Connie Rosati

We commonly talk about what is _good for_ someone or something. But the expression “good for” seems to refer to differing relations depending on the context of use. This chapter focuses on the _welfarist_ good-for relation and undertakes to defend a particular view about the structure and nature of this good-for value. After discussing the basic structure of welfarist good-for, the chapter considers and critically assesses alternative views, including Moore’s eliminativist view, the “private ownership” view Wayne Sumner attributes to Moore, and both Donald Regan’s and Guy Fletcher’s (more recent) “locative analyses.” According to the _rational fit_ theory of welfare defended herein, the welfarist good-for relation is a reason-giving relation of fit between a welfare object and a welfare subject, where a welfare subject is a valuable being.

The idea that normativity and agency are importantly connected goes back at least as far as Kant. But it has recently become associated with a view called “constitutivism.” Perhaps the best-known critique of constitutivism appears in David Enoch’s article, “Agency, Shmagency,” which is the focus of this chapter. His critique of my article, “Agency and the Open Question Argument,” is briefly addressed, explaining why, contrary to his claims, I do not therein defend a form of constitutivism. It is then explained why his “shmagency challenge” does not effectively expose the real challenge faced by those who might wish to develop constitutivist theories. Finally, the chapter considers why we should take seriously the idea that normativity and agency are importantly connected, an idea that neither Enoch’s challenge nor the challenge articulated for constitutivism here does anything to defeat. Enoch has not shown that normativity won’t come from what is constitutive of agency.

Many philosophers have been skeptical about the existence of promises to self, and in fact, self-promises appear to face a dilemma. Critics have argued that promises to self are conceptually impossible. Since the agent is both promisor and promisee, she can release herself from a self-promise at will, and so she was never really bound. Self-promises, in short, cannot be genuine because unlike our promises to others, they cannot create obligations. Even if it could be shown that self-promises are not conceptually impossible, they seem to be of little importance or effect. It seems clear why we would need and want to make promises to others, but why would we ever need or want to make promises to ourselves? This chapter attempts to address this dilemma. The chapter argues that the supposed possibility of “self-release” does not show that promises to self are impossible. Insofar as there is a real difficulty for the possibility of self-promises, it lies in making out a plausible distinction between release from a self-promise and breach of that promise. But this difficulty, The chapter suggests, can be answered. The chapter goes on to offer a preliminary defense of the importance of self-promises, arguing that their importance lies in how they may function to serve our interest in autonomy—in having effective authority over ourselves.

Of the many ideas for which Ronald Dworkin is justly famous, perhaps the most striking is his idea that the US Constitution is to be read morally. This essay seeks to honor Dworkin’s idea by sketching the beginnings of an alternative approach to reading constitutions morally. It begins by distinguishing between the idea that constitutions of a certain sort are to be read morally and Dworkin’s way of reading a constitution morally. I review some of the well-known difficulties for his approach in order to make clear how an alternative would need to do better. Finally, I sketch a moral learning approach to reading constitutions morally. I argue that concern for constitutional legitimacy, respect for the overriding authority of morality, and humility about our own limitations support an approach to interpreting a constitution that allows for moral learning to be reflected in the law.

In the past fifteen years, ethical theory construction has come under attack from a number of directions. I aim to provide a deeper foundation for these critiques by examining recent efforts to define "good" as a part of theory construction in ethics. I argue that the reforming definitions of "good" offered by John Rawls, Richard Brandt, and most recently, Peter Railton, deprive us of the ability to raise the questions that we as human agents want to be able to raise about what to desire. More generally, determinate accounts of the good are contrary to a kind of deliberation that is essential to being a person. To be a person, I contend, is to be an inventor of possible selves, a creature who engages in self-invention. Our capacity for self-invention involve deliberation that enables us to make of ourselves persons for whom different things are good. Self-invention is thus a process that involves invention of our good. Determinate accounts of the good, by fixing what is to be our good, are at odds with our capacity for self-invention. Questions about a person's good, I argue, are not separable from her questions about what sort of person to be. And decisionmaking about a person's good is an open-ended, creative process in which she simultaneously constructs her identity and her good

In his book, The Solace: Finding Value in Death through Gratitude for Life, Joshua Glasgow recounts his thoughts as he tried to prepare for a conversation about death with his dying mother, whom he hoped to comfort. After rejecting certain possible sources of solace, he argues that our passing away itself has value, which it derives from the meaningfulness of our lives as a whole, and this value can provide the comfort we may seek. I raise a number of difficulties for and questions about Glasgow’s claims, ultimately concluding that even if our passing away had some value, recognizing thiswould add nothing to the solace we may derive from reflecting on the value of our lives themselves.

In our everyday lives, we confront a host of moral issues. Once we have deliberated and formed judgments about what is right or wrong, good or bad, these judgments tend to have a marked hold on us. Although in the end, we do not always behave as we think we ought, our moral judgments typically motivate us, at least to some degree, to act in accordance with them. When philosophers talk about moral motivation, this is the basic phenomenon they seek to understand. Moral motivation is an instance of a more general phenomenon—what we might call normative motivation—for our other normative judgments also typically have some motivating force. When we make the normative judgment that something is good for us, or that we have a reason to act in a particular way, or that a specific course of action is the rational course, we also tend to be moved. Many philosophers have regarded the motivating force of normative judgments as the key feature that marks them as normative, thereby distinguishing them from the many other judgments we make. In contrast to our normative judgments, our mathematical and empirical judgments, for example, seem to have no intrinsic connection to motivation and action. The belief that an antibiotic will cure a specific infection may move an individual to take the antibiotic, if she also believes that she has the infection, and if she either desires to be cured or judges that she ought to treat the infection for her own good. All on its own, however, an empirical belief like this one appears to carry with it no particular motivational impact; a person can judge that an antibiotic will most effectively cure a specific infection without being moved one way or another.

Stephen Darwall has recently suggested (following work by Mark Overvold) that theories which identify a person’s good with her own ranking of concerns do not properly delimit the ‘scope’ of welfare, making self-sacrifice conceptually impossible. But whether a theory of welfare makes self-sacrifice impossible depends on what self-sacrifice is. I offer an alternative analysis to Overvold’s, explaining why self-interest and self-sacrifice need not be opposed, and so why the problems of delimiting the scope of welfare and of allowing for self-sacrifice are distinct. If my analysis is correct, desire theories may allow for self-sacrifice however they delimit the scope of welfare.

This essay explores the nature of narrative representations of individual lives and the connection between these narratives and personal good. It poses the challenge of determining how thinking of our lives in story form contributes distinctively to our good in a way not reducible to other value-conferring features of our lives. Because we can meaningfully talk about our lives going well for us at particular moments even if they fail to go well overall or over time, the essay maintains that our good must consist in something more than an accumulation of good discrete moments. Since persons have the capacities to reason, remember, and imagine, our good depends on a larger view of our lives that integrates its particular moments in a narrative. That narrative provides shape and texture to our lives. Storytelling serves to connect the events of our lives to each other, and to explain why the meaning and value of past events or features of our lives can shift as the life, and hence the story of the life, continues to unfold. The essay concludes that narrative enables us to see our lives in ways that support, encourage, or promote our self-concept and self-worth as agents who have controlling authority over our own lives.