Scholar. But Benson appears to mean something very different by a sense of self-worth. For Benson, it is evidently a sense of one's competence to respond to the various demands one thinks others could appropriately make. So whereas I have in mind a sense of one's own inherent worth or value, Benson's sense of self-worth has as its focus a feature of one's status in relation to others and to standards of conduct. A person could regard herself as competent in the way that interests Benson, while lacking a sense of worth as I understand it. Perhaps both senses of self-worth must be present if a person is to function autonomously, but I leave the question whether that is so for another time.

²⁷ This may well amount to endorsing the ideal they have been given. See Rosati, Connie S., Self-Invention and the Good (doctoral dissertation, 1989)Google Scholar on the importance of a self-ideal. See also Rosati, , ‘Persons, Perspectives, and Full-Information Accounts of the Good’Google Scholar and ‘Naturalism, Normativity, and the Open Question Argument.’ For related ideas, see Christine Korsgaard's discussion of practical identities in, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)Google Scholar. See also David Velleman's discussion of a person's self-conception in Velleman, J. David, Practical Reflection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).Google Scholar

²⁸ See Frankfurt, Harry, ‘Identification and Wholeheartedness,’ in The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 159–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁹ I explore the notion of fit while attempting to spell out the good for relation in ‘Personal Good.’

³⁰ See Schapiro.

³¹ It helps to equip her, borrowing Aristotle's words, to [bear] with resignation many great misfortunes.’ Aristotle, , The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Ross, David (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926), 1100b.Google Scholar

³² I have already suggested that persons who have a sense of their own worth will manifest self-respect. As Dillon has emphasized, persons with a sense of self-respect will also be disposed to certain emotional responses to their treatment by others, such as a sense of indignation or resentment of others' disregard of them. See Dillon, , ‘Self-Respect: Moral, Emotional, Political,’ p. 230.Google Scholar

³³ This is most obviously the view of those who accept broadly Kantian approaches in ethics. But some suitable notion of the value of persons (which is not to say of persons alone) is arguably critical to ethics in general and so would have to be a part of any plausible moral theory.

³⁴ My discussion at this point was prompted by Phillip Pettit, who I here thank for pressing the question of how my account interacts with what he called ‘internal norms of preference formation.’ I want to say just a bit here to address his question more directly than I have in the text. I am uncertain which norms count as those internal to preference formation. If we understand them to be, or to include, norms of consistency, transitivity, responsiveness to information, and so on, then surely effective parents will shape their children's preferences in keeping with those norms; to do otherwise would, for obvious reasons, subvert the aim of producing happy, autonomous agents. The internal norms may also include ones connected to the natural mechanisms that seem to be at work in preference formation. I have tried to make clear how effective parenting facilitates successful exploitation of these mechanisms in our efforts to achieve good lives. I hope to have said enough here and in the text to allay any worries that my account may be in tension with such internal norms of preference formation as may exist. No doubt far more needs to be said, but filling out the details is, I think, work for those whose aim is to construct a theory of preference-formation.

³⁵ This sort of common sense observation has been explored in some of the literature on self-respect. See Dillon, , ‘How to Lose Your Self-Respect,’ p. 131.Google Scholar

³⁶ I am grateful to Christian Piller for pressing this point.

³⁷ This is not yet to say that unconditional love just is a regard for the value of the child. See Velleman, J. David, ‘Love as a Moral Emotion,’ Ethics 109 (1999): 338–374CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for defense of the idea that love is an ‘arresting awareness’ of value in another person, an awareness that ‘arrests our tendencies toward emotional self-protection from another person, tendencies to draw ourselves in and close ourselves off from being affected by him’ (360–361).

³⁸ This response applies, of course, to the next two objections that I consider, but I won't repeat the point. The additional replies I make in the text are compatible with treating the appeal to good parenting as purely heuristic.

³⁹ Thanks to Andrew Williams for pressing this line of objection.

