Richard J. Arneson

Human Flourishing Versus Desire Satisfaction

What is the good for human persons? If I am trying to lead the best possible life I could lead, not the morally best life, but the life that is best for me, what exactly am I seeking? This phrasing of the question I will be pursuing may sound tendentious, so some explanation is needed. What is good for one person, we ordinarily suppose, can conflict with what is good for other persons and with what is required by morality. A prudent person seeks her own good efficiently; she selects the best available means to her good. If we call the value that a person seeks when she is being prudent “prudential value,” then an alternative rendering of the question to be addressed in this essay is “What is prudential value?” We can also say that an individual flourishes or has a life high in well-being when her life is high in prudential value. Of course, these common-sense appearances that the good for an individual, the good for other persons, and the requirements of morality often are in conflict might be deceiving. For all that I have said here, the correct theory of individual good might yield the result that sacrificing oneself for the sake of other people or for the sake of a morally worthy cause can never occur, because helping others and being moral always maximize ones own good. But this would be the surprising result of a theory, not something we should presuppose at the start of inquiry. When a friend has a baby and I express a conventional wish that the child have a good life, I mean a life that is good for the child, not a life that merely helps others or merely respects the constraints of morality. After all, a life that is altruistic and perfectly moral, we suppose, could be a life that is pure hell for the person who lives it—a succession of horrible headaches marked by no achievements or attainments of anything worthwhile and ending in agonizing death at a young age. So the question remains, what constitutes a life that is good for the person who is living it?

Perfectionism and Politics

Philosophers perennially debate the nature of the good for humans. Is it subjective or objective? That is to say, do the things that are intrinsically good for an agent, good for their own sakes and apart from further consequences, acquire this status only in virtue of how she happens to regard them? Or are there things that are good in themselves for an individual independently of her desires and attitudes toward them? The issue sounds recondite, but has been thought to be pregnant with implications for politics as it ought to be. Plato vigorously insists that knowledge of the good is precious and the person who has it is uniquely fit to rule:

JOEL FEINBERG AND THE JUSTIFICATION OF HARD PATERNALISM

Joel Feinberg was a brilliant philosopher whose work in social and moral philosophy is a legacy of excellent, even stunning achievement. Perhaps his most memorable achievement is his four-volume treatise on The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law , and perhaps the most striking jewel in this crowning achievement is his passionate and deeply insightful treatment of paternalism. Feinberg opposes legal paternalism, the doctrine that “it is always a good reason in support of a [criminal law] prohibition that it is probably necessary to prevent harm (physical, psychological, or economic) to the actor himself.” Against this doctrine Feinberg asserts that when an agents sufficiently voluntary choice causes harm to herself or risk of harm to herself, this category of harm-to-self is never a good reason in support of criminal law prohibition of that type of conduct.

Equality of Opportunity for Welfare Defended and Recanted

Kasper Lippert-Rasmussens interesting criticisms of the ideal of equality of opportunity for welfare provide a welcome occasion for rethinking the requirements of egalitarian distributive justice. 1 In the essay he criticizes I had proposed that insofar as we think distributive justice requires equality of any sort, we should conceive of distributive equality as equal opportunity provision. Roughly put, my suggestion was that equality of opportunity for welfare obtains among a group of people when all would have the same expected welfare over the course of their lives if each behaved as prudently as it would be reasonable to expect her to behave. My specific proposal was more demanding, holding that when an age cohort reaches the onset of responsible adulthood, they enjoy equal opportunity for welfare when for each of them, the best sequence of choices that it would be reasonable to expect the person to follow would yield the same expected welfare for all, the second-best sequence of choices would also yield the same expected welfare for all, and so on through the array of lifetime choice sequences each faces. (In the jargon of my 1989 essay, equal opportunity for welfare obtains when everyone faces effectively equivalent sets of life options.) Think of an individual facing a world that is fixed except for her choices, so that for each lifetime sequence of choices she might select a definite expected welfare attaches to that selection. The relevant best sequence of choices the individual faces-the best effective opportunity the individual has-is the one the yields her the highest

