Against the Fundamentality of GOOD

Forthcoming in The Journal of Philosophy. (Formerly “The New Mooreans” & “On the Fundamentality of Good”) pdf

The argument that is in question in this article concerns the would-be dependence of one form of value on another. When something is intrinsically good for someone, which is to say, directly beneficial for them, it is so because it is good simpliciter. Proponents of the argument have so-called ‘perfectionist’ values chiefly in mind: worthwhile artworks, striking natural formations, intellectual and scientific achievements. They contend that the fact that engaging with perfectionist goods is non-instrumentally good for people depends on the fact that perfectionist goods are good simpliciter. I argue that the dependency argument is not forced on us by intuitive claims about dependence, or by the need to be adequate to our practices with the relevant class of values. The good for theorist can provide a sophisticated account of perfectionist goods. If successful, the article provides a line of defense for the view that good is good for.

Iris Murdoch’s Perfectionism

In progress

Iris Murdoch takes a position that resembles figures in the broadly Moorean tradition (Nagel, Raz, Wolf) in privileging exemplary aesthetic and intellectual values, and in maintaining that they are beneficial for us to engage with because of their excellence (simpliciter). I argue that, even as the comparison is useful in putting Murdoch into conversation with views that are better understood, the resemblance is superficial. Murdoch takes the excellence-making feature of exemplary artworks and intellectual disciplines to be their form-like nature: their success at serving as models or accounts of reality. If we take the Platonic dimension of Murdoch’s project seriously, then it is not right to say that the objects have the property of being good in anything like Moore’s sense. In fact, I will offer a reading of Murdoch’s perfectionism that brings her closer to the view of the Mooreans’ opponents—a view on which the power of excellence and the power of benefit are one and the same. I bring out what is distinctive and promising about this proposal.

Iris Murdoch on the Self

In progress

It is clear enough that Iris Murdoch takes a dim view of the self. But what is her objection, exactly? Murdoch makes a number of charges: human beings are self-absorbed, avoidant, deluded, self-interested, egotistical, and selfish. While Murdoch tends to run these charges together as the same deficiency in different guises, I argue that they are plausibly distinct from one another. I think through a range of proposals about the role of the self in ethics—from ancient eudaimonism to Kant’s category of duties to self, and from Joseph Butler and Robert Adams on self-love to Freud on fantasy. I turn to these traditions for resources with which to qualify Murdoch’s position on the self-other axis in ethics. I go on to suggest that not all charges are relevant to Murdoch’s basic proposal that ethics involves the process of ‘unselfing’ in which we silence the self through loving attention to others. Ultimately, I suggest that Murdoch’s position on the self and the task of ethics is helpfully situated in the context of Buddhist and Vedantic positions on ‘no-self’. Drawing on contemporary discussions of the illusory nature of the self, I draw out what is distinctive and suggestive about Murdoch’s position.  

On the Value of Aesthetic and Intellectual Activity: A Reply to Ross

Forthcoming in Robert Audi and David Phillips (eds.), The Moral Philosophy of W. D. Ross pdf

Is value personal in the sense that what is of value is of value for someone? Or is value impersonal in the sense that what is of value, while it pertains to a subject, is of value simpliciter?  Ross was a staunch proponent of the view that value is impersonal. I am a proponent of the view that value is personal. This essay asks which of us is right. The controversy is over the metaphysical structure of non-instrumental value. But this abstract question is brought to bear on particular kinds of evaluative phenomena: forms of value that are properly thought ‘admirable’ or ‘commendable’ such as aesthetic and intellectual excellence. These values are marshalled as hard cases for the personal value theorist, so a lot turns on whether she can give a plausible account of them. I make the case that she can.

