Thomas Hurka

Continues the discussion of theoretical and practical perfection by examining the considerations that give some beliefs and intentions more quality and therefore value than others. It argues that Aristotelian considerations about rationality as essential to humans require measures of quality to be formal, considering only formal properties of beliefs and ends rather than their substantive content. There are two such measures: the extent of a belief's or end's content in space, time, and objects involved, and the degree to which different beliefs and ends are organized in a hierarchical structure. Together, these measures value explanatorily organized knowledge, a unified life, and complex, difficult activities such as games.

Argues for two claims about human essential properties that together constitute an “Aristotelian” theory of human nature. The first is that humans essentially have a physical nature involving circulatory, digestive, and other physiological systems; their functioning to a high degree constitutes good health and, beyond that, athletic excellence. The second is that humans are essentially rational, both theoretically and practically. This last claim yields the two main “Aristotelian” values of theoretical and practical perfection, which develop theoretical and practical rationality. The claim is defended both intuitively, in thought‐experiments, and by the analysis of psychological explanation, in which rationality plays a central role.

Discusses how different perfections are compared within a single life. After arguing that physical perfection has less value than theoretical or practical rationality while those are roughly equal in value, it defends a “balancing” view that prefers a well‐rounded achievement of different perfections and, beyond that, of different instances of the same perfection. Its key is the idea, represented on indifference graphs, that the relative value of an extra unit of perfection A as against B depends on the relative extent to which A and B have already been achieved. To the objection that this idea promotes dilettantish mediocrity, the chapter replies that two plausible empirical factors imply that the best practically available lives will usually specialize moderately on one perfection or perfectionist activity. Nonetheless, well‐roundedness remains in principle a perfectionist ideal.

Chapters 8–10 discuss the measurement of individual perfections, especially the theoretical and practical perfection that realize theoretical and practical rationality. This chapter introduces the basic structure of this measurement, which looks both to the number of certain states a person has – beliefs for theoretical perfection, intentions for practical perfection – and their score on a dimension of quality. It then elaborates on the dimension of number by discussing the further conditions a state must meet to count for perfection. Are all beliefs of a person relevant, or only those that are true, justified, or both? Do all the ends he intends count, or only those he achieves, is justified in believing he will achieve, or both? Discussion of these alternatives raises issues about romanticism, prudence, relations between the mind and world, and more.

Given some perfectionist values, whether derived from human nature or not, what is the structure of a moral view centered on them? This chapter argues that the most plausible perfectionism is consequentialist, identifying right actions by the quantity of good they result in; tells us to maximize the good rather than satisfice; and is time‐ and agent‐neutral, so we should care equally about perfections at all times and in all lives. That we should pursue others’ perfections as much as our own goes against a common view of narrow perfectionism as egoistic, but is necessary if the view does not make each person's perfection involve acting virtuously toward others. It can also be obscured if people can promote others’ perfection less well than their own and if their perfections often cooperate, so one's achieving them encourages rather than retards others’ doing so.

Discusses different possible understandings of human nature, e.g., that it consists in the properties distinctive of humans, essential to them, or distinctive –and essential. In the end, it defends a version of perfectionism mandating the development of those properties essential to humans and conditioned on their being living things. It then uses this version to answer standard objections to perfectionism, e.g., that human nature includes trivial or morally repellent properties; it also rejects the traditional view that each person's perfection necessarily involves acting morally or virtuously toward others.

This chapter further develops the perfectionist case for distributive equality by arguing that different people's perfections do not compete but often cooperate, so one person's achieving perfection encourages or requires others to do so. This cooperativeness is the core of Marx's argument for distributive equality and strengthens the case from natural abilities and diminishing marginal utility given in Ch. 12. The chapter then considers perfectionist arguments of Green and Bosanquet for private property and the free market, arguing that while these have some merit they do not overturn the general perfectionist case for equality; its arguments here echo those of Hobhouse.

