What is Good and Why by Richard Kraut | Notes & Summary
Relevance
Having been immersed in two cultures, I was shown how morality binds and blinds. Everyone thinks they are right while holding and discrediting the fact that everyone else thinks they are also right.
Most people take on their moral values and virtues implicitly through media. They take on high-level values of “equality”, “wealth” etc. without questioning why they are valuable. As a result most people can not transcend their cultural and temporal boundaries.
That is far from desirable for me: I would like to think that if I were born in 20th century Germany I wouldn’t have been a Nazi. This level of cultural independence must come from a first-principles reconstruction of ethics.
It’s not that I am a bad person who doesn’t have moral intuitions but rather I do not trust my intuitions seeing how we inherit it from random processes of media and culture. I do not want fortune to dictate how I treat other people.
Thus, I must examine my moral intuitions through reasoned analysis.
However, I found it difficult to take most ethical theories seriously given that I believe moral intuitions are evolved tendencies from random processes without sufficient authority.
Only ethical theories that start by appealing to the Good life are the ones that can hold authority over an error-theorist whose meta-ethical views are influenced by evolution. For otherwise, I can just disregard morality and it’s callings as an antiquated demand just as many individuals who are married (a rather recent institution) ignore, and correctly ignore, their primal callings to procreate with others.
I must ask what is “Good” instead of what is “Right”.
This book provides the most satisfying description so far.
Brief:
The theory of well-being presented here is a Neo-Aristotelean conception which states that the Good for any human is flourishing: the enjoyment of the development and exercise of its capacities, which can loosely be cut into affective, sensual, cognitive, physical and social. It proves this by listing the least objectionable non-instrumental Goods (Good in and of themselves) and systematizes from that. One can rank lives of Goodness, and even make decisions about tradeoffs between these capacities, but the fundamental variable is not quantifiable and should not be maximized. Instead the Good life has a shape, an Aristotelean Golden mean for each of these capacities.
The non-instrumental Goods of well-being has both a hedonistic (needs to be enjoyed by the subject) and objective (a power needs to be developed or exercised) qualities. Similarly, non-instrumental Bad need to be disliked by the subject and be either an impediment to development, or an undesirable exercise (e.g. feeling pain too often or feeling sad when you should feel happy). The third and largest category of things are indifferent but can be instrumentally Good or Bad, and should be pursued and desired only to the extent they achieve their non-instrumental counterparts. If you desire an instrumental Good for itself (e.g. money) you become vain.
The ambition of this project is to show that it is enough for an agent to pursue his own enlightened self-interests to arrive at a morally exemplary stage. Unlike the more modern ethical theories, it provides a full account of how one should live, not just how he should interact with others. It relies on testing against our intuitions and empirical data rather than reasoning from a sound metaphysical bedrock. It is much more flexible and human but less clear and limiting (in that it does not impose enough restrictions on what we may not do to others). Lastly, it rejects that the dichotomy between personal and common Good is a warranted one. In other words, differentiating between prudential and moral reasoning is a useful pragmatic guide but there is no extra “moral force” impelling us to chase the Good, all we need is a desire to pursue our own Good Life.
The theory commands (or more like recommends since this is all in your self-interest) that you pursue to your greatest capacity your own well-being and the well-beings of others you have a duty to (by examining your social relations).
There are four layers of restrictions to what powers you should not develop and exercise even if you enjoy them: The first layer are instrumental Goods which are thought to be Good in and of themselves e.g. killing ones enemy or money. The second layer are hinderances to one’s own ability to further develop capacities e.g. excessive masturbation drains energy for cognitive development. The third layer are hinderances to your social capacity e.g. being a bad friend harms you directly. The fourth layer is a constructed layer of virtue, meaning, and duty which, in the long run, you are better off sticking too.
This system of ethics recommends pursuing your own Good with the understanding that your own Good is inextricably tied to the Good of others, the disregard of which has profound and irrecoverable consequences on yourself. These consequences aren’t merely game-theoretical ones of direct punishment or reward but you rather risk directly impeding your social capacities.
Lastly, it claims the Sovereign of the Good, that is: all our practical decisions and moral judgements need to flow from the Good. All our virtues and institutions need to defend their legitimacy by showing how they can promote the Good.
Here is why I am such a big fan of this theory:
It treats ethics as both a descriptive and normative endeavor by testing it against our intuitions. This line of thinking recognizes it’s own fallibility. “A good theory of well-being should be built on a root idea that is obvious, widely recognized, and rich in implications.” It clarifies my intuition while presenting non-obvious but effective direction in my life.
While there remains a lot to be desired: “What capacities should an individual develop? How should I treat other’s justly?” this theory is the bedrock which tells us why be good to other people. It leaves sockets open for manuals to perfect all of it’s capacities. E.g. Perhaps we can plug deontology into how we should treat other individuals to better clarify our moral intuitions as rational beings. This gives the high-level map which each individual and society needs to flesh out empirically for themselves.
It is very Karmic and we don’t need a reason for why people should pursue the Good.
I have a tendency to chase for permanence and solidity at the expense of being in the moment which the Buddhists criticize heavily, and rightfully so in my opinion. I used to collapse all my moments of joy and experience into my Magus Opus whatever that may be. But this theory forces me to focus on the momentary enjoyments without disqualifying the importance of long term projects. The Magus Opus is important and should be pursued as much as it enables me and those who I have a duty to to flourish.
