I. Introduction
In his critique of egoism as a doctrine of ends, G. E. Moore famously challenges the idea that something can be “good for” someone.Footnote 1 Moore asks, “In what sense can a thing be good for me? It is obvious, if we reflect, that the only thing which can belong to me, which can be mine, is something which is good, and not the fact that it is good. When therefore, I talk of anything I get as ‘my own good,’ I must mean either that the thing I get is good, or that my possessing it is good.”Footnote 2 As Moore's remarks indicate, the notion of “my own good” strikes him as strangely proprietary; and, as he goes on to argue, its proprietary nature precludes it from being normative. In this respect, Moore appears to have found the expression ‘good for me’ akin to the peculiar expression ‘true for me.’Footnote 3 Just as the latter expression suggests a kind of truth that the individual herself could have exclusive reason to believe, so the former expression suggests a kind of value that the individual herself could have exclusive reason to promote, and that, Moore evidently thought, would be no kind of value at all. As Moore expresses it, “the only reason I can have for aiming at ‘my own good’ is that it is good absolutely that what I so call should belong to me…. But if it is good absolutely that I should have it, then everyone else has as much reason for aiming at my having it, as I have myself.”Footnote 4 The expression ‘good for me,’ insofar as it denotes something normative, must simply be a convoluted way of saying that my possessing a thing is good tout court.
Moore's challenge to the notion of “my own good” has implications not just for egoism, of course, but for the very idea of individual welfare, at least insofar as the idea of welfare or good for a person signifies something more than that the thing a person gets is good or that the state of her possessing it is good.Footnote 5 Insofar as it does have implications for the notion of individual welfare, Moore's challenge presents a problem not only for welfare consequentialism, the dominant contemporary rival to his own “ideal” utilitarianism, but for any theory of ethics that assigns us a duty to promote individual welfare.Footnote 6 The challenge might fairly be understood as partly normative, at least in its implications, for ontology circumscribes obligation, but it is, at its core, metaphysical. If Moore is right, the notion of a person's “own good” or what is “good for her” reflects a fundamental error about the sorts of value properties that exist, and, as a consequence, no plausible objectivism about ethics could be welfarist, at least not in the welfarist's sense.
Moore's argument has recently been revived in a way that makes explicit the broader challenge it poses to the notion of welfare or good for a person. Donald Regan, a largely unreconstructed Moorean, elaborates on Moore's argument, employing it, as he says, to “cast doubt on a proposition which many people would regard as the first axiom of moral theory,” namely, that morality is fundamentally concerned with advancing the welfare or well-being of individuals.Footnote 7 Regan claims we have no need of the notion of well-being or good for a person, which, so far as he can see, captures nothing not already captured by Moore's idea of good possessed by a person, or as Regan prefers to describe it, good occurring in a person's life. I will here follow Regan in referring to theorists who treat being good for a person, or being good for P, as a distinct normative property, and who may give normative primacy to individual welfare or personal good, as “good-for theorists,” and I will frequently refer to Mooreans as “good theorists,” which is not, I hasten to add, to endorse Regan's view.Footnote 8
Regan makes clear that in denying the distinctness and normative primacy of good for, he does not mean to deny that we ought to be concerned with what goes on in one another's lives. Moreover, he remarks more than once that the Moorean concept of intrinsic value may well encompass everything encompassed by the good-for theorist's concept of welfare: the best account of the good, he assures us, will likely include whatever is plausibly the good for individuals, even if it includes a good bit more than this.Footnote 9 The question that interests him is why we ought to be concerned with what goes on in one another's lives. As he expresses it, “I do not ask, like Cain, whether I am my brother's keeper,” but, rather, “why [I am] my brother's keeper.”Footnote 10 The good-for theorist, he maintains, can offer no coherent answer, not one, at least, that does not rest on a prior Moorean conception of value that renders good for otiose. “So far as I can see,” Regan tells us, “well-being as a normative concept does not figure in the best account of why we are obligated to care about what happens in others' lives (or, for that matter, in our own).”Footnote 11
One might be tempted to dismiss the broader challenge. Whatever the merits of Moore's criticism when directed against egoism, one might argue, it ought not to lead us to abandon common sense.Footnote 12 After all, what could be more obviously true than that things can be good or bad, not merely in an absolute sense, but for us? What could be clearer than that our lives can go better or worse, not just, to borrow Henry Sidgwick's memorable phrase, from the point of view of the universe, but from our point of view? Yet as clear and obvious as this may be, I feel the pull of Regan's rhetoric when he virtually dares the good-for theorist to pony up and offer a genuine analysis of welfare, or at least some story that would vindicate being good for P as a normative concept or property distinct from being good. A striking feature of the rather extensive literature on welfare is, as Regan rightly emphasizes, how little in the way of analysis good-for theorists provide. As far as I have been able to discover, no real effort has been expended trying to explain, as Regan puts it, what the “for” is doing in the notion of “good for,” or for that matter, what the “good” is doing.Footnote 13
In this essay, I want to explore what I will from here on call the “Moorean challenge,” focusing exclusively on Regan's recent and more extensive presentation and development of it.Footnote 14 I am interested in this challenge for several reasons, two of which I want to mention from the start. First, although much has been written about welfare or personal good, we still lack a fully adequate theory, and the Moorean's claims provide a useful entry into the question of how to understand the basic normative idea of something's being good for a person.Footnote 15 Second, if objectivism or realism about ethics is true, then our most immediate access to ethical facts, I suspect, is likely to be our access to facts about individual welfare. Ask any parent raising a child or any person engaged in caring for an infirm parent or an ailing partner what he or she is doing—anyone who does these things without ulterior motive, that is—and however skeptical they may otherwise be about morality, they will tell you that they are looking out for their child's or parent's or partner's interests. Ask any person planning a life for herself why she seeks what she does—any person whose choices rest not on avowed self-sacrifice, that is—and she will likely report not merely that she finds those undertakings or pursuits interesting, challenging, important, or valuable but that she believes they suit her and that engagement with them will enable her to lead a happy life.Footnote 16 If normative facts exist, I conjecture, they get their first grip on us in relation to those we love, including ourselves.Footnote 17 If these conjectures are correct, then making sense of good for will be important to vindicating a plausible objectivism.
Before turning to Regan's arguments, I want to note that some philosophers have argued for a position that is the direct inverse of Regan's, namely, that nothing is good simply, things can only be good for or good in a way. Footnote 18 A few have evidently claimed, even more stringently, that nothing can be good unless it is good for someone. Footnote 19 The welfare theorist need not go so far. On the contrary, she can allow that even if good for turns out to have normative priority from the moral point of view, some states are simply good and so ought, other things equal, to be promoted.
