Holtug's Persons, Interests, and Justice systematically explores and carefully knits together the most significant of the arguments, hard cases and sometimes provocative results to have emerged over the last three decades in discussions relating to the still very much unsettled critical questions of the connection between the individual's own self-interest and the overall goodness of a given outcome and, in particular, what makes one distribution of welfare across a population morally better than another. Holtug's own conclusion is that axiology must take a ‘person-affecting’ form – albeit of the ‘wide strong’ variety – according to which what makes one outcome better than another is rooted in things in the first outcome being better, or things in the second outcome being worse, for individuals.
Certainly Holtug has described elements of his current view in his earlier work. Still, this new monograph has the great advantage of being both fresh and intuitive. The monograph is required reading for graduate students and professional philosophers but would be absolutely appropriate for upper-level undergraduate courses in ethics as well. This is so, despite the difficulty of the material, in part because Holtug is resolute in wanting to figure things out from the ground up and in part because he has a gift for making his most technical points in terms of concise and readily appreciated cases. The undergraduate can follow along and indeed come to understand a good bit about what has happened within moral philosophy since Parfit's Reasons and Persons (1984) and why the discussion Parfit and others started remains so important today. At the same time, anyone working in this area will want to understand Holtug's careful construction of his own position and will be compelled to contend with the sophisticated but fair-minded criticisms he develops against the competing positions. Hence: a very good read for the undergraduate – and a must-read for graduate students and professional philosophers.
The book begins with Holtug's ground-up strategy in action: an exploration of welfare that starts with the simplest of building blocks, namely, the interests individuals undeniably have in securing that which has value to them and will make their lives go well. Holtug's preferred phrase here is ‘self-interest’, and the question of value he poses is that of intrinsic value: what has value to the individual from the individual's own self-interested point of view – what benefits the individual not as a means to an end but as an end in its own right.
Holtug's project is, however, structural in nature. His main goal isn't to define self-interested value but rather to say what it is for an individual to have a self-interest in a benefit and, specifically, a future benefit. For that purpose, he identifies some of the underlying principles that determine when it is that the individual has a self-interest of the appropriate sort – the kind of self-interest that bears on the issue of whether one outcome is morally better than another (pp. 21–2).
Those underlying principles are collected, in due course, under what Holtug calls the prudential view. They include the idea that the sorts of individuals who may have self-interests and serve as the bearers of value need not be human. At least many non-human animals count, as do at least many human foetuses. But rocks don't (‘they cannot have an interest in things going any particular way’ (p. 24)).
As noted, Holtug's main interest is not to define self-interested value or to argue in favour of or against, e.g., a preference-satisfaction theory as against a hedonic theory as against an objective list theory. Nonetheless, his critical discussion of the ‘Preference View’ is useful and intuitive. Preferences and benefits, Holtug insists, are two different things (pp. 28–51). It may be in a young person's self-interest to read Hume's Treatise even if he or she does not then have any preference for doing so (p. 33).
The ‘Identity View’, in contrast, seems able to handle that kind of case with ease. According to the Identity View – and here I compress Holtug's discussion – an individual has a self-interest in a future benefit being secured at a later time if and only if that individual exists at the earlier time and it is that very same individual who will (assuming things go well) stand to gain at that later time (p. 26). Holtug argues, however, that we are compelled to recognize that the ‘self’ that stands to enjoy the future benefit need not be numerically identical to the individual who has the originating self-interest. Why? Holtug is swayed by the same sort of fission problem (a ‘person's cerebral hemispheres are transplanted’) that led Parfit, decades ago, to argue that we must distinguish between what we consider important for a person's survival and the continued existence of that person (pp. 73–6). The important thing in survival is thus not identity but rather that, between the present individual and the future individual, there exists a certain ‘physical realization of relevant psychology’, including ‘core’ or ‘distinctive’ psychology (pp. 89 and 95), that is, the ‘Relation M’ (p. 99). The upshot: a view of self-interest in future benefits that embraces not just the case where we ourselves stand to gain from those future benefits, but also the case where none but our psychophysical ‘continuers’ stand to gain (p. 104).