The book's final three chapters address the common objection that perfectionism is unacceptable because it is hostile to the central political values of liberty and equality. This chapter argues that perfectionism can give considerable positive support to liberty if it treats autonomous choice as a perfection, as there are independent reasons to do, and emphasizes how little the state can do to promote a person's perfection; as Green and others emphasize, that is mostly for him to do. The result is not an absolute commitment to the “harm principle” but considerable support. The chapter concludes by contrasting perfectionism's commitment to liberty with its rejection of the stronger ideal of state neutrality, which forbids even noncoercive promotion of the good; perfectionism strongly favors such promotion.

Some versions of perfectionism, e.g., Plato's and Nietzsche's, are antiegalitarian, but this is often because of claims about desert or maximax aggregation, which the best perfectionism rejects. And this perfectionism can give at least qualified support to distributive equality by arguing that people's natural abilities are fairly close to equal and that there is diminishing marginal utility of resources, in that these are more important for enabling moderate perfection than for allowing improvements from there to the highest heights. Both these empirical claims are made more plausible by the Aristotelian values defended earlier in the book, especially those involving formal measures of theoretical and practical perfection.

Many formulations of narrow perfectionism supplement the basic ideal of developing human nature with further claims about reality, freedom, desire, and, especially, teleology. This chapter argues that these claims are unhelpful accretions that should be set aside; doing so simplifies the theory and saves it from needless objections. The chapter also argues that perfectionism should reject metaethical naturalism, the view that claims about human nature entail claims about value. Instead, it presents itself as a substantive moral view, to be defended by substantive argument. The chapter concludes by discussing the epistemology of essential properties, arguing that they can be discovered either through intuition about thought‐experiments or by examining explanatory theories.

A time‐ and agent‐neutral perfectionism must aggregate values both across times in a life and across persons in a society or in the whole world. This chapter examines a series of ways of doing so, arguing that different principles are attractive given perfectionist rather than nonperfectionist values. It rejects additive principles for implying “repugnant conclusions” that are even more repellent for perfectionist than for other values, and defends a diminishing marginal value view that is intermediate between the additive view and averaging. It also examines Nietzsche's antiegalitarian maximax principle, which says society should maximize the excellence of its few most excellent individuals, and a single‐peak view that values the first achievement of a perfectionist good above any subsequent achievements.

Nietzsche is often regarded as a paradigmatically anti-theoretical philosopher. Bernard Williams has said that Nietzsche is so far from being a theorist that his text “is booby-trapped not only against recovering theory from it, but, in many cases, against any systematic exegesis that assimilates it to theory.” Many would apply this view especially to Nietzsche’s moral philosophy. They would say that even when he is making positive normative claims, as against just criticizing existing morality, his claims have neither the content nor the organization characteristic of moral theory.

Thomas Hurka presents the first full historical study of an important strand in the development of modern moral philosophy. His subject is a series of British ethical theorists from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, who shared key assumptions that made them a unified and distinctive school. The best-known of them are Henry Sidgwick, G. E. Moore, and W. D. Ross; others include Hastings Rashdall, H. A. Prichard, C. D. Broad, and A. C. Ewing. They disagreed on some important topics, especially in normative ethics. Thus some were consequentialists and others deontologists: Sidgwick thought only pleasure is good while others emphasized perfectionist goods such as knowledge, aesthetic appreciation, and virtue. But all were non-naturalists and intuitionists in metaethics, holding that moral judgements can be objectively true, have a distinctive subject-matter, and are known by direct insight. They also had similar views about how ethical theory should proceed and what are relevant arguments in it; their disagreements therefore took place on common ground. Hurka recovers the history of this under-appreciated group by showing what its members thought, how they influenced each other, and how their ideas changed through time. He also identifies the shared assumptions that made their school unified and distinctive, and assesses their contributions critically, both when they debated each other and when they agreed. One of his themes is that that their general approach to ethics was more fruitful philosophically than many better-known ones of both earlier and later times.

