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Intuitive Maximin
- Joseph Mendola
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- Canadian Journal of Philosophy / Volume 35 / Issue 3 / September 2005
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- 01 January 2020, pp. 429-439
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One standard objection to familiar utilitarian consequentialism queries its troubling commitment to the maximization of overall value irrespective of distribution, for instance among the well and badly off. Call this ‘the objection from distribution.'
The simplest and most obvious alternative form of consequentialism deploys some sort of maximin principle. Maximin principles maximize the well-being of the worst off. Lexical maximin rules in particular, which are perhaps the simplest and most obvious subtype, maximize first the well-being of the worst-off, and then in case of ties among the worst-off, maximize the well-being of the second worst-off, and so forth. Maximin principles provide an obvious route to the unification of plausible concerns with maximization and with distributional equity.
Contributors
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- By Mitchell Aboulafia, Frederick Adams, Marilyn McCord Adams, Robert M. Adams, Laird Addis, James W. Allard, David Allison, William P. Alston, Karl Ameriks, C. Anthony Anderson, David Leech Anderson, Lanier Anderson, Roger Ariew, David Armstrong, Denis G. Arnold, E. J. Ashworth, Margaret Atherton, Robin Attfield, Bruce Aune, Edward Wilson Averill, Jody Azzouni, Kent Bach, Andrew Bailey, Lynne Rudder Baker, Thomas R. Baldwin, Jon Barwise, George Bealer, William Bechtel, Lawrence C. Becker, Mark A. Bedau, Ernst Behler, José A. Benardete, Ermanno Bencivenga, Jan Berg, Michael Bergmann, Robert L. Bernasconi, Sven Bernecker, Bernard Berofsky, Rod Bertolet, Charles J. Beyer, Christian Beyer, Joseph Bien, Joseph Bien, Peg Birmingham, Ivan Boh, James Bohman, Daniel Bonevac, Laurence BonJour, William J. Bouwsma, Raymond D. Bradley, Myles Brand, Richard B. Brandt, Michael E. Bratman, Stephen E. Braude, Daniel Breazeale, Angela Breitenbach, Jason Bridges, David O. Brink, Gordon G. Brittan, Justin Broackes, Dan W. Brock, Aaron Bronfman, Jeffrey E. Brower, Bartosz Brozek, Anthony Brueckner, Jeffrey Bub, Lara Buchak, Otavio Bueno, Ann E. Bumpus, Robert W. Burch, John Burgess, Arthur W. Burks, Panayot Butchvarov, Robert E. Butts, Marina Bykova, Patrick Byrne, David Carr, Noël Carroll, Edward S. Casey, Victor Caston, Victor Caston, Albert Casullo, Robert L. Causey, Alan K. L. Chan, Ruth Chang, Deen K. Chatterjee, Andrew Chignell, Roderick M. Chisholm, Kelly J. Clark, E. J. Coffman, Robin Collins, Brian P. Copenhaver, John Corcoran, John Cottingham, Roger Crisp, Frederick J. Crosson, Antonio S. Cua, Phillip D. Cummins, Martin Curd, Adam Cureton, Andrew Cutrofello, Stephen Darwall, Paul Sheldon Davies, Wayne A. Davis, Timothy Joseph Day, Claudio de Almeida, Mario De Caro, Mario De Caro, John Deigh, C. F. Delaney, Daniel C. Dennett, Michael R. DePaul, Michael Detlefsen, Daniel Trent Devereux, Philip E. Devine, John M. Dillon, Martin C. 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Acknowledgments
- Joseph Mendola, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
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- Goodness and Justice
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Index
- Joseph Mendola, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
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- 10 April 2006, pp 323-326
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Frontmatter
- Joseph Mendola, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
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1 - Introduction
- Joseph Mendola, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
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Summary
Ethicists must deliver intuitive platitudes about lying, murder, theft, injury, and the whole familiar bunch. If we can hope to surprise or advance, it is only in neglected or undeveloped corners of normative consensus. True conclusions in ethics must be mostly boring.
And yet ethicists must deliver a vindication of common moral claims. We must give arguments that should convince all the reasonable that our normative claims are correct. To put it grandly, we must deliver a transcendental vindication of those claims, from the point of view of the universe. To put it less grandly, we must provide a direct argument for the truth of the claims, independent of appeal to common moral intuitions. We need to provide considerations that ought to convince those who are outside normative consensus that we are right and they are wrong. If we merely monger common intuitions, unsupported by argument, evidence, or fact beyond their mere familiarity or warm fuzziness, we will have little to add to the standard wisdom of the street and the sea lanes. And worse, to the immoral, disagreeable, skeptically minded, or just diverse, it may not unreasonably seem that there is nothing to philosophical ethics but so much talk, so much high-minded or sanctimonious but otherwise empty blather.
