A value asymmetry in double effect reasoning

The Knobe effect is that people judge cases of good and bad foreseen effects differently with respect to intention: in cases of bad effects, they tend to attribute intention, but not so in cases of good effects.

Now, this is clearly a mistake about intention: there is no such asymmetry. However, I wonder if there isn’t a real asymmetry in the value of the actions. Simplify by considering actions that have exactly one unintended side-effect, which is either good or bad. My intuition says that an action’s having a foreseen bad side-effect, even when that side-effect is unintended and the action is justified by Double Effect, makes the action less valuable. But on the other hand, an action’s having a foreseen good side-effect, when that side-effect is unintended, doesn’t seem to make the action any better.

Let me try to think through this asymmetry intuition. I would be a worse person if I intended the bad side-effect. But I would be a better one if I intended the good side-effect. My not intending the good side-effect is a sign of vice in me (as is clear in the standard Knobe case, where the CEO’s indifference to the environmental benefits of his action is vicious). So not only does the presence of an unintended good side-effect not make the action better, it makes it worse. But so far there is no asymmetry: the not intending of the bad is good and the not intending of the good is bad. The presence of a good side-effect gives me an opportunity for virtue if I intend it and for vice if I fail to intend. The presence of a bad side-effect gives me an opportunity for vice if I intend it and for virtue if I fail to intend.

But maybe there still is an asymmetry. Here are two lines of thought that lead to an asymmetry. First, think about unforeseen, and even unforeseeable, effects. Let’s say that my writing this post causes an earthquake in ten years in Japan by a chaotic chain of events. I do feel that’s bad for me and bad for my action: it is unfortunate to be the cause of a bad, whether intentionally or not. But I don’t have a similar intuition on the good side. If my writing this post prevents an earthquake by a chaotic chain of events, I don’t feel like that’s good for me or my action. So perhaps that is all that is going on in my initial value asymmetry: there is a non-moral disvalue in an action whenever it unintentionally causes a bad effect, but no corresponding non-moral value when it unintentionally causes a good effect, and foresight is irrelevant. But my intuitions here are weak. Maybe there is nothing to the earthquake intuition.

Second, normally, when I perform an action that has an unintended bad side-effect, that is a defect of power in my action. I drop the bombs on the enemy headquarters, but I don’t have the power to prevent the innocents from being hit; I give my students a test, but I don’t have the power to prevent their being stressed. The action exhibits a defect of power and that makes it worse off, though not morally so. Symmetry here would say that when the action has an unintended good side-effect, then it exhibits positive power. But here exactly symmetry fails: for the power of an action qua action is exhibited precisely through its production of intended effects. The production of unintended effects does not redound to the power of the action qua action (though it may redound to its power qua event).

So, if I am right, an action is non-morally worse off, worse off as an exercise of power, for having an unintended bad effect, at least when that bad side-effect is unavoidable. What if it is avoidable, but I simply don’t care to avoid it? Then the action is morally worse off. Either way, it’s worse off. But this is asymmetric: an action isn’t better off as an exercise of power by having an unintended good effect, regardless of whether the good side-effect is avoidable or not, since power is exhibited by actions in fulfilling intentions.

Forgiveness of sins

It is very plausible that God can forgive wrongs we do to him. But a very difficult question which is rarely discussed by philosophers of religion is how God can forgive wrongs done to beings other than God.

This puzle seems to me to be related to the mystery of the line: “Against you [God], you alone, have I sinned” in Psalm 51:4, a line that seems on its face to contradict the obvious fact that the sins in question (David’s adultery with Bathsheba and murder of Uriah) seem to be primarily against human beings. Perhaps also related is Jesus’s puzzling statement: “No one is good but God alone” (Mark 10:18).

I think the answer to all of these questions may lie in a metaphysics and axiology of participation on which all the value of creatures is value had by participation in God, so that only God is good in the primary sense and only God is sinned against in the primary sense, which in turn gives God the normative power to forgive all wrongs, including wrongs directly against God as such as well as wrongs against God’s goodness as participated in by creatures.

The value of knowledge

Here’s a curious phenomenon. Suppose I have enough justification for p that if p is in fact true, then I know p, but suppose also that my credence for p is less than 1.

Now consider some proposition q that is statistically independent of p and unlikely to be true. Finally consider the conjunctive proposition r that p is true and q is false.

If I were to learn for sure that r is true, I would gain credence for p, but it wouldn’t change whether I know whether p is true.

