2 The Bradford-Fletcher dialectic

Bradford’s tripartite perfectionism begins by taking stock of the involved elements within perfectionism. She argues that perfectionism as generally conceived only concerns two elements: a specified capacity and its relevant activity. Bradford then goes on to assert that these two elements are insufficient for a satisfactory account of the robust badness of pain, as she states: “there are three elements that are relevant for perfectionist capacities, not just two” (2021: 596). Bradford proposes that the third element should be the outputs of human capacities (2021: 596). Originally, a capacity is fulfilled when it engages in some relevant activity, but Bradford holds that capacities are in fact fulfilled only if they produce an output that matches the capacity’s function (e.g., the output of successfully achieving some personal end corresponds with the intended function of a person’s capacity for practical rationality). This tripartite scheme can be characterised as follows (Bradford Reference Bradford2021: 596):

Thus, robust goodness on tripartite perfectionism is constituted by the produced outputs corresponding correctly to some relevant capacity. Symmetrically, “the opposite of a capacity being fulfilled is its being malfilled” (Bradford Reference Bradford2021: 598). Robust badness would similarly be derived from a “malfillment” of human capacities, where the produced outputs do not correspond correctly to some relevant capacity. A common example would be a person’s rational capacity. If the rational capacity originally aims to engage in some activity and produce a rationally justified output x, it is malfilled when it instead produces a rationally unjustified output y. This malfillment would the constitute robust badness in perfectionistic terms.

It is through this malfillment account, Bradford argues, that the robust badness of pain can be accounted for in perfectionistic terms. In order to show this, Bradford first argues that the relevant capacities to feel sensations of pain are not good candidates for perfectionistic capacities in the first place. Perfectionism requires capacities that can be exercised intentionally, or in other words, capacities that are active. The capacity to feel sensations of pain on the other hand, seems involuntary. I cannot choose to feel or not feel pain. Thus, the capacity to feel sensations of pain is passive. For this reason, Bradford posits that the capacity for practical rationality as an active capacity is ideal for an accounting of the intrinsic badness of pain. This is because “pain’s badness is a malfillment of practical rationality given a near-universal standing end to feel good rather than feel bad… a standing end to avoid pain and pursue pleasure” (Bradford Reference Bradford2021: 599, italics in original). The failure of avoiding pain would be an incorrect output corresponding to the human capacity for practical rationality, thus, being in pain or remaining in pain would constitute robust badness.

Despite tripartite perfectionism providing a plausible explanation of the badness of pain, it has been subjected to some serious criticism. This is primarily the case because Bradford’s malfillment account of pain turns on the premise that the relevant capacity that is being malfilled is a person’s capacity for practical rationality. Fletcher, in response, rightly points out that this would have the unfortunate consequence of excluding genuine cases of pain (like infant pain), rendering these cases to not truly be robustly bad (Reference Fletcher2022). This is because the outputs of practical rationality are outputs that infants cannot plausibly achieve. With undeveloped rational capacities, it is hard to imagine babies engaging in practical reason in order to avoid pain. The concern here may also apply to people with severe cognitive impairment which prevents them from achieving appropriate practically rational outputs. Given the difficult conclusion tripartite perfectionism entails, that the pains of babies and people with severe cognitive impairment are not actually robustly bad, Bradford’s account cannot universally capture the full badness of pain.

3 Kauppinen’s solution: telic perfectionism

Kauppinen’s telic perfectionism can be divided into three main theses: (i) the telic interpretation of flourishing and unflourishing, (ii) the subjective nature thesis and the telic character of pain and (iii) the telic perfectionist’s account of the badness of pain.

For (i), Kauppinen argues that instead of the successful outputs of human capacities, what the perfectionist should be concerned with is the successful achievement of the formal aims of human capacities. Formal aims here refer to the telos or implicit purpose that is embedded within a specified human capacity, such that “such aims set the standard of success and failure” for the function of the specified human capacity (Kauppinen Reference Kauppinen, Rossi and Tappolet2025: 218). Following an Aristotelian vein, where, for instance, the telos or purpose of an acorn is to grow into an oak tree, the formal aim of a human capacity like practical rationality is an implicit purpose to respond correctly to relevant reasons in order to achieve some personal end. Thus, the formal aim of practical rationality is to correctly guide behaviour to achieve some stated personal end. Kauppinen then characterises the telic interpretation of flourishing and unflourishing as follows: “Flourishing consists in successfully realizing the formal aims implicit in the functioning of our fundamental capacities to a sufficient degree. Unflourishing in some respect consists in frustrating a formal aim, or realising it to an insufficient degree” (Reference Kauppinen, Rossi and Tappolet2025: 219).