My aim in this essay is certainly not to argue either that nothing can be good unless it is good for or that good for is less epistemically and metaphysically problematic than Moorean good.Footnote 20 Instead, my aim will be, in the first instance, to explicate the Moorean challenge, the better to clear away certain confusions. Moore, and Regan following him, and no doubt other neo-Mooreans besides, maintain that good is unanalyzable. One could take the position that good for P, too, is unanalyzable, and if that is right, then making out that being good for P is a distinct normative property cannot require that one provide an analysis of it.Footnote 21 I am not inclined to think that good for P is unanalyzable, and, indeed, I have made preliminary efforts at an analysis elsewhere.Footnote 22 What I hope to do here is to provide an account of the form and function of good for P, with the aim of characterizing the distinct normative property that apparently figures in talk about a person's good. The account will elucidate what ordinary good-for talk is about, while making sense of what must arguably be common ground among good-for theorists, regardless of whether they think being good for P is analyzable and regardless of the form of analysis they might favor. I cannot make a complete case for good for, of course, any more than the good theorist can make a complete case for good. I shall not, in any event, be concerned to defend the “axiom” at which Regan takes aim. My interest lies in clarifying our theoretical alternatives so that we might better decide what to admit into our moral ontology and better assess what may be at stake in whether objectivists treat good or good for as fundamental.
II. The Moorean Challenge
The Moorean challenge is best understood, I believe, on the model of J. L. Mackie's skeptical critique of objective values.Footnote 23 Recall that Mackie did not challenge our ordinary understanding of what our normative sentences mean or our understanding of the truth conditions for those sentences. On the contrary, he allowed that we intend to talk about objectively prescriptive properties and that our utterances would express truths about the instantiation of just those properties, if only there were any.Footnote 24
The good theorist likewise does not challenge our understanding of what our sentences mean (of what we intend by our utterances) when we talk, as we so commonly do, about what is good for people. At least, the good theorist is not best understood as challenging our understanding of what we mean. After all, ordinary speakers are presumably competent with both the concepts good and good for. When we talk about what is good for someone, we fully intend, as the good theorist recognizes, to talk about people's welfare, and the sentences we utter in so doing are best understood as expressing propositions about people's welfare, not propositions about the good. The good theorist is also not best understood as challenging our understanding of the truth conditions for our claims about what is good for people.Footnote 25 When we assert the sentence
(a) “X is good for P”
we express the proposition
(b) X is good for P,
which is presumably true if and only if
(c) X is good for P.
It might seem that because the good theorist believes that the only truths about value are truths about the good, we must understand his challenge differently. The good theorist must instead be claiming that proposition (b) is true if and only if
(d) X is good,
or perhaps that (b) is true if and only if, to adopt Moore's other phrasing,
(e) P's possessing X is good.
Given the platitude that
(f) The proposition that p is true if and only if p,
this understanding of the challenge would have the Moorean rejecting the disquoted truth condition, and so accusing us of being confused about the truth conditions for our own claims.Footnote 26 Alternatively, the good theorist must be accusing us of repeatedly misspeaking. We mean to say “X is good,” which expresses the proposition X is good, and is true if and only if X is good; or we mean to say “P's possessing X is good,” which expresses the proposition P's possessing X is good, and is true if and only if P's possessing X is good. But we continually slip and say “X is good for P.”
Putting to one side any difficulties internal to these understandings of the Moorean challenge, what is important for present purposes is that either understanding would fail to capture the Moorean's claim to be baffled as to what we could be talking about when we talk about what is good for an individual. Were we simply confused about the truth conditions for our own claims, the correct truth conditions being ones the Moorean well understands, or were we merely misspeaking, our slips being easily identified and corrected, there would be nothing to baffle the Moorean. We intend to talk about what is good for P, and we take the judgment that X is good for P to be true if and only if X is good for P. This is what the Moorean finds unintelligible.
The good theorist surely means to make a claim about the normative facts: just as Mackie's more general challenge seeks to call into doubt the existence of objectively prescriptive properties, so the Moorean challenge seeks to call into doubt the existence of a distinct normative property of being good for P. Of course, we talk as if there were such a distinct property—ordinary normative discourse is littered with claims about what is good for us, quite apart from claims about the goodness or value of states of affairs. The good theorist argues, in effect, that we are in error. Obviously, the good theorist cannot endorse a global error theory; rather, he advances a local error theory with respect to good for.
A. The anti-good-for argument
The good theorist's “anti-good-for argument” can be presented more formally as follows:
(1) The sentence “X is good for P” expresses the proposition X is good for P, which is true if and only if X has the property of being good for P.
(2) There is no such property as being good for P.
(3) So there are no facts about what is good for P.
(4) Therefore, all sentences of the form “X is good for P” are, strictly speaking, not true.
This much gets us to the good theorist's negative conclusion with respect to good for. Of course, as we have already seen, the good theorist does not maintain that we point to nothing real when we mistakenly talk as if there were good-for facts. We can, accordingly, understand the argument to continue as follows:
(5) There is, however, an absolute or monadic property good.
(6) Moreover, this monadic property can be instantiated by things that P possesses, or by P's possessing X, or by things that occur within the life of P.
(7) Therefore, among the truths about value are truths of the form
X is good and possessed by P,
P's possessing X is good, and
X is good and occurs in the life of P.
(8) The only truths about value and persons that approximate to what we might mean to express by utterances of the form, X is good for P, are in fact truths of the form
X is good and possessed by P,
P's possessing X is good, and
X is good and occurs in the life of P.
(9) Therefore, if we are to speak truly and precisely about value and persons, we should make only judgments of the form
X is good and possessed by P,
P's possessing X is good, and
X is good and occurs in the life of P.Footnote 27
Having presented his negative case and offered his alternative formulations, the good theorist argues, in short, that either the predicate “is good for” denotes nothing at all or it denotes “good.” From here on, I will focus on the formulation “X is good and occurs in the life of P” or good occurring in the life of P. I do so not merely because that is the formulation Regan adopts but because I believe that the best construal of it likely provides the best construal of the other formulations as well.