If I were to learn for sure that r is false, my credence for p would go down. How much it would go down depends on how unlikely q is. Fact: If P(q)=(2P(p)−1)/P(p), where P is the prior probability, then if I learn that r is false, my credence for p goes to 1/2.

OK, so here’s where we are. For just about any proposition p that I justifiedly take myself to know, but that I assign a credence less than 1 to, I can find a proposition r with the property that learning that r is true increases my credence in p and that learning that r is false lowers my credence in p to 1/2.

So what? Well, suppose that the only thing I value epistemically is knowing whether p is true. Then if I am in the above-described position, and if someone offers to tell me whether r is true, I should refuse to listen. Here is why. Either p is true or it is not true. If p is true, then my belief in p is knowledge. In that case, I gain nothing by learning that r is true. But learning that r is false would lose my knowledge, by reducing my credence in p to 1/2. Suppose p is false. Then my belief in p isn’t knowledge. In the above setup, if p is false, so is r. Learning that r is false, however, doesn’t give me knowledge whether p is true. It gives me credence 1/2, which is neither good enough to know p to be true nor good enough to know p to be false. So if p is false, I gain nothing knowledge-wise.

So, if all I care about epistemically is knowing the truth about some matter, sometimes I should refuse relevant information on the basis of epistemic goals (Lara Buchak argues in her work on faith that sometimes I should refuse relevant information on the basis of non-epistemic goals; that’s a different matter).

I think this is not a very good conclusion. I shouldn’t refuse relevant information on the basis of epistemic goals. Consequently, by the above argument, knowing the truth about some matter shouldn’t be my sole epistemic goal.

Indeed, it should also be my goal to avoid thinking I know something that is in fact false. If I add that to my goals, the conclusion that I should refuse to listen to whether r is true disappears. For if p is false, although learning that r is false wouldn’t give me knowledge whether p is true, in that case it would take away the illusion of knowledge. And that would be valuable.

Nothing deep in the conclusions here. Just a really roundabout argument for the Socratic thesis that it’s bad to think you know when you don’t.

What's the good of consciousness?

A question has hit me today that I would really want to have a good answer to: What’s the point of consciousness? I can see the point of reasoning and knowledge. But one can reason and have knowledge without consciousness. What would we lose if we were all like vampire Mary?

One could suppose that the question has a false presupposition, namely that there is a point to consciousness. Perhaps consciousness is just an evolutionary spandrel of something genuinely useful.

Still, it seems plausible that there be an answer. I can think of two.

First, perhaps consciousness is needed for moral responsibility, while moral responsibility is clearly valuable. But this won’t explain what the point of brute animals being conscious.

Second, maybe contemplation of truth is valuable, where we use “contemplation” broadly to include both sensory and non-sensory versions. And while one can have unconscious knowledge, one cannot have unconscious contemplation. But why is contemplation of truth valuable? Intuitively, it’s a more intimate connection with truth than mere unconscious knowledge. But I fear that I am not making much progress here, because I don’t know in what way it’s more intimate and why this intimacy is valuable.

Perhaps there is a theistic story to be told. All truth is either about God or creation or both. Contemplating truths about God is a form of intimacy with God. But creation also images God. So contemplating truths about creation is also a form of intimacy with God, albeit a less direct one. So, perhaps, the value of consciousness comes from the value of intimacy with God.

Or maybe we can say that intimacy with being is itself valuable, and needs not further explanation.

An argument for theism from certain values

Some things, such as human life, love, the arts and humor, are very valuable. An interesting question to ask is why they are so valuable?

A potential answer is that they have their value because we value (desire, prefer, etc.) them. While some things may be valuable because we value them, neither life, love, the arts nor humor seem to be such. People who fail to value these things is insensitive: they are failing to recognize the great value that is there. (In general, I suspect that nothing of high value has the value it does because we value it: our ability to make things valuable by valuing them is limited to things of low and moderate value.)

A different answer is that these things are necessarily valuable. However, while this may be true, it shifts the explanatory burden to asking why they are necessarily valuable. For simplicity, I’ll thus ignore the necessity answer.

It may be that there are things that are fundamentally valuable, whose value is self-explanatory. Perhaps life and love are like that: maybe there is no more a mystery as to why life or love is valuable than as to why 1=1. Maybe.

But the arts at least do not seem to be like this. It is puzzling why arranging a sequence of typically false sentences into a narrative can make for something with great value. It is puzzling why representing aspects of the world—either of the concrete or the abstract world—in paint on canvas can so often be valuable. The value of the arts is not self-explanatory.

