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Notes
Parenthetical page numbers for quotations from Walden refer to Henry D. Thoreau, Walden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).
I have borrowed the general structure of this example from Fred Feldman, Pleasure and the Good Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004).
The instrumental value of our encounters with disease and failure is important in another respect: it can explain the intuition that a persons life can be improved by the way she responds to disvalue. I return to this point in §3.
There might be a sense in which slavery was a failure: it was a failure to respond appropriately to the value of the people who were enslaved. In this sense, it may well be that any bad that is caused by humans counts as a failure. If in addition there is a sense in which any bad that occurs naturally counts as an instance of disease, then we could take Thoreau’s claim that awareness of disease and failure are prudential evils at face value, since “disease and failure” would then refer to all badness that exists.
While the invocation of human nature here may strike some biologically-informed philosophers as problematic, it needn’t be. The Thoreauvian can follow the lead of contemporary neo-Aristotelians, and claim that ‘human nature’ is not a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for being a member of the species homo sapiens, but instead provides the criteria for being a non-defective example of the human form of life. See Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) and Michael Thompson, “Apprehending Human Form,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 54 (2004): 47–74.
See, for example, Devendra Singh, “Adaptive Significance of Waist-to-Hip Ratio and Female Physical Attractiveness,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65 (1993): 293–307.
As Foot observes, “while animals go for the good (thing) that they see, human beings go for what they see as good.” Op cit., p. 56.
Simon Keller’s account goes astray here. See his “Welfare as Success,” Noûs 43 (4): 656–683.
George Sher, Beyond Neutrality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 202.
Defenses of objective list theories can be found in: Richard J. Arneson, “Human Flourishing versus Desire Satisfaction,” Social Philosophy and Policy 16 (1999): 113–142; and Thomas Scanlon, "Value, Desire, and Quality of Life," in The Quality of Life, ed. Martha C. Nussbaum and Amartya Sen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 185–200; David Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), Chapter 8; John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 85–90.
As Brad Hooker claims, “a theory which specifies an underlying rationale for our various general principles is, other things being at least roughly equal, better than one which doesn’t.” “Ross-Style Pluralism Versus Rule-Consequentialism,” Mind 105 (1996): 536.
In this respect, it has an advantage over several contemporary accounts that are extensionally similar (although not identical) to Thoreau’s. See for instance, Thomas Hurka, The Best Things in Life: A Guide to What Really Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Stephen Darwall, “Valuing Activity,” Social Philosophy and Policy 16 (1999): 176–196.
See, for example, L. W. Sumner, Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 162–166.
I would like to thank Kirsten Egerstrom, Charles Goodman, Christopher Gowans, Bob Guay, John Hacker-Wright, Max Pensky and several anonymous referees for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Morgan-Knapp, C. A Thoreauvian Account of Prudential Value. J Value Inquiry 48, 419–435 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-014-9442-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-014-9442-0