Most importantly, Developmentalism presents everything I need to think about in my life. This theory of ethics is encompassing without being redundant and guiding without being totalitarian. It provides a conception of Good to aim at and make decisions against. It provides the only underlying variable that matters (enjoyable development and exercise of capacities) which all my heuristics can rally themselves around. It condenses and collapses so much complexity without losing much descriptive power. This is how it helps me:
We have desires for many things. Not all of which are good for us. We can use this conception of Good to examine and modulate our desires. For example, our desire for instrumental goods such as money or fame should be proportional to the amount of non-instrumental goodness they may bring forth, or in other words their utility.
It burns away unwarranted and ultimately unsatisfactory goals by pointing out the vanity of money, fame, and legacy without negating their usefulness.
Once we know who an organization (financial/political) should be responsible for and in what capacity, it becomes quite easy to determine the implementation because the Good of each being is already mapped out.
We have a solid layer of value to test the authority of our cultural values and political institutions. Freedom, democracy, equality can no longer be taken as Good in-and-of-themselves but must prove how they benefit the Good of Developmentalism.
Summary:
Nature of the Good
I must ask what is the good not what is the right. For the right presumes an external pressure, something I must abide by. Yet my evolutionary views expose anything seemingly binding and external for the faux mechanism that it is: much like how I ignore my gut instinct of fear when taking risks that today are all too recoverable, any notion of right that is not profitable for me I can just ignore like I rightfully ignore the fear drive (and obtain better well-being because of ignoring it). The Good on the other hand is an internal motivator.
My meta-ethical views necessitate that I ask “what is the Good?”
The ambition of this ethical project is to show that the best state one can be in (a state of perfected selfishness) is a state that can be considered morally exemplary.
Selfish is not used in a colloquial but in a technical sense. The ambition of these neo-Aristotelean approaches is to prove that by just clarifying and following what is colloquially thought of as Good for us, we can derive a complete system of ethics.
Unlike modern moral systems which starts from a Good which usually derives from some form of universalized rational capability, we do not start with what is good for the rational being but what is good for humans specifically by observing their development and flourishing.
It’s ambition lies on the claim that the personal and common Good are so intertwined that it makes no ultimate (but much pragmatic) sense to talk about prudential and moral reasons to act. The dichotomy between personal and collective Good holds little place in Aristotelean thinking.
Also deferring from modern morality, this theory aims to give us a fuller scope of what the Good life is. It collapses seemingly indifferent decisions of whether we should develop our capacities or even eat vegetables into the realms ethics. It’s attractiveness lies in the fact that it provides a full and complete picture of how to live and act for each individual to flesh out on a contextual basis. It does not believe morality as giving us concrete procedures on how to act. As a result, developmentalism is much more flexible and has less uncomfortable edge cases (Golden Rule -> sincere Nazi; Utilitarianism -> colosseum problem; Deontology -> ax-wielding murderer). As a tradeoff it does not provide the rule based guidelines which humans seem to require lest they become hypocritical (perhaps a combination with objective act consequentialism will resolve this). It is hesitant to prescribe any form of concrete action guidelines before being informed of specific situational constraints.
Furthermore, unlike modern theories, developmentalism is hostile to maximization. It believes that the Good life has a shape, optimal amounts of any positive or negative that constitutes the Good. Despite that the underlying shape is unquantifiable, the author does not hesitate to use quantifying methods to measure lives while recognizing these methods sacrifice in descriptive power. It’s important to keep maximizing tendencies out of virtue ethics.
What is the Good?
The Good either indicates an effectiveness of measuring against an existing, internal standard “he is a good chef” or the very standard of well-being itself “he is doing good”. The latter category we are interested in specifically the nature of this Good.
When we talk about A is Good. We always mean that A is good for a certain thing B. Goodness implies a suitability. This is the definition for all things. A is good for thing B if A is suitable for B.
For living things what is good is flourishing: the development and utility of it’s capacities. For the flourishing of each living thing we need to empirically examine what constitutes its healthy development, hence developmentalism.
Q: How would we respond to the snake who loses its tail as a defense mechanism?
A: We would say the loss of its tail, an exercise of it’s capacity, is Good given the circumstance. But, the circumstance of being pursued by a predator is bad given that it presents a potential impediment on future development.
For human beings there is an extra criteria of enjoyment. Because we take on the hedonistic claim that all non instrumental Goods are pleasurable or enjoyable to some degree.
To flourish as a human being is to develop and exercise in an enjoyable manner ones capacities. These capacities can roughly be split into physical and mental (cognitive, sensory, affective, and social).
Q: This definition seems to overlook meaning. He with a why can bear with almost any how. Perhaps its encapsulated in enjoyment or maybe in our social capacities? What I am getting at is that there seems to be something: duty, meaning… that is external to our development and enjoyable exercise of our capacities which we are willing to sacrifice for.
A: Pleasurable is to be taken in it’s most liberal sense. It is the Greek notion of Eudemon that encapsulates all subjective states of Good: pleasure, engagement, meaning, love…
Non-instrumental Good is what constitutes flourishing; it is the components of flourishing not the means or resources to it. Thus we can separate the non-instrumental ends such as eating with friends with the instrumental means such as money. A non-instrumental Good is a Good in-and-of-itself, the developmentalists hesitate to define with any more specificity or propose thought experiments enabling us to tease out the true Good from the facades. Instead it relies on the trust in our shared human biology as a basis that our intuition would align and agree on what the goods in and of themselves are.
“This narrative and normative schema does not and is not intended to answer the deliberative questions we normally have to answer about the major turning points in our lives — which career to pursue, whether to marry, whether to have children, what our ideals should be, and so on. But it is the proper starting point from which to develop a more concrete strategy.” We must fill it in ourselves by examining models, our own circumstance and talents.
“Illumination about well-being is to be obtained by a process of making the general and abstract more detailed and precise. But this is not a process that comes to an end at some fixed and easily recognizable point. Every account of what is good for a human being must be a sketch that is specific enough for certain purposes but not for others; further elaboration and further inquiry are always possible. “
Why is this the Good?