Theism can provide an explanation of this puzzling value: Artistic activity reflects God’s creative activity, and God is the ultimate good. Given theism it is not surprising that the arts are of great value. There is something divine about them.

Humor is, I think, even more puzzling. Humor deflates our pretensions. Why is this so valuable? Here, I think, the theist has a nice answer: We are infinitely less than God, so deflating our pretensions puts us human beings in the right place in reality.

There is much more to be said about arts and humor. The above is meant to be very sketchy. My interest here is not to defend the specific arguments from the value of the arts and humor, but to illustrate arguments from value that appear to be a newish kind of theistic argument.

These arguments are like design arguments in that their focus is on explaining good features of the world. But while design arguments, such as the argument from beauty or the fine-tuning argument, seek an explanation of why various very good features occur, these kinds of value arguments seek an explanation of why certain features are in fact as good as they are.

The moral argument for theism is closely akin. While in the above arguments, one seeks to explain why some things have the degree of value they do, the moral argument can be put as asking for an explanation of why some things (more precisely, some actions) have the kind of value they do, namely deontic value.

Closing remarks

1. Just as in the moral case, there is a natural law story that shifts the argument’s focus without destroying the argument for theism. In the moral case, the natural law story explains why some actions are obligatory by saying that they violate the prescriptions for action in our nature. But one can still ask why there are beings with a nature with these prescriptions and not others. Why is it that, as far as we can tell, there are rational beings whose nature prescribes love for neighbor and none whose nature prescribes hatred for neighbor? Similarly, we can say that humor is highly valuable for us because our nature specifies humor as one of the things that significantly fulfills us. (Variant: Humor is highly valuable for us because it is our nature to highly value it.) But we can still ask why there are rational beings whose nature is fulfilled by the arts and humor, and, as far as we can tell, none whose nature is harmed by the arts or humor. And in both the deontic and non-deontic cases, there is a theistic answer. For instance, God creates rational beings with a nature that calls on them to laugh because any beings that he would create will be infinitely less than God and hence their sensor humor will help put them in the right place, thereby counteracting the self-aggrandizement that reflection on one’s own rationality would otherwise lead to.

2. Just as in the moral case there is a compelling argument from knowledge—theism provides a particularly attractive explanation of how we know moral truths—so too in the value cases there is a similar compelling argument.

Counting goods

Suppose I am choosing between receiving two goods, A and B, or one, namely C, where all the goods are equal. Obviously, I should go for the two. But why?

Maybe what we should say is this. Since A is at least as good as C, and B is non-negative, I have at least as good reason to go for the two goods as to go for the one. This uses the plausible assumption that if one adds a good to a good, one gets something at least as good. (It would be plausible to say that one gets something better, but infinitary cases provide a counterexample.) But there is no parallel argument that it is at least as good to go for the one good as to go for the two. Hence, it is false that I have at least as good reason to go for the one as to go for the two. Thus, I have better reason to go for the two.

This line of thought might actually solve the puzzles in these two posts: headaches and future sufferings. And it's very simple and obvious. But I missed it. Or am I missing something now?

Is knowledge of very important things very valuable?

It seems right to say that knowledge, as such, is very valuable when the matter at hand is of great personal importance to one. For instance, it seems intuitively right that it is very valuable to know whether the people one loves are alive.

Suppose Bob, Alice’s beloved husband, was in an area where a disaster happened. Carl read a list of survivors, and told Alice that her husband was one of the survivors. But five minutes later Carl realized that he confused Alice with someone else, and that it wasn’t Alice’s husband’s name that he saw on the list. Carl is terrified that he will have to tell Alice that her husband wasn’t on the list. He goes back to the list and, to his great relief, finds that Bob is on the list as well.

Alice correctly believes that her husband survived the disaster. She does not know that her husband survived, though she thinks she knows. She is Gettiered.

If knowing that one’s beloved husband has survived a disaster is very valuable, Carl would have a quite strong reason to go back to Alice and tell her: “I just checked the list again very carefully, and indeed your husband is on it.” (It would be ill-advised, perhaps, for Carl to say to Alice that he had made the mistake the first time, because if he told her that, she would start worrying that he has made a mistake this time, too.) For, Carl’s telling this to Alice would turn her Gettiered belief into knowledge.

