Knowing What is Good For You: A Theory of Prudential Value and Well-Being

210 Pages·2012·1.446 MB·English

by  Tim E. Taylor (auth.)

Knowing What Is Good for You

Knowing What Is Good
for You
A Theory of Prudential Value and
Well-Being
Tim E. Taylor
© Timothy E. Taylor 2012
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-28511-8
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First published 2012 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-33021-8 ISBN 978-0-230-35979-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230359796
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12
Contents
Preface viii
Introduction 1
1 Setting the Scene 5
A. Aims 5
The enumerative question and the explanatory questions 5
Functional and descriptive adequacy 6
B. Well-being and prudential value 8
Definition and use 8
Where to start? 10
The nature of prudential value 11
C. Criteria 16
2 The Main Contenders 19
A. The subjective/objective distinction 19
B. Subjective theories 21
Hedonism/mental-state theories 21
Happiness/life-satisfaction accounts 25
Desire-satisfaction accounts 28
C. Objective theories 31
Aristotelian theories 31
Objective-list accounts 33
D. Other theories 34
Hybrid or intermediate accounts 34
Functionings and capabilities 35
3 Objective or Subjective? 37
A. Arguments in favour of the objective approach 37
The horizon problem 38
Conflicts with value intuitions 40
B. Arguments in favour of the subjective approach 47
The subjective intuition 47
Sumner’s arguments 49
C. The possibility of a hybrid approach 53
D. Conclusions 55
v
vi Contents
4 What Sort of Subjective Account? 57
A. Hedonism? 57
B. Desire-satisfaction? 62
The attitudinal model 62
Desire and the future: the disappointment problem 63
The pleasant surprise problem 65
Desire and the present/past 66
Direction of fit 68
Broader notions of desire 70
C. A third way 72
Subjective valuings 72
Subjective valuings and other states 77
Why value does not ‘fall through’ to the reasons
why we value things 81
5 Developing a New Subjective Account 83
A. How states of the world can have value 83
Does subjective valuing always confer value? 84
Idealised or filtered actual valuings? 85
A variant: valuing plus desire 89
B. How states of mind can have value 90
What kinds of states of mind? 90
Two part or unified account? 95
Unity at a deeper level? 96
Variation between individuals and cases 98
Conclusion 101
6 Modifications to the Basic Approach 103
A. The rationale for conditions 103
B. Scope conditions 104
Remoteness 104
Intrinsic vs. extrinsic 112
Subject’s indifference 114
C. Information conditions 114
D. Authenticity conditions 121
E. Normative conditions 125
F. Conclusions 127
7 Conflicts and Comparisons of Value 129
A. Conflicts 129
Cases where something is valued positively and
negatively in different respects 130
Contents vii
Cases where a higher-order valuing has the opposite
polarity to a lower-order one, or to a pleasure or pain 132
Cases where something is valued positively and
negatively at different times 135
Complicating factors 138
B. Measurement 141
Ordinal comparisons 141
What underlies ‘strength’ 142
How far can we go in quantifying value? 147
C. Conclusions 148
8 Well-Being 150
A. An account of well-being 150
A bottom-up account 150
The rivals: top-down approaches 153
B. Comparison and measurement of well-being 162
Principle 162
Practice 166
C. Conclusions 170
9 Overview 172
A. Summary 172
B. How far have we succeeded? 175
Notes 180
Bibliography 190
Index 195
Preface
This book proposes a philosophical account of prudential value and
well-being. I hope, however, that it will be of interest not only to phi-
losophers, but also to others who have an interest in this important
subject. For those who are relatively new to the subject, I have included,
as Chapter 2, a summary of the mainstream theories in this area. Those
who are already familiar with the literature may wish to skip Chapter 2
and move straight from Chapter 1 to Chapter 3.
The ideas that find expression in this book first came to me while I
was studying for a Ph.D. at Birkbeck, University of London. I am grate-
ful to my supervisor, Anthony Price, for his numerous perceptive and
probing comments on earlier drafts of the material which has resur-
faced, in much revised form, in this book, and to others at Birkbeck,
in particular Miranda Fricker and Sam Guttenplan (now retired) whose
comments helped shape these ideas.
In writing the book itself I was fortunate to be accepted as a Visiting
Research Fellow at the University of Leeds. I am grateful to Jim Parry for
looking favourably upon my application, and to Ulrike Heuer for her sup-
port in this and other matters. Some of the material in this book was pre-
sented in initial form at seminars at the Centre for Ethics and Metaethics
and the Interdisciplinary Ethics Applied Centre for Excellence in Teaching
and Learning. It has benefited much from the insights of those who offered
comments at these sessions, in particular Chris Megone, Gerald Lang,
Ulrike Heuer, Georgia Testa, Daniel Elstein and David Brown. Particular
thanks are due to Wouter Kalf, who provided perceptive and helpful com-
ments on several chapters, and to Kate Griffin who gave me useful feed-
back on the book as a whole from the perspective of the informed general
reader. I was fortunate to arrive at Leeds at a time when Sam Wren-Lewis
was working towards his Ph.D. on measurement of well-being. This book
has benefited enormously from Sam’s input in more ways than I can list.
Thanks are due to Anna Todd for kindly allowing me to use her paint-
ing, which seemed so fitting for the cover. Finally, I would like to thank
my wife Rosa for patiently proofreading the manuscript, my daughter
Helen for compiling the contents, and both for their love and support
throughout the long gestation of this project.
Tim Taylor
May 2011
[email protected]
viii
Introduction

Ask people what matters to them, and they will give you a wide vari-
ety of answers. Some will be quite general: the health and happiness
of their families, success in their careers, close personal relationships,
material prosperity, for example. Others will be very specific: buying
that house in the country, seeing the kids through university, making
sure their parents are comfortable in old age. Most of the time, it is these
specific desires and goals that preoccupy us, to the extent that we think
about what matters to us at all.
Nevertheless, from time to time many of us will sit back and think
about what matters to us in more general terms. Sometimes this may
be because we have come to question the specific goals that we have
been pursuing; at other times, particularly pivotal ones such as the end
of adolescence or the approach of retirement, we may feel a need to
make decisions about what specific goals to choose. When we do this,
we may ask ourselves questions like ‘how can I make my life better?’
or ‘how can I achieve happiness?’ The fact that, for many people, such
questions may arise only on rare occasions should not lead us to under-
estimate their importance. The answers we find to these questions, and
the decisions we take as a result, may fundamentally shape the course
of our lives.
Underlying all these ‘how’ questions are some deeper, philosophi-
cal questions. Philosophers tend to feel that, before we can answer
the question of how one can make one’s life go well, we need to know
what it is for someone’s life to go well. What are the features of, or facts
about, a person’s life that would enable us to say whether or not it was
a good life? Questions like this seek to define the concept of human
well-being, sometimes referred to as ‘welfare’. The question may need
to be more specific than this, since a life might be described as ‘good’
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