“Developmentalism proposes that we can achieve some insight into what is good for us by tracing the development — and that means healthy development — of a human being over the course of a lifetime. As we have seen in our discussion of the virtues and the value of autonomy, it seeks to understand why valued features of our lives are valuable by seeing how they fit into the life of a properly developing child. It does not simply assert that justice, honesty, and autonomy are somehow valuable. It asks a more specific question: are they good for us? And then it uses a rough picture of the powers of a human being — cognitive, affective, sensory, and so on — as a template in which whatever is good for us can be situated…There is nothing sacrosanct about this rough and crude list of human powers. It accords with common sense, but common sense is subject to correction and change. We may be able to achieve a more refined and illuminating map of human powers with the help of the empirical sciences or the insights of the arts.”
Q: it seems that developmentalism cannot escape the norms of a culture and falls prey to cultural relativism? Under the same line of thought what if a culture said they think slaughtering babies is good? Or, more realistically, what if a culture thought that the only Good in and of itself was the communion with God?
A: Developmentalism lies on the bedrock axiom that human biology is similar enough such that we can agree across cultures on a set of things that are Good in and of themselves upon which we can systematize and develop a theory of ethics from.
Regarding the baby sacrifice the developmentalist would say “Show me, let’s not consider hypotheticals here but real empirical facts about human nature. Show me a culture where slaughtering babies and sacrifice is thought of as a Good in itself.”
Regarding God, the developmentalist could claim that usually deities are humans with perfectly developed capacities. But the more plausible diffusion is that the anthropocentric developmentalism is too metaphysically dissimilar from a society that believes in a more totalitarian God to begin with.
In fact, developmentalism can transcend it’s own culture. It criticizes a lot of the vanities we desire for their own sake today. It is great at burning away what Girard termed as “Metaphysical Desires” which had no real basis. It can also tell us how to design optimal institutions given we know the scope of it’s responsibilities.
Developmentalism takes the things we find least objectionable as Good-in-themselves and attempt to find an underlying thesis. It observes and judges nature but isn’t as Functionalist as Aristotelean ethics, accepting that what we are meant to do is good.
“It finds it plausible that these enjoyments — of food, friends, dancing, writing — are Good; and, like any other theory of well-being, it looks for unifying elements among these examples. Nature comes into the picture at this stage: our sense of taste, our sociability, our physical capacities, our language skills were the origins that led, eventually, to such sophisticated activities as dinner with friends, dancing, and writing. We say that nature gave us something good in all these cases, but in saying that, we are standing in judgment of nature, not bowing down to it as the arbiter or determinant of what is good. We are free to arrive at the conclusion that some natural powers are bad for the person who has them.”
Indeed, in these examples the individuals are enjoying themselves (hedonism) and getting what they want (conative). “But when we examine those common features, we find that they do not work in other cases. Developmentalism proposes an alternative: when we enjoy food, when we interact with friends, when we dance, when we love language, we are enjoying the use of skills that originate in our inherent powers and emerge more fully through a process of training.”
Q: why is pleasure not a Good-in-itself but flourishing is. indeed you can say doing drugs is pleasurable but not good, you can also however say that learning how to kill your enemies is developing and exercising in enjoyment but not good. You might say the latter impedes flourishing yet I can counter so does doing drugs. On what basis do we have to accept developmentalism but reject hedonism. Doesn’t the former simply elaborate on the latter namely where we find enjoyment?
What I am proposing is that conative theory and hedonism does not fail in places where developmentalism succeeds, rather the latter merely points out what should be rationally desired in conative theory and what is enjoyable in hedonism.
A: Hedonism does indeed remain in the background. Consider that enjoyment is an incredibly important part of well-being. The authors may not find a problem that developmentalism elaborates on Hedonism. In fact it probably considers it a place of pride that it aligns with our intuitions that pleasure is Good.
Q: Why do we need an objective basis? The good must be some form of subjective enjoyment with an objective exercising of a capacity. But if someone is in a VR machine and it is indistinguishable why does it matter?
A: It aligns with most people’s intuitions mined out of the Experience machine thought experiment that people think just perfect subjective hallucination is not enough. For all pragmatic purposes this does not matter, but it might when our technologies get powerful enough.
“We can think of countless cases of this sort, and all of them depend on our confidence that the exemplary performance of complex tasks that make use of our cognitive, affective, and social powers is good for the person who achieves that goal.”
We are free to choose and evaluate which actions to develop based on how they will affect our ability to enjoyably develop and utilize other actions. “The argument is not that we have certain powers and inclinations when we are young, and therefore their development must be good for us. Rather, we notice, as we systematize our thoughts about what is good, that they fall into a pattern, and the notion of an inherent power waiting to be developed plays an organizing role in that process of systematization.”
The way to disprove developmentalism would have to show how the enjoyable development and utility of a majority of one’s natural capacities could be harmful for the agent.
Q: Are there false positives, Goods that this theory would consider good but we wouldn’t?
A: The next section details what capacities to and not to develop. Since every good must be considered in the broader context of the Good life and how it conforms to that ideal shape, there does not exist many false positives.
Q: Are there false negatives, Goods that this theory wouldn’t consider good but we would?
A: Initially you would think things like fame or power many would consider Good. But you realize that we really only desire them so far as they help us develop or exercise our capacities in some pleasurable manner.
What Powers should we Develop?
There seems to be two methods to determine what powers should not be developed.
