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BENEFITS, HOLISM, AND THE AGGREGATION OF VALUE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2008

David McNaughton  and
Piers Rawling
David McNaughton
Affiliation:
Philosophy, Florida State University
Piers Rawling
Affiliation:
Philosophy, Florida State University
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Abstract

We reject Moorean holism about value—the view that the value of the whole does not equal the sum of the values of its parts. We propose an alternative aggregative holism according to which the value of a state of affairs is the sum of the values of its constituent states. But these constituents must be evaluated in situ.

We also argue that, in addition to value tout court, there are benefits that can go to individuals—where the value of a state of affairs need not equal the sum of the benefits it supplies. To deny this claim is to deny, among other things, the possibility of even raising distributional concerns, or that of stating egoism in a coherent fashion. And denying these possibilities is implausible. But once benefits are in the picture, there is, pace certain forms of consequentialism, pressure to acknowledge that we can have extra reason to pursue them beyond considerations of the effect of such pursuit on the general good.

We conclude by applying these thoughts to, first, the claim that Pareto-optimality is necessary for maximal value (we argue that this thesis is false); and, second, Parfit's ‘repugnant conclusion’ (we use this conclusion to bolster our claim that value need not be the sum of benefits: if value were always the sum of benefits, the repugnant conclusion would follow; the repugnant conclusion is false; therefore value is not always the sum of benefits).

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , January 2009 , pp. 354 - 374
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2008

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References

1 Moore, G. E., Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 36. (Originally published in 1903.)Google Scholar

2 Ibid., 84.

3 Ibid., 28.

4 Ibid., 21.

5 Ibid., 214.

6 Ibid., 216.

7 Ibid., 215; emphasis in the original. Moore offers two different interpretations of this phrase, and labels this sense (1).

8 Ibid., 36.

9 These parts do not include their combination as an additional part. To do so would not only be misleading, but probably lead to regress: would we include the combination of [the basic parts and their combination] as itself a further part?

10 Thanks to Joe Long and the other members of our Florida State University graduate seminar in spring 2008 for raising this question.

11 Cf., e.g., Davidson, Donald, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 59Google Scholar, on the redescription of actions.

12 Moore, Principia Ethica, 21, 24, 87, respectively.

13 See Dancy, Jonathan, Ethics without Principles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), chap. 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Setting aside the isolation test, this distinction between fundamental and derivative value, if adopted by a Moorean, might help in her defense against certain complaints. For example, Scanlon, T. M., What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 88–89Google Scholar, claims that because Moore adopts a purely “teleological” account of value, he (Moore) cannot give a satisfactory account of his own claim that friendship is a good. Scanlon implies that Moore's teleological account of value commits him to the view that “the primary reason to be loyal to one's friends is … that this is necessary in order for the friendship to continue to exist” (89). We take Scanlon to be attributing to Moore the following line of reasoning: loyalty is not fundamentally valuable; hence, it must be instrumentally valuable—valuable as a means to continuing friendships. But a modified Moorean position has available the following possibility: loyalty is not a means to continued friendship; rather, it is partly constitutive of friendship. On this account, loyalty is both valuable as an end and derivatively valuable—its value derives from the value of the friendship. We do not think that this will save the Moorean account of friendship, but we do not share Scanlon's account of why it should be rejected. Scanlon rejects a teleological account of value; we accept it (at least as far as acts are concerned). We reject the Moorean account of friendship not because of objections to its account of value, but because we take it that a Moorean account of reasons would entail that the strength of your reasons to act always varies only with the value of your so acting. And we deny this; we claim that positional facts can also play an ineliminable value-independent role in certain reasons, such as reasons of friendship. See, e.g., McNaughton, David and Rawling, Piers, “Deontology,” in Copp, David, ed., Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 424–58Google Scholar.

15 Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, chap. 2, objects to this, but we answer him in McNaughton, David and Rawling, Piers, “Holism about Value,” in Lance, M., Potrc, M., and Strahovnik, V., eds., Challenging Moral Particularism (London: Routledge, 2008), 116–32Google Scholar.

16 Moore, Principia Ethica, 34–35.

17 Thanks to Anthony Price for this point.

18 See, e.g., Moore, Principia Ethica, 197.

19 The suggestion comes from Brad Hooker.

20 For more on our view of Moore's theory of organic unities, see McNaughton and Rawling, “Holism about Value.”

21 Moore, G. E., Ethics (London: Williams and Norgate, 1912), 99–100Google Scholar.

22 Donald Davidson, “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” in his Essays on Actions and Events, 3–19.

23 Smith, Michael, The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 96Google Scholar.

24 See, for example, Parfit, Derek, “Reasons and Motivation,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary volume 71 (1997): 99–130CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Ibid., 124.

26 See, for example, Dancy, Jonathan, Practical Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), chap. 2Google Scholar; Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, 43–49; and Parfit, “Reasons and Motivation,” 128.

27 Moore, Principia Ethica, 99; emphasis in the original.

28 Feldman, Fred, for example, expounds this sort of position in his “Justice, Desert, and the Repugnant Conclusion,” in his Utilitarianism, Hedonism, and Desert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 195–214CrossRefGoogle Scholar. We discuss this essay below.

29 Alastair Norcross suggested this possibility to us.

30 See, for example, Parfit, Derek, Reasons and Persons, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 493–501Google Scholar.

31 Its popularity explains our citing Wikipedia in a scholarly essay. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency (accessed July 2007).

32 Parfit, Reasons and Persons, 387–90.

33 Ibid., 387.

34 Ibid., 388.

35 Feldman, “Justice, Desert, and the Repugnant Conclusion.”

36 Ibid., 212.