But if Carl has any reason to talk to Alice about this again, the reason is not a very strong one. Hence, even in cases which are of extreme personal importance, knowledge as such is not very valuable.

I conclude that knowledge as such is of little if any intrinsic value. Truth and justification, of course, can have great intrinsic value.

Objection: Carl doesn't have to talk to Alice to turn her true belief into knowledge. For he would have informed Alice had he not found Alice's husband on the list. Thus, on certain externalist views where knowledge depends on the right counterfactuals, Carl's second check of the list is sufficient to turn Alice's true belief into knowledge, even without Carl talking to Alice.

Response: Maybe, but the case need not to be told that way. Perhaps if Alice's husband were not on the list, Carl wouldn't have had the guts to tell Alice. Or perhaps he would have waited twenty four hours to check that Alice's husband doesn't appear on an updated list.

Progress

I was doing logic problems on the board in class and thinking about rock climbing, and I was struck by the joy of knowing one's made progress on a finite task. You can be pretty confident that if you've got an existential premise and you've set up an existential elimination subproof then you've made progress. You can be pretty confident that if you've got to a certain position on the wall and there is no other way to be at that height then you've made progress. And there is a delight in being really confident that one has made progress.

Moreover, the value of the progress doesn't seem here to be merely instrumental. Even if in the end you fail, still having made progress feels valuable in and of itself. One can try to say that what's valuable is the practice one gets, or what the progress indicates about one's skills, but that doesn't seem right. It seems that the progress itself is valuable. Of course, it has to be genuine progress, not mere going down a blind alley (though recognizing a blind alley, in a scenario where there are only finitely many options, is itself progress).

The value of progress (as such) at a task derives from the value of fulfilling the task, much as the value of striving at a task derives from the value of fulfilling it. But in both cases this is not a case of end-to-means value transfer. Maybe this has something to do with the idea developed by Robert M. Adams of standing for a good. Striving and a fortiori progress are ways of standing and moving in favor of a task. And that's worthwhile even if one does not accomplish the task.

Qualia and value-laden why-questions

[Note added later: A version of this argument was first discovered by Kahane.]

Consider the famous story of Mary, the neuroscientist raised in a monochrome environment who finally sees an instance of red. It has famously been argued that no matter how much science she knew before she saw red, she learned something new when she saw red, and hence there is something more to the mental life than what science says. I've always been rather sceptical of this line of argument: it just didn't seem to me that a fact was learned.

But I am now thinking--as a result of a social experience--that there is an interesting way to argue that at least in some cases like Mary's one is learning a fact when one experiences a new quale. To know the answer to a why-question is to know a fact. After all, the answer to a why-question encodes an explanation, and explanations are given by means of facts.

Now suppose that Mary instead of leading a monochrome life led a charmed life and never felt any pain. One day she stubs her toe. She learns something by stubbing her toe: what pain feels like. But again we ask: is there a fact that Mary has learned? Here then is an argument:

1. By learning what pain feels like, Mary learned why pain is bad.
2. One learns why something is the case only by learning a fact.
3. So learning what pain feels like is learning a fact.

I give the pain version of the argument not because I find it very plausible, but because I think some readers will find it plausible. I myself am not inclined to think that pain is intrinsically bad, and the reasons why pain is extrinsically bad were available to Mary prior to her stubbing the toe (she knew that pain distracts people from worthwhile pursuits, that it tends to go against people's desires, etc.) But even if I am not convinced by the pain case, I find it pretty plausible that there will be some value-based case where by learning what a quale is like one learns the answer to a why-question. I find particularly plausible aesthetic versions of this. Here's a case where I've had the relevant aesthetic experience: "Why is dark chocolate gustatorily valuable? Because it tastes like that!" Here's one where I haven't. Being largely insensitive to music (more a matter of the brain than the ears, I think), I don't experience music like other people do, and so I don't know why Beethoven is a great composer, though I know on the testimony of others that he is a great composer. But there are possible experiences--namely, those that normal people receive upon listening to Beethoven--such that the what-it-is-like of these experiences answers the question of why Beethoven is a great composer.

Of course, these examples won't help a value-nihilist. But why would anyone be a value-nihilist? (A question with a hook.)