Defending the Purely Instrumental Account of Democratic Legitimacy

Governments compel their subjects to obey laws and duly empowered commands of public officials. Under what circumstances is this coercion by governments morally legitimate? In the contemporary world, many say a legitimate government must be democratic, and, with qualifications, I agree. (Let us say that in a democracy all nontransient adult residents are eligible to be citizens and each citizen if free to vote and run for office in free elections that determine who shall be lawmakers and top public officials.) More controversially, I hold that what renders the democratic form of government for a nation morally legitimate (when it is) is that its operation over time produces better consequences for people than any feasible alternative mode of governance. Christopher Griffin criticizes this purely instrumental account of the justification of democracy. 1 His target is a 1993 essay by me that outlines a version of this approach. 2 He also offers a brief sketch of an alternative line of argument to the conclusion that democratic government is uniquely morally legitimate. I welcome the stimulus to revisit this large and significant topic provided by Griffins interesting arguments. Griffin develops two arguments against my line on democracy. I shall argue that one of his arguments misfires and the other one, though it correctly challenges a genuinely confused train of thought, is not well aimed at any argument I ever advanced or have any interest in

Egalitarianism and Responsibility

This essay examines several possible rationales for the egalitarian judgment that justice requires better-off individuals to help those who are worse off even in the absence of social interaction. These rationales include equality (everyone should enjoy the same level of benefits), moral meritocracy (each should get benefits according to her responsibility or deservingness), the threshold of sufficiency (each should be assured a minimally decent quality of life), prioritarianism (a function of benefits to individuals should be maximized that gives priority to the worse off), and mixed views. A case is made for adopting either prioritarianism or a mixed view that gives priority both to the worse off and to the more responsible and deserving.

Is Work Special? Justice and the Distribution of Employment

I investigate from an egalitarian welfarist standpoint the issue of whether state-guaranteed employment should be offered as a matter of right to able-bodied poor citizens who suffer chronic or persistent unemployment. An affirmative answer is defended. One consideration supporting this right to work is that provision of transfer aid in the form of jobs rather than cash screens “nonneedy bohemians” from the class of beneficiaries. The main conclusion of the essay is defended from one objection based on efficiency wage models of the labor market and from another based on the alleged impossibility of maintaining the self-respect and self-esteem of able-bodied individuals who fail to earn their own keep independently in a market economy.

Do Patriotic Ties Limit Global Justice Duties

Some theorists who accept the existence of global justice duties to alleviate the condition of distant needy strangers hold that these duties are significantly constrained by special ties to fellow countrymen. The “patriotic priority thesis” holds that morality requires the members of each nation-state to give priority to helping needy fellow compatriots over more needy distant strangers. Three arguments for constraint and patriotic priority are examined in this essay: an argument from fair play, one from coercion, another from coercion and autonomy. Under scrutiny, none of these arguments qualifies as successf

Freedom and Desire

Muddles can be instructive. The clarifying confusion to be examined in this paper is Isaiah Berlins intelligent vacillation on the issue of whether or not the extent of a persons freedom depends on his desires.1 Is the amount of freedom an agent possesses determined solely by his objective circumstances or is it also partly a function of his subjective tastes and preferences? In clarifying this question I shall suggest that Berlin has trouble answering it because he almost perceives that interpersonal car-

Egalitarian Justice versus the Right to Privacy

In their celebrated essay “The Right to Privacy,” legal scholars Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis identified as the generic privacy value “the right to be let alone.” This same phrase occurs in Justice Brandeiss dissent in Olmstead v. U.S. (1927). This characterization of privacy has been found objectionable by philosophers acting as conceptual police. For example, moral philosopher William Parent asserts that one can wrongfully fail to let another person alone in all sorts of ways—such as assault—that intuitively do not qualify as violations of privacy and thus cannot be violations of the right to privacy.