And so we face two dragons. There may be no sufficiently transcendental vindication of any ethical claims, so that ethics is just a bunch of chatter.
Contents
- Joseph Mendola, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
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2 - Multiple-Act Consequentialism
- Joseph Mendola, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
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Summary
Act consequentialism – the view that right acts are those individual acts with best consequences available in the circumstances – has an obvious and intuitive rationale. To make the world as good as possible is a plausible moral goal. But indirect forms of consequentialism promise more intuitive normative implications, though at evident cost of intuitive rationale. This chapter will introduce a new form of consequentialism, Multiple-Act Consequentialism or MAC, which combines the intuitive rationale of act consequentialism and the intuitive normative implications of the best indirect forms.
MAC has four key tenets: (1) There are group agents of which we are constituents. (2) Direct consequentialist evaluation of the options of group agents is appropriate. (3) Sometimes we should follow our roles in a group act even at the cost of the overall good we could achieve by defection from those roles. In particular, one should defect from a group act with good consequences only if one can achieve better consequences by the defecting act alone than the entire group act achieves. (4) When different beneficent group agents of which one is part specify roles that conflict for one, one should follow the role in the group act with more valuable consequences.
MAC is a natural response to three standard objections to familiar forms of act consequentialism. Section I sketches these three objections, the indirect consequentialism that is the standard consequentialist response, and standard objections to indirect consequentialism. We need another approach. The rest of the chapter develops MAC.
3 - Three Objections
- Joseph Mendola, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
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Summary
I have given a more or less direct argument for the truth of MAC, which depends on the presumption that some basic consequentialist normative principle for ranking outcomes is true. But we must also see if MAC can evade the three standard intuitive objections to familiar forms of act consequentialism. And we need a better and more concrete sense of how it works.
One characteristic objection to act consequentialism is that it is too permissive. It sometimes allows or even requires the violation of very intuitive general moral prohibitions against killing, injuring, lying, and the like. There are two different aspects of this objection. First, it underlines the moral significance of certain sorts of goods – for instance, life, health, and true belief – that may be treated as basic by conceivable consequentialist normative principles but that characteristically aren't so treated. Second, it suggests that the maximization even of such goods as life and health by murder and injury – indeed, even of such goods as the relative absence of murders and injuries – is often immoral.
The gilded city is a gaudy reef of predators and pain. A wave of your wand, and it would disappear. Many lives would be lost today. But the world would be a happier place. Indeed, over time it would suffer fewer murders, and include more people, since innocent visitors would not be killed.
Part One - A Better Consequentialism
- Joseph Mendola, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
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7 - Maximin, Risks, and Flecks
- Joseph Mendola, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
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Summary
The specific maximin structure of the Hedonic Maximin Principle is mandated by the direct argument of the last chapter. It may seem intuitively troubling in various respects. But this chapter argues that such a structure is in fact in appropriate concord with commonsense normative intuitions of the same level of generality and abstraction. You may be initially disinclined to believe this. So was I. But please bear with me, since I hope to surprise you. In the next chapter, we will consider the detailed normative implications of this structure in conjunction with hedonism and Multiple-Act Consequentialism, and see that they are also properly intuitive.
There are three controversial elements of this structure. First, it is a maximin structure, which gives special preference to the maximization of the well-being of the worst-off, regardless of the cost to others who will remain nevertheless relatively better-off. Second, it considers distribution not over individual lives but rather over individual moments of lives, and indeed, to be precise, over individual bits of individual moments of lives, over flecks of experience. Third, it incorporates a maximin treatment of risks, and hence is very risk-averse.
Sections I, II, and III concern the plausibility of flecks of moments of lives as the basic locus of moral concern. Section IV concerns maximin. Section V concerns risk aversion. Section VI traces relevant interactions of these three structural elements.
Entire lives are perhaps the customary basic locus of concern in moral theory.
Goodness and Justice
- A Consequentialist Moral Theory
- Joseph Mendola
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In Goodness and Justice, Joseph Mendola develops a unified moral theory that defends the hedonism of classical utilitarianism, while evading utilitarianism's familiar difficulties by adopting two modifications. His theory incorporates a developed form of consequentialism. When, as is common, someone is engaged in conflicting group acts, it requires that one perform one's role in that group act that is most beneficent. The theory also holds that overall value is distribution-sensitive, ceding maximum weight to the well-being of the worst-off sections of sentient lives. It is properly congruent with commonsense intuition and required by the true metaphysics of value, by the unconstituted natural good found in our world.
6 - Just Construction
- Joseph Mendola, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
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Summary
The second element of the Hedonic Maximin Principle – its maximin structure – is the central subject of this part. Chapter 7 will argue that it is suitably intuitive. This chapter develops a direct argument for HMP on the basis of the ordinal hedonic value discerned in the last chapter. We will also consider the implications of other conceptions of hedonic value – for instance, a cardinal conception.