⁴⁰ This is, of course, true whether or not one holds an ideal preference or informed-desire theory of welfare.

⁴¹ Martha Nussbaum describes a case involving a village with no reliable supply of clean water. The women had experienced no anger about their physical situation, because they had no recognition that they were malnourished and living in unhealthy conditions. Once adequately informed about their situation, through government sponsored consciousness raising programs, they began to demand a host of changes. This is just the shift in preference we would expect, a shift toward preferences more consonant with their own value, as well as the value they attach to their children. Nussbaum, p. 69.

⁴² Nussbaum describes the case of Vasanti, who stayed in an abusive marriage for a number of years. While disliking her abuse, Nussbaum tells us, she also thought of it as something women simply must tolerate as a part of their role in life once they marry and move into the home of their husbands. Nussbaum, pp. 68–69. We might plausibly explain this case in the following way. Vasanti lives in a culture in which women are not properly valued, and so in being raised, they do not acquire a sense of their own worth but instead are taught that their value is instrumental to the needs of their husbands and children. Moreover, autonomous functioning is not encouraged, and so neither the autonomy making capacities nor the concomitant motives are adequately nurtured. Not having been encouraged to reason and be moved by reasons, not having been encouraged to reflect, not having been stimulated to imagine possibilities, it is no wonder that women like Vasanti may lack a sufficiently critical perspective on their life circumstances and may have trouble envisioning how their circumstances might be better. Whether people are better off for having adjusted their preferences to their limited life prospects is, of course, a complex question. In some cases, we may be inclined to say that a person is better off with her diminished preference scheme; in others, we may judge that the preferences that suit her circumstances deprive her, sadly, of a good life. Whatever we say about a particular case, thinking prospectively, a person arguably fares better if her preferences not adapt, at least not fully, to her difficult circumstances; for she does better to be prepared for the possibility of changed circumstances. Women who illicitly educated girls while the Taliban remained in power presumably took the view that, rather than raise their daughters to accept fully their limited circumstances, they would ready them for a better day. Doing just that, I would suggest, is in keeping with the foregoing account of good parenting and its relation to preferenceformation and personal good.

⁴³ I do not mean to suggest that all welfare theorists see themselves as addressing these problems, though proponents of preference or desire theories of welfare surely do.

⁴⁴ I borrow the term ‘reality requirement’ from Sumner, pp. 158–65, where he contrast a reality requirement with what he calls an ‘objective value requirement.’

⁴⁵ As Sumner explains, an objective value requirement takes one of two basic forms, depending on whether welfare is thought to have a subjective component. See Ibid., pp. 163–166. The first form holds that a person benefits only from satisfaction of her preferences for objective values, and she benefits regardless of whether she finds engagement with those values satisfying. The second adopts a hybrid approach, maintaining that a person benefits only from satisfying engagement with objective values.

⁴⁶ The difficulty arises when proponents of objective value requirements attend only to the value of the objects of preferences and not to the value of the preferring individual. Of course, some who reject the idea that persons have value also reject the notion of anything being ‘good for’ a person in favor of the idea of ‘good occurring in the life of a person. See Hurka, Thomas, “Good’ and ‘Good for,” Mind 96 (1987): 71–73Google Scholar and Regan, Donald H., ‘Against Evaluator Relativity: A Response to Sen,’ Philosophy & Public Affairs 12 (1983): 89–132Google Scholar. In a more recent essay, in which he criticizes attempts to show the value of rational nature, Regan suggests that Mooreans can accept a picture that conies pretty close to what ‘good for’ theorists have in mind. See Regan, , ‘The Value of Rational Nature.’Google Scholar For his most recent discussion of ‘good for,’ see Regan, Donald H., ‘Why Am I My Brother's Keeper?’ in Wallace, R. Jay, Pettit, Phillip, Scheffler, Samuel, and Smith, Michael, ed., Reason and Value: Themes From the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).Google Scholar