Kauppinen brings up the example of the capacity for practical rationality to illustrate unflourishing. However, as an agential capacity, the capacity of practical rationality would have both a personal aim/end and the formal aim/end of practical rationality itself. Unflourishing here would thus include the frustration of both personal and formal ends such that “your failure both by the standards imposed by your end and the internal standards of practical reason is robustly bad for you” (Kauppinen Reference Kauppinen, Rossi and Tappolet2025: 220). Kauppinen uses an agential capacity as an example likely to contrast it with a central feature of his account, the capacity for valenced experiences (a non-agential capacity). This capacity would only require a frustration of formal aims with no personal end needed, thus setting up a way around Fletcher’s criticisms.

For (ii), Kauppinen first argues that human agents have capacities that are self-defining. The function of these self-defining capacities constitutes in part our natures. In illustration, Kauppinen brings up the example of systems of values or beliefs that we identify with; these systems are chosen volitionally by us and are thus adopted to be part of our nature. Building on this, Kauppinen claims that a key self-defining capacity that humans have is the capacity for valenced experiences (Reference Kauppinen, Rossi and Tappolet2025: 220–222). According to Kauppinen, valenced experiences are positive or negative experiences that we go through. Additionally, they are not “exercises of agency” (Reference Kauppinen, Rossi and Tappolet2025: 222), they just happen to us. Kauppinen then argues that these valenced experiences also have implicit formal aims, and such formal aims are derived from some intrinsic motivational force that is constitutive of the content of valenced experiences. The capacity for valenced experiences can therefore be used to characterise pain – as Kauppinen writes: “In virtue of the phenomenal character of unpleasant pain and associated intentional content, the formal aim implicit in the operation of the capacity for negatively valenced experience is elimination of all such experiences” (Reference Kauppinen, Rossi and Tappolet2025: 226).

For (iii), Kauppinen characterises pain within his framework of telic perfectionism. Given (ii), pain is a negatively valenced experience, and there is consequently an implicit formal aim within the experience of pain to eliminate the experience of pain. Given (i), unflourishing refers to the frustration of the formal aim of a human capacity. Since being in pain and remaining in pain would frustrate the formal aim of the capacity of negative valenced experiences, the experience of pain under telic perfectionism would constitute a genuine case of robust badness. Kauppinen’s account also has the added benefit of avoiding Fletcher’s criticisms through the employment of non-agential capacities as the central feature for deriving robust badness. Since the capacity for negatively valenced experiences are by nature non-agential, they do not include “personal-level aims that get frustrated by being in pain” rather “pain and suffering frustrate the formal aim implicit in negatively valenced experiences themselves, regardless of our contingent personal-level aims” (Kauppinen Reference Kauppinen, Rossi and Tappolet2025: 228). Therefore, infants despite lacking any personal-level aim to avoid pain, would still possess the capacity for valenced experiences due to being human. The pain that infants feel would thus still constitute a genuine case of robust badness and the same would hold for any being that felt pain.

4 An asymmetry problem with Kauppinen’s telic perfectionism

As promising as Kauppinen’s account is for explaining the badness of pain, it ultimately fails due to an asymmetry inherent in its framework. The main formula used by telic perfectionism to derive the robust badness of pain is the frustration of the formal aim of the capacity for negative valenced experiences. However, this formula is asymmetric insofar as when it is applied to the capacity for positively valenced experiences, it does not actually yield an account of a robust bad. In order to see why this is the case, we have to consider first what possibly the formal aim of the capacity for positively valenced experiences could be. Although Kauppinen hints that the formal aim of positively valenced experiences is the seeking of more pleasant experiences, he does not explicitly state it as such.

Kauppinen, in analysing the content and telos of negatively valenced experiences, appeals to several accounts of the character of affective phenomenal experiences. These include reflexive imperativism, first-order imperativism and evaluativism (Reference Kauppinen, Rossi and Tappolet2025: 222–225). He uses these accounts to justify why the formal aim of the capacity for negatively valenced experiences is the elimination of experiences of pain. This is because such experiences have an imperative to stop painful experiences. Consequently, it is these accounts that we need to turn to in order to understand the possible formal aims of the capacity for positively valenced experiences.

