Many people are drawn to the Prioritarian view that "Benefiting people matters more the worse off these people are." (Parfit 1997, 213) Importantly, this is not just the (utilitarian-compatible) idea that many goods have diminishing marginal value, so that better-off people are likely to benefit less than worse-off people from a certain amount of material goods. Even after accounting for all that, the idea goes, the interests of the worse-off just matter more; we should even give a lesser benefit to the worst off rather than a (genuinely) slightly greater benefit to someone who is already well-off.
This view always struck me as deeply misguided. By effectively attributing diminishing marginal value to welfare itself, you can end up implying that even considering just a single individual, it might be "better" to do what is worse for him (e.g. giving him a smaller benefit at a time when his quality of life is lower, rather than a greater benefit at a different time).
But there is a closely related view that is more theoretically cogent. Rather than attributing diminishing marginal value to welfare itself, you attribute it to the basic goods that contribute to one's welfare (happiness, etc.). This goes beyond the familiar idea that material resources have diminishing instrumental value, say for making you happy. We are now introducing a kind of non-instrumental diminishing value, by saying that happiness itself makes more of a difference to your welfare the less of it you have.
This view has similar practical implications to prioritarianism. If given a fixed amount of a basic good to distribute (a fixed-size happiness boost, say), it is better, all else equal, to give it to the worst off individual. But it has significant theoretical benefits. Rather than abandoning moral equality and saying that equal-or-lesser interests of the worst off just matter more, we maintain the equal consideration of interests and instead affirm that we are able to make more of a difference to the interests of the worse off (even with an equally sized happiness boost). We prioritize helping them, not because they matter more, but because we are able to benefit them more.
And, of course, we avoid the near-incoherence of attributing diminishing marginal value to welfare itself.
Can you see any reason to prefer the traditional prioritarian view (on which welfare has DMV) over this utilitarian-compatible competitor (on which welfare-contributors have DMV)? Has anyone formulated this latter view before?
Wednesday, July 17, 2019
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[Paul Kelleher send in the following comment:]
ReplyDeleteHarsanyi's aggregation theorem combined with individual risk-aversion with respect to lifetime well-being together entail prioritarianism. I agree that this can have some counter-intuitive implications (especially in one-person cases like the one you adduce here), but I think John Broome is correct that the anti-prioritarian must explain where the Harsany-based argument goes wrong (see his entry on the Oxford Handbook of Value Theory). Broome thinks it goes wrong by assuming a notion of individual welfare functions that are not constructed using the axioms of decision theory. He thinks such a notion cannot be found, because (he thinks) decision theory offers the only plausible route to cardinalization. If I follow you, your proposal requires that we have cardinalized notions of the "welfare-contributors", as distinct from a cardinalized notion of welfare itself. --- In any case, perhaps being mindful of where someone like Broome might object to your proposal will help illuminate a route forward to developing/defending it further.
Thanks Paul, I'll have to look into that!
DeleteIf I recall correctly, Brad Hooker endorses the view that you like in “The Elements of Well-Being,” and Tom Hurka endorses it in his popular book, *The Best Things in Life* (though he might say that none of the claims in that book that are seemingly about welfare are really about welfare).
ReplyDeleteAh, thanks Eden! Do you recall whether either of them discuss the view in relation to prioritarianism (i.e. explicitly making the case that this is a better way to accommodate apparently prioritarian intuitions)?
DeleteNo, I don't remember their making that point. But it's been a while since I've read those pieces.
DeleteI completely agree that this view is much better than prioritarianism. I do wonder though whether this view is really incompatible with utilitarianism. One thing that utilitarians are happy with is the idea that e.g. pleasure might have diminishing marginal utility. But the way of explaining that would be to define welfare in terms of preference-satisfaction, and to say that preferences for pleasure might have the kind of shape that implies diminishing marginal utility. You suggest that utilitarians only allow for diminishing instrumental value. But this is misleading, because pleasure is here a final value (it is desired non-instrumentally). So why not just present this as a way that utilitarians can explain more of the intuitions that prioritarianis rely on?
ReplyDeleteHi Daniel, yes, absolutely, I suggest in the final paragraph that this is a "utilitarian-compatible" competitor to prioritarianism. I earlier suggested that it goes beyond the "familiar" way of appealing to diminishing marginal utility, but I didn't mean to imply that this further move is in any way incompatible with utilitarianism.
DeleteGlad to hear you like the view!
I don't quite understand how this even makes sense from a logical point of view. I mean in what sense are you even measuring benefiting more? Isn't saying doing X for A benefits A more than doing Y for B benefits B just a different way of saying that given the choice you should choose the first one?
ReplyDeleteTo be clear I understand the suggestion you are trying to make but when I think about what I mean to say when I describe two increases in happiness to be by the same amount it feels to me like I'm just consulting my intuitions about total welfare. I mean that might not quite be right but it definitely doesn't feel like I have the kind of independent grip on all these concepts that would let me freely vary them like this.
DeleteConsider some episode of conscious pleasure. Suppose you could either give that experience to someone who has already had lots of good experiences, or to someone else who has had a sadder time of late. By stipulation, the conscious episode would be identical whoever receives it -- it would be the "same amount" of *pleasure*. (That's a purely descriptive matter of fact.) But it's an open question whether the sadder person would gain more intrinsic benefit from the experience. (That's a normative question about the relation between the recipient and the benefit.) And it's a yet further question whether it's just *more important* to favour sadder people, even with equally-sized benefits. (That's a normative question about the relation between us, as potential benefactors, and the recipient.) So I think it makes good sense to distinguish these concepts. And the normative and descriptive ones, at least, are surely independent.
DeleteRichard, what I find appealing about your idea is that seems to resolve something that has bothered me for some time: What if two people differ in their capacity for happiness or other forms of life satisfaction, not because one is richer or healthier than the other, but purely because one of them has more ambitious life goals.
ReplyDeleteImagine one person who has life goals like having a satisfying career, finding love, overcoming challenges, learning about the world, travel, things like that. Imagine a second person who has some extremely simple life goal that can be satisfied much more cheaply. Maybe they are content to be a recluse who does nothing all day but admire and dust their collection of pogs. It seems strange to say that, all other things being equal, the second person has a more valuable life because they consume fewer resources to get the same amount of life satisfaction.
In our world today this does not seem like a big moral issue. But it becomes starker in slightly futuristic scenarios. Imagine you had a choice between giving one dose of a potion that adds +10 healthy years to the life of each of the aforementioned people, or giving two doses to one of them. Imagine that both people will enjoy an extra +10 years of life. However, the person with the normal, ambitious preferences might not have enough money and resources to do everything he wants to do in those ten years, while the recluse does. Doesn't it seem a little weird to say the recluse, for that reason, deserves both doses? Under your proposed modification of prioritarianism we can perhaps avert this. We can say that even if the recluse gets more satisfaction with the extra ten years than the ambitious person, the ambitious person will get more welfare out of it.
At the most extreme we could imagine some sort of AI or other futuristic entity with the power to duplicate people. Imagine the recluse arguing to the AI that it should kill everyone on Earth and replace them with duplicates of the recluse and their pog collection. The recluse could argue that since it does not have to expend resources satisfying the ambitious life-goals of everyone else, it will have more resources leftover to make even more duplicate recluses and pogs, resulting in a net gain in utility. This seems problematic, but again, I think your modified prioritarianism could prevent it.
(We might also be able to avoid the "replace everyone in the world with recluse duplicates" scenario by appealing to some sort of value holism that you have discussed before. Maybe diversity is a contributory value. I find this idea appealing, but get the heeby jeebies at the thought of trading human welfare off against diversity.)