Finally, Holtug argues in favour of the ‘Value of Existence View’ according to which a person's coming into existence itself constitutes a benefit (or burden) to that person – the sort of thing a person can have a self-interest in obtaining (or avoiding). In other words, existence (not existence in general, but rather a particular existence) can be better for a person than never existing at all. We can even, Holtug writes, ‘assign zero value to non-existence’ (p. 142). Metaphysical concerns with the notion that it can be better for a person – say, Jeremy – to exist, Holtug argues, are mitigated if Jeremy in fact exists. What if Jeremy does not exist? Then, according to Holtug, it cannot be true that non-existence is worse for Jeremy since Jeremy, as a non-existent thing, cannot have any properties at all. But it's unclear how, if Jeremy's non-existence is anything other than worse, Jeremy's existence can be better. In mitigation of that apparent puzzle, Holtug suggests that we can say that, had Jeremy existed, non-existence would have been worse for him (and existence would have been better for him) (pp. 142–3). ‘And this is sufficient to bring Jeremy within the scope of our moral concern’ (p. 143). But it's unclear to me that such counterfactual results (e.g. the result that Jeremy would have had the requisite features to allow us to conclude that non-existence is worse for him) will be strong enough to support the conclusions we in due course shall need to reach about still other cases (e.g. in a case in which, had Jeremy existed, it would have been better for Jeremy never to have existed, that it is in that case permissible to leave Jeremy out of existence).
Structural principles relating to self-interest and individual value in hand, Holtug then turns to considerations of justice and in particular the question of how welfare is to be distributed across a population. In this context, he clarifies (though without much argument) that the axiology of outcome goodness he adopts is aggregative in nature. That's so, even though as noted earlier he adopts the person-affecting view that what is important, morally, has to do with making things better for people as individuals and not simply making things better for the world. At the same time, the non-identity problem and the case of wrongful life (the life less than worth living; what he calls the ‘Problem of Suffering’) move him to favour a wide, as opposed to a narrow, person-affecting principle, a principle that can explain how one outcome can be morally worse than another even though it makes things worse for no existing or future person at all (pp. 159–62).
Of particular importance here – and a main focus of the remainder of the book – is that the wide person-affecting principle Holtug adopts is not extensionally equivalent to the simple total view. Instead, the view Holtug favours – Prudential Prioritarianism – assigns additional weight to units of welfare distributed to the worse off. Here, Holtug delves deeply into the egalitarian/prioritarian debate, and his discussion of the prioritarian approach (as well as Leximin, Pareto considerations and the Levelling Down Objection) is unparalleled in both its precision and persuasive effect (pp. 169–243).
So is his analysis of what we are to say about how people who never exist at all are to be fitted into the overall view on distribution. He thus argues against the positions (i) that only actual people matter morally, (ii) that only people who exist in all the options under comparison (only ‘necessary’ people) matter morally and (iii) that only ‘independently existing’ people matter morally (pp. 263–77) and concludes that the merely possible matter morally. Hence, as noted, the fact that existence would have been better for Jeremy had Jeremy existed is enough to ‘bring Jeremy within the scope of our moral concern’. I agree with Holtug's conclusion here (and he indeed rejects the person-affecting approach I have described on different grounds altogether (pp. 272–7)). It's a provocative conclusion, but it's one I think we have no choice but to endorse for reasons Holtug carefully but efficiently explores.
The difficulty is that the combined force of that conclusion, the Value of Existence View (which seems well-defended) and the aggregative approach (which doesn’t) seems to compel us to reach the further but unfortunate result that the existence of an additional happy person can make one outcome morally better than another (pp. 110–11; 149; 330–4; and generally 244–89). But here Holtug, to his credit, steps back. Since the view at issue would generate not just the standard Repugnant Conclusion but also what he calls the ‘Super Repugnant Conclusion’, he leaves open where our analysis should take us next (pp. 287–90).
Overall, Holtug's work is blessedly non-doctrinal. One doesn't feel that he stubbornly clings to points the rest of the world has already passed by. This is not to say that some of his results will not make us worry that the view in the end will itself topple. For my part, I respect the fact that Holtug swims against the mainstream in endorsing a person-affecting approach but also think that his declining to take advantage of the non-aggregative elements that seem to go with that approach will cause trouble in the long run. Just to take one example: on the view he accepts, my psychophysical continuers benefiting at some future time is just as important to me as my benefiting at some future time. Once this result is combined with an aggregative account of outcome value, it can be seen as deeply disturbing. How can it matter just as much to me for thirty of my continuers to divide the welfare I would have enjoyed had I continued to exist and they not? Holtug himself points out the problem – he calls it the ‘repugnant conclusion about self-interest’ (pp. 120–7) – but it doesn't make him go back to the drawing board on this particular issue (and take a still closer look at Lewis's view, which he nonetheless notes, on p. 68). But perhaps it should. The same goes for his discussion of the Depletion Example (pp. 159–60).
What my brief description of Holtug's project misses is the deftness of the arguments he puts forward in favour of his position and the brilliance that shines through time and again in the critical analyses he provides of the (often widely held) positions that compete with his own. All in all, Holtug's Persons, Interests, and Justice is one of the best books in moral philosophy we have seen in decades.
