Tuesday 31 July 2012

Basic Well-being

(by Joe)

I finished reading Reasons and Persons over the weekend - as you may have noticed, I haven't blogged about it like I threatened to at the start of the month. Its incredibly dense and technical, and whilst I got a lot out of it, I wasn't that inspired to write anything. I probably got the most out of section three, which concerns personal identity. Whilst most of Parfit's ideas weren't new to me, they've been incredibly influential in shaping my views on the self, so it was nice to read them in the original. Sections one and two, concerning self defeating theories, and rationality and time, respectively, weren't directly relevant to most of my work, but were nonetheless interesting. Once you get used to it, Parfit's writing is actually extremely enjoyable, full of dry humour and inventive examples.

The fourth and final section, concerning future generations, and our moral responsibility towards them, raised several fascinating issues. Not least of these was the question of how, morally speaking, we ought to compare different distributions of well-being1. If we could have either 1% of the population very well off and 99% in poverty, or 100% just a fraction above poverty, which should we choose? In some cases these kinds of questions are going to be intuitively obvious, but Parfit weights them in such a way as to make them very difficult to answer. Does a slight reduction in overall well-being justify more equality? Should we be worried about the total or the average well-being? Can any amount of well-being justify any amount of suffering?

Yes, I chose those numbers intentionally.

These are all important questions, ones that we struggle to answer to this day, but I think that there's a crucial point that Parfit, and others, have missed. Economists and (utilitarian) ethicists tend to view well-being as a pseudo-numerical quantity - even if we can't count it precisely, we can at least make general statements about whether a certain policy will result in "more or less" well-being. Often this isn't a problem; when we discuss famine relief, or NHS funding, an analysis of the well-being that different options are likely to produce is essential. However, when we start to talk about higher levels of well-being (what Parfit terms "quality"), the numerical metaphors begin to break down. What does it mean to say that somebody is a million times better off than somebody else, or even just a hundred times better off? I genuinely don't know - I just don't have any conception of the kind of happiness or fulfilment that somebody this well off would be experiencing. When I'm asked to consider whether ten people suffering is worth one of these "super-lives", I just don't have any meaningful way of answering.

Parfit is at least partly aware of this difficulty, writing that Nozick's appeal to a "utility monster" as a refutation of utilitarianism is weakened due to the "deep impossibility" of such a creature. Nozick imagines a being who, unlike ourselves, has no limit to the pleasure it can get from the consumption of basic resources. Such a monster has a potential quality of life millions of times better than our own, thus requiring that we sacrifice everything to it in the name of greater utility. As "we cannot imagine, even in the dimmest way", what it would be like to be such a creature, we can deny that Nozick's argument has any intuitive force to us (Parfit 1984: 389). Parfit still thinks that such considerations can shed light on what we ought to do, but as a direct refutation of utilitarianism, Nozick's argument fails.

Nozick's utility monster was capable of consuming a limitless amount, and deriving equal pleasure from every bite. What about those who consume 100 times what the average person does? In terms of raw monetary resources, such people are relatively common. Do they really have a quality of life that far above my own? I don't think they do, and I think that this highlights a general flaw common to economic and utilitarian reasoning.

The internet seems to think that it might look like this.

I can , of course, imagine being fabulously wealthy, but I'm very sceptical of how much more well-being this wealth might bring me. Basic economic security, enough for me to enjoy the things that I enjoy, is all that I ask for. Maybe I'm just unusually ascetic (although this doesn't seem to be true, as I enjoy good coffee, expensive books, and nice food), but it strikes me that a basic level of well-being, not that far above what I currently enjoy, should be enough for anyone. I don't mean that they'll necessarily be happy, but rather that above this baseline physical resources aren't going to do most people a great deal of good. Being happy seems far more reliant on personal outlook and lifestyle choices than any degree of wealth or privilege. Parfit introduces the notion of a life being "worth living", but then goes on to include lives that are much better than this in his calculations. I'm not sure that this makes any sense in the real world - once a life is worth living, there's only so much that external factors can do to improve it. So when we're calculating how to allocate resources, we should bear in mind that "super-lives" may simply be an a posteriori impossibility - something that in practice does not, and cannot, exist.

This is pretty contentious, to say the least. It obviously undermines mainstream economics, and the whole acquisitive structure of the modern world. However, the important thing to note is that even if we set this baseline at my own level, or slightly above, it is still an extremely privileged position. Most of the world's population have not yet reached it. Parfit's moral conundrums remain, albeit in a slightly reduced form. We no longer need to worry about the moral worth of extremely good lives, because such lives simply don't exist. Instead we need to look at maximising the number of lives that reach the level of basic well-being. For argument's sake, we might define such a level as (currently) £10,000/year, ignoring tax. It's obviously going to depend on local prices, as well as extraneous issues such as childcare and differences in taste. What's essentially is that our level of basic well-being involves a relatively comfortable life, but nothing particularly fancy. How we go about maximising those at this level is obviously an even more contentious issue, and one that I don't plan to discuss here any time soon - this blog's meant to be about minds, not politics.

(This video has been doing the rounds today, and the basic point at 3:00, that rich people can't actually spend all their money, is similar to what I've been trying to say. TED apparently refused to publish it, although I'm sure things are a bit more complicated than that.)



1. Parfit uses a variety of different terms for the general idea of 'living a better life'. It's a very contentious topic, and one that I'm going to be ignoring today.

Parfit, D. 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: OUP. (All references from the revised 1987 edition, which I've noticed has several indexical errors - so watch out!)

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