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On ‘Hybrid’ Theories of Personal Good

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2019

Thomas Hurka Open the ORCID record for Thomas Hurka [Opens in a new window]
Thomas Hurka*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

‘Hybrid’ theories of personal good, defended by e.g. Parfit, Wolf, and Kagan, equate it, not with a subjective state such as pleasure on its own, nor with an objective state such as knowledge on its own, but with a whole that supposedly combines the two. These theories apply Moore's principle of organic unities, which says the value of a whole needn't equal the sum of the values its parts would have by themselves. This allows them, defenders say, to combine the attractions of purely subjective and purely objective views. This common understanding of the theories is, however, mistaken. At the most fundamental level they don't combine a subjective and an objective element but two objective ones. Once this is understood, their attraction as hybrid theories diminishes: the value in their wholes may be just the sum of the values in their parts.

Type
Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 31 , Issue 4 , December 2019 , pp. 450 - 462
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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References

1 Barry, Brian, Political Argument (London, 1965), pp. 3–8Google Scholar; Hurka, Thomas, Perfectionism (New York, 1993), ch. 7Google Scholar.

2 Parfit, Derek, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984), pp. 501–2Google Scholar.

3 Moore, G. E., Principia Ethica (Cambridge, 1903), pp. 27–36Google Scholar.

4 Wolf, Susan, ‘Happiness and Meaning: Two Aspects of the Good Life’, Social Philosophy and Policy 14 (1997), pp. 207–25, at 209CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Wolf, ‘Happiness and Meaning’, p. 211.

6 Kagan, Shelly, ‘Well-Being as Enjoying the Good’, Philosophical Perspectives 23 (2009), pp. 253–72, at 255CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Kagan is open to, and attracted by, the idea that the objective goods your well-being consists in enjoying can include states not of you, such as other people's knowledge (pp. 256, 262). But this idea is in some tension with the topic of personal good and also with his own claim, in earlier writings (e.g. ‘Me and My Life’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 94 (1994), pp. 309–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar), that your well-being can depend only on your intrinsic, and not your relational, properties. I therefore set it aside.

7 Kagan, ‘Well-Being’, p. 257.

8 Kagan, ‘Well-Being’, pp. 253–5.

9 E.g. Raz, Joseph, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford, 1986), ch. 12Google Scholar; Raz, ‘Duties of Well-Being’, in his Ethics in the Public Domain (Oxford, 1995), pp. 3–28Google Scholar; Adams, Robert Merrihew, Finite and Infinite Goods (New York, 1999), ch. 3Google Scholar.

10 Woodard, Christopher, ‘Hybrid Theories’, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Well-Being, ed. Fletcher, Guy (London, 2016), pp. 161–74Google Scholar.

11 Woodard, ‘Hybrid Theories’, p. 168.

12 Kagan, ‘Well-Being’, pp. 257–8.

13 Wolf, ‘Happiness and Meaning’, pp. 217–18.

14 See Hurka, Thomas, Virtue, Vice, and Value (New York, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Kagan, ‘Well-Being’, p. 261.

16 Hooker, Brad, ‘The Elements of Well-Being’, Journal of Practical Ethics 3 (2015), pp. 15–35, at 30Google Scholar. Though Hooker directs this objection only at radical hybrid theories, it applies equally to moderate ones once we see that pleasure qua pleasure, as in the pleasure of chocolate, isn't an element in the whole that moderate theories value.

17 Kagan, ‘Well-Being’, pp. 261–2.

18 Sarch, Alexander F., ‘Multi-Component Theories of Well-Being and Their Structure’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 93 (2012), pp. 439–71, at 444–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Hooker, ‘The Elements’, pp. 31–3.

19 Compare Kagan, ‘Well-Being’, pp. 258–9.

20 I'm grateful to Eric Mathison for stimulating discussions and to two referees for Utilitas for helpful suggestions.