Now we will want to be careful in how we understand step 9 of the anti-good-for argument. The good theorist need not be understood as advocating that we purge ordinary discourse of good-for talk (as if we could do that), or even (more realistically) that we theorists refrain from such talk. After all, the good theorist's point concerns the facts, and so long as we keep ourselves straight about those, the good theorist can allow that no harm need come from our continuing to use good-for talk as shorthand for his more accurate but awkward locutions.Footnote 28
I want to focus on two steps in the argument—steps 2 and 8. I will consider step 8 in Section III below, but I will begin, here, with step 2. Why, according to Regan, should we doubt that there is any such property as being good for P? Regan argues that good for is a chimera in the classical sense, a fiction cobbled together from not merely incongruous but, in this case, contradictory elements.Footnote 29
Regan relies on certain critical assumptions in setting out his argument. He assumes that when something is good simpliciter, we are required to care about it: a reason exists to care about it and to promote it.Footnote 30 The reason in play is an external, agent-neutral reason, so the “we” means just what it says: any agent should care about and, ceteris paribus, promote something insofar as it is good. As Regan acknowledges, some will reject his externalism about reasons, insisting that an agent has a reason to care about and promote something only insofar as she takes an interest in it.Footnote 31 For purposes of the present discussion, however, we can grant Regan his assumptions. Even if the good-for theorist believes that an individual's good gives him agent-relative reasons, she can allow that it also gives him—and anyone else—agent-neutral reasons. We needn't worry here about whether such reasons are also, strictly speaking, external reasons. The main point is that the good-for theorist can and should concede that it would rob personal good of the possibility of any important place in moral theory if facts about what is good for a person only provided agent-relative reasons.Footnote 32 Ordinary ethical thought, in any case, arguably does not treat personal good as purely prudential and normatively agent-relative; and so the good-for theorist would, in my view, make a mistake in treating it as such, at least insofar as she means to capture the notion of good for that figures so prominently in our everyday lives. From the standpoint of moral theorizing, if we suppose that ordinary ethical thought affords some insight into morality, moral theory must be responsive to it, whether or not, in the end, moral theory properly gives primacy to good for.Footnote 33
I want to emphasize that in granting, for purposes of argument, that when something is good we have agent-neutral reason to promote it, I do not take myself to be granting anything special about good. Saying that when something is good we have reason to promote it is, I would argue, just a way of indicating that good is normative. But so are right and ought. And so, the good-for theorist wants to insist, is good for, as Regan well recognizes.
B. The dilemma argument
Which brings us to Regan's argument. The notion of good for, Regan evidently thinks, combines incompatible ideas: the concept of good, of something normative, something that makes a claim on any individual, and an unexplained “for,” which involves a restriction to the individual that undercuts that universal claim. As a consequence, Regan maintains, the good-for theorist faces a dilemma.Footnote 34
On one horn of the dilemma, she can concede that ‘good for’ merely denotes what the Moorean's ‘good occurring in the life of’ denotes. That would allow the good-for theorist to retain the claim that when X is “good for” P, a reason exists for anyone to care about and promote X for P. After all, promoting X for P would just be one part of promoting the good simpliciter, which, according to the Moorean, is precisely what is to be promoted. But it would amount to acknowledging that being good for P is not a distinct normative property, or as Regan puts it, “That would amount to abandoning ‘good for’ as an independent concept.”Footnote 35
On the other horn of the dilemma, the good-for theorist can deny that good for is simply good occurring in the life of, aiming to maintain being good for P as an independent concept or distinct normative property. But Regan contends that if the good-for theorist takes this approach, she must give up her claim that welfare or good for is normative, because she must give up the claim that the fact that something is good for someone provides reasons for anyone, not merely for the individual whose good is in question.Footnote 36 If X is good for P, P may have a reason to promote or obtain X, but no one else has a reason to promote or obtain X for P.
I believe the confusions alluded to earlier (in Section I) lie precisely in Regan's reasons for drawing the conclusion that being good for P cannot be both a concept or property distinct from good and a normative concept or property. In fairness to Regan, though, this is also precisely where the good-for theorist needs to do some serious theoretical work. What Regan thinks is that if being good for P is to be a concept or property independent of good, it must involve a relativization not merely of the sort involved in talking about the good that occurs relative to one life or another, but a relativization of goodness—of the normativity—itself. As Regan expresses it, “The good for Abel must be peculiarly Abel's—the goodness or the value must be peculiarly Abel's—in a way that the mere occurrence of universal good in Abel's life does not necessarily satisfy. But if the good for Abel is peculiarly Abel's—if its value is somehow essentially a value for Abel—then why indeed should Cain care? We think there is a deep connection between value and reasons. That suggests precisely that if the good for Abel is a matter only of value for Abel, then it creates reasons for Abel, and for no one else.”Footnote 37 The Moorean idea of good occurring in the life of does not, Regan claims, face a similar difficulty: “If the ‘for’ means ‘occurring in the life of’, this gives us an empirical relativization to the agent, but the normativity involved is still the universal normativity of ‘good’.”Footnote 38
It is understandable why Regan thinks that good for involves a relativization of goodness or normativity. As I have already noted, good-for theorists say little that would explain what the ‘for’ or the ‘good’ in ‘good for’ means, and in the absence of an alternative explanation, Regan's thought seems natural enough. Moreover, theories of welfare—hedonistic theories, desire theories, and even Wayne Sumner's authentic happiness theory—have tended to be subjectivist.Footnote 39 (The objective list theory and Stephen Darwall's recent rational care theory stand out partly because they are exceptions to the dominant subjectivist trend.)Footnote 40 Regan rightly questions (for example, in discussing Sumner's theory) whether an individual's (subjectivist) good could provide any agent other than the individual herself with a reason. After all, according to Sumner, if an individual is satisfied, say, with a life of self-flagellation, then so long as her satisfaction is informed and autonomous, her welfare lies in self-flagellation.Footnote 41 Perhaps we should concede that such an individual herself has reason to pursue her heart's desire, Regan would allow (though he sometimes appears to doubt that welfare claims yield even agent-relative reasons); but surely, he would insist, we have no reason to promote her enjoyment of this (worthless) endeavor.
Contrary to what Regan claims, however, the concept of being good for P does not involve a relativization of normativity or goodness, or so I will suggest. If we can sensibly wonder whether we have reason to promote a person's good as some theory of welfare construes it, then we should doubt the adequacy of that theory, rather than the coherence of something's being good for a person. Regan claims that unless the ‘for’ in ‘good for’ signals a relativization of normativity, good for cannot be distinct from good, though, of course, it is just this relativization that would prevent judgments about what is good for a person from making a claim on agents other than the individual herself. But this is incorrect. After all, we have a number of other terms—for example, ‘right,’ ‘ought,’ and ‘rational’—each of which expresses universal normativity, while also expressing a property distinct from good.
How, then, should we understand good for? What the Moorean seems to imagine when he criticizes the good-for theorist's position is that the latter's good-for judgments must concern a relational complex, X is good for P, with the following structure: X has the monadic property good, but this goodness, or perhaps X's being good, stands in a (curious) for relation to P. If this were so, then we could begin to see why the Moorean would find talk about what is good for someone unintelligible. The line of thought seems to be that insofar as X has the property good, X is good for P provides agent-neutral reasons, but insofar as the for relation relativizes the normativity or goodness to P, X is good for P provides only agent-relative reasons. Hence, good for is incoherent, combining as it does these incompatible elements; and being good for P lacks normativity, because being a normative property just is being a property facts about the instantiation of which provide agent-neutral reasons.Footnote 42
In my view, this line of thought misconstrues good-for judgments. The relational complex, X is good for P, does not include the monadic property good at all. Instead, it includes the relational property is good for P: it has X and P as relata and is good for as a dyadic relation.Footnote 43 We should not be misled by the fact that the word ‘good’ occurs as part of the name of the relation expressed by ‘is good for.’ We should not be misled here anymore than we should be misled by occurrences of the word ‘good’ in judgments of instrumental value. Consider the sentence, “A hammer is good for driving nails into wood.” Surely no one supposes that the proposition expressed by that sentence concerns a relational complex with this structure: A hammer has the property good—the property Moore deemed the central subject matter of ethics—and stands in an instrumental for relation to driving nails.Footnote 44
As an initial matter, then, good for does not involve a relativization of goodness or normativity. Good for P is not goodness relative to P but a distinct relational value.Footnote 45 Of course, simply to assert, as I have thus far, that good for is not as the Moorean thought only gets us so far in addressing the Moorean challenge. My claim responds to a certain argument for the charge that good for is a chimera—a cobbling together of incompatible elements—by offering a diagnosis of the mistake behind that charge. Still, one can reasonably demand a positive alternative to the view I have claimed is mistaken. The good-for theorist needs to say more to make it plausible that being good for P is a fully normative property distinct from being good.