The first method is that since the good life is one of continuous flourishing, we need to do a calculus not of only the goodness of one action but its ability to affect our flourishing in the long run:
“The goodness of each separate component of flourishing is better understood when it is seen as part of a larger whole, and the goodness of the whole is better understood when it is seen not merely as an unspecified abstraction but as a complex whole that is constituted by these concrete parts.”
Developmentalism is able to evaluate an action not only on its enjoyment but whether it will impact an agent’s ability to develop in other categories, by examining other models of the same species. It is precisely this balance which makes it able to curb the single-variable maximizing behavior of hedonism. One can transform “part of one’s body (and impede the powers one could exercise through its use) in order to enjoy the exercise of affective and social powers that one correctly judges to be central components of well-being.”
This answers, in a satisfying manner, why compulsive masturbation is not good: because it takes away your ability to develop other powers.
Q: It seems that in Athens, pedophilia would be good to develop because it doesn’t hinder your ability to develop other powers?
A: Perhaps the developmentalist would again take this as a point of pride indicating the flexibility of this theory, stating that: in such a society where an important part of ones social flourishing is dictated by sexual relationships between mentor and mentee, and these relationships are truly rewarding ones which don’t hinder your other capacities, it is in the interest of individuals to pursue these relationships.
The second attempt is to try to show that certain things are only instrumentally valuable.
For example, we humans have a naturally destructive power, why should we not develop that? Now there is great instrumental value in destroying an aggressor (so more people can flourish). But the very act of destruction is not instrumentally good. You can kill someone with a simple shove or by accident but you cant create a masterpiece artwork like that, developmentalism focuses on the utilization of repeatedly developed capacities.
“When we consider the sorts of activities it is good for us to engage in, we find that the best explanation for their goodness consists in the way they involve the enjoyable use of our bodies, senses, emotions, and intellect. We are not led to the conclusion that, for our own good, we might do best to extirpate these powers or to use them only when it is instrumentally valuable to do so. On the contrary, we find that our well-being consists precisely in the full flowering of these powers, just as the good of any living thing consists in its flourishing.” Not destruction however. Destruction can be thought about good, by certain violent societies, yet it is the preparation for destruction and the development from that rather than the act itself which is good.
“Recall the point that one can push another person to his death with almost no effort. If that is counted as the activation of our destructive powers, there is no plausibility in the idea that such an activity is non-instrumentally good. Admittedly, human beings sometimes take pleasure in seeing other human beings and other creatures suffer; that is part of what might be meant when it is said that we have a destructive or aggressive nature. But that part of what is natural to us — if it is natural — should, unlike other parts, be extirpated because it does us no good.”
Q: How does this system of morality impose restrictions on what we shouldn’t do?
A: This system of morality imposes restrictions. The first layer are instrumental goods which are thought to be good in and of themselves e.g. killing ones enemy or money. The second layer of restrictions is hinderance of one’s own non-social abilities e.g. excessive masturbation drains energy for cognitive development. The third layer of restrictions is hinderance of social ability e.g. being a bad friend harms you directly. The fourth layer of restrictions is this layer of meaning and duty and the consequences of breaking that.
This system of ethics is all about pursuing your own good with the understanding that your own good is inextricably tied to the good of others, the disregard of which has profound and irrecoverable consequences on yourself.
The weakest part of this theory is that it can’t live up to what our conscience demands and does not provide any guidelines on how to act when dealing with others. But it provides a great overall framework to why you should care about others. Perhaps, we need deontology to further extrapolate our intuitions.
What is the bad?
In this categorization, there are things which are good, bad, and indifferent (only instrumentally good or bad).
What is bad happens on both the developmental and exercise level of capabilities. Both impediments and misutilizations of capacities are “bad”.
Impediments are quite straight forward, e.g. the loss of partial taste on the tongue. Mis-utilizations are a bit more tricky; they have to be a justifiably unpleasant utilization which the person does not like. There are two conditions here: the first one is that the utilization cannot be justifiably approved by the person and the second is that the person does not subjectively like it. These bad things may interfere with out abilities but they, in and of themselves are bad, as components of un-flourishing. What is bad must be examined based on the capacity.
Q: Do you have to dislike something for it to be bad? What if it is something hindering your capabilities but you like it e.g. drugs.
A: There’s a hedonistic as well as an objective basis for Good and Bad in this theory. For something to be bad it has to invoke a form of dislike as well as be negative or a form of misfiring. Also we need to examine how it contributes to the overall shape of the life, not in just one small context. Perhaps some stress is good, but too much isn’t. Regarding the bad which one likes: it’s hard for us to categorize as a bad outright, but perhaps more fair to determine this as a façade of the Good. The real deficiency is one’s inability to determine Good from Bad in this case.
Q: What if someone says they like staring at a wall while they rot?
A: The developmentalist would conclude that there is a deficiency in his cognitive capacity to determine Goodness.
What is Indifferent and Vane?
Let us examine items which are indifferent, this is the largest set e.g. “Chicago” is the name of a city.
However, within this set, there is a subset which are supposed to be indifferent yet people often form a desire for them. These things are called vanities.
The vanity of fame for example is the direct desire that people know us or know something about us. The way to prove it is something neither good nor bad can only be through examining whether the object is something that is good for us to have in a developmental manner, and whether it is good non-instrumentally. Like such: “Consider once again a child in the course of his normal development. At a certain point in his life, he will acquire the concept of fame, and he will at that point be capable of forming a desire for it and enjoying its acquisition. Should those who care for his well-being try to inculcate that aspiration in him, on the grounds that it will be non-instrumentally good for him to become famous? If he does acquire this new ambition and must make room for its fulfillment by taking time and energy away from other goals, what should be sacrificed? Which of his cognitive, affective, social, and physical powers should develop less fully, in order that he become extremely well known and enjoy that fame? Suppose he can become extremely well known, and can enjoy his fame, by becoming the victim of a heinous crime — one that leaves him incapable of any further development. Would those who care for his well-being be tempted to commit that crime for his sake? The hypothesis that the enjoyment of fame is good has nothing to recommend it.”