Reflexive imperativism asserts that the affective phenomenology (i.e., the pleasantness or unpleasantness) of an experience is inherent in the experience itself. According to Barlassina and Hayward, reflexive imperativism argues that “each experience has affective phenomenal character in virtue of possessing reflexive imperative content” (Reference Barlassina and Hayward2019: 1014). This is insofar as pleasurable experiences like P feel “pleasant in virtue of being (at least partly) constituted by a Command…. More of P!” (Reference Barlassina and Hayward2019: 1014). Vice versa, painful experiences like Q would be painful in virtue of being constituted by a command Less of Q! Saliently, in characterising reflexive imperativism, Kauppinen does also state that “pleasures motivate us to get more of themselves” (Reference Kauppinen, Rossi and Tappolet2025: 224).

For first-order imperativism, the affective phenomenology of an experience is based on the experience’s representation of the external world as good or bad. It does so by combining sensory and affective phenomenology to have direct imperative force on a person. This is such that “the content of a mental state is a first-order imperative content if and only if it directs the subject to do something about the non-mental world” (Barlassina and Hayward Reference Barlassina and Hayward2019: 1021–1022). Regarding experiences with a positive affective phenomenal character, first-order imperativism states that such experiences would have “first-order imperative content” that directs the subject feeling good to “get more of” the positive experience (Barlassina and Hayward Reference Barlassina and Hayward2019: 1021). Ultimately, the difference between reflexive and first-order imperativism is that first-order imperativism argues that affective phenomenology (unpleasantness and pleasantness) is explained by the content of mental states that are directed towards the external world. Reflexive imperativism, on the other hand, proposes that it is explained by mental states that are directed towards themselves.

To illustrate how each account shows that there is an imperative force within valenced experiences that motivates action, consider the pain of cutting one’s knee after a motorcycle accident. First-order imperativism would state that the pain is unpleasant because it represents a bodily condition (a cut knee) as bad. Ultimately, it directs the person experiencing the pain to do something about the external world: to tend to the cut knee. Reflexive imperativism, on the other hand, states that the pain in your knee is unpleasant because inherent in the painful experience is the command to get rid of itself.

In contrast, consider the pleasant experience of eating a delicious meal. First-order imperativism would state that the experience of eating is pleasant because it represents a bodily condition (i.e., being full) as good. It would then direct the person experiencing the pleasant experience to do something about the external world too: namely, to seek out more of the same delicious food. Reflexive imperativism instead asserts that the pleasure of eating a delicious meal is pleasant because there is an inherent command within the experience of pleasurable eating to obtain more of the same pleasurable experience.

Lastly, on evaluativism, “valence reduces to a representation of the goodness/badness of worldly objects, the phenomenology of valence consists in worldly objects appearing as good/bad” (Barlassina Reference Barlassina2020: 277). Whether a specified experience has positive or negative valence thus depends on some evaluative judgement about the contents of the experience that consequently represents the experience as good/bad to an experiencing subject. Despite not having any clear imperative component, Kauppinen does suggest that “at least part of what is distinctive of evaluative representation is to guide action” (Reference Kauppinen, Rossi and Tappolet2025: 225). Thus, an experience that is represented as good quite possibly guides the subject experiencing it to seek out more good experiences.

Overall, if the above accounts help define the formal aim of our capacity for valenced experiences, it is reasonable to conclude that the formal aim for the capacity for positively valenced experiences would be to seek out more of the same kind of experiences. This is so that the experiencing agent may continue having the same positively valenced experiences. This is because, as noted above, these accounts of affective phenomenology would generally state that the experience of positively valenced experiences would motivate the person experiencing such experiences to seek out more positively valenced experiences.

