David Sobel

Hybrid goods include both an objective and a subjective component. On the account of hybrid goods presented in this chapter, a component of well-being is subjective if and only if its value is determined by warrantless favoring attitudes. A component of well-being is objective if either it is valuable for one irrespective of one’s favoring attitudes toward it or, while a normative role for one’s attitudes in grounding prudential value is allowed, this role is restricted to attitudes that are appropriately responsive to the goodness of their object. Hybrid goods so understood have not been subjected to much analysis. This chapter aims to show how understanding them brings into view complexities in how the attitudes of persons affect the value of the goods in their lives, casts light on certain substantive prudential goods such as friendship, and illuminates the nature of rational choice between incommensurably good options.

Is graduate school for me? Should I ask him to marry? What does it make sense to do when one’s self-interest and morality sharply conflict? This book articulates and defends one general answer to such questions: subjectivism. Subjectivism maintains that things have value because we value them. Caring about stuff makes stuff matter. In a world without anything that anyone or anything cared about, nothing would matter. Additionally, subjective accounts maintain that the most important values are relational. I care about how well and gracefully Federer is playing and you (most likely) don’t. Because of this difference, I have a reason to check the score or to watch his matches and you do not. Things may be valuable or reason-providing for me but not for you because I care about them and you do not. Getting clearer on exactly what that means and why we might think it is true will be the business of this book. This book aspires to sketch the main contours of the long and winding road from valuing to value and to make a case that the road is sound and bridges that have been purported to be impassable are in fact repairable.

Libertarian self-ownership views in the tradition of Locke, Nozick, and the left-libertarians have supposed that we enjoy very powerful deontological protections against infringing upon our property. Such a conception makes sense when we are focused on property that is very important to its owner, such as a person’s kidney. However, this stringency of our property rights is harder to credit when we consider more trivial infringements such as very mildly toxic pollution or trivial risks such having planes fly overhead. Maintaining that our rights against all infringements are very powerful threatens to implausibly make such pollution and trivial risk broadly impermissible. This chapter suggests that self-ownership views have tended to inappropriately conflate the seriousness of different types of infringements and that treating all infringements so seriously is implausible because it would make too much impermissible. The chapter considers several ways to avoid this result within a self-ownership framework and concludes that the best approach is to allow that the strength of the protection against infringements should be tied to the seriousness of the harm of the infringement.

The goal of this chapter is to describe three lines of research centered on the hypothesis that young children possess domain-specific systems of causal knowledge that allow for various kinds of reasoning about possibility. The first line of research examines how children form and reason about hypotheses for data from novel causal systems they observe in the environment. This work is based on computational models of causal reasoning based on Bayesian inference. The second line of research examines how children conceptualize fictional worlds as opposed to reality. This work suggests that fiction (and pretense more generally) might serve as a means of exploring real-world causal structure. Finally, the third line of research examines children’s counterfactual reasoning generally construed, and explores the possibility that domain-specific causal knowledge allows for a general mechanism for counterfactual inference to function.

Derek Parfit, in _On What Matters_, argues that all subjective accounts of normative reasons for action are false. This chapter focuses on his “Agony Argument.” The first premise of the Agony Argument is that we necessarily have current reasons to avoid our own future agony. Its second premise is that subjective accounts cannot vindicate this fact. So, the argument concludes, subjective accounts must be rejected. This chapter accepts the first premise of this argument and that it is valid. The main thesis of this chapter is that subjectivists can account for our reasons to get pleasure and avoid agony. The chapter concludes that the Agony Argument does not justify the rejection of subjective accounts. The chapter also examines Parfit's understanding of the distinction between objective and subjective theories. The chapter claims Parfit offers a surprisingly narrow understanding of subjectivism such that even if his critique were successful, this would be bad news for fewer theories than we might have thought. Finally, the chapter replies to some possible worries about the arguments of this chapter.

This is the eighth volume of Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy. Since its revival in the 1970s, political philosophy has been a vibrant field in philosophy, one that intersects with jurisprudence, normative economics, political theory in political science departments, and just war theory. OSPP aims to publish some of the best contemporary work in political philosophy and these closely related subfields. This volume features nine chapters that address a range a issues and represent cutting-edge work in the field. Topics discussed include fair compensation, republican political theory, incentives and inequality, toleration and rights to do wrongs, pardons and humanitarian intervention.

How should we understand the fundamental difference between objective and subjective theories of well-being? Authors typically presuppose some understanding of the divide but don’t do much to explain why that understanding is better than its rivals or gets at the heart of the distinction. We explicate criteria for a better account of the divide and use such criteria to critique extant understandings of the divide. We then propose and defend a new understanding of the divide, one that characterizes subjectivism in terms of the normative role it grants to warrantless attitudes in grounding benefits to subjects.