III. Relational Good
Recall Regan's conjecture that on the best theory of the good, the notion of good occurring in the life of an individual will likely pick up every plausible good for. If the extension of good encompasses the good for, then it might seem not to matter whether being good for P is a distinct normative property, as the good-for theorist maintains. But of course, as Regan stresses, the question is not whether but why I am my brother's keeper. Even if the good theorist can pick up all the good fors that may be of practical, normative concern to the good-for theorist, he will not thereby have succeeded in answering Regan's question. The good-for theorist could still be right in thinking that talk about what is good for someone concerns a distinct normative property.
Now I agree with Regan that once we get to this stage in the debate, it is hard to come up with decisive arguments for one side or the other. He remarks:
[W]e are approaching the point, if we are not there already, where the extensions of the Moorean's ‘good’ and the ‘good for’ theorist's ‘good for’ are effectively indistinguishable. In such a situation we will not be able to decide between the concepts by adducing counterexamples to one theory or the other—states or events which the proponents of one theory can claim the other theory attaches the wrong valence to. What we need is conceptual arguments, but it is not easy to find arguments that have any purchase on such a fundamental disagreement.Footnote 46
Regan does offer a conceptual argument for the Moorean view—an unsuccessful one, I believe—which I will touch on briefly toward the end of this essay.
One consideration might seem, at the outset, to favor the good-for theorists' position. As a matter of ordinary observation, different items, activities, undertakings, and relationships seem to suit or fit different individuals, and they do so in such a way that some (and not others) at least appear, intuitively, to benefit those individuals. But the Moorean presumably recognizes something close to this thought, for he will surely acknowledge that certain goods can “occur in” some individuals' lives but not in others. The good that consists in the pleasurable experience of playing a piano sonata will occur in the life of the person capable of playing the piano and of taking pleasure in playing it, but not in the life of the person who lacks either the ability to play or to appreciate classical music. Thus, the debate seems even more intractable than Regan suggests: not only might good and good for share an extension, but, at a more theoretical level, the good theorist and good-for theorist can each apparently account for key features of our experience.
These considerations suggest a different obstacle to recognizing being good for P as a distinct normative property. Normative concepts figure, in differing and characteristic ways, in the regulation of attitude and action. One reason to doubt the existence of a supposed normative property would be if that property (or the concept of it) seemed to have no distinctive normative role to play. But this, the good theorist might suggest, is precisely the case with good for. Even if the concept of being good for P is not incoherent, why believe there is such a relational property as being good for P when all the normative work is apparently already done by good (occurring in the life of)?Footnote 47 I want to approach this question from two directions: the first returns us to step 8 of the “anti-good-for argument” (discussed above in Section II.A) and involves thinking about what is picked up by good for that might be missed by good occurring in the life of; the second involves, much more briefly, thinking directly about the normative role apparently played by good for. As I will try to show, contrary to what Regan claims, the Moorean's good and good for are not “effectively indistinguishable,” and we can shed light on the distinctness of good for by attending to its special—and pervasive—normative role.
A. Good for versus good occurring in a life
Regan claims to find deeply puzzling the ‘for’ in ‘good for P,’ and I have undertaken to address his perplexity. But I want to register my own puzzlement as to what could be meant by such expressions as ‘good possessed by P’ and ‘good occurring in the life of P.’ It would be a mistake, in my view, to think that good for is problematic in a way that good occurring in the life of is not. So the question with which I want to begin is this: What might be missing from good occurring in the life of P that is captured by good for P?
Suppose that a new parent approaches you, a seasoned parent, and asks for advice about child-rearing. You begin to advise him about how to discern and promote what is good for his child. He stops you short and says, “Now wait a minute, I'm a Moorean. Believe me, I love my child every bit as much as the next parent, but I'm not interested in what is ‘good for her.’ In fact, I don't understand this ‘good for’ talk. I'm interested in promoting good occurring in her life.” You would no doubt be puzzled, and calling attention to this fact is meant to stress a point made earlier in passing, that common sense is on the good-for theorist's side. Of course, common sense might be confused, but it might instead be tracking a species of value omitted from the Moorean picture, and it is this species of value that the good-for theorist presumably seeks to investigate.
So what advice might you offer if you wanted to answer the Moorean parent in terms he would find intelligible? To figure this out, we first need to understand the Moorean notion of good occurring in the life of, and for this, we need a working account of the good. Moore himself famously thought that many things are good, although the greatest goods are certain “organic unities.” As Moore explains,
there is … a vast number of different things, each of which has intrinsic value; there are also very many which are positively bad; and there is a still larger class of things which appear to be indifferent. But a thing belonging to any of these three classes may occur as part of a whole, which includes among its other parts other things belonging both to the same and to the other two classes; and these wholes, as such, may also have intrinsic value. The paradox, to which it is necessary to call attention, is that the value of such a whole bears no regular proportion to the sum of the values of its parts.Footnote 48
Moore contrasts the relation among parts of an organic unity with the relation between means and ends. A change of means would leave the intrinsic value of the end unchanged. In contrast, a change of any part would alter the intrinsic value of the whole or organic unity to which the part contributes, even if the part itself has no intrinsic value. Moore tells us that the relation between parts and whole is not causal.Footnote 49 Nor is it additive; the intrinsic value of the whole bears no regular relation to the sum of the values of its parts.Footnote 50 Otherwise, though he provides numerous examples, Moore says little to clarify the nature of organic unities, and, in fact, this is in keeping with his view of good as a simple, nonnatural, sui generis property.Footnote 51 No more can be said to explain why some items combine so as to produce value in excess of their value as parts than can be said to explain why good supervenes on some things rather than others.
