In Well-Being and Death, Ben Bradley rigorously defends a number of interesting and controversial theses about death and well-being. In chapter 1, he defends hedonism, arguing that pleasure is the only thing that contributes to a person's well-being. His defense is both new and interesting, and I'll talk about it in greater detail below.
In chapter 2, Bradley argues that the overall value of an event for a person is the difference it makes to how things go for that person. Thus, we must compare how things went with how things would have gone. Since this involves an appeal to a counterfactual, and since Bradley opts for the Lewis–Stalnaker account of counterfactuals in which we determine what would have happened had some actual event not occurred by considering what would have happened in the closest (i.e. the most similar) possible word in which that event does not occur, the overall value of any event (including death) is relative to a similarity relation. And since no particular similarity relation is privileged, there is no unequivocal, context-invariant answer as to whether, or to what extent, a given death (or other event) is bad for a person.
In chapter 3, Bradley argues against the widespread assumption that dead people do not have a well-being level. He argues instead that their well-being level is zero. And this allows him to hold that, even though death marks the end to a person's existence, death is bad for a person at times after her death – specifically, at all those times at which she would have otherwise been living well.
In chapter 4, Bradley argues that the death of a newborn infant is typically worse than that of a young adult, arguing that the badness of death does not depend ‘on the psychological features of the victim at the time of death (e.g., her ability to conceive of her future), or on facts about psychological unity’ (p. 177). He thereby argues against Jeff McMahan's influential time-relative interest account.
Lastly, in chapter 5, Bradley argues that how bad death is for a person depends only on what it deprives her of and not at all on what had gone before and, thus, not at all on whether, say, she lived a full life or completed her life's work.
Many of the views that Bradley argues for are, at first blush, implausible, but Bradley nevertheless makes a compelling case for most of them. Bradley comes to these controversial views by starting with a handful of core insights and following them wherever they lead. He eschews any ‘accretions or modifications that would give the appearance of ad hoccery in order to satisfy intuitions about particular cases’ (p. xx). In this way, Bradley arrives at his views about death and well-being in much the same way that act-utilitarians arrive at their views about morality. Whether you are likely to find Bradley's arguments persuasive will, I think, depend in large part on whether you share Bradley's penchant for simple theories as well as his willingness to countenance the counterintuitive implications that such simple theories typically enjoin. Of course, even if you don't share Bradley's proclivities, you should definitely read his book, for, like hedonistic act-utilitarianism, Bradley's view is a worthy contender and a useful foil. His arguments for them are clever, subtle, and often persuasive. And, as he shows, their more complex rivals often have counterintuitive implications of their own.
Although I think highly of the general quality of the book, it's not surprising that I find some of its arguments wanting. I'll focus here on some of my worries about the first chapter. In chapter 1, Bradley defends hedonism indirectly, by arguing that the leading alternatives are unacceptable. One leading alternative, the one that I favor, is pluralism. According to this view, there are other things besides pleasure (e.g. achievement) that contribute to a person's well-being. Bradley raises three main objections to this view.
First, he claims that pluralism is objectionably arbitrary. All that he says in support of this is that, no matter what's on the pluralist's list of things that contribute to a person's well-being, we can always ask: ‘Why should these things be on the list? What do they have in common?’ (p. 16). It's unclear, though, how the mere fact that we can ask such questions shows that pluralism is objectionably arbitrary. Clearly, Bradley must think that the pluralist is unable to provide any answers.
But here's a suggestion on how the pluralist might attempt answering such questions. It involves an appeal to a formal account of well-being, which is to be distinguished from a substantive account of well-being. Whereas the latter tells us what kinds of things contribute to a person's well-being, the former tells us what the contribute-to-a-person's-well-being relation is – that is, it's an analysis of well-being. On one formal account of well-being (one suggested to me by my colleague Peter de Marneffe), to say that p contributes to S's well-being is just to say that the fact that p is itself a good reason to feel glad for S. If this is right, then the pluralist can say that what explains why, say, achievement but not desire satisfaction goes on the list is that the fact that S has achieved something, but not the fact that S's desire has been satisfied, is a good reason to feel glad for S. Of course, the specifics here are controversial, but I mean only to illustrate how the pluralist might go about answering Bradley's questions.
Second, Bradley argues that we should reject pluralism, because pluralists often refuse to tell us how to weigh the various things on their lists. They refuse, for instance, to tell us how to compare the effect that pleasure has on a person's well-being with the effect that, say, achievement has on her well-being. Bradley claims that this refusal amounts to a refusal to theorize about well-being. But, as Simon Keller argues in ‘Welfare and Achievement of Goals’ (2004), well-being may not be a unitary concept like height or mass. It might instead be like fitness. Suppose that you can lift more than I can, but that I can run further than you can. Perhaps, all we can say, then, is that you are fitter in one respect (i.e. strength) and that I'm fitter in another (i.e. endurance). There may be no further fact as to which of us is fitter overall. Well-being might be the same way. Suppose that your life is more pleasurable than mine but that mine contains more achievement than yours. Perhaps, all we can say, then, is that you're better-off in one respect and that I'm better-off in another. There may be no further fact as to which of us is better-off overall.
It would be interesting, I think, if theorizing about well-being led us to conclude that well-being is more like fitness than mass in this way. And, having arrived at this conclusion, I don't see how a refusal to say how we're supposed to weigh the various things on the list constitutes our refusal to theorize about well-being.
Third, Bradley argues that insofar as pluralists include things such as achievement or desire satisfaction on their lists, their views will succumb to his objections against what he calls ‘correspondence theories’, theories that hold that the value atoms include some propositional attitude (e.g. desiring or pursuing) along with its proposition being true. One of his main objections to such theories is that they paradoxically imply that ‘there will be some cases in which a person's life goes well if and only if it does not go well’ (p. 30). These are cases in which, say, the person desires to be badly-off or pursues as her sole project that her life goes badly. However, contrary to Bradley's suggestion, not all correspondence theories have such paradoxical implications. Consider the view according to which the degree to which a particular pain is bad for its subject depends not only on its phenomenological qualities, but also on whether it has been suffered in vain. Let's suppose that, to the extent that some pain was endured in pursuit of a goal that was successfully achieved, it is partially redeemed and is, thereby, made correspondingly less bad. So long as the successful achievement of a goal can never make such pains neutral in value but can only make them less disvaluable, this view will avoid the above paradoxical implication. For even if a person suffers some pain for the sake of achieving her goal of ruining her life, and even if she succeeds in achieving this goal, there is no implication that her life will thereby be made not bad at all. All that the success entails is that the pain suffered is not as bad as it would have been had it been suffered in vain, not that it's of neutral or positive value. Now, I'm not claiming that this view is particularly plausible, but it illustrates that Bradley's objection doesn't necessarily apply to all correspondence theories, and there are, I believe, plausible correspondence theories in the neighborhood of this one – see, for instance, the view that I defend in ‘Welfare, Achievement, and Self-Sacrifice’ (2007).
Although I find some of Bradley's arguments wanting, I find many of them persuasive and all of them worth thinking about. Clearly, the book makes an important contribution to the literature, carving out a number of new and interesting positions. It is, I believe, essential reading for anyone interested in philosophical issues concerning death and well-being. I recommend it highly.
