I. The Pattern of Overall Value Arguments

 

So far we’ve discussed two ways people argue for moral conclusions: i) arguments like the one about social security in which what we want is used as a premise. I suggested that we often needed a substantive moral premise to make the arguments valid and at all plausible; ii) simple moral arguments. I suggested that these typically are not strong. There is an assumption that should be made explicit behind this thinking: when you have a bunch of bad choices, you should do the least bad. This will matter in what follows.

 

In moral arguments, we often look at the good and bad features - the harms and benefits - of an action. We use them to calculate the action’s overall value. For example, when deciding whether to go home for the weekend, you might consider the cost, the pleasure you will get from seeing friends and family, the aggravation of spending time with Uncle Sol, the boring time spent traveling, the work you will not get done, etc. You could make a list. And you might, at least in principle, think that you could assign a value to each of these factors. You then add all of that up and you get the overall value of the action. And then you can apply a principle like this (OVP) on p. 350.

But this is not the ideal version of the principle. It omits an important aspect- your options. Two points here. First, consider the action “ending world hunger” or “finding a cure for cancer”. This says you should do them. But you can’t. The sensible idea seems to be that you should do something only if you can do it.

 

Second, sometimes you are in a situation in which an action may be pretty bad - its harms outweigh its benefits - but you still should do it. Example: 3 tests coming up, time to study for only 1. You’ll do well on each iff you study for it. Each option (Study for exam #1, study for exam #2, study for exam #3) has more harms - 2 bad exams - than benefits - 1 good exam. You shouldn’t conclude that you should not study for any one exam. You do have another option - study for none (and, say, go to a movie). OVP seems to imply that you should not do any of these things. But that can’t be the right result. OVP is false. [Reconstruct this argument.]

 

The point is that the thing to do is the thing with the best overall value among your options and to avoid doing things that are less good. OVP misses this. The revised principle, from p. 351, is b better. I think something like (OVP1) is the central principle of the best moral arguments.

 

To apply the overall value principle one has to know about actions, their alternatives, and their overall values. This can be hard, but we do the best we can.

Alternatives are other things you can do.

Overall value is assessed in terms of harms and benefits. Merely having some harmful effect does not make an action wrong, nor some benefit make it right. Harms and benefits are typically consequences. But we needn't limit them to that. They include all the things that would happen if the action were done. Ask yourself, "How would things be if that were done?" If consequences are effects that come later, then there might be other features that go into the calculation. E.g., suppose a teacher has a favored student. The teacher gives that student a higher grade than is deserved. Every other student in the class is given the deserved grade. No later consequences of note result. Still, you might say that there’s a harm associated with this action - unfair treatment. You could insist that a consequence of the action is that one student is unfairly treated. Let's not worry about whether that counts as a consequence or not. It’s still a harm.

 

The imp. point: when you are trying to decide what to do, you are weighing factors against one another. Examples: studying v. watching a movie, college v. joining the army, private college v. public college. Also applies to hard moral cases: abortion, euthanasia. Notice that OVP1 applies well to easy moral cases: throwing rocks at strangers for fun - harm to them outweighs your pleasure.

 

Notice that (OVP1) itself doesn't say what has value. It leaves open substantive moral issues. Some think human happiness is what's really valuable. Others think wisdom is, or life. Some think what's valuable is maximizing satisfaction of desires. Others think that there's what's good for people, independent of what they desire. (OVP1) is neutral about that.

 

There's widespread agreement about lots of specific values: health, freedom from pain, etc. Some matters are harder to resolve, and comparisons hard to make. But we do it. Take a course on ethics for further discussion of this.

 

Question: Does anyone doubt that, in effect, frequently when we judge that we should or should not do something, we are making a judgment about what is more valuable than what?

 

A further complication also needs to be taken into account. When we are figuring out what to do, we often do not know the consequences. Rather, we have possibilities and probabilities. We can use OVP1 to cover this as follows: suppose action A has a good chance of leading to harm H. You can regard “the probability of H” as itself a harm (or bad thing), and thus it is something that lowers the overall value of A.

 

Further complications: ties, do we always have to maximize (can we just do good enough)?

 

This enables us to see a key point about how overall value arguments will go: there will be premises asserting what the various harms and benefits associated with an action are, and then premises weighing them out.

 

The general patterns of arguments are stated on p. 351.

 

II. Assessing Overall Value

To better appreciate the implications of (OVP1), consider the following four questions:

1. Suppose S has to implement a policy that will affect all the members of some group and no one else. S has two options, Plan A and Plan B. She can’t continue the present policy. Compared to the present situation, more people benefit by Plan A than by Plan B. According to (OVP1), what should she do? 

2. Suppose S has to implement a policy that will affect all the members of some group and no one else. S has two options. She can’t continue the present policy. Compared to the present situation, everyone involved benefits from Plan A. Some people benefit from Plan B but some people are worse off. According to (OVP1), what should she do?

3. Same set up. Everyone is better off with Plan A and everyone is worse off with Plan B. According to (OVP1), what should she do?

4. Suppose S’s friend, Miss Take, is about to choose between two options, A and B. S knows that B is the better option. Unfortunately, Miss Take is about to choose A. S is able to intervene and prevent Miss Take from making this mistake. According to (OVP1), should she intervene?

 

Answers: from the information given, S should implement Plan A in (3). You don’t have enough information to tell in the other cases. In (1) and (2), you need to know how much the people involved benefit or are harmed. In (4) you need to know the effects of intervention to determine the principle’s implications for the case.

 

5. See exercise 7, p. 355.

 

This exercise brings up “where do you draw the line” considerations. It is important to see that such points usually are of little help in assessing arguments.