Abstract
According to welfarism about value, something is good simpliciter just in case it is good for some being or beings. In her recent Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association, “Good-For-Nothings”, Susan Wolf argues against welfarism by appeal to great works of art, literature, music, and philosophy. Wolf provides three main arguments against this view, which I call The Superfluity Argument, The Explanation of Benefit Argument, and The Welfarist’s Mistake. In this paper, I reconstruct these arguments and explain where, in my view, each goes wrong.
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Notes
Note, however, that depending on how we are to understand the ‘nature’ of a particular being, there may be some aspects of a being’s nature that this being could not be without. Such aspects of a being’s nature could not count as good or bad for this being (unless, of course, they were to affect its ability to fulfill other aspects of its nature).
Note that I do not wish to be committed here to hedonism about welfare. My point is more narrow: that hedonism can account for the value for us of great works.
See Heathwood (2007).
See Bramble (2013).
Sacks, quoted in Rachels (2004).
Moreover, these works might help us to develop or grow as people in ways that might improve our ability to experience pleasures (or avoid pains) further down the track. For example, one’s watching Scenes From a Marriage might make one a more sympathetic person, and so better able to experience the pleasures of love later in one’s life. Alternatively, one may learn things from watching it that could help one to save one’s own marriage (or perhaps to realise that one should not get married in the first place!).
An anonymous reviewer suggests to me that these lives seem wasted not because they involve no qualitatively new pleasures, but because the pleasures they do involve are merely sensual or bodily ones. But it seems to me that a life spent having the same higher pleasure over and over again (say, of re-reading Middlemarch well beyond the point at which there is anything new to be gleaned from it) would also be a largely wasted life.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Meredith Rossner, Sorin Baiasu, Christoph Hanisch, and Herlinde Studer-Pauer, for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. I would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers of this journal for their helpful comments. Research for this paper was funded by the ERC Advanced Grant “Distortions of Normativity”.
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Bramble, B. On Susan Wolf’s “Good-for-Nothings”. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 18, 1071–1081 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-015-9588-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-015-9588-2