Shelly Kagan

Most people believe that there are limits to the sacrifices that morality can demand. Although it would often be meritorious, we are not, in fact, morally required to do all that we can to promote overall good. What's more, most people also believe that certain types of acts are simply forbidden, morally off limits, even when necessary for promoting the overall good. In this provocative analysis Kagan maintains that despite the intuitive appeal of these views, they cannot be adequately defended. In criticizing arguments for limited moral requirements as well as those for unconditionally prohibited acts, Kagan offers a sustained attack on two of the most basic features of ordinary common sense morality.

In The Geometry of Desert I used graphs to explore two common ideas about moral desert, namely, that people differ in terms of how deserving they are, and that it is a good thing if people get what they deserve. I argued that desert is a more complex value than we normally recognize, and I laid out a number of alternative possible views, defending some of them. In a pair of critical discussions published in this journal, Victor Tadros and Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen offer a variety of objections to several of the ideas I have put forward. In this essay I welcome their criticisms and respond to some of the main points they raise.

There is one thing we can be sure of: we are all going to die. But once we accept that fact, the questions begin. In this thought-provoking book, philosophy professor Shelly Kagan examines the myriad questions that arise when we confront the meaning of mortality. Do we have reason to believe in the existence of immortal souls? Or should we accept an account according to which people are just material objects, nothing more? Can we make sense of the idea of surviving the death of one’s body? If I won’t exist after I die, can death truly be _bad_ for me? Would immortality be desirable? Is fear of death appropriate? Is suicide ever justified? How should I _live_ in the face of death? Written in an informal and conversational style, this stimulating and provocative book challenges many widely held views about death, as it invites the reader to take a fresh look at one of the central features of the human condition—the fact that we will die.

In Rethinking the Good, Larry Temkin argues that the common belief in the transitivity of better than is incompatible with various other value judgments to which many of us are deeply committed; accordingly, we should take seriously the possibility that the better than relation is not, in fact, a transitive one. However, although Temkin is right, I think, about the mutual incompatibility of the beliefs in question, for the most part his examples don’t leave me inclined to deny transitivity. Nonetheless, there is one example, involving infinity, that does seem to me particularly troubling.

According to the dominant philosophical tradition, intrinsic value must depend solely upon intrinsic properties. By appealing to various examples, however, I argue that we should at least leave open the possibility that in some cases intrinsic value may be based in part on relational properties. Indeed, I argue that we should even be open to the possibility that an object''s intrinsic value may sometimes depend (in part) on its instrumental value. If this is right, of course, then the traditional contrast between intrinsic value and instrumental value is mistaken.

Most intuitively forceful criticisms of utilitarianism, I believe, reduce to two basic objections. Both arise from the relentlessness of the utilitarian injunction to promote the overall good. On the one hand, this means that agents are permitted to perform an act of any kind whatsoever–provided only that the consequences of that act are better than those of any alternative. In particular, this means that it is permissible to impose tremendous sacrifices or injuries upon someone, if this is the only way to ensure even greater gains for others. But in allowing agents to deliberately impose harm on someone for the sake of others, utilitarianism seems to permit acts which are morally unacceptable. Intuitively, we want to say that rights, or other moral prohibitions, forbid treating people in certain ways–ways allowed by utilitarianism. This, then, is the first major objection: utilitarianism permits too much.

Typically, discussions of well-being focus almost exclusively on the positive aspects of well-being, those elements which directly contribute to a life going well, or better. It is generally assumed, without comment, that there is no need to explicitly discuss ill-being as well—that is, the part of the theory of well-being that specifies the elements which directly contribute to a life going badly, or less well—since (or so it is thought) this raises no special difficulties or problems. But this common assumption is a mistake, since it is far from obvious how to extend even familiar theories of well-being so as to explicitly cover ill-being as well. This paper acts as an introduction to ill-being, noting some of the interesting and overlooked problems ill-being raises for qualitative hedonism, preference theory, and objective list theories. Particular attention is paid, by way of illustration, to the claim that knowledge is an objective good. Assuming this is so, what exactly is the opposite of knowledge, the objective bad which lowers one’s well-being in the same way that knowledge raises it?