However, the frustration of the formal aim to seek out and thereby continue positively valenced experiences does not seem to constitute a robust bad but merely a privation of a good. To illustrate, let’s take a pleasurable experience as a positively valenced experience. Consider then the following scenario:

This entire episode should, under telic perfectionism, constitute a robust bad. However, missing out on marshmallows does not seem to be a robust bad but a mere privation of good. The upshot of the above thought experiment is that it shows the formula of telic perfectionism (the frustration of formal aims of capacities) to be unable to accurately capture robust badness. To recap, under Kauppinen’s telic perfectionism, the capacity for negatively valenced experiences can be schematised as follows:

1. (1) Fulfilment of formal aim (end pain) = robust good

2. (2) Frustration of formal aim (end pain) = robust bad

However, for consistency’s sake, the inverse about the capacity for positively valenced experiences must also be true. Based on the accounts of affective phenomenology Kauppinen relies on:

1. (3) Fulfilment of formal aim (continue pleasure) = robust good

2. (4) Frustration of formal aim (continue pleasure) = robust bad

What the thought experiment shows instead is that:

1. (4’) Frustration of formal aim (continue pleasure) =/= robust bad

Telic perfectionism thus seems to misidentify different cases, such that if used on its own it cannot tell whether the frustration of the formal aim of a capacity for valenced experience is a mere privation of good or a genuine robust bad. Telic perfectionism will inevitably assign all cases to be robustly bad. To be plausible, it must somehow posit and justify the asymmetry here, such that the frustration of the formal aim of the capacity for negatively valenced experiences is robustly bad, but the frustration of the formal aim of the capacity for positively valenced experiences is not.Footnote ²

This asymmetry here reminds us of the familiar problem of the disvalue objection: that there is a lacuna in perfectionistic theories of well-being in accounting for the intrinsic goodness/badness of the felt quality of experiences. The disvalue objection thus reappears yet again in Kauppinen’s telic perfectionism. In the case of telic perfectionism, Kauppinen tries to get around Fletcher’s criticisms by appealing to the nature of pleasure and pain themselves as supplying the requisite ends for human capacities for valenced experiences. However, as a perfectionist, Kauppinen stops short of accepting that the experiential content of phenomenal experiences can have any bearing on the robust badness (or goodness) of the experience itself. Instead, it is exclusively the frustration of the formal aims of the capacity for valenced experiences that make up the robust badness of an experience. However, as argued above, this method of deriving robust badness from valenced experiences is actually incapable of distinguishing between robust badness and a mere privation of good – which is the fundamental problem the disvalue objection raises against perfectionism itself.

If we were to allow a phenomenal account of the badness of pain to apply to the above thought experiment (i.e., the experiential content of phenomenal experiences makes up the robust badness (or goodness) of the experience itself), it would instead produce a relatively more coherent explanation of why the frustration of the aim to eliminate negatively valenced experiences is robustly bad and why the frustration of the aim to seek more positively valenced experiences is not robustly bad. Simply put, on phenomenal accounts, negatively valenced experiences like pain are robustly bad in themselves, so allowing them to continue would thus inevitably also be robustly bad. On the other hand, because positively valenced experiences like pleasurable marshmallow snacking are good in themselves, the ceasing of such experiences would merely be a privation of the good. Phenomenal accounts can easily handle the asymmetry that I have raised. However, any attempt to smuggle in or embrace a phenomenal account of the badness of pain would be to abandon telic perfectionism.Footnote ³ This is because robust badness will no longer be exclusively derived from the frustration of a human capacity’s formal aim.

Ultimately, there seems to be an intractable difficulty in any attempt to reconcile perfectionism with instances of robustly bad pains. As noted earlier, Bradford’s tripartite perfectionism suffered a fatal blow from Fletcher’s objection from infant pain. This led Fletcher to conclude that his objection generates “a license for pessimism about perfectionism in general” (Reference Fletcher2022: 235). From my argument above, I conclude that Kauppinen’s telic perfectionism does no better than Bradford’s formulation in reconciling perfectionism with the badness of pain. With the failure of both Bradford’s and Kauppinen’s formulations of perfectionism, I feel inclined to agree with Fletcher that there is license for pessimism about perfectionism in general.

Perhaps it is time for perfectionists to accept that the monistic perfectionistic ideal of a sole arbiter of welfare is not possible. The intrinsic/robust badness of painful experiences is perhaps incompatible with any good the exercise of characteristic human capacities can bring. Going forward, it seems that perfectionism’s future best prospects are for it to be potentially adopted into some further pluralistic theory. Perhaps certain salient or useful aspects of perfectionism (e.g., the development of human attributes or features) could be incorporated into a pluralistic theory that also includes a phenomenal account of the badness of pain. However, as it stands, perfectionism alone as a monistic theory does not seem to be able to account for the badness of pain.Footnote ⁴