…or, “I will make this dead horse get up and ride, dammit!”
1) In The Moral Landscape, you write that it is not societies, but individuals, who suffer from injustice (80). Do you view “human well-being” as a generalized abstraction, or is it agent-specific, to particular individuals in specific circumstances? On pp. 33-34, you say that there are “many different ways” and a “real diversity” of ways to define well-being, and that it includes “what matters to the average person.” This suggests that well-being is subjective, but you then liken it to physical health, which is an abstraction and an objective state, the truth value of which is not dependent on the person’s believing it.
2) To rephrase the first question: you ground your moral perspective in an imagined state of the worst possible suffering for everyone, as a sort of objective, negative state which gives us a lodestar to avoid. But it is not clear whether you do the same thing with regard to well-being. Do you regard them as symmetrical? That is, is there also a single, polar conception of generalized human health? Or would you say, to paraphrase Tolstoy, that everyone suffers in basically the same way, while there are an infinite number of ways to be healthy or flourish or experience well-being?
3) If there are many different ways to flourish, and if flourishing is agent-specific, would that not counsel limits on both moral obligations and on politics? You seem to suggest a sort of easy transfer from moral perfectionism to political perfectionism when you say that people should be treated as ends in themselves only when doing so “safeguard[s] human well-being,” but not when it does not (p. 79-80). If well-being is a unitary abstraction toward which ethics and politics should be directed, would you counsel a person to take unhealthy actions now for the sake of promoting the single abstract notion of human health? For example, should I go donate my healthy body to the nearest medical school right now, to advance the cause of medicine? On the other hand, if there are many different kinds of flourishing, should I not be allowed to pursue happiness as I see fit, respecting the freedom of others to do the same?
4) How do you propose to mediate between conflicting claims of people who say they need something for well-being? For a hypothetical, a genius surgeon is exhausted from non-stop work and needs to go on a vacation to recuperate, but a dozen people whom only he can treat show up needing emergency surgeries. Or the owner of a vacant lot is trying to decide whether to build a hardware store that the local carpenters really need, or a daycare center that the local mothers really need. Or, I have $100 and can spend it on a new watch for myself or to pay for life-saving surgery—for a profoundly evil person. On what criterion does a third party (the government, or something, which proposes to treat all these agents as means to the higher end of the “just society”) differentiate between their conflicting claims for the ingredients of well-being? (The classical liberal answer—that individuals have rights that cannot be overridden—is based on treating people as ends in themselves, full stop, but you reject that.)
5) How do you define “fairness”? You call it a “felt experience” and say that people demonstrably experience “negative emotions” when they experience unfairness, but of course religion is also a felt experience that gives people emotional responses, and you reject it as a reliable account of the world or a legitimate basis of morality. If not all felt experiences associated with emotion can be relied upon to give content to morality, what alternative do you propose to use to define “fairness”?
6) In an endnote in The Moral Landscape, you reject the idea that human well-being “would lead us to do terrible things like reinstate slavery, harvest the organs of the poor,” and so forth, because “there are rather clear reasons not to do these things—all of which relate to the immensity of suffering that such actions would cause and the possibilities of deeper happiness that they would foreclose. Does anyone really believe that the highest possible state of human flourishing is compatible with slavery, organ theft, and genocide?” (199 n. 11) What if the answer is yes? What argument would you use to show that such forms of purported well-being are inappropriate? Similarly, you reject the possibility of a Jeffrey Dahmer who asserts he must harm others for his well-being because you believe we are not “obliged to consider…diabolical inversion[s] of priorities” when considering an objective morality (34-35). On what criteria do you define these things as “diabolical”? To appeal to “well-being” at this point, or to “the immensity of suffering,” would commit the fallacy of petitio principii, because you are using diabolism or suffering to reject these claims as legitimate elements of the concept of well-being; that is, you say we are not “obliged to consider them” when deciding what counts as well-being. Why not? These desires are, after all, “felt experiences” associated with “emotion.” What are the standards for deciding which emotions and experiences are worthy of consideration when building our model of well-being? How do you answer this question without falling into the Euthyphro Dilemma, that the criteria of selection are doing all the real work in your model of well-being? That is, if for Reason X, we are required to exclude Acts Causing Suffering from the criteria that go into our picture of well-being, then are you not really just reiterating Reason X?
7) Do you think people have the right to believe in and practice religion in ways that affect only themselves? (By that I mean, excluding religious practices like circumcision or indoctrination of others; do you believe people have the right to, for example, pray or practice dietary taboos?) If so, why? Or do you think it is impossible for them to only affect themselves? and if that is the case, do you believe all religion should be banned?
8) Do you believe there are any things that are (1) morally preferable and (2) something it would be improper to compel a person to do? Why or why not?
9) Do you believe that a person has a possessory right to things that he or she has not earned? By this I mean, their bodies, intelligence, beauty, talents, or inherited wealth? If the answer is yes to some things and no to other things, on what grounds would you differentiate them? You say (as noted above) that you would not agree with compulsory organ donation—what about a genius doctor who makes an artificial heart in his spare time? Would you use the state to compel him to give it to people who need it? Isn’t the intuitive answer that forcing someone to undergo compulsory organ donation is unthinkable, while forcing the doctor to give up his artificial heart is more acceptable? Yet this is an inversion of your theory of desert, because the first person hasn’t earned his heart and the doctor certainly has earned the manufactured heart. (Or am I wrong about this? Does your intuition tell you otherwise?)
10) What is your response to the public-choice problems involved in redistributive government? In particular, you reject the idea that “any attempt to impose wisdom or compassion from the top—no matter who is at the top and no matter what the need—is necessarily corrupting.” One major reason classical liberals give for rejecting the imposition of “wisdom” “from the top” is that even if on one day a good person “is at the top,” there’s no way to prevent a bad person from getting to the top the next day (as Madison said, “wise statesmen will not always be at the helm”) and therefore it’s wiser to limit the state’s power in all cases, and leave people to make their own decisions. What is your response to this? Do you think this is not a serious concern?
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