The value of communities

A men's lacrosse team has twice as many members as a basketball team. But that fact does not contribute to making a men's lacrosse team twice as valuable as a basketball team. Likewise, China as a country isn't about 500 times as valuable as Albania just because it is about 500 times as populous. This suggests that an otherwise plausible individualist theory about the value of a community is false: the theory that a community's value resides in the value it gives to individuals. For the kind of value that being on a basketball team confers to its players, being on a lacrosse team confers on twice as many; and the kind of value that being Albanian confers on its members, being Chinese confers on almost 500 times as many people. One possibility is to see the relevant goods as goods of instantiation: it is good that the values of there being a lacrosse team (or at least of a pair of lacrosse teams: a single team being pointless), there being a basketball team (or a pair of them), there being a China and there being an Albania be realized. But I think that isn't quite right. For while changing the rules of basketball to admit twice as many players to a team wouldn't automatically double the community good, doubling the number of basketball teams does seem to significantly increase the community goods by making there be twice as many basketball communities.

In fact, there seem to be three goods in the case of basketball: (a) the good of instantiation of there being basketball teams (and their playing); (b) the community good of each team; and (c) the good for each involved in these communities. Good (a) is unaffected by doubling the number of teams (unless we double from one to two, and thereby make playing possible); good (b) is doubled by doubling the number of teams; good (c) is doubled both by doubling the number of teams and by doubling the team size. Thinking about the behavior of (b) gives us good reason to think that this good does not reduce to the goods of the individuals as such.

But perhaps this reason isn't decisive. For maybe the goods of individuals can overlap, in the way that two Siamese twins seem to be able to share an organ (though the right ontology of shared organs may in the end undercut the analogy), and in such a case the goods shouldn't be counted twice even if they are had twice. For in these cases, perhaps, the numerically same good is had by two or more individuals. If you and I are both friends of John, and John flourishing, then John's flourishing contributes to your and my flourishing, but it doesn't contribute thrice over even though this flourishing is good for three--we should count overall value by goods and not by participants. Maybe. This would be a kind of middle position between the individualist and communitarian pictures of the value of community: there is a single good of type (b), but it is good by being participated in by individuals.

I don't know. I find this stuff deeply puzzling. I have strong ontological intuitions that communities don't really exist (except in a metaphorical way--which may well be importNt) that pull me towards individualist pictures, but then I see these puzzles...

Goods of instantiation

It's good that there have been someone with Albert Schweitzer's character, or a planet like Saturn. When we talk of the value of there being a thing of a particular sort, we're talking of the value of some property being--say, being a ringed gas giant of such and such appearance--being instantiated. Intuitively, that value of instantiation resides in the instantiated thing: it seems clear that Albert Schweitzer and Saturn have the goods of instantiating Schweitzerlikeness or Saturnlikeness.

But there is a problem with this obvious thing to say. For if the value of Saturnlikeness being instantiated is found in Saturn, then if there were a second planet, Shmaturn, that was Saturnlike then we would have that good twice over, once in each planet. But that misunderstands how goods of instantiation work. It is good that Saturnlikeness be instantiated. It isn't twice as good that it be instantiated twice.

So what do goods of instantiation reside in? One could answer: "Nothing. Goods don't need to have a substrate as a home." But I do have the Aristotelian intuition that goods have something like a metaphysical home, that it is good that p only if that is a good for something that p. Maybe I should abandon that intuition. But let's see what we can say given that intuition.

If Platonism is true, then a very natural answer is that the goods of instantiation are goods for the instantiated properties. This leads to a very interesting idea. Artists do good to the Platonic realm by instantiating it. God benefited kangarooness by creating kangaroos. This seems a bit crazy.

If theism is true, then perhaps goods of instantiation are actually good for God (in a non-internal way that is compatible with divine aseity). God has something supra-Schweitzerlike or supra-Saturnlike about him. It is good for God--it glorifies him--for there to be something Schweitzerlike or Saturnlike. This approach may not actually be that different from the Platonist one if properties are divine ideas.

Unreleasable promises and the value of punishment

Alice and Bob are conscientious vegetarians. Alice gets Bob to promise her that if Alice ever considers ceasing to be vegetarian, Bob should offer her the most powerful arguments in favor of vegetarianism even if Alice doesn't want to hear them. Years pass, and Alice's vegetarian fervor fades, and she mentions to Bob that she is considering giving up vegetarianism. Alice then says: "Please don't try to convince me otherwise."

What should Bea do? As a rule, the promisee can release the promiser from a promise. So it seems that Alice's request that Bob not importune her with the arguments for vegetarianism overrides the promise. But Bob promised to offer the arguments even if Alice didn't want to hear them. It seems that this was a promise where the usual release rule makes no sense. Can a promise like that be valid?