I will return to the matter of organic unities later. For now, I want to focus on the fact that Moore allows that a variety of things individually have at least some intrinsic value. In particular, I want to make use briefly of one of Moore's more controversial claims about the value of an individual thing. Moore famously maintained that a beautiful object has at least some intrinsic value apart from consciousness of it, even if the value of the whole comprised of being conscious of a beautiful object far exceeds the value of the beautiful object alone.Footnote 52 In a thought experiment, intended as one part of his refutation of hedonism, Moore asks us to imagine two worlds, a beautiful world filled with mountains, sunsets, forests, waterfalls, and everything we most admire, and a filthy, garbage-strewn world filled with all manner of things we find utterly revolting. He asks us to imagine further that no one will be around to experience either world. Still, Moore asks, wouldn't it be rational to produce the former world rather than the latter? Moore thinks it would: the existence of the beautiful world is better in itself “quite apart from its effects on any human feelings.”Footnote 53 Although Moore maintained that ‘good’ expresses a simple, unanalyzable nonnatural property, he sometimes characterized being good as being such as “ought to be” or “ought to exist for its own sake.”Footnote 54 In concluding that the beautiful world is better in itself, Moore effectively concludes that it is such as ought to exist.
But now consider that you (and the rest of us) are about to be annihilated. You stand in the “Create-A-World” booth with two buttons on the panel in front of you. You push the button marked “beautiful,” and poof! There it is (and there we aren't). Only, as it turns out, this beautiful new world is not empty of human life—one person is in it, just one, and, indeed, as befits the world around her, she is a beautiful person, only she is endlessly sleeping. Now the question is whether beauty is occurring in her life. In one sense, the answer must be yes; after all, she's alive, beauty exists, and in the very time and place that she exists—it's all around her. If we are not prepared to say that the beauty of the world around her is occurring in her life, then at least we might be prepared to say that her own beauty is occurring in her life. And if Moore is right that beauty has at least some intrinsic value, that would seem to be good occurring in her life. Good occurs in the life of P when good occurs in the time and place in which P lives. Call this the time-and-place, or “TP,” characterization of good occurring in the life of.
If good occurring in a life required only spatiotemporal coincidence, then individuals could sleep through lives in which a good deal of good occurs, and this would have peculiar results for what we ought to do.Footnote 55 We ought, other things equal, to redecorate meticulously the rooms of the permanently comatose, pipe beautiful music into their rooms, send in the clowns. To be sure, we will promote more good by expending our energies elsewhere.Footnote 56 But the suggestion that we could have any reason to promote good occurring in the lives of the permanently comatose, at least in this sense, is dubious at best. If this were all the Moorean had in mind, then I think we could reasonably doubt that good occurring in a life makes a claim on us just as much as we can doubt that the self-flagellator's Sumnerian good for makes a claim on us. Good occurring in the life of P, in the bare sense sketched by TP, does not capture what the good-for theorist has in mind.
If coexistence in time and place, even to the extent of physical embodiment, is not enough for occurring in a life, what more is required? Suppose our sleeping beauty awakens, and she becomes conscious of the world she inhabits. The question is not whether her consciousness of her world introduces additional value.Footnote 57 The question is whether her consciousness of it is enough to make what she is conscious of “occur in her life,” so that if what she is conscious of is good, then there is “good occurring in her life.”Footnote 58 Consciousness might seem to be necessary. We think of the life of a person as something she lives, and not merely by being present, but by functioning as an agent. And so it would seem that for good, or anything else for that matter, to occur in her life, it has to be something that at least enters into her consciousness and in that way makes contact with her. Perhaps we should say, then, that good occurs in the life of P when good occurs in the time and place in which P lives and P is conscious of the occurrence. Call this characterization of good occurring in the life of the time-place-consciousness characterization, or “TPC.” We can imagine more stringent characterizations than TPC, depending on what P must be conscious of for good to occur in her life. But because it makes no difference to the arguments to come, let's leave as an open question whether P must be conscious merely of the occurrence of something that happens to be good or whether P must be conscious not merely of something's occurrence but of its good-making qualities or even of both those and its goodness.Footnote 59
At this point, I want to suggest, we can begin to see where the good theorist and the good-for theorist would part company. Of course, some good-for theorists might well say that TPC in fact captures all they ever meant to say when they talked about what is good for a person. Some who accept an objective list theory of welfare, for example, might take such a view. To my mind, however, if they do take that view, then they ought to be good theorists rather than good-for theorists, because they will have accepted a view that falls short of what I think good-for theorists must be tracking—or better, as we will see, attending to—in treating good for as distinct from good. So what does good occurring in the life of leave out that good for might capture? We should notice two points of divergence between good occurring in the life of, in the TPC sense, and good for.
First, not all good-for theorists believe that in order for something, X, to be good for P, its occurrence or existence must enter into P's consciousness. To take some stock examples, some have maintained that P could be benefited by posthumous fame or that P could be harmed by the betrayal of her faithless partner, even if she never learns of his or her faithlessness. Yet both those good-for theorists who allow for such good (and bad) fors and those who deny them, take themselves to be arguing about what is good for an individual, and so about where good for P is instantiated. If all that good-for talk were about was good occurring in the life of as prescribed by TPC, good-for theorists who do not accept a consciousness requirement would not be talking about good for, despite what they may think. These good-for theorists could be mistaken, but I do not think their position should be ruled out prior to our efforts to advance and assess analyses of good for P.
This first divergence might seem to suggest that the Moorean ought to have stuck with TP as a specification of what it is for good to occur in the life of someone. But even good-for theorists who reject a mental-state view of the good for would and should contend that TP does not capture all that is involved in being good for someone.Footnote 60 In any case, good and good for diverge in a second way, even if we suppose that goods must enter into consciousness to occur in a life.
Return to our beauty, who is now awake and conscious of the beautiful world she inhabits; add, if you like, that she is conscious of being conscious of beauty. Even if that were enough for good to occur in her life, it seems not enough, intuitively, for good for her to occur. We might cash out this intuition in various ways, and which way makes most sense bears on what a correct analysis of good for P would look like. Suppose she is conscious just as described, yet takes no pleasure in the beauty around her; it is a matter of indifference to her. Or suppose her apprehension of beauty, even if accompanied by immediate pleasure, is promptly followed by crippling prickly sensations or by an overwhelming sense of her own inadequacy that engenders suicidal ruminations. Examples like these suggest that TPC, with its consciousness condition, not only requires too much but too little. As I will try to explain, the problem is not simply that TPC is incomplete but that good occurring in the life of has entirely the wrong structure to get at what fundamentally concerns the good-for theorist.
In response to the first claimed divergence between good and good for, the good theorist might simply deny that good can occur in a life where P is not conscious of a good, even if good can also occur outside of a life. As for the cases in which our beauty apprehends beauty but takes no pleasure in it, or takes immediate pleasure promptly followed by physical or emotional suffering, good has not, in fact, occurred in her life; or, more precisely, in the latter cases, the good occurred fleetingly only to be overwhelmed by the bad. Such possibilities do not show, however, that the idea of good occurring in the life of misses something captured by good for; they merely indicate that we do not yet have the right account of the good.
As mentioned earlier, Regan himself thinks that the good is pleasurable experience of objectively appropriate activities. For Regan, then, the good consists in something like Moorean organic unities.Footnote 61 Of course, the mystery, on the Moorean picture, is just the one mentioned in passing in our earlier consideration of organic unities, namely, what explains the complexity: why do some things but not others hang together in such a way that good supervenes on them?