Realism about the Good For Human Beings

September 2023 in the Oxford Handbook of Moral Realism, edited by Paul Bloomfield and David Copp. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pdf

Against those who contend that there is a basic duality between the moral and the non-moral good, or the right and the good, I articulate a form of realism that works with a unified conception of the good in which virtue and benefit are key concepts, and in which the “moral good” is not foundationally distinctive, but explicable in terms of the good for human beings. I argue: (a) that virtuous actions are such because and insofar as they (actually or potentially) protect, preserve, secure, or promote the good for human beings, and (b) that being appropriately responsive to the good for human beings is (at least part of) what it is to be a virtuous person, where this form of responsiveness can itself be shown to be good for the one who is so. My proposal is one way of developing a schema for the relationship between virtue and the beneficial that is variously developed by Philippa Foot and Judy Thomson. The schema is that virtues are ways of doing and being that are necessary because and insofar as some human good hangs on them.

Activity, Consciousness, and Well-Being

January 2023. Analysis as part of a book symposium on Richard Kraut’s The Quality of Life with Peter Railton and Valerie Tiberius. pdf.

I critically engage with the form of experientialism about well-being that Richard Kraut lately defends. Kraut has long investigated questions about well-being. He remains committed to the view that exercising our powers, or in other words, being active, is essential to the good for human beings. But Kraut is now inclined to emphasize activity only insofar as it bears on conscious experience. He works to close the gap Robert Nozick had insisted upon between doing something and having the experience of doing it. And where the gap remains, he urges that activity matters only insofar as it conduces to valuable states of consciousness. I probe the envisaged relationship between activity and consciousness. I argue that there can be a robust and relevant difference between doing something and having the experience of doing it—that much depends on what the activity is, and a closely related point, what counts as successfully doing it. I also resist the claim that the value of engaging in an activity, whatever it is, is the state of experience yielded thereby.

Must We Be Just Plain Good? On Regress Arguments for the Value of Humanity

(January 2018). "Must We Be Just Plain Good? On Regress Arguments for the Value of Humanity," Ethics (128): 346-372. Pdf.

There is a powerful argument for the special value of humanity that turns on the nature of relational value. For anything to be relationally valuable, something must be non-relationally valuable, and people meet the criteria. Relational value borrows its normativity—its reason-giving force—from the value of people whose value is not borrowed from it, or anything else. The argument emerges from broadly Kantian discussions of human value, but it is patterned on a schema that has wide currency, and is often taken to be something of a truism. I examine the argument schema in this article, and my conclusion is in a clear sense negative. Non-relational value is not required to make sense of the existence of relational value, so the special value of humanity will not come from this kind of argument about the structure of value. Fortunately there is a positive lesson. While the value of people is not of necessity non-relational, we can capture the value of people, and what is owed to them, in fully relational terms.

Kant’s Commitment to Metaphysics of Morals

(2016). “Kant's Commitment to Metaphysics of Morals,”
European Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 24, Iss. 1, pp. 103-128. Pdf.

A definitive feature of Kant’s moral philosophy is its rationalism. Kant insists that moral theory, at least at its foundation, cannot take account of empirical facts about human beings and their circumstances in the world. This is the core of Kant’s commitment to “metaphysics of morals,” and it is what he sees as his greatest contribution to moral philosophy. This article clarifies what it means to be committed to metaphysics of morals, why Kant is committed to it, and where he thinks empirical considerations may enter moral theory. The paper examines recent work of contemporary Kantians (Barbara Herman, Allen Wood and Christine Korsgaard) who argue that there is a central role for empirical considerations in Kant’s moral theory. Either these theorists interpret Kant himself as permitting empirical considerations to enter, or they propose to extend Kant’s theory so as to allow them to enter. I argue that these interpretive trends are not supported by the texts, and that the proposed extensions are not plausibly Kantian. Kant’s insistence on the exclusion of empirical considerations from the foundations of moral theory is not an incidental feature of his thought which might be modified while the rest remains unchanged. Rather, it is the very center of his endeavors in moral philosophy. If we disagree with it, I argue, we have grounds for moving to a distinctly different theoretical framework.