As the case demonstrates, there are times when it would be useful to be able to make promises that one cannot be released from by the promisee. But one cannot infer the existence of an ability from its usefulness: it could be useful for a pig to be able to fly. Still, it seems pretty plausible that Bob's promise is valid.

But now compare another case. During a fight, Carlos spitefully promises Alice that he's not going to get Alice's birthday party even if she wants him to come. Carlos does not, I think, have any moral duty to keep his promise if Alice reaches out to mend fences, releases him from his promise and invites him to his party.

In fact, my sense is that the release from the promise is irrelevant in the case of Carlos. For suppose that Dan, also fighting with Alice, promises Alice not to get her a birthday present. Dan does not, I think, violate any moral duty by giving Alice a birthday present, even absent a release, as long as it's clear that Alice would enjoy the present.

So how does the Bob case differ from the Carlos and Dan cases? I think it's that what Carlos and Dan promise Alice isn't good, or if it has any value it's a value dependent on how Alice feels about it at the time. But what Bob promises Alice has a value independent of how Alice feels at the time.

But here is another kind of unreleasable promise: an authority might unconditionally promise Alice a fair punishment should Alice do a particular wrong. And it is clear that Alice's releasing of the authority is irrelevant. If what I said about Bob's, Carlos' and Dan's promises is a guide, then unreleasable promises must be valuable for the promisee independently of the promisee's views and desires. Hence, just punishment is good for the punishee.

Value-of versus value-for

Some people distinguish the (non-instrumental) value of an individual's feature from the (non-instrumental) value for the individual of that feature. Ockham's razor, on the other hand, suggests we identify them. There is an interesting kind of argument from the nature of love for such an identification. Love has at least three aspects: benevolence, appreciation and pursuit of union. (For more on this, see One Body.) Love isn’t merely a conjunction of these aspects. The aspects are tightly intertwined, with each furthering the others. And the identification of (non-instrumental) value-of with value-for gives us a particularly elegant account of part of this intertwining. Appreciation is appreciation of what is valuable. When I appreciate the value of an individual, I seek to preserve and promote that value. Now when I act benevolently for an individual, I seek to preserve and promote what is of value for the individual. If the value-of and value-for are the same, then this appreciation motivates the benevolence and the benevolence is an expression of the appreciation. And a benevolence that is an expression of appreciation is a benevolence that escapes the danger of being patronizing and condescending.

On the other hand, if value-of and value-for were different, then not only would we lack this elegant intertwining, but there could be a real conflict between appreciation and benevolence. For appreciation would naturally lead me to promote the value of the beloved, which would take time away from the benevolent promotion of the value for the beloved, and conversely. The identity of value-of and value-for makes it possible for love to have an intrinsic unity between the appreciative and benevolent aspects. And union can then flows from these, since through benevolence one unites oneself to the beloved in will and through appreciation one unites in intellect.

Values cannot be accurately modeled by real numbers

Consider a day in a human life that is just barely worth living. Now consider the life of Beethoven. For no finite n would having n of the barely-worth-living days be better than having all of the life of Beethoven. This suggests that values in human life cannot be modeled by real numbers. For if a and b are positive numbers, then there is always a positive integer n such that nb>a. (I am assuming additiveness between the barely-liveable days. Perhaps memory wiping is needed to ensure additiveness, to avoid tedium?)

Pain

I have a strong theoretical commitment to:

1. To feel pain is to perceive something as if it were bad.
2. Veridical perception is non-instrumentally good.

On the other hand, I also have the strong intuition that:

3. Particularly intense physical pain is always non-instrumentally bad.

Thus, (1) and (2) commit me to veridical pains being non-instrumentally good. But (3) commits me to particularly intense physical pain, whether veridical or not, being non-instrumentally bad. This has always been very uncomfortable for me, though not as uncomfortable as intense physical pain is.

But today I realized that there is no real contradiction between (1), (2) and (3). Rather than deriving a contradiction from (1)-(3), what we should conclude is:

4. No instance of particularly intense physical pain is veridical.

And I don't have a very strong intuition against (4). And here is a story supporting (4). We systematically underestimate spiritual goods and bads, while we systematically overestimate physical goods and bads. Arguably, the worst of the physical bads is death, and yet both Christianity and ancient philosophy emphasize that we overestimate the badness of death. It is not particularly surprising that our perceptions suffer from a similar overestimation, and in particular that they typically present physical bads as worse than they are. If so, then it could well be that no merely physical bad is so bad as to be accurately represented by a particularly intense physical pain.

One difficulty is that the plausibility of my position depends on how one understands "particularly intense". If one has a high enough standard for that, then (4) is plausible, but it also becomes plausible that pains that just fall short of the standard still are non-instrumentally bad. If one has a lower standard for "particularly intense", then (4) becomes less plausible. I am hoping that there is a sweet spot (well, actually, a miserable spot!) where the position works.

Two kinds of families of goods

I have the good of friendship with Trent. Suppose Trent was my only friend. Then I would be getting two good things out of my friendship:

1. having Trent as a friend
2. having a friend.

These are separate non-instrumental goods. When I came to be friends with Trent, I already had good (2) as I had other friends, so I "only" gained good (1) (which is a great good). But if I had had no friends previously, coming to be friends with Trent would have provided me with both good things.

So the family of friendship-with-X goods has the property that not only are particular members of the family non-instrumentally valuable, but it's also of non-instrumental value to possess some member or other of that family, which gives one d over and beyond that particular member. Not all families of goods are like this. Consider the family F consisting of the two goods (a) friendship with Trent and (b) reading Anna Karenina. There is no good of possessing some member of F that goes over and beyond the two particular goods in F. It's good to be friends with Trent and it's good to read Anna Karenina, but there is no third disjunctive good here. Or at least there is no third non-instrumental disjunctive good (we can imagine cases where the disjunction is, as such, instrumentally valuable, say when a prize is given to anyone who is friends with Trent or is reading Anna Karenina).

Here's another example. Consider the subfamily of the friendship-with-X goods given by friendships with blue-eyed people. While every member of this subfamily is valuable (I'm supposing for simplicity that all cases of friendship are valuable), there does not seem to be a further value to being friends with a blue-eyed person. Someone all of whose friends are brown- or green-eyed is missing out on the good of friendship with the particular people whose eyes are blue, but isn't losing out on some further good. On the other hand, someone who has no female (or no male or no American or no Iranian) friends seems to be losing out on something valuable over and beyond the value of the particular female friends that he or she does not have, though it is unclear whether the lost value here is instrumental (say by providing a different outlook on the world) or not.

Intra- and inter-choice comparisons of value

Start with this thought:

1. If I have on-balance stronger reasons to do A than to do B, and I am choosing between A and B, then it is better that I do A than that I do B.

But notice that the following is false:

2. If in decision X, I choose A over C, and in decision Y, I choose B over D, and I had on-balance stronger reasons to do A than I did to do B, then decision X was better.

To see that (2) is false, suppose that in decision X, you are choosing between your friend's life and your convenience, while in decision Y, you are choosing between your friend's life and my own life. Your reasons to choose your friend's life over your convenience are much stronger (indeed, they typically give rise to a duty) than your reasons to choose your friend's life over your own life. Nonetheless, to save your friend's life at the cost of your own life is a better thing than to save your friend's life at the cost of your own convenience.

There is a whiff of paradoxicality here. But it's just a whiff. If you chose your convenience over your friend's life you'd be a terrible person. So in a case like that described in (2), choosing B (e.g., your friend's life over your life) is a better thing than choosing A (e.g., your friend's life over your convenience), choosing C (e.g., your convenience) is worse than choosing D.

In other words, when you choose A over B, the on-balance strength of reasons for A doesn't correlate--even typically--with the value of your deciding for A. Rather, the on-balance strength of reasons for A correlates (at least roughly and typically) with the value of your deciding for A minus the value of your deciding for B. This is quite clear.

This helps to resolve the paradox of why it is that doing the supererogatory is better than doing the obligatory, even though in a case where an option is obligatory the reasons are stronger than the reasons for supererogation. For omitting the supererogatory is much less bad than omitting the obligatory.

We may even be able to use some of the above to make some progress on the Kantian paradox that a good action by a person with a neutral character is better than a good action by a person with a good character, once we observe that it is worse for a good person to do something bad than for a neutral person to do the same thing, since the good person does two bad things: she does the bad thing in itself and she fights her good personality. Thus, even though the good person has more on-balance reason to do the good thing, because the strength of reasons doesn't correlate with the value of the action but with the value of the action minus the value of the alternative, this does not guarantee that her action has greater value than the good action of the neutral person.

Health

Is there a good of overall health, over and beyond particular goods of health, such as having keen eyesight, being able to run fast, etc.?

Suppose you have a broken leg and you believe this was your only health problem. But then you learn that your hearing is below normal and that this cannot be cured. Before you learned this bad news, you thought that fixing the fracture would both restore the health of the leg and overall health. But after learning the bad news, you knew that fixing the fracture would restore the health of the leg but not overall health. If overall health has a value over and beyond its components, then your level of motivation should go down, since previously actions that promoted the health of the leg apparently promoted two goods, while now you see that they promote only one. Yet surely your motivations wouldn’t decrease, or they hardly would. This suggests that the good of overall health is either not a further good or at best a minor good.

The most fundamental and what matters most

What matters most are things like people, love, understanding, courage, friendship, beauty, etc. According to many contemporary metaphysicians, what is most fundamental are things like sets, points, photons, charge, spin, the electromagnetic field, etc. It's almost as if the metaphysicians took the fact that something matters to be evidence that it isn't fundamental.

But here is a plausible hypothesis or at least heuristic:

• Fundamental predicates apply primarily to fundamental entities, and derivatively to other entities.

While a table can have mass or be charged, it has mass or is charged derivatively. It is particles that primarily have mass or are charged. Now, some value predicates like "matters" or "is valuable" are fundamental. (Of course, this is the controversial assumption.) Thus we have reason to think the kinds of things they primarily apply to are themselves fundamental, and they apply only derivatively to non-fundamental things. But the value of a person is not derivative from the value of the person's constituents like fields or particles, and the way in which a person matters does not derive from the ways in which fields or particles matter.

Thus, either persons will be themselves fundamental, and primary bearers of value, or else persons will be partly constituted by something fundamental which is a primary bearer of value. The best candidate for this valuable constituent is the soul. Hence, either persons are fundamental or they have souls that are fundamental.

In fact, I would conjecture that we should turn on its head the correlation between fundamentality and not mattering that we find in much contemporary metaphysics. The more something matters, the more reason we have to think it is fundamental, I suspect. This may lead to a metaphysics on which there are fundamental facts about persons, their psychology and their biology, a realist metaphysics with a human face.

The structure of the space of utilities

What kind of a structure do the utilities that egoists (on an individual level) and utilitarians (on a wider scale) want to maximize have? A standard approximation is that utilities are like real numbers. They have an order structure, so that we can compare utilities, an additive structure, so we can add utilities, and a multiplicative structure, so we can rescale them with probabilities. But that is insufficiently general. We want to allow for cases such as that any amount of value V₂ swamps any amount of value V₁. Thus, Socrates thought that any amount of virtue is better to have than any amount of pleasure. The structure of the real numbers won't allow that to happen.

A natural generalization is to note that the multiplicative structure of the space of utilities was overkill. We don't need to be able to multiply utilities by utilities. That operation need not make sense. We simply need to be able to multiply utilities by probabilities. Since probabilities are real numbers, a structure that will allow us to do that is that of a partially ordered vector space. However, we should not impose more structure on the utilities than there really is. It makes sense to multiply a utility by a probability in order to represent the value of such-and-such a chance at the utility. And since we have an additive structure on the utilities, we can make sense of multiplying a utility by a number greater than 1. E.g., 2.5U=U+U+(0.5)U. But it is not clear that it always makes conceptual sense to negate utilities. While it makes sense to think of a certain degree of pain as the negative of a certain degree of pleasure, it is not clear that such a negation operation is available in general.

Getting rid of the spurious structure of multiplying utilities by a negative number, and removing the unnecessary multiplication by numbers greater than 1, we get naturally get a structure as follows. Utilities are a partially ordered set with an operation + on them and there is an action of the commutative multiplicative monoid [0,1] on the utilities, with the order, addition and action all compatible.

A further generalization is that [0,1] may not be the best way to represent probabilities in general. So generalize that to a commutative monoid (with multiplicative notation). We now have this. A utility space is a pair (P,U) where P is a commutative monoid with multiplicatively written operation and an action on U, U is a commutative semigroup with an additively written operation + and a partial order ≤, where the operations, action and orders satisfy:

• (xy)a=x(ya) for x,y∈P and a∈U
• x(a+b)=xa+xb for x∈P and a,b∈U
• If a≤b, then xa≤xb for a,b∈U and x∈P
• If a≤b and c∈U, then a+c≤b+c.

I keep on going back and forth on whether U really should have an addition operation, though. I do not know if utilities can be sensibly added.