“Possible worlds” are fully detailed ways the universe might be. If there are other sorts of basic value than ordinal hedonic value found in other wildly possible worlds, still I will presume, for most of our discussion here, that such worlds are too unrealistic to be of concern to ethics. Call the worlds that are in question for us, which have merely ordinal hedonic value, “feasible worlds”.
The Hedonic Maximin Principle specifies the proper ordering, from worst to best, allowing for ties, of lotteries over feasible worlds.
That this is an ordering of things from worst to best means that (a) each member of the set of those things is either better, worse, or as good as any other specific member; (b) the “better than”, “worse than”, and “as good as” relations are transitive; and (c) nothing in the set holds more than one of the “worse than”, “better than”, or “as good as” relations to any other specific member.
Part Three - Maximin
- Joseph Mendola, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
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8 - A Code
- Joseph Mendola, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
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Summary
The conjunction of Multiple-Act Consequentialism and the Hedonic Maximin Principle modulates a traditional utilitarian concern about hedonic good through a focus on two sorts of justice: distributive justice and the avoidance of unjust means such as murder. I will refer to this marriage as the just good theory, or JGT.
JGT has been directly vindicated on the basis of ordinal hedonic value, and we have seen that each of its elements is intuitively appropriate at an abstract level, subject to some reservations about how the details work. We face one more argumentative burden. This chapter argues that, in the world we inhabit, the just good theory supports a moral code that I will call the Proposed Code, or PC for short, and that PC is a properly intuitive detailed morality.
PC is a relatively concrete set of normative directions. I will argue that it is within the range of contemporary reflective normative intuition of the same level of detail. You easily may have forgotten how JGT, which is a form of direct act-based consequentialism, can support a fixed moral code at all. The answer is that it supports such a code in the context of the actual group acts in which we participate. It is a code for us in those somewhat contingent circumstances.
PC has two major components, which reflect major components of the just good theory and also of contemporary reconstructions of commonsense morality.
Bibliography
- Joseph Mendola, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
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5 - Natural Good
- Joseph Mendola, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
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Summary
Hedonism is in adequate accord with our normative intuitions. But I have also promised a direct argument, independent of appeals to normative intuition, for the truth of that element of the Hedonic Maximin Principle. That is the task of this chapter.
Here is the short version: Ethical discourse is justificatory reason giving. And this requires hedonism, in the world we inhabit, whether we like it or not and whatever our normative intuitions. That is because pain and pleasure involve the only unconstituted natural normative properties found in the world.
This is a new metaethical alternative, within the cracks between familiar views. Justificatory reason giving has a metaphysical cost, but because there is this new metaethical alternative, we can pay it.
You may reasonably worry that hedonism is antecedently more plausible than any of the controversial metaphysical and metaethical claims that I will make here in support of it. But the nature of ethical discourse as justificatory reason giving requires an objective and asymmetrical vindication of its key normative claims over possible competitors. Normative intuitions alone are not enough. We must develop some understanding of what conditions might make our intuitions suitably true or otherwise asymmetrically appropriate, and see that those conditions are in fact plausible. And the only obvious thing that could provide such a vindication of a specific conception of the sole basic normative value is the existence in our world and all relevant alternatives of merely that type of basic value.
4 - Intuitive Hedonism
- Joseph Mendola, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
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Summary
Multiple-Act Consequentialism must be accompanied by a basic normative principle, and the basic normative principle proposed here is the Hedonic Maximin Principle. HMP has two elements, which are developed in this and the following part. The next part concerns its maximin structure. This part concerns its hedonism.
Hedonism is the view that pleasure is the basic ethical or normative value, and pain the basic disvalue. Chapter 5 will argue that hedonism is true, whether we like it or not and whatever our normative intuitions. But this chapter argues that it is appropriately intuitive.
The hoary philosophical tradition of hedonism suggests that it is at least reasonably and roughly intuitive. But philosophers no longer treat it that way. For the most part, they think that they know it to be obviously false on intuitive grounds, much more obviously false on such grounds than familiar competitors. I will argue that this consensus is wrong. I will defend the intuitive cogency of hedonism relative to the now dominant desire-based and objectivist conceptions of well-being and the good. I will argue that hedonism is still a contender, and indeed that our current understanding of commonsense intuition on balance supports it.
It may seem quite unlikely that such an argument will succeed. For instance, here is Sumner's relatively sympathetic evaluation of hedonism's prospects:
Time and philosophical fashion have not been kind to hedonism. Although hedonistic theories of various sorts flourished for three centuries or so in their congenial empiricist habitat, they have all but disappeared from the scene. […]
Part Two - Hedonism
- Joseph Mendola, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
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Part Four - Advice for Atomic Agents
- Joseph Mendola, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
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