Q: is there a better litmus test here — what is the condensed litmus test for knowing if something is good or bad.
A: There is no litmus test or thought experiment, our knowledge in this ethical system is always fallible. This, instead of being seen as a hinderance, can be seen as a strength: it recognizes and acknowledges the limitations of ethics whereas other theories do not.
The process of figuring out how we can best flourish is an epistemic endeavor that is fallible in nature, it requires both deductive (e.g. philosophy, biographies, rational argumentation on career choice) as well as inductive (e.g. how did I feel about that job?) approaches. We must be satisfied when we are given enough clarity to act and not demand more precision than necessary. This model of the Good life, can at every level of abstraction act as the overriding model to answer that question for you.
“Questions of ultimate ends are not amenable to direct proof. Whatever can be proved to be good must be so by being shown to be a means to something admitted to be good without proof. The medical art is proved to be good by its conducing to health; but how is it possible to prove that health is good? The art of music is good, for the reason, among others, that it produces pleasure; but what proof is it possible to give that pleasure is good?” Thus Mill, in the first chapter of Utilitarian- ism. Hume argued for a similar point — that “ultimate ends . . . can never . . . be accounted for by reason” — and he inferred, “Something must be desirable on its own account, and because of its immediate accord or agreement with human sentiment and affection.”
We have desires for many things. Not all of which are good. We can use this conception of Good to examine and modulate our desires: our desire for instrumental things such as money or fame should be proportional to the amount of non-instrumental goodness they may bring forth, or in other words their utility.
To clarify: “The desire for fame must not be confused with other desires. Its object is simply that one be known by many others. It should be distinguished from the desire to be admired, appreciated, or respected for one’s skills or accomplishments. A singer who is gratified by the warm applause of her audience need not have a general desire to be famous, or even the more specific desire to be famous as a fine musician. When she is pleased by the enthusiastic response of her audience and shows her audience that she appreciates their response, she is participating in a relationship that has some of the characteristics of a friendship.”
Another example of vanity is wealth. Here, I agree there is nothing good about the subjective awareness that one owns a lot. In other words, wealth is only good such that it can bring the non-instrumental good of flourishing.
Properties of the good
Firstly, to figure out if we should pursue something, even if it is a non-instrumental good like the appreciation of literature we must ask what else could be pursued, the opportunity costs.
“When doing so is costless, it is better to develop a love of reading good fiction than not to. To defend that answer, we merely have to say how such an activity, pursued with pleasure, promotes, in some way, one of the components of well-being. The enjoyment of literature, we can reasonably say, is an exercise of one’s cognitive and affective powers. It activates and enlarges one’s powers of imagination, social understanding, and appreciation for the riches of language. It builds on the pleasure we take, as children, in storytelling, and it admits of endless variation and development. As one becomes a more experienced ethical agent and learns more from one’s social interactions, one can bring to and take from one’s reading a deeper understanding of human beings.”
Secondly, the good life has a certain shape and balance “and that thought lies behind certain quantitative judgments we make about what is good or bad for people. A certain amount of something or other will do no harm; but there is such a thing as too much of it, because at a certain point it begins to do harm.” Take anger for example, if it is appropriate and you only occasionally feel it then it will do you no harm. If you feel it every day, you should examine your circumstance because it will begin to impede on your capacities. Similarly, it is good for someone to perceive they are loved, but too much of this especially in development may create self-centered personalities. It is all about finding the Aristotelean mean. These capacities might self-sabotage at extremes or affect the abilities for other capacities to grow and develop (e.g. excessive masturbation).
Thirdly, we can compare lives since dimensions of cognitive, affective, social, and physical powers all have roughly equal weight as elements of well being.
Q: Can we compare between dimensions. E.g. is it better to be socially well-off and emotionally starved but flourishing in other aspects or the reverse.
A: Developmentalism faces a paradox here. On the one hand it wants to say that these are all separate and non-tradeable aspects of the Good life, on the other it hints at a basis where we can compare lives and decisions. The latter is best understood as a way of modeling the former in a quantifiable manner. Just because something isn’t quantitative in reality doesn’t mean it cannot be fleshed out quantitatively. The real problem that this theory faces is that it seems to imply that our social capacities can be measured by some currency that can be traded for other forms of flourishing. Ie. It does not have a reason to reject someone who screwed someone else but rendered himself much more flourishing, if the calculus adds up.
Q: In this lens is it better to develop a taste for something? e.g. is the person with a picky food choice better because they are better developed or is the person who doesn’t care and gets pleasure from many foods better because he experiences more pleasure?
A: There’s a distinction between a discerning and a picky eater. A discerning eater has well developed food tastes which is good. A picky eater however generally wasn’t exposed to a broad taste pallet growing up, which can be seen as a developmental hinderance.
On a broader point, this theory is very much pro-desire. Specifically, cultivating the right desires to the right amount. As a theory of self-affirmation, it is very much against the self-negating Buddhists in this dimension.
Lastly, we can safely say that if a life is flourishing in all ways another life is but with more avenues, that is a better life. “Nothing would be gained by saying that if someone fails to abide by this principle when he makes choices about how to live his life, he is irrational. But if he flouts this principle and his choices are effective, he will certainly be worse-off.”
