Weighing Goods

Equality, Uncertainty and Time

John Broome

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781119451235
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

This study uses techniques from economics to illuminate fundamental questions in ethics, particularly in the foundations of utilitarianism. Topics considered include the nature of teleological ethics, the foundations of decision theory, the value of equality and the moral significance of a person's continuing identity through time.

Chapter 1
Introduction I: The Structure of Good

One part of ethics is concerned with good. This book is about that part. Specifically, it is about the structure of good.

More exactly, it is about betterness. Some things are better than others, so that a relation of betterness holds between them. This book is about the structure of this relation. Though I shall use the word ‘good’ as well as ‘better’, I am not referring to some metaphysically mysterious entity, but only to the homely matter of which things are better or worse than others.

I shall be particularly concerned with just one aspect of the structure of good. Good occurs, as I shall put it, at different ‘locations’. For instance, good comes to different people: there is your good and my good, and the publisher’s good. People, then, are locations for good. They constitute one ‘dimension’ of locations, as I shall say. Good comes at different times, too, so times are locations for good, and constitute a second dimension. The fact of uncertainty gives us a third dimension. We do not know whether our behaviour will cause temperatures to rise globally by one degree Celsius, or two, or five. Each of these possibilities is an example of a ‘state of nature’. What happens in one state of nature will be good to some degree, and may be better or worse than what happens in another. So we can think of states of nature as locations of good, forming a third dimension. This book investigates how good occurring at different locations goes together to make up overall good. How is good aggregated? When aggregated across the dimension of people, for instance, is overall good simply the total of people’s good, so that the better of two societies is always the one with the larger total? Or alternatively, might a society with a smaller total of good, evenly distributed across the population, sometimes be better than a less equal society with a larger total? I shall be concerned with questions like this.

The methods of economics can help with this project in ethics. I shall be making use of some formal theorems from economics and decision theory. In their original home, these theorems were intended to say something about the structure of preferences. But they can be redirected towards the structure of good instead. Specifically, they link together the different dimensions of good. For instance, they link the way good is aggregated across people with the way it is aggregated across states of nature. So they make a connection between the value of equality and the value of avoiding risk. This book explores connections of this sort.

But before coming to my more detailed argument, I need to talk generally about the idea of the structure of good. Moral philosophy these days is more often centred on rationality rather than good, so my interest in good needs explaining. That is the purpose of this first introductory chapter.

According to some ethical theories, the concern for good amounts to the whole of ethics, not just a part. How we should live our lives, these theories say, and how we should act on each particular occasion, are determined entirely by the pursuit of good. Once we know what is good, or more exactly what is better than what, we shall know the right way to live and the right way to act. Let us call a theory that says this teleological. A nonteleological ethical theory, on the other hand, gives a role in ethics to other considerations besides good. Most nonteleological theories, nevertheless, give some role to good too.¹ So this book will have something to contribute to nonteleological theories too.

But what exactly is this distinction I am drawing when I pick out one part of ethics as concerned with good or betterness? What really distinguishes an ethical theory concerned only with good from any other ethical theory? How, indeed, could an ethical theory be concerned with anything other than good? Is not what an ethical theory is concerned with necessarily what the theory considers good? If a theory says we should live in such-and-such a way, or act in such-and-such a way, does that not mean it considers these ways of living and acting to be good? John Rawls defined an ethical theory as teleological if ‘the good is defined independently from the right, and then the right is defined as that which maximizes the good’.² This is much the same as the definition I gave. But what distinction is Rawls making? If a theory claims that such-and-such is the right way to live or act, is it not also implying that it is a good way to live or act?

Evidently some work is needed to draw a line between the part of ethics that is concerned with good and other parts. That is the first object of this chapter. This book leaves the other parts aside, and I want first to separate them out clearly. Since teleology is concerned only with good, and with all of good, the boundaries of teleology coincide with the boundaries of good. So I shall proceed by asking what, exactly, distinguishes teleological from nonteleological ethics. This is a useful method for delimiting the concept of good. But it does not mean that the arguments of this book are relevant to teleologists only. As I say, good is important in nonteleological ethics too.

To start with, Section 1.1 describes two ways of making the distinction between teleological and nonteleological ethics, and explains why I think they are unsatisfactory. Sections 1.2 and 1.3 then describe the way I favour. Section 1.4 discusses what type of priority the concept of good has in ethics.

1.1 Acts versus consequences, and agent relativity

How, then, are we to draw the line between teleological and nonteleological ethics? The contrast between good and right suggests one answer. Rightness is commonly thought of as a property of acts, and goodness as a property of states of affairs. So we might make the distinction like this: teleological ethics first evaluates states of affairs, and then determines the value of an act from the value of the state of affairs it leads to – of its consequences, that is; nonteleological ethics, on the other hand, assigns intrinsic value to some acts, independently of their consequences. For instance, the view that breaking a promise is wrong in itself, quite apart from its consequences, would be nonteleological.

The idea is, then, that teleology insists acts are to be valued by their consequences alone, and that this is how it should be distinguished from other theories. This is the source of the term ‘consequentialism’. ‘Consequentialism’ is these days used more often than ‘teleology’, but it means the same, except that some authors narrow its meaning in a way I shall be explaining. I prefer the older term for two reasons that will soon appear.³

However, this way of making the distinction between teleological and nonteleological ethics turns out to fail. It relies on a division between an act and its consequences that cannot be maintained. It is not clear where an act leaves off and its consequences begin. If you perform an act, one consequence will be that you have performed it. If you break a promise, one consequence will be that you have broken a promise, and the wrongness of promise breaking can be taken as a bad feature of this consequence. Teleology, in evaluating the consequences of promise breaking, can therefore take account of the wrongness of promise breaking itself. In this way, the intrinsic values of acts can be absorbed into teleology.

This fact is generally recognized. In all the recent debate about teleology, nothing has been made to depend on separating the value of an act from the value of its consequences. The fact that an act has been done is generally counted amongst the consequences of that act, and the intrinsic value of an act is counted as a teleological consideration in the act’s favour. Samuel Scheffler, for instance, says:

When I speak of the act-consequentialist as requiring agents to produce the best overall outcomes or states of affairs, I do not mean that the act-consequentialist divides what happens into the act and the outcome, and evaluates only the latter with his overall ranking principle. Rather, the act itself is initially evaluated as part of the overall outcome or state of affairs. The act-consequentialist first ranks overall outcomes, which are understood, in this broad way, to include the acts necessary to produce them, and then directs the agent to produce the best available outcome so construed.⁴

I shall follow this practice. I shall not try to distinguish between the value of an act and the value of its consequences. I shall apply the notion of goodness to acts as well as to their consequences, and identify the goodness of an act with the goodness of its consequences. I shall take both to include any intrinsic value the act may have, as well as any good that may result from the act. Teleological ethics, then, in its pursuit of good, will take account of the intrinsic values of acts.

This is one reason I find the term ‘consequentialism’ unsatisfactory: whatever distinguishes teleological from nonteleological ethics, it is not that the former values only consequences, whereas th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Introduction I: The Structure of Good
• Chapter 2: Introduction II: Weighing Goods
• Chapter 3: Similarity Arguments
• Chapter 4: The Separability Theorems
• Chapter 5: Expected Utility and Rationality
• Chapter 6: The Coherence of Good
• Chapter 7: Coherence Against the Pareto Principle
• Chapter 8: The Principle of Personal Good
• Chapter 9: Equality
• Chapter 10: The Interpersonal Addition Theorem
• Chapter 11: Utilitarian Metaphysics?
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement