Comments?
I'd love to hear.
Robert
Bass
Department of Philosophy
Coastal Carolina
University
Conway, SC
rhbass@gmail.com
Recently, Luka Yovetich presented an argument for egoism. I found it unimpressive and said why. Bill Dwyer and Luka both responded to defend the argument. I am still not impressed. The argument remains, just as it was before, completely inadequate to support egoism.
There are some differences in the ways that Bill and Luka understand the argument. These may only represent differences in phraseology or of emphasis. I will, at various points, say something about what one or the other of them said. However, to a large extent, their approaches are congruous and depend on the same mistakes or confusions. Those are what I shall mainly address.
The principal mistakes center around the notions of happiness and of ultimate goals. Both Bill and Luka seem to assume (a) that everyone has an ultimate goal, (b) that being happy or achieving happiness is the sort of thing that can be an ultimate goal, (c) that it is natural – not just in the sense of being unsurprising, but in the sense of being a part of our nature – to want happiness more than anything else (Luka) or to have happiness as an ultimate goal (Bill), (d) that happiness, if it is our ultimate goal, defines or circumscribes an entirely self-interested life, and (e) that “should� or “ought,� as they are used in ethics have sense – and only have sense – in their relation to a goal, i.e., that saying that a person ought to do something is to say that it will contribute to achieving some goal that he has.
If all of these claims were true, then there would be a very short argument for egoism – one incidentally that would not depend on mention of the alternative of death. (So, the premise, in Luka’s original argument, that mentions the alternative of life or death is entirely beside the point. It contributes nothing to the argument but a rhetorical flourish. I suspect it is there because Rand, in her different and also mistaken arguments for egoism, made much of the life vs. death alternative.) The argument, as addressed to any agent, could then go like this:
1. Happiness is your ultimate goal (from a, b, and c).
2. You ought to do whatever is required for or contributes to (your) happiness (from 1 and e).
3. Therefore, you ought to do whatever is required for or contributes to living an entirely self-interested life (from 2 and d).
That formulation of the argument, I submit, has three advantages. First, it is based on assumptions that Bill and Luka both seem to accept. Second, it is cleaner and logically tighter than the argument that Luka originally presented. Third, at least given a certain interpretation of (c) – that it is our nature to have happiness as an ultimate goal – it is valid.
However, this fact, that one can present a short and valid argument for egoism, should raise suspicion, for, of course, most philosophers (not to mention most ordinary, reflective non-philosophers) have thought that egoism is mistaken. Unless you opt for the (crazy) assumption that most philosophers were incapable of following or constructing a simple valid argument or else that, though they could follow it, they were somehow dishonestly refusing to admit the truth of a conclusion that they actually recognized to be true, the only reasonable conclusion is that most philosophers have not accepted all of the assumptions (a-e) on which the argument is based.
And, in fact, that’s true. The assumptions, (a) through (e), are not simple, obvious, uncontroversial or self-evident. Different philosophers would focus on different problems with one or more of the assumptions, but I think that every one of the assumptions is either false, or if, as is sometimes the case, an assumption can be interpreted so that it is true or at least plausible, the sense in which it is true or plausible is not the sense that is needed for the argument to be valid.
So, let’s return to the assumptions. First, is it true that everyone has an ultimate goal? To be clear about this, something has to be said about what is meant by calling something an ultimate goal. An ultimate goal is not just “the greatest goal, the most important one,� as Luka said. If that were so, even an ultimate goal could be over-ridden or properly subordinated to other considerations. It would have more weight or importance than any other single goal, and so would be the most important, but there might be some combination of other goals that, taken together, have more importance than it does. (Example: The largest bill I have in my wallet, right now, is a ten, so not losing the ten is a more important goal than not losing any of the others. But I could still lose more than ten dollars by losing some combination of the other bills in my wallet.) Instead, having an ultimate goal has to be interpreted, for the purposes of this argument, as having some goal to which any and all other goals are subordinated as means. To make this clearer, here is a set of distinctions I use in explaining the various kinds of ends and means to them and their inter-relations (I use “end� rather than “goal�):
I. An objective is something sought, aimed at or to be performed.
II. An end is an objective sought, aimed at or to be performed for its own sake.
III. A means is an action taken or state of affairs selected or brought about for the sake of some objective.
IV. An external means is a means adopted for the sake of its expected causal contribution to an independently specifiable objective.
V. A constitutive means is a means adopted because it is taken to at least partially constitute the objective to which it contributes. The objective cannot be adequately specified entirely independently of the constitutive means.
VI. Afinal end is an end that is not sought or aimed at for the sake of any further objective.
VII. Anultimate end is a final end to which all other objectives are means.
Plainly, the sense I have given is the one needed for the Bill-Luka argument to work. Happiness might be your ultimate goal in the other sense – the sense of being your most important goal – and still get outweighed by other goals you have. Is it true in this sense (the sense of line VII) that everyone has an ultimate goal? Aristotle offered an argument that appears to bear on this question. It occurs in the Nicomachean Ethics, I.2:
If, then, there is some end of the things that we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this), and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else (for at that rate the process would go on to infinity, so that our desire would be empty and vain), clearly, this must be the chief good. (1094a 18-22)
 :
On the face of it, the form of this argument is:
1. If P then Q
2. Not R (because S)
3. Therefore, Q
That’s puzzling unless it is assumed that there is an unstated premise to the effect that R is the only relevant alternative to P. So, filling in, the best reading of the argument appears to be along the following lines:
1. If there is some end of the things we do, this must be the chief good.
2. Either there is some end of the things we do or we choose everything for the sake of something else.
3. We do not choose everything for the sake of something else (for at that rate ... ).
4. Therefore, this must be the chief good.
If this reconstruction is correct, the argument is fallacious. In the sense in which it is plausible that the second premise is true, there being some end of the things we do has to mean that there is some end for each of the things we do – that is, that we do not act without some end or other. That, of course, is consistent with our different actions having different ends in view. But it is not plausible that the first premise is true unless the existence of some end of the things we do means that there is some single end of all the things we do. (Otherwise, what does “this� mean in the consequent?) So, if the second premise is true, the antecedent of the first may be false. Since the truth of the antecedent isn’t insured by anything else in the argument, the conclusion that “this must be the chief good� does not follow. This argument, then, does not show that there must, as a matter of human psychology, be an ultimate end.
Nor is it clear that any other argument could provide support for that conclusion. It might be asserted that if an agent has two ends, then he has a further end constituted by the compound of the two. If that were correct, then, for any agent who has any end at all, there would have to be also an ultimate end (if he has only one end, then the same one). There is a problem in that this would make the existence of an ultimate end definitional, and the presence of an ultimate end would have no more or different normative or reason-giving force than the presence of the ends that constitute it. In terms of a pair of ends, A and B, when those alone are relevant, we can already say that there is a consideration in favor of any action that advances one without damaging the other, in favor of any action that advances both, against any action that damages both, and against any action that damages one without contributing to the other. But if the presence of some compound end is supposed to definitionally follow from the presence of any other ends, the A-B compound does no more than A and B separately did. For the compound to have any independent normative force, it must be more than just a compound; it must, for example, establish some kind of trade-off or priority relations (at least for some range of cases) that apply when actions in the service of A are actions in the disservice of B. If the compound has independent normative force, its presence cannot be guaranteed definitionally; if it does not, there is no point in introducing it.
It is neither logically nor psychologically necessary that people have ultimate goals. A person may have multiple goals that are not all part of, included in or contributory to any ultimate goal. If there is some reason that we must have an ultimate goal, it is a reason that we ought to have one (or come to have one), not a reason that we can’t help having one. (This, by the way, is why Bill’s and Luka’s reply to my counter-example in which I showed that we could make sense of saying that someone should do something even when it was not true that he needed to in order to achieve his goal, falls flat. Their replies both rested on the assumptions that the person faced with the situation I described had an ultimate goal and that what I was talking about was what was needed to achieve or promote that goal. Since both of those assumptions may be false, they are not addressing the case I presented.)
Let’s look now at assumptions (b) and (d) together. They were, remember, (b) that being happy or achieving happiness is the sort of thing that can be an ultimate goal, and (d) that happiness, if it is our ultimate goal, defines or circumscribes an entirely self-interested life.
Here, I want to know what happiness is supposed to be. Aristotle said (I am employing the common, though I think misleading, translation of “eudaemonia� as “happiness�), that it is a platitude that happiness is the good, but that we need a clearer account of what happiness is. When it came to developing his own clearer account, it turned out that happiness includes having friends, whose well-being is sought for its own sake; being just, which he explicitly says is for the good of another rather than one’s own; and being generous, again for its own sake. (Aristotle is not – even though he holds that one’s own happiness is one’s ultimate goal – an egoist in the sense of having a non-moralized interest theory, and therefore is not an egoist at all.)
So, it is relevant to ask what Bill and Luka think happiness is, whether, so understood, it is suited to play the role of an ultimate goal (i.e., how it relates to (b)), and whether, if it is, having happiness as one’s ultimate goal is equivalent to living an entirely self-interested life (i.e., how it relates to (d)).
Luka seems to identify happiness with a “psychologically satisfying life.� Bill is less clear, but I don’t think he would substantially disagree. He speaks of how “happiness is experienced as intrinsically or self-evidently valuable.� (Emphasis added.) That suggests, as Luka’s definition did in a different way, that happiness is entirely an experiential state or condition, one that one likes or enjoys or prefers to its alternatives. Otherwise, if there were conditions upon or components of happiness that were not necessarily a matter of experience, it would be hard to see how one could experience it – happiness itself, rather than just its subjective components or conditions – as intrinsically valuable. (Perhaps one would not find it valuable if one were aware of all of its components or conditions.)
In so understanding happiness, Luka and Bill are in accord with a long line of modern philosophers, beginning with Locke in the 17th century, running through Kant and Bentham in the 18th, Mill and Sidgwick in the 19th, and successors down to the present. I do not wish here to contest this understanding, but shall only mention that it is not the only way that happiness has been understood, either by philosophers or by ordinary people. Notably, happiness has been conceived by Aristotelians and Thomists as having some objective components so that it was never given, simply because one was in some experiential state, that one was happy. But for my present purposes, it is sufficient to note that the conception of happiness as an experiential state is the one that both Bill and Luka seem to be employing.
Is happiness, so understood, something suitable to play the role of an ultimate goal, something to which all other goals or objectives are subordinated as means? Now, I think it is a mistake to treat happiness, understood in this way, as an ultimate goal at all; it is, of course, something that we value, care about or enjoy for its own sake, but its principal role in our practical reasoning is as a (fallible) indicator of whether we are getting or achieving what we care about rather than as a goal that we pursue. However, I shall not argue that in detail here. For the present, I shall point out two problems with treating happiness itself as the ultimate goal.
The first is that, in many cases, including some of the most important and long-term decisions we make, appealing to happiness yields no advice at all as to what to do. I do not mean that, when we face such a choice, we do not know enough to determine which course of action will contribute most to our happiness (that may be a problem, too, but it’s a different one). Nor do I mean that the options stack up equally (at least as far as we can tell). I mean that there literally is no answer to the question.
Suppose you are trying to decide whether or not to marry a particular person on the basis of how happy you expect to be if you do as compared to how happy you will be if you don’t. As a simplifying assumption, assume that, whichever way you decide, things will go reasonably well – not so wonderfully as to be fantastically improbable, just reasonably well. (The comparison only becomes more difficult if you factor into the decision consideration of the tiny chance that things will go improbably well, the moderately large chance that things will not go terribly well, and the tiny chance that either will be disastrous.) How can you decide, in terms of happiness, which decision is better?
To further simplify, think about how your life will be, say, ten years down the road. Since we are assuming that things will go reasonably well, whichever you choose, we would expect you to be reasonably happy with the way you decided. Does that mean that the two choices are (about) equally good in terms of happiness? Not necessarily. One of the features of long-term plans that make a significant difference to what you are doing over the term of the plan is that you are altered in the process. You engage in different activities, spend time with different associates, and acquire different interests (in the sense of things that interest you or that you take an interest in). If you marry, you will be introduced to a certain circle of people, will probably have children you will care about, will probably seek and find a certain kind of job or profession. If you do not marry, you will have different acquaintances, will probably have different kinds of relations with those people, will not have children (at least not the same ones), may find a very different kind of profession, and so on. What makes you happy or contributes to your happiness will itself change in the process. In the married life, ten years hence, you will be happy that you married and will think that is much better than what your life would have been like if you had not married. You would not, as you are then – with the attitudes, interests and preferences of someone happily married – want the kind of life that would be yours if you had not married. But the same point applies in the other direction as well. Had you chosen not to marry, you would, in the unmarried life ten years hence, be happy with it and would be glad that you had not chosen to marry. With the attitudes, interests and preferences of someone who is happily unmarried, you would not, as you are then, want the kind of life that you would have if you were married. Nor does it help to make the comparison from your present stand-point. With the attitudes, interests and preferences you have now, you would not be happy with either outcome. Neither what the married life nor what the unmarried life of a ten-year-distant future would be like would make you happy if you remained, in terms of what satisfied you, just as you are now.
The point is that if happiness is conceived as an experiential state, what makes you happy will depend in part on what you want, desire or aim at (and on whether you’re getting or achieving whatever that is) when your happiness is being assessed. There is not a neutral conception of happiness that enables you to establish an over-all ranking. There is only how you will assess your happiness, given certain attitudes, interests and preferences – and what those will be will depend in part on your decision and so your decision cannot be based, in turn, upon them. To put it differently and more briefly, the answer to the question, which life will make you happier? – depends on what you will be like when you have that life, but what you will be like depends on which you choose, so you can’t base your choice on how it will affect your happiness.
Here’s the second problem, which was already hinted at in what I just said. It can be treated much more briefly. There is an important sense in which happiness is a second-order concept. We are not just happy (or not). We are happy about certain things, happy that our projects come to fruition, happy that certain goals are achieved, happy that we get something we want. Unless we care about other things than our happiness, we will not be happy to get them. Moreover, some of these at least have to be things cared about for their own sakes, not just because they contribute to happiness. (Saying they are all cared about only because of their contribution to happiness leaves you back where you started. They won’t contribute to happiness unless you care about them in some other way.) We need something more specific than happiness – particular wants to satisfy, desires to fulfill, projects to engage us, goals to achieve – in order to find happiness in pursuing them. “Pursue happiness� cannot be the only guideline, any more than “obey the law� can be the only law.
Now, perhaps that can be understood as a way of treating happiness as an ultimate goal, though I don’t think it should be. However, even if it is, with a little further explanation, it bears on the plausibility of Bill’s and Luka’s assumption (d), that happiness, if it is someone’s ultimate goal, defines or circumscribes an entirely self-interested life.
Once we realize that happiness is a second-order concept, that assumption loses whatever plausibility it had. In general, a person is happier, when other things are equal, if he gets or achieves or does what he wants or aims at. That is, he is happier – again, provided that other things are equal – than he would be if he had not gotten, achieved or done what he wanted or aimed at. But, given this, why could he not have aimed at, say, doing something for the good of others, or, to be more specific, at something like feeding the hungry. (Of course, I am taking him to aim at these things for their own sakes.) If he did, and if he succeeded, then he would be happier than if he failed or fell short of his objective. Now, if we interpret having happiness as his ultimate goal in this way (again, I think we should not), it is possible for someone both to have happiness as his ultimate goal and not to be living an entirely self-interested life. It is part of his happiness to care about others for their own sakes and not just for their contribution to his happiness. So, assumption (d) is not true: Happiness, even if understood as an ultimate goal, does not define or circumscribe an entirely self-interested life.
Assumption (c) can now be dealt with very quickly. Given what has already been said, the assumption that it is natural – not just in the sense of being unsurprising, but in the sense of being a part of our nature – to have happiness as an ultimate goal has no plausibility whatsoever. There is little reason to treat happiness as an ultimate goal (and it wouldn’t necessarily be egoistic even if it were) and there is none at all for thinking that everyone even has an ultimate goal, much less that everyone has this particular ultimate goal, “by nature.�
For the final assumption, (e), Bill and Luka both appear to think that “should� or “ought,� as they are used in ethics have sense – and only have sense – in their relation to a goal, i.e., that saying that a person ought to do something is to say that it will contribute to achieving some goal that he has. Bill gives it a sharper formulation than does Luka: He says “it only makes sense to talk about an ethical ‘should’ in the context of an antecedent goal or purpose. You cannot say that you ‘should’ value something as an end, only as a means to an end.�
As they both should know, this is a highly controversial claim in ethics. It is not an uncommon view, and it is one that Rand seemed to express at times, especially clearly in “Causality vs. Duty.� (She was not consistent, for it is not the only view on the subject to be found in her writings. She also seemed willing to claim that there were questions – and answers – about which goals were right or proper. If she were not willing to discuss what goals one should have, some of her animadversions about those who do not choose to live are barely sensible. They would just not have chosen the same ultimate goal as she. If all oughts are relative to goals, they would have done nothing wrong.)
I said the claim was controversial. There have in fact been many who held that it was false, that in some way, reason bears not just upon means but upon ends. Broadly, there are, in the history of moral theory, two different models of how reason may bear on ends. They might be called the Guide Model and the Filter Model. On the Guide Model, reason picks out certain ends for us and, in effect, says “There is the good: Go there!� This is, on my reading, the approach of much classical moral theory, from Plato on. On the Filter Model, reason operates upon an existing corpus of ends, and rules some things out, says that some ends are not, all things considered, acceptable. On the Filter Model, you may also be required to have or to take steps to come to have an end that you did not before, but it happens, so to speak, through the back door. What happens is that you are required not to adopt any of its alternatives – that is, all the alternatives representing the principles you already accept get filtered out. Though others had employed it before, I think the first person to self-consciously employ the Filter Model was Kant. In limiting cases, the two are equivalent: “Go there!� is equivalent to “don’t go anywhere else!� Still, even if they may sometimes converge on conclusions, there is a difference in method.
The point of this brief digression is just to illustrate that the assumption (e) is not uncontroversial. It is certainly not something that is obviously true or accepted by all competent thinkers. So, if the assumption that oughts are only meaningful or true in relation to given ends is part of a case for egoism, it needs argument.
In any event, I believe it is false. I shall not here spend time arguing that it is. In the past, I have argued on the list that it is not possible to understand oughts that are relative to given goals unless it is assumed that there is at least one ought- or reason-giving principle that is correct without depending on any particular goals one might have – that is, that there must be unconditional oughts if there are to be any conditional oughts. And I do not think that is the only way that the assumption fails. For the present, I am content just to point out that it is an assumption that needs support which has not been provided.
---
So, what’s left of the argument? Essentially nothing. Assumptions (a) and (c) are false, (b) is doubtful, (d) is false, and (e) stands in need of argumentative support which it hasn’t been given. At the most generous estimate, if we grant that (b) and (e) are true, we only have that happiness is the sort of thing that might be an ultimate goal and that all oughts are relative to a goal. That is not nearly enough to underwrite any argument for egoism.
If we go back to the argument I constructed on behalf of Bill and Luka, based on their assumptions, not a single line survives intact:
1. Happiness is your ultimate goal (from a, b, and c).
2. You ought to do whatever is required for or contributes to (your) happiness (from 1 and e).
3. Therefore, you ought to do whatever is required for or contributes to living an entirely self-interested life (from 2 and d).
The first does not because it depends on (a) and (c) as well as (b). The second does not because it depends on the first as well as on (e). The third does not because it depends on the second and on (d).
There is simply nothing left.
Rob
_____
Rob
Bass
rhbass@gmail.com
http://oocities.com/amosapient
