Abstract
The idea that we should maximize the good is a compelling one. After all, if you know what is good—that is, what is objectively worth pursuing—it makes sense to say that you should produce as much of it as you can. But the idea that we should maximize happiness is not obviously right; this idea depends on the assumption that happiness is the only thing that is objectively worth pursuing and this assumption is doubtful, particularly if happiness is understood as pleasure. After some consideration of the historical context of the idea that happiness should be maximized, I argue that the good for a person includes more than happiness. The good is more plausibly thought of in pluralistic terms. Finally, I argue that pluralist theories of a person’s good make maximizing problematic because they do not provide a single target and, further, because they include items (such as friendship) that are not appropriately maximized.
By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question: or, what is the same thing in other words, to promote or to oppose that happiness. I say of every action whatsoever, and therefore not only of every action of a private individual, but of every measure of government (Bentham 1996).
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Notes
- 1.
Mill 1979, in particular, argues extensively that virtue is good as a means or a constitutive part of happiness.
- 2.
Mill also thought that pleasures differed in degrees of quality (Mill 1979). This is an important difference between Bentham and Mill, but it need not concern us here.
- 3.
There is not complete consensus, however. Julia Annas for example, argues that the word “happiness” should be used to describe what is achieved in the best human life (Annas 1995).
- 4.
The point of talking about a good life for a person, or a prudentially good life is to distinguish the value of well-being from moral value. It’s at least conceptually possible for a person to live a morally good life that isn’t good for her (for example, the life of a person who sacrifices her life for a moral cause), or (somewhat more controversially) for a person to live a life that is good for her but not morally good (for example, Gaugin who abandoned his family to paint Tahitian natives).
- 5.
We are supposed to put aside practical worries about the machine failing or the intentions of the “super-duper neuroscientists” who run the machine. We are also supposed to imagine that others have the same option so that our decision to hook up or not will not cause others to experience less pleasure. By defining the case as he does, Nozick is trying to isolate our intuitions in order to focus our attention on the question about whether pleasure is the only thing that matters to us.
- 6.
But not all; there are some who defend actual preference theories (Heathwood 2006; Keller 2004). Notice that actual preference theories can make use of a distinction between what is wanted intrinsically and what is wanted as a means to something else in order to deal with at least some apparent counter-examples.
- 7.
For an informative recent anthology see Eid and Larsen (2008).
- 8.
Mill, of course, would disagree, as I mentioned above in fn. 1. But Mill’s view that virtue is a part of happiness makes his hedonism into something quite different from Bentham’s and I would argue that it is ultimately difficult to see how Mill’s rather sophisticated conception of human happiness is something that can be maximized in the way that Bentham’s pleasures could be.
- 9.
The idea that agential capacities and what I call the virtues of “reflective wisdom” are necessary for living a good life is an idea I develop in more detail elsewhere (Tiberius 2008).
- 10.
Subjective theories of well-being like the informed desire theory or life satisfaction theory may be able to accommodate these insights by arguing that the plurality of values identified by the Ancients are reliable causes of well-being. But if they do this, given the nature of the causes, they will not end up with a simple story to tell about maximization.
- 11.
A pre-cursor to this theory is developed in Tiberius and Plakias (2010). I defend the theory in detail in my “Well-being for Uninformed: Prudential Reasons and the Value Fulfillment Theory”. It is listed at the end as “unpublished ms.”
- 12.
For a more thorough discussion see Tiberius (2008); in that work I talk about taking our values to be “justified” rather than “appropriate” as I now prefer. Values as I intend them are similar to what psychologists would call “life goals”: “specific motivational objectives by which a person directs his life over time” Schmuck and Sheldon (2001, p. 5).
- 13.
For an illuminating discussion of caring see Jaworska (2007). I agree with Jaworska that caring does not have to involve reflectiveness (one of the main theses she defends in this article), but I do not take caring and valuing to be quite the same thing, as will become clear.
- 14.
If we take ‘desire’ in the broadest sense, where a desire is any pro-attitude, then valuing is a species of desiring and the value fulfillment theory of well-being is a species of a desire theory. It’s not clear that this is a helpful way of thinking about ‘desire’, though it is true that VFT shares some of the advantages of desire theories in virtue of its similarity to them.
- 15.
I want to avoid taking a stand on whether desires necessarily give us some reason to act, however trivial. For my purposes, it is enough to say that desires simpliciter do not track prudential or well-being related reasons, reasons which are due some consideration in deliberating about what to do. Throughout the paper, then, when I talk about reasons I mean to refer to such prudential reasons.
- 16.
Life satisfaction and positive affect do sometimes come apart. We can see this in studies of the relationship between income and well-being. See (Kahneman and Deaton 2010). For an example in which positive affect and rewardingness pull in different directions see White and Dolan (2009) on the relationship between having children and well-being.
- 17.
For more, see Tiberius (unpublished manuscript), and Raibley (2010).
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Tiberius, V. (2013). Maximization and the Good. In: Brockmann, H., Delhey, J. (eds) Human Happiness and the Pursuit of Maximization. Happiness Studies Book Series. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6609-9_5
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