Regan considers a more specific version of the question, as it pertains to his own claims about the good. One might ask, he conjectures, whether by limiting the good to pleasurable experiences, the Moorean is not really concerned with good or value for the individual after all. “Why else should an experience of a beautiful sunset, or a great mathematical theorem, or a Bach cantata, need to be enjoyable in order to be valuable?” Regan responds:
I cannot answer this point fully here. The short answer is that what is really valuable (non-relatively) is the appreciative engagement of the subject with a worthy object. The subject's pleasure is relevant because pleasure is an inevitable concomitant, and therefore a sign, of the right sort of engagement. But it is the engagement of the subject and appropriate object that is valuable. To my mind, when there is the right sort of engagement, we could as well say that the value created is value ‘for’ the sunset, or the theorem, or the cantata, as insist that the value is ‘for’ the subject. The object of appreciation is brought to life by being attended to and appreciated. But in fact, the real value is neither ‘for’ the subject nor ‘for’ the object. The value is just there, in a whole to which both subject and object make an indispensable contribution.Footnote 62
As far as I can see, this response merely repeats in varying ways the Moorean position, without answering the underlying question. The idea of an object of appreciation being “brought to life” by being pleasingly appreciated seems to me a mere metaphor. As for the claim that we could just as much say that the right sort of engagement creates value for the sunset, this strikes me as exposing a dilemma for Regan. If the expression ‘value for’ has to be understood in the same way in connection with the sunset as it does in connection with a person, and it can only plausibly be understood as an abbreviated expression for good or value occurring in the life of, then value for the sunset would have to be value occurring in the life of the sunset. But what could this mean? Either good occurring in the life of amounts to something along the lines of TPC, in which case good cannot occur in the life of a sunset and thus be “for” the sunset, or good occurring in the life of is nothing but good, full stop, in which case Regan cannot plausibly claim that good occurring in the life of captures all that the good-for theorist could sensibly mean by good for, even if the good includes all good fors.
If Regan's response provides less illumination than we might have hoped, it nevertheless affords a very useful starting point for getting a clearer grip on the key differences between the pictures offered respectively by the good theorist and the good-for theorist. One difference concerns whether complexity or structure is to be found in substantive values or goods, or whether it is to be found in the value property itself. A view like that of Moore and Regan builds structure into its theory of the good leaving good itself a simple, unanalyzable nonnatural property. And, indeed, that goods have a complex structure seems the only thing that could give the good theorist a prayer of making good on the claim that the good will include any plausible good for. The good-for theorist, in contrast, finds structure in the value property. ‘Good for P’ expresses a kind of relational value, and to give an analysis of the relational property of being good for P—of welfare or well-being—is to give an analysis of a certain normative relation that holds between persons and other things.Footnote 63 Whether (and this is a point to which I will return briefly) those things are themselves good in something like the Moorean sense, whether, more precisely, they are intrinsically valuable, is a question about the good for rather than a question settled by the nature of the relational property.
In the case of both complex goods or organic unities and the good for, a relation of some sort holds between items. On Regan's view, the relation is between a worthy object or activity and a subjective response, one that fits or “brings to life” that object or activity. The subjective response is a “sign of” appropriate engagement, but we might say, more strongly, that it fits and completes the object or activity so as to produce a whole that is good. Although Regan says that what is “really valuable” is appreciative engagement with a worthy object, in calling objects worthy and activities objectively appropriate he must be supposing that such things have at least some intrinsic value. It's just that the values that are to be promoted are the wholes consisting of the worthy item or activity and the complementary response. It is important to be clear about the relata in the complex goods that constitute the to-be-promoted. Regan makes clear that he does not subscribe to the view that individuals have value.Footnote 64 The relata, then, are not the worthy object and the person herself but, rather, the worthy object and the appropriate response or engagement (pleasurable experience, in Regan's view, being an indicator thereof) that happens to be had by an individual. She figures in the mix, it seems, just because it is only agents who can respond in a fitting way to worthy objects or engage in objectively appropriate activities. When the relata are in place, the simple nonrelational property good supervenes, or, if you prefer, the predicate “good” applies.Footnote 65
What are the relata in the relation that is the focus of the good-for theorist? As I have already noted, good-for theorists have said extraordinarily little about this.Footnote 66 I believe, however, that the entire project of attempting to discern the elements of personal good or individual welfare rests on something like the following picture. For the good-for theorist, the relation of interest holds between a valuable being—a person or agent—and an object or activity or another being.Footnote 67 It might turn out that the only objects or activities that can stand in the good-for relation to a person are ones that are themselves worthy, but as far as I can tell, whether that is so is not settled by the very concept of personal good. The relata, then, are persons, valuable beings, and objects or activities or other beings that may or may not themselves be valuable. The question still to be answered by the good-for theorist concerns the nature of the relation that holds between these relata.
