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Ambiguities in Feldman's Desert-adjusted Values

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2009

Ingmar Persson
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Abstract

Fred Feldman has argued that consequentialists can answer the well-known ‘objection from justice’ by replacing the utilitarian axiology with one that makes the value of receiving pleasures and pains depend on how deserved it is. It is shown that this proposal is open to three interpretations: (1) the Fit-idea, which operates with the degree of fit between what recipients get and what they deserve; (2) the Merit-idea, which operates with the magnitude of the recipients' desert or merit; and (3) the Fit-Merit idea which is a combination of (1) and (2). It is argued that none of these ideas will do, among other things because they fail to take into account the fact that justice involves inter-personal comparisons.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , November 1997, pp. 319 - 327
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

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References

1 Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, lv (1995), 567–85Google Scholar. All unprefixed page references in the text are to this article.

2 Cf. what Feldman says in ‘Justice, Desert, and the Repugnant Conclusion’, Utilitas, vii (1995), 189–206, esp. 194–5Google Scholar.

3 In Confrontations with the Reaper, New York, 1992, ch. 11Google Scholar, Feldman takes the more extreme line that only (2) counts. I criticize this view in ‘Feldman's Justicized Act Utilitarianism’, Ratio, ix (1996), 39–46Google Scholar.

4 ‘Justice’, 197.

5 As is true on Erik Carlson's sophisticated development of the F-idea in ‘Consequentialism, Distribution and Desert’, this volume.

6 For instance, if it is stipulated that Carlson's exponent m is =2 (ibid.), which is necessary to obtain the result that the intrinsic value of the outcome of either S or T getting 10 and the other nothing equals that of both receiving 3, the single person case of one of them getting something like 9 will not have positive value! On the other hand, if m is stipulated to be close to 1, we are committed to another counter-intuitive conclusion, viz. that the value of the 10–0 distribution roughly equals that of a 4.5–4.5 distribution.

7 I assume that ‘the evil of pain’ means the intrinsic badness of pain.

8 I consider the fanciful case of creating recipients rather than the more usual case of having to give the 10 units to one of two existing recipients. For the state of one getting the 10 units will here be inseparable from that of the other being around and getting nothing, and this may cloud our judgement about the intrinsic value of the former state.

9 ‘P5: Negative desert mitigates the intrinsic badness of pain’ (578) must be qualified in the same way as P1, whereas P6 will have to go by the board like P3.

10 Many thanks to Erik Carlson and Fred Feldman for very helpful comments.