This is Volume 9 of Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy. It contains papers on democracy, the law, political liberalism, voting, social experimentation, state neutrality, equality and incentives, self-ownership, drugs and prostitution, and Lincoln. Chapters include: “Challenging Democratic Commitments: On Liberal Arguments for Instrumentalism About Democracy” (Daniel Viehoff); “Emotional Abuse and the Law” (Elizabeth Brake); “Practical Political Liberalism” (Caleb Perl); “Beyond the Voting Debate” (Brookes Brown); “Social Experimentation in an Unjust World” (Jacob Barrett and Allen Buchanan); “State Neutrality and the Dismantling of the Gendered Division of Labour” (Anca Gheaus); “If It’s Not Your Talent, How Come You’re Getting an Incentive?” (Peter Dietsch); “(Owning) our Bodies, (Owning) our Selves?” (Sean Aas); “Self-Sovereignty, Drugs, and Prostitution” (Peter de Marneffe); “Lincoln as Political Philosopher” (William A. Edmundson).

This paper articulates and defends a novel hybrid account of well-being. We will call our view a Robust Hybrid. We call it robust because it grants a broad and not subservient role to both objective and subjective values. In this paper we assume, we think plausibly but without argument, that there is a significant objective component to well-being. Here we clarify what it takes for an account of well-being to have a subjective component. Roughly, we argue, it must allow that favoring attitudes that are not warranted by the lights of objective values can ground benefits. Given this understanding, we show that there is an important and unrecognized expansion in the resources available to fully objectivist views: namely that such views can help themselves to the value of warranted love of objective goods. Such a move by the objectivist can help them respond to concerns that, on their view, a person’s well-being can be too alien to them. We next argue that, nonetheless, such objectivist views are still unconvincing due to their lack of a subjective component. This motivates a move from fully objective accounts to hybrid accounts. We show that many prominent hybrid theories in the literature are inadequate because they implausibly minimize the subjective component. This motivates a move to a robust hybrid view that has an expanded subjectivist component. We conclude with some remarks about the interrelation between the subjective and objective components in the hybrid account that we favor and a role for resonance in a theory of well-being other than serving as a hard constraint on any benefit.

Derek Parfit, in On What Matters, argues that all subjective accounts of normative reasons for action are false. This chapter focuses on his “Agony Argument.” The first premise of the Agony Argument is that we necessarily have current reasons to avoid our own future agony. Its second premise is that subjective accounts cannot vindicate this fact. So, the argument concludes, subjective accounts must be rejected. This chapter accepts the first premise of this argument and that it is valid. The main thesis of this chapter is that subjectivists can account for our reasons to get pleasure and avoid agony. The chapter concludes that the Agony Argument does not justify the rejection of subjective accounts. The chapter also examines Parfit's understanding of the distinction between objective and subjective theories. The chapter claims Parfit offers a surprisingly narrow understanding of subjectivism such that even if his critique were successful, this would be bad news for fewer theories than we might have thought. Finally, the chapter replies to some possible worries about the arguments of this chapter.

Many philosophers maintain that neither one’s reasons for action nor one’s well-being are ever grounded in facts about what we desire or favor. Yet our reason to eat a flavor of ice cream we like rather than one we do not seems an obvious counterexample. I argue that there is no getting around such examples and that therefore a fully stance-independent account of the grounding of our reasons is implausible. At least in matters of mere taste, our “stance” plays a normative role in grounding reasons.

This is the second volume of Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy. Since its revival in the 1970s political philosophy has been a vibrant field in philosophy, one that intersects with jurisprudence, normative economics, political theory in political science departments, and just war theory. OSPP aims to publish some of the best contemporary work in political philosophy and these closely related subfields. The papers in this volume address a range of central topics and represent cutting edge work in the field. They are grouped into three main themes: ideal theory, the moral assessment of states, and issues in social reliations.

What are our reasons for acting? Morality purports to give us these reasons, and so do norms of prudence and the laws of society. The theory of practical reason assesses the authority of these potentially competing claims, and for this reason philosophers with a wide range of interests have converged on the topic of reasons for action. This volume contains eleven essays on practical reason by leading and emerging philosophers. Topics include the differences between practical and theoretical rationality, practical conditionals and the wide-scope ought, the explanation of action, the sources of reasons, and the relationship between morality and reasons for action. The volume will be essential reading for all philosophers interested in ethics and practical reason.

Libertarian self-ownership views have traditionally maintained that we enjoy very powerful deontological protections against any infringement upon our property. This stringency yields very counter-intuitive results when we consider trivial infringements such as very mildly toxic pollution or trivial risks such having planes fly overhead. Maintaining that other people's rights against all infringements are very powerful threatens to undermine our liberty, as Nozick saw. In this paper I consider the most sophisticated attempts to rectify this problem within a libertarian self-ownership framework. I argue that all of these responses are significantly flawed.