This translates to a practical decision making criteria: “When someone has his whole future ahead of him and asks what purposes he should cultivate for his own good, we think he should answer this question by considering the various dimensions of well-being: which of the various options before him will allow him to flourish as a mentally active, emotionally and socially engaged person? We work with a concrete menu of goods, adjusted to the peculiar temperament and talents of each individual; and if one career will cultivate all that another career would, and more besides, we think the first is better.”
Q: what do we say to someone who does not develop their potential and chase for the good life? Is laziness or immorality the accusation? Do we need to provide further reasons for pursuit since the good life is in and of itself its own reward? Do people have a responsibility to be ambitious in cultivating their passions?
A: There is no ultimate distinction for the agent between moral and prudential reasons, both collapse into “selfish” reasons which the agent pursues. Developmentalists would argue that we do not need something like constitutivism to show why we should pursue the Good life because it is tautologically what we should aspire, hope for, and aim at. In a sense people do have a responsibility, a personal responsibility to cultivate their passions. Perhaps the critique of someone who refuses to do so is a lack of responsibility.
Sensory Development
For sensory stimulation, not only are impediments bad but so are negative emotions such as pain, nausea, chills… These are bad for the fact that we dislike them and the way they feel. If we manage to like them (e.g. chasing pain or nausea as part of a greater more complex experience), or we are unjustified in disliking them (e.g. toddler on helping his sister) then they cease to be non-instrumentally bad. There is a degree of well-being that is pleasure thus these states constitute a state of un-flourishing, not even accounting for how the pain from being burned in the fire may limit your other capacities as well.
Affective Development
On the affective side however it’s too simple to say that all positive emotions are good and all negative emotions are bad. Just like how pain in sensory can be welcomed as part of a broader experience, “it is not necessarily bad, even to a small degree, to feel angry, guilty, ashamed, frustrated, anxious, or afraid. Fears that are planned — those provided by scary movies, for example — can enhance one’s pleasure precisely be- cause of their negativity. It is reasonable to want to be the sort of person who becomes angry when there is good reason to do so; to feel afraid in truly dangerous situations; to feel guilty or ashamed when one goes astray and needs to change. ” Thus “the simple theory should be replaced by the thesis that the negative emotions can be felt too often and the positive emotions too infrequently.”
The only bad that can happen is either misfiring (e.g. jolts of intense unwarranted joy/anger) or the proper firing of continuously negative emotions. In the latter case, we should examine our circumstance and situation. “But when the frequency of anger reaches a certain threshold, those bouts of anger, each appropriate to its occasion, are, taken as a group, bad.”
Q: Why is affective flourishing different from sensory flourishing. Why is say, feeling numbness when you feel pain not a bad as feeling indifferent when you should feel sadness is?
A: There is something about pain and the other bad sensations which cannot be enjoyed in and of themselves but only as a larger context (e.g. masochism). This is untrue for sadness however which can be welcomed as part of an appropriate response.
Social Development
Affective flourishing informs our social decision. Even though it is good to feel anger at an injustice when it is appropriate to do so, the constant feeling of anger in a prolonged sequence is not healthy and one should try to minimize the relationships which causes this form of behavior. This shows how our conception of good and the development and exercise of our different capacities regulate each other in a checks and balances systems, just as our intuition would lead us to believe.
Instead the ideal is broadly “to have affectionate and nonconflictual relationships with other people — relationships in which one feels warmly toward others and that seldom, if ever, give one reason to be angry or jealous. The degrees of emotional warmth and closeness of personal relationships vary enormously, ranging from the familiarity of a second self to the tepidness of civic cordiality. It is impossible to achieve intimacy with a great many. The best one can hope for is to share the deepest mutual affection — love — with a few, and to have some liking for or felt connection with everyone else who is not a mere stranger in one’s social world. These sorts of relationships with others cannot be sustained for long unless one has achieved a certain kind of self-mastery and social intelligence. One must not merely experience certain warm feelings and sympathies, but learn how to express them and to become effective in one’s efforts to treat others well.”
On the other hand, a sociopath or someone who is indifferent on whether others love or care for him can be said to have lost a very important part of his capabilities, analogous to “if one is unable to taste food with pleasure, or reacts to all food with indifference, that is a loss.”
Similarly, if someone who is socially inept perceives that he is loved when he is not “we should think of him as someone who possesses a simulacrum of a good, not the real thing… Being loved is not by itself good, for someone who is loved may not be conscious of being loved — he may even be dead. Nor is it good merely to be in a pleasant state of mind that is unconnected to reality.” A good must be a subjective state of enjoyment combined with a state of reality.
Social relations also constrain how just and fair we are. It is a great boon for one’s well being if we are just in a just society and a great loss if we are unjust in a just society (degree of alienation) or in an unjust society. Our conclusions are more modest than Plato’s: “justice in one’s relation to the whole of one’s social world is one component of a flourishing life; if someone is entirely unjust — unjust to everyone — that by itself detracts from his well-being.”
Q: My biggest problem with this theory it doesn’t show us how to treat others with easy principles in the absence of which we tend to be hypocrites, rationalizing why we should get what we want. The problem with this theory is that it renders the treatment of others as merely a currency that is exchangeable for cognitive, physical, affective flourishing. E.g. what would these theory say to the crazy scientist who kidnaps people (decrease in justice) to perform experiments (cognitive) and the crazy scientist perceives this as a net gain?
The author concedes “it(being unjust) would be a reasonable strategy if the members of all other families are following the same strategy.” Which seems like a deeply unsatisfactory ethical system. It treats other people’s wellbeing as merely a currency in our own calculus: “But they had better succeed in gaining those advantages — otherwise their social disconnectedness will be a net loss. And they must really be advantages — not just things they want.”
A: The developmentalist would say that he doesn’t know enough about the crazy scientist to give him advice. It’s too general and not specific enough.