Another difference between the pictures offered by good and good-for theorists should, at this juncture, already be apparent: the relations respectively involved in the good and in good for involve differing directions of fit. For the good theorist, fit is object- or activity-directed—attitudes or responses are to fit worthy objects or appropriate activities. Certain responses are, we might say, “called for” by the nature of the valuable item and complete a valuable whole as to-be-promoted. For the good-for theorist, in contrast, fit is person- or agent-directed—items (valuable or not) are to fit or suit a valuable being—are “called for” by her nature—and so are to be promoted in relation to her.Footnote 68 The views differ, we might say, in what they deem to be the center of normative gravity.Footnote 69
Notice that this difference in the center of normative gravity tends to upend Regan's inquiry, or at least his framing of it. As he expresses it, his inquiry concerns not whether but why we are our brother's keeper. The good theorist, he claims, thinks that we ought to be concerned with what goes on in one another's lives, that we are our brother's keeper; he merely offers a different and, Regan thinks, better account of why we are our brother's keeper than the one offered by the good-for theorist. But now we can see that this is not, strictly speaking, true. Being concerned with what happens in our brother's life is not being concerned for our brother, and, indeed, if our brother is not himself valuable, such direct concern would appear to be misguided. On the good theorist's view, we never ought to act, to borrow Stephen Darwall's edifying formulation, for our brother's sake, but only for the sake of what goods may occur in his life. Our brother and his responses will be an “inevitable concomitant,” to be sure, and we cannot promote the good without supporting him as a part of that process, but if the question is whether I am my brother's keeper, the answer must be no. And so, contrary to Regan's framing of his inquiry, the question “Why am I my brother's keeper?” can never really arise for the good theorist.Footnote 70
The difference in what I have been calling the center of normative gravity reflects, in turn, a difference between two types of normative reasons, each of which has the universal normativity that Regan claims good has but that good for, if distinct from good, lacks. Some normative reasons derive from the value of worthy objects when appropriately appreciated or from the value of objectively worthwhile activities appropriately engaged in by an agent. Other normative reasons derive from the value of agents or persons themselves. The normative reasons provided by facts about what is good for a person are of the latter sort, and because the value of persons is an objective value, not a merely relative one, reasons deriving from what is good for a person are reasons for anyone.Footnote 71
These considerations point us to an important fact about the nature of good for that helps to make clear why the monadic property good is no proper part of good for P and that helps us to see what the ‘for’ is for. ‘Good for’ expresses a relation; the good for is a form of objective value. But whereas ‘good’ in the good theorist's scheme signals the intrinsic value of an item or whole, ‘good’ in the expression ‘good for’ does not signal the intrinsic value of the item deemed to stand in the good-for relation or to instantiate the relational property of being good for P. We can make the point clearer by reminding ourselves of an important distinction, to which Christine Korsgaard has called our attention, between two ways in which something can have value.Footnote 72 It can have intrinsic value, which is the value a thing has in itself, a value which has traditionally been taken to depend on a thing's intrinsic properties.Footnote 73 It can also have extrinsic value, or value that derives from some other source. Whereas the good theorist's good is intrinsic value, the good-for theorist's good for, although just as normative, is a kind of extrinsic value; the good for gives anyone a reason to act, but the source of the “good-for value” of any item that is good for a person is its relation to a being with value. Of course, an item with good-for value might also have intrinsic value, but that is not the sort of value our good-for talk concerns.Footnote 74
Although good for is a form of extrinsic value, we can still meaningfully distinguish between those extrinsically valuable things that are good for a person directly, or just in themselves, and those that are merely indirectly or instrumentally good for her.Footnote 75 Those things that are instrumentally good for her are those that are means to the things that are directly good for her. Those that are directly good for her are those that stand in a relation to her of the sort that the good-for theorist still needs to specify—those, we might say, that “fit” her. Insofar as these claims about the structure of the value tracked by our good-for talk are correct, the ‘good’ in ‘good for’ signals not intrinsic value but the existence of a reason for promoting or supporting X in relation to P. Again, the item in question might itself have intrinsic value, but the occurrence of ‘good’ in ‘good for’ does not signal the intrinsic value of that item.Footnote 76 So how should we understand the ‘for’? If ‘good for,’ in talk about what is good for a person, expresses a relation of “fit” between a person and some object, activity, or being, the ‘for’ indicates the direction of fit.Footnote 77 As a first approximation, I would suggest that when we say that X is good for P, we indicate that there is a reason to promote X with P as the beneficiary of the action in light of or out of regard for the value of P.
An analogy may help to shed light on the structure of the relational property of being good for P. Consider a valuable work of art—valuable aesthetically speaking, that is. When we appreciate the value of a work of art, or what we take to be a valuable work of art, we undertake to preserve it in its valuable condition. That will involve preserving not simply the features of it in virtue of which it is aesthetically valuable, but other features and surrounding conditions which may be necessary to preserve its overall condition. What this will require will vary, of course, with the sort of art work it is; preserving a marble sculpture will involve actions different from those involved in preserving a medieval fresco. Nevertheless, these undertakings have in common an orientation toward the valuable work of art.
Good for a person operates in a structurally similar way, presupposing the ethical value of persons. Of course, persons are not themselves “to be promoted”; we face no general duty to produce persons, as many believe we do to produce or bring about the good. Persons are, however, valuable in the sense that their nature renders them sources of a legitimate demand for our considerate and respectful treatment.Footnote 78 We perhaps most readily appreciate the value of persons in the context of personal affections, and we may be moved to act toward our intimates out of love or concern in precisely the ways we ought to act just out of a regard or respect for them as valuable beings. When we appreciate, and act out of regard for, the value of a person, we seek to preserve her condition as the valuable being she is. That will involve not simply attending to those features she shares with all persons and in virtue of which persons are valuable, but attending to her sundry other features and her circumstances, all of which may bear on what preserves, sustains, or nurtures her. What regard for a person will require will vary, at least in important ways, with the varying features and circumstances of different individuals. Nonetheless, as in the case of a valuable work of art, our orientation in considering what is good for a person is the person herself.
Let me quickly sum up the discussion thus far. Good-for value is relational, not relativist value.Footnote 79 It is objective in that it gives anyone a reason for action, though the good for might, for all that has been said herein, be otherwise subjective; perhaps the normative relation good for itself involves a mental-state requirement, or perhaps the relational property being good for P is instantiated only by items that produce particular mental states. Finally, good for is a form of extrinsic rather than intrinsic value.
B. The normative role of personal good
Peter Railton has observed, in developing his informed-desire account of good for a person, that our discourse includes alongside the language of the desired, wanted, or preferred, the language of the desirable, valuable, or good.Footnote 80 These discrete kinds of talk at least purport to do different work; in particular, talk of what is desirable or good purports to provide a critical stance on the merely desired or preferred. I think a like point can be made here. Our discourse includes alongside the language of what is good or valuable or worth wanting, the language of what is good for someone, what is in her interest, what is worth wanting or doing for her sake. These discrete kinds of talk at least purport to do different, if not unrelated, work. Our discourse thus itself provides prima facie evidence for the existence of distinct notions, doing distinct normative work.
What normative work might that be, in the case of good for? Assuming that ordinary ethical talk is a reliable guide, good for functions normatively in at least three ways. First, judgments about what is good for a person guide child-rearing. The vast bulk of what effective parents do in raising their children, including what they do in fostering their capacities as autonomous agents and bringing them into the moral community, aims to benefit their children, if not in the present moment, then over the course of a lifetime.Footnote 81 Second, good-for judgments guide individual decision-making with regard to how to build a life. Of course, in deciding what to pursue and how to live, we attend not merely to our desires but to what we believe to be of value and to “what we owe to each other,” to borrow Thomas Scanlon's apt expression.Footnote 82 But except where morality makes demands on us that require that we forgo a benefit, and except where an individual undertakes or is forced into a life of self-sacrifice, an individual rationally forms these judgments with an eye to her long-range happiness or life satisfaction. Finally, good-for judgments guide the setting of social policies. Indeed, their bearing on social policies is evident not only when it comes to questions of public health, education, and welfare, but even in the basic operation of the law, at least in places where the legal system takes seriously the value of persons.
The property of being good for a person, as I have characterized it, well matches the normative role of judgments about what is good for a person. Whether from the first-person or third-person standpoint, our focus in making these judgments is on the person herself and what preserves and advances her, presupposing her value and attending to the particulars of her nature and circumstances.