Everyday moral thought uses the concepts of virtue and vice at two different levels. At what I will call a global level it applies these concepts to persons or to stable character traits or dispositions. Thus we may say that a person is brave or has a standing trait of generosity or malice. But we also apply these concepts more locally, to specific acts or mental states such as occurrent desires or feelings. Thus we may say that a particular act was brave or that a desire or pleasure felt at a particular moment was malicious. Even when they concern acts, these last judgements are of virtuousness rather than of moral rightness. They therefore turn essentially on a person’s motives; while he can act rightly from a bad motive, he cannot act virtuously from a bad motive. But they assess the virtue or vice of particular acts and mental states rather than of persons or traits of character. These global and local uses of the virtue-concepts are clearly connected, in that we expect virtuous persons to perform and have, and virtuous traits to issue in, particular virtuous acts, desires, and feelings. A philosophical account of virtue should explain this connection, but there are two different ways of doing so. Each takes one of the two uses to be primary and treats the other as derivative, but they disagree about which is the primary use. A dispositional view takes the global use to be primary and identifies virtuous acts, desires, and feelings in part as ones that issue from virtuous..

Many philosophers of the last century thought all moral judgments can be expressed using a few basic concepts — what are today called ‘thin’ moral concepts such as ‘good,’ ‘bad,’ ‘right,’ and ‘wrong.’ This was the view, fi rst, of the non-naturalists whose work dominated the early part of the century, including Henry Sidgwick, G.E. Moore, W.D. Ross, and C.D. Broad. Some of them recognized only one basic concept, usually either ‘ought’ or ‘good’; others thought there were two. But they all assumed that other moral concepts, including such ‘thick’ ones as the virtue-concepts ‘courageous’ and ‘kindly,’ can be reductively analyzed using one or more thin concepts and some more or less determinate..

Using Bernard Suits’s brilliant analysis (contra Wittgenstein) of playing a game, this paper examines the intrinsic value of game-playing. It argues that two elements in Suits’s analysis make success in games difficult, which is one ground of value, while a third involves choosing a good activity for the property that makes it good, which is a further ground. The paper concludes by arguing that game-playing is the paradigm modern (Marx, Nietzsche) as against classical (Aristotle) value: since its goal is intrinsically trivial, its value is entirely one of process rather than product, journey rather than destination.

This paper challenges the widely held view that ‘good for’, ‘well-being’, and related terms express a distinctive evaluative concept of central importance for ethics and separate from ‘simply good’ as used by G. E. Moore and others. More specifically, it argues that there's no philosophically useful good-for or well-being concept that's neither merely descriptive in the sense of naturalistic nor reducible to ‘simply good’. The paper distinguishes two interpretations of the common claim that the value ‘good for’ expresses is distinctively ‘subject-relative’. One concerns the ground of this value, or the properties that make something good for you; it says these must involve some relation to you. The other concerns the resulting value itself, or what supervenes on this ground; it says that too involves a relation. Neither interpretation, the paper argues, yields a significantly distinct evaluative concept. The ethically fundamental evaluative concept is just ‘simply good’.

This paper examines what it takes to be the intrinsic human goods of knowledge and achievement and argues that they are at many points parallel. Both are compounds, and of parallel elements: belief, justification, and truth in the one case, and intentional pursuit, competence, and success in the other. Each involves a Moorean organic unity, so its full presence or value requires a connection between its elements: an outside-in connection, where what makes a belief true helps explain why it’s justified, for knowledge, and an inside-out connection, where what makes a pursuit competent helps explain its success, for achievement. The features that determine the degrees of value of instances of the two goods, or make some truths more worth knowing and some goals more worth achieving, are also similar, turning in both cases largely on two forms of generality. And more specific goods that follow from valuing generality, such as integrated understanding and complex, difficult achievement, mirror each other structurally. Taken together, these many parallels suggest that knowledge and achievement may both instantiate a more abstract value of rational connection to reality. With or without that deeper unification, the parallels strengthen the claims of both to be genuine goods.

‘Hybrid’ theories of personal good, defended by e.g. Parfit, Wolf, and Kagan, equate it, not with a subjective state such as pleasure on its own, nor with an objective state such as knowledge on its own, but with a whole that supposedly combines the two. These theories apply Moore's principle of organic unities, which says the value of a whole needn't equal the sum of the values its parts would have by themselves. This allows them, defenders say, to combine the attractions of purely subjective and purely objective views. This common understanding of the theories is, however, mistaken. At the most fundamental level they don't combine a subjective and an objective element but two objective ones. Once this is understood, their attraction as hybrid theories diminishes: the value in their wholes may be just the sum of the values in their parts.