“Our physical, sensory, affective, social, and cognitive powers seldom operate in isolation from each other. Very few things we do employ only one of them. A good example of the way in which they can be brought together is provided by the enjoyment of our sexual powers. Human sexuality at its best is as much in the head as in the body; it is an intricate cognitive, social, affective, sensory, and physical interaction with the world.”
To see how these powers restrain each other, let us examine what this theory has to say about rape, something that utilitarianism, conative theory, and hedonism has no great argument against.
“There are so many better kinds of sexual pleasure for him to feel. Rape is a pleasure infused with feelings of hostility, anger, or rage — all burdensome feelings. It is devoid of the sexual pleasure that consists in giving sexual pleasure. So it lacks the positive affective and social aspects that other forms of sexual experience have. If possible, it should be replaced by a sexual orientation that allows someone to combine, in a single experience, receiving sexual pleasure from and giving sexual pleasure to someone for whom he has some liking — if possible, someone he loves. We should call the rapist’s pleasure a bad pleasure, meaning by this that it is worse by far than the many kinds of sexual pleasure that are good for him to have.”
Even in situations where rape is the only way to express sexuality (e.g. prison) it might not be the path to choose. “That rape is, in certain situations, better for the rapist than something else does not show that it is, in general, good to some degree for someone to be a rapist. In the setting of a prison, the extinction of all sexual desire might be a better outcome for someone than its persistence if that opened space for other activities.”
Cognitive Development
“That does not mean that the mere possession and use of basic mental skills is noninstrumentally good. But taking pleasure in their use certainly is. Someone who delights in using language, solving mental puzzles or practical problems, telling stories, or making things is, to some extent, doing well precisely because he enjoys the exercise of his cognitive powers. It is not simply his being pleased by something or other that is good. Nor is it the mere use of his mind. But when the process of using one’s mind for this or that purpose, or for no purpose at all, is enjoyed, that is good.”
Whose Good to Promote?
Where we have arrived now is pure wise selfishness. In well functioning societies with good moral systems, it can take us quite a long way just optimizing for one’s own well being. Our social capacities are especially restraining.
Yet, as we have shown, it is still quite limited. We cannot say for certain that you should not be a terrorist, or you should not rape or kill since other people’s well-being seems to be an internally exchangeable currency for one’s own social, cognitive, and physical development.
So whose good should we promote in addition to our own wellbeing for “the mere fact that an act would do some good is never, by itself, enough to support a conclusion about what should be done.”
“Utilitarianism goes astray by supposing that this question is of no independent importance because it is always to be answered by looking to the greatest quantity of good. As W. D. Ross emphasizes in his critique of utilitarianism, “the highly personal character of duty” must not be overlooked.”
The answer provided is “what I have, all things considered, reason to do is not determined solely by the good (or bad) it will do for me but, rather, by considering the well-being of all the potential beneficiaries of my action in light of my relationship to them and other pertinent factors.” Essentially the author argues that we should examine our social roles we have entered and optimize the social good for those individuals.
Let us first examine promises and their mechanisms for social roles are built on explicit/implicit promises. Promises should be kept not because they are promises but that they bring about some good. A promise that does bad should not be kept, although you will still owe an explanation to the promised. It is ok to break a promise when the new action minus the good lost from the breakage of the constitution of promises as well as harm of the relationship is greater than the good originally delivered by the promised action.
“We can assume that playing tennis is good for both. But that does not mean that it was already the case, before the promise, that father and daughter should spend the afternoon playing tennis with each other. That doing V would be good for S does not by itself support the conclusion that S should do V; many other alternatives may be equally good or better. But when S makes a promise to do V, and doing so would be good for someone, these facts join together to provide S with a reason to do V. In some cases, there is already sufficient reason to perform an act that we later promise to perform; in others, a promise joins together with a good to create a sufficient reason.”
Q: “When it is understood that the purpose one should have in making a promise is, in large part, to enhance one’s own well-being, and it becomes clear that keeping the promise would defeat that goal rather than foster it, the promise loses all or nearly all its force.” Are we only obliged to reason on our own calculus?
A: Yes you should seek to maximize your good with the first caveat that your wellbeing is inextricably tied to others. Not only in how they might reciprocate but how you feel as a social being: whether you live up to your own conscience’s demands of justice.
The second caveat is how do we achieve well-being. Maybe instead of thinking about it like a calculus we need to think about it like a drawing. If we pursue this good in an objective act consequentialist manner, we will find out that the best way to develop as a social being is to develop virtues of compassion and justice such that we care for the well-being of others directly. Indeed the underlying question may be “How should I lead the good life?” but due to our shared social nature it quickly breaks from the self.
Social relations are constructed of implicit and explicit promises: “The practice of promising gives us the option of picking out some person or group as the object of our special concern for a length of time of our choosing, and of delivering a good of our choosing to that person or group. It is one small example of the ways in which social communities provide structure to our lives by carving out various practices by which we do good for ourselves and for others. Many of these practices are long-term and good-specific. Teachers, farmers, builders, warriors, parents — the list is extremely long, is always undergoing trans- formation, and is always open to question. These are social roles for which we need training, and when we learn them, we enter into relationships with others through which we do what is good for them. They are like the practice of promise keeping, in that they give us some help in answering the question “Whose good should I promote?”
It is quite easy to answer why one should enter social relationships. And in these contracts duty is created. This is perhaps the most limiting factor of this ethical theory.
“That does not mean that we should unthinkingly accept whatever social division of labor we find in place. But the social division of labor into which we are born and trained gives us a starting point for our reflections: this is the way we do good now, and if we think there is something wrong with these social roles, then at least we know what it is that has to be changed.”