The good theorist's position, in denying the coherence of good for, is conspicuously at odds with the way we find it natural to talk and think about ourselves and others.Footnote 83 No parent, except perhaps someone like our bewildered Moorean parent, would say that he sees to his child's education because he seeks to bring about the valuable state of affairs that consists in his child's pleasurable appreciation of knowledge. A parent aims, in his child-rearing activities, not at the good but at what is good for his child—it is good for the child that she be educated; and he sees to her education, at least in the first instance, out of love and concern for her, not out of a concern for realizing value in the world.Footnote 84 That a parent aims at the good for his child rather than at the good simpliciter helps to explain why he focuses on his child and what happens to her in a way the Moorean might well regard as quite out of proportion to the overall good to be realized.Footnote 85 Vast swathes of our social lives, including family law, pediatric medicine, and primary and secondary education, reflect the parental orientation, with its focus on children and their welfare. Of course, a parent may, in aiming at what is good for his child, direct her toward what he thinks is good simply; but it is for the child's own sake that he wants her not to miss out on valuable pursuits; it is for her sake that he wants the valuable state of affairs that consists in her taking pleasure in learning to obtain. No person, except perhaps a Moorean, thinks of her quest for happiness as a quest to produce valuable states of affairs. A person aims, in seeking to lead a satisfying life, not to increase the quantity of value in the world but to enhance for her own sake the character and quality of her own passage through time. And this is so, even if she enhances her own life to a very large extent by engagement in activities that increase the amount of value in the world as well. Our tendency to talk as we do and to orient much of our thought and action around what benefits ourselves and others seems utterly natural and, for reasons I will suggest shortly, nearly inescapable.
One might be tempted to think that the good theorist will still routinely issue the prescriptions of a good-for theorist. After all, if, say, the pleasurable responses of individuals are constituents of any valuable whole, then producing the good will be pretty much all about promoting good occurring in the lives of individuals. And as a necessary means thereto, there must be functioning persons; so we will feed, educate, and heal in all the familiar ways. But good occurring in the life of is in fact not well suited to the normative role that good for plays. Even if, in order to promote the good for, we must preserve and promote persons as a necessary means thereto, there is no reason to think that would involve us in all that we ordinarily undertake on people's behalf. The difference in direction of fit between good and good for carries with it an orientation toward different ends, and thus a difference in what is treated as a means and what is treated as an end. What's more, because the preservation and promotion of persons must be fundamentally instrumental for the good theorist, he confronts, in principle, the trade-offs that give rise to familiar, vexing problems for utilitarianism. Why, for example, waste any resources on persons whose capacities are such that developing them promises to yield little in our efforts to promote the good?
IV. Agency and Value
Trade-offs of some sort there will inevitably be, of course, and so in making the foregoing claims, I do not mean to prejudge the question of the normative priority of good versus good for, though we can perhaps begin to see what may be at stake in how we settle the question. I have been aiming simply to make it plausible that ‘good for P’ expresses a distinct, fully normative property and so one with a legitimate place in our moral ontology, whether or not it gets pride of place.Footnote 86
Regan does, however, offer an argument to settle the question of normative primacy against good for and in favor of good. His argument appeals to a developmental story about agency. Regan's tale goes roughly as follows. We acquire our idea of value as a result of experiencing our own felt wants, desires, and needs. The origins of our idea of value may, in fact, explain why many are inclined, mistakenly, to think that “value must be relative to a valuing agent.”Footnote 87 But even if our ideas of value have their beginnings in our desires and needs, we can develop into complete and competent agents only insofar as we come to see that we must look beyond these inner drives in order to arrive at the whole truth about value, including the truth about value occurring in our lives. The development from our initial, inner promptings to a full understanding of value occurs incrementally. At first, we may experience problems of conflicting desires, and so we learn to restrain some desires in the interest of others. As a next or associated step, we may come to assess our lower-order desires from the standpoint of our higher-order desires. Ultimately, however, we will come to ask about the justifiability of our most fundamental desires and even our entire set of desires: are those desires “justified and directed at worthy ends”? Regan explains: “This is the step, raising what I have elsewhere called the ‘desire-transcending question,’ that makes us agents. When we ask this question, we are asking for a standard for our desires, a standard that cannot be grounded in our desires themselves…. [A]cknowledging this question and confronting it … is the crucial passage to agency.”Footnote 88
At the point at which we realize that we must “transcend our desires,” Regan asks, does an agent who is deliberating about what is to be promoted think in terms of good or good for?
So far as I can see, there is no reason why he should assume at this stage, when he first begins his survey of the world and his search for the to-be-promoted, that the to-be-promoted is necessarily limited to occurrences within people's lives—and even less reason why he should assume that the to-be-promoted is necessarily limited to occurrences within people's lives that might seem in some intuitive sense to involve benefit ‘for’ them. But these limitations are what would correspond to the claim that the question the agent asks himself should be understood as a question about the ‘good for’. If the agent does not begin with these a priori limitations, then we should understand him as asking about the ‘good’. Even if it turns out that ‘the good’ is entirely constituted by things in people's lives, and even things that might be thought of as ‘benefiting’ them in some sense, still, the agent's question is about ‘the good.’Footnote 89
Indeed, Regan claims, nothing would compel an agent “to attend to the fact of her own particularity as an agent.”Footnote 90
Although I am not convinced by all of Regan's developmental story, I see nothing in that story itself that a good-for theorist need deny.Footnote 91 The good-for theorist might well allow that we come to the idea of value through our own experiences of needing and wanting things, that we gradually come to restrain, assess, and, ultimately, seek full justification for our desires, as we develop into full-fledged agents. But if good for is as I have described it here, then full justification of an agent's desires will, in some instances, be provided by facts about her own good rather than facts about the good. What's more, the good-for theorist would remind us that Regan's developmental story, while acceptable as far as it goes, omits a critical part: namely, the process or activity of raising full-fledged agents, a process that requires that we attend not merely to the good but to the fledgling agents themselves.
Indeed, given the characterization of good for on offer here, we should expect that a fully developed agent's question regarding the to-be-promoted will largely concern the good for. To be sure, it need not, and should not, in the course of an ordinary human life, concern only her own good for. If she is to be a faithful friend, a loving partner, an effective parent, and a full participant in the moral community, she will inevitably ask how to promote not simply her own good and not even simply the good but also—and often—another's good. Nonetheless, as an agent, as a being with an interest in the “full truth about value,” the question of her own good cannot fail to press, and legitimately so. I would even be prepared to go further and say inescapably so; if she is to be able to function effectively as an agent in the first place, she must operate from a standpoint that presupposes and responds to her own value. I will not try to defend these stronger claims here, however.Footnote 92 Perhaps it is possible for a fully developed agent rationally and willingly to regard her life as a mere vessel of valuable states, and herself as merely a vassal of the good. But if that is possible, it is only, I would suggest, because in the course of becoming an agent, other people did not so regard her.
V. Conclusion
If the claims I have been making about how to understand good for are correct, then ‘good for P’ indeed expresses the concept of a fully normative property distinct from good—and even from good occurring in the life of an individual. Given the difference in direction of fit, we have reason to doubt that in fact the extension of good will include all the good for, although significant overlap will no doubt exist.Footnote 93 One insufficiently explored question concerns why that would be so. Of course, it still remains for good-for theorists to offer a compelling analysis of the fundamental relation that has as its focus the value of the person. I hope to have at least made it plausible that their efforts would not be wasted.
