quote: 'We are left with several varieties of pers...

2006-06-03T13:16:02.146-04:00

quote: 'We are left with several varieties of personal value. Well-being is generally understood as the value of a life for the person, and I have argued above that a ‘veridical’ mental-state theory (equivalently: an ‘experienced’ desire-satisfaction theory) is the best account of this species of value.'

I was trying to develop a position that differs from yours only on being objectivist (desires play no role) but the problem you are dealing with is orthogonal to the subjectivist/objectivist divide. The common issue is whether some state of affairs can make one's life better solely in virtue of obtaining, without entering experience. (For you, in virtue of fulfilling a desire, for me, because it is the kind of state that contains value). For a long time I've been discussing for a friend whether it is possible to have an "experience requirement" that did not get into the difficulties of NOzick's experience machine. He, like you, seem to believe that we can conceive the experience requirement as a necessary condition: some state of affairs that is valuable (or desired) must enter experience in order to contribute to a person's good. The ground of value is not the experience (it is being objectively valuable -for me or desired - for you) but having a veridical experience of it is necessary in order to have that value affect someone's life. IF this view were coherent, it would solve all our intuitions: on one hand it would satisfy Kagan's requirement that a good "must make a difference in the person"; on the other, it would satisfy the intuition that it is the obtaining of some state of affairs that which has value, not our having experiences of a certain "type" (without an ontological commitment on the source of that experience).
There is a logical space for a theory in which the ground of value is some feature of the experienced fact, but experience is required in order for that value to affect well-being. Let us schematize this view in this way: the state of affairs S= (X having the experience that P, P) is good for X. The value of S supervenes on some feature of P, not on X having the experience that P, but X having the experience that P is required for S to be good for X.

I now think this conception is incoherent, even if it is not logically incoherent. Suppose that X's aim is that less whales be killed. We would have to say that the fact that a whale is killed makes his life go worse when he is aware of it, but not not when he is not aware of it. This is for me intuitively incoherent with the idea that what has value is that a whale is not killed (or the complex state of affairs made up by [a whale is killed; x desired a whale not to be killed], and not the having of a certain sort of experience. If what is valuable (for x) is that a whale is not killed, not the having of an experience as if a whale is not killed, how can it be that a killed whale makes his life worse only when it enters his experience? It's like saying: I care about people dying only as long as I look at them; it is enough for me to turn my head, and forget about them, to make my life go better (if the fact does not enter into my experience, it cannot make my life worse). I think to endorse this point of view means to really think that things that have value are experiences, not the fact experienced. So from this perspectives it sounds acquard to exclude non-veridical experiences.

What moved myself to look for an experience requirement was the idea that it was absurd to allow what happens after one's death to influence one's well-being; and Kagan's idea that it must be something of that person... So we are caught in a dilemma: either refuse theories that are at the same level (ethically) with mental - state hedonism; or accept the unintuitive idea that what happens after one's death can make one's life go worse. Maybe the only reasonable way out of this dilemma is to reject the idea that "prudential value" is a useful concept. Maybe we only get into contradictions if we think that we can separate the good into that person's good, that other person's good, etc.

Michele

Comments on Philosophy, et cetera: Well-Being Essay

quote: 'We are left with several varieties of pers...