Q: Is there a baseline social role between me and any human. It seems to me if I don’t have any social role with being X I can optimize my wellbeing irrespective of him/her? What would this theory say to someone who pushes a button and every time someone completely inconsequential to him dies while he grows his capacities.
A: It would reply that this is a cruel person who is deformed in some manner socially. That he is not a well-developed social being.
Q: What advice does this theory give to the doctor who is choosing between two options: personal well-being at the expense of his patients or vice-versa?
A: It would say we do not know without more specificity. We can’t prescribe moral commandments.
Take an act of self sacrifice “Suppose a parent, to earn enough money to give his child an expensive education, gives up a job that makes full use of his talents and in its place accepts a post that is intellectually and emotionally deadening and physically dangerous, but provides a large and steady income. Developmentalism and common sense count this as an act of self-sacrifice — no coincidence, since developmentalism is rooted in widely accepted assumptions about what is good.”
The parent fulfills his duty but appears to diminish his wellbeing in the long run.
“Intimate relationships typically involve some willingness to accept some degree of sacrifice for the sake of the other person, and the character of an intimate relationship can change radically when individuals sense that the other person is not willing to incur any losses in well-being… It is good for people to enter into and sustain some relationships in which each individual is confident that sacrifices would be made on his behalf. Such relationships provide the sort of attachment and commitment that enhance our well-being as affective beings. In such friendships, each stands ready to be worse-off in some respect; but in a different respect they are, because of that willingness, better-off — though this is not the calculation that stands behind their being prepared to make a sacrifice. It is not only intimate friendship that requires a willingness to accept a loss of well-being along some dimension. Some of the qualities normally counted as virtues — justice, honesty, courage — make that same demand, as we will see.”
Q: What is the nature of duty? Is it something distinct from the Good?
A: No it is the result of pursuing the Good in an objective act consequentialist manner. You realize that the best way to promote your own Good is paradoxically to care for others directly. And impose upon yourself rules which you will not break.
The dad is both better off (more flourishing life in general because duty holds up a pillar of meaning) as well as worse off (less well-being and flourishing in his capacities). This still should be considered a sacrifice however and practically different from someone who sacrifices his play time to improve himself.
As a benefactor of such an action we are not justified in saying “He wanted to do that, he is pursuing his Good!” and not reciprocating. Because he operated under duty which implies some form of implicit promise in your relationship, to not reciprocate or feel no need to reciprocate would imply that you are affectively impaired and socially maladjusted: you destroy a relationship which is Good for you and hurt a friend whom you should’ve cared directly for.
The Sovereignty of the good
Moral as well as “practical reasoning must always proceed by way of premises that have to do with what is good (to that extent, utilitarianism is on the right track), but good must be understood developmentally.” In other words, when it is morally right or wrong for someone to do something or when we are making practical decisions we need to collapse the decision into and only into how that contributes to the agent’s good.
We commonly make a distinction between moral reasons and prudential reasons. They usually refer to actions which have consequences in either other’s or our own wellbeing respectively. However moral wrongness is not it’s own discrete category “But what one is likely to have in mind when one says that one does not eat meat because it is morally wrong is that it is not one’s own good but that of animals that one is thinking of. The criticism to be made of this practice is not that it has the property of moral wrongness, however that property is to be understood; it is simply that it willingly does great and unnecessary harm.” To put in other terms, the agent has a duty to animals which is violated and decreases his own good as a result. It all collapses into his good.
“The insight behind Ross’s statement is that acting for one’s good is not a reason that is inherently inferior to that of acting for the good of some- one else. But if one wishes to call “morally right” every action that some- one should undertake, the term will cover too large a territory to be of any value. There is nothing objectionable in abiding by the common distinction between moral and prudential reasons, so long as one is careful not to regard the latter category as inherently inferior. The more important question is whether there is a distinctive category of reasons — the ones that we invoke when we are concerned with moral rightness — that we must add to, and recognize as superior to, the kind that adverts to goodness and badness. We have not discovered any, and the common practice of distinguishing moral from prudential reasons gives us no reason to suppose that there are any.” There is no inherent difference between acting for the well being of a child you are responsible for and acting for your own good.
“All the elements of good practical reasoning are, in some way, good-related or bad-related: they must say which sorts of goods and harms are in view, whose good and harm are in view, how much good and how much harm are in view, why that good or harm should be done to that person and not another, and so on. There must be a premise that says how the act under consid- eration plays a role in advancing or protecting someone’s well-being. There must also be a premise that explains why this agent should act for the good of that beneficiary or those beneficiaries. If there are counter- vailing considerations, these must point to some harm that the act under consideration would do, or some individuals whose good this agent should not be neglecting. In these several different ways, good and bad lie at the center of practical justification. Once we know everything we can know about facts that are related to goodness — what is good (in- cluding what is best), what is bad (and worst), to whom one should do good, the strength of competing considerations based on good and bad, and the proportionality of burdens and benefits — there is nothing further one needs to learn in order to decide how to act. If that is so, good is indeed “sovereign,” to use Iris Murdoch’s phrase: it is the “master value” of practical life and the focal point of practical thought.”
In this way, everything becomes to an extent conditional: dependent on how well it can bring about our Good (this might not be true if we pursue our Good in an objective act consequentialist manner). Unlike more commanding theories, we need to decide for example, if we should be virtuous: “None of this proves what Plato sought to prove: that being a just per- son is so great a good that it is worth having even if it brings with it the loss of all other goods. Our conclusions are more modest: justice in one’s relation to the whole of one’s social world is one component of a flourishing life; if someone is entirely unjust — unjust to everyone — that by itself detracts from his well-being.”