I want to motivate the claim that some philosophical problems are too technical (1) to care about as objections to a view. This is not to say these problems don’t matter- on the contrary, they must be uncovered and dealt with, but no one should seriously change their ethical orientation as a result of them. I won’t be laying out a formal account of what “too technical” means and the argument I provide will be skeletal, but I think it’s an issue that deserves more consideration.
According to the desire satisfaction view, roughly speaking, your life goes well for you to the extent you have what you want.
Ben Davies writes, in a very nice little paper:
Subjectivists think that our well-being is grounded in our subjective attitudes. Many such views are vulnerable to variations on the ‘paradox of desire’, where theories cannot make determinate judgements about the well-being of agents who take a positive valuing attitude towards their life going badly. However, this paradox does not affect all subjectivist theories; theories grounded on agents’ prudential values can avoid it.
Putting it more formally, Davies quotes Bradley as saying:
Suppose desire satisfactionism (DS) is true, and suppose Epimenides has just two desires. His first desire, Da, is a desire of intensity +5 for an apple. He does not get the apple, so his life includes a desire frustration of value –5. His second desire, Db, is a desire of intensity +10 that his life goes badly for him. Is Db satisfied? If it is, then Epimenides’ life contains a desire-satisfaction of value +10, in which case his life has an overall value of +5 (it goes well for him), in which case Db is not satisfied after all. If Db is not satisfied, then his life contains a desire frustration of value –10, in which case his life has an overall value of –15 (it goes badly for him), in which case Db is satisfied. Thus if DS is true, Db is satisfied if and only if it is not satisfied, and Epimenides’ life goes well if and only if it does not go well. (Bradley 2007: 46)
Now there are some ways to avoid the paradox, and this is what Davies paper is about. Davies seeks to show various evasive strategies don’t work against a reinforced variant of the paradox. Imagine Pythagoras. Pythagoras makes the following judgements as to what would be good for him.
To own a house with a red roof.
To write a book.
To have a dog.
For no more than 2 of the things that would be good for him to happen.
Now as it happens desires 1 & 2 are fulfilled, but Pythagoras never owns a dog. Is judgement 4 fulfilled? At first glance, yes, since only 1 & 2 are fulfilled by the first-order circumstances. But this means that 4 judgments are fulfilled, bringing the number to 3. But this means judgment 4 isn’t fulfilled. But this means it is fulfilled and so on and so forth.
Structurally, these problems resemble the liar paradox and its variants, and Russell’s paradox of “The set of all sets that are not members of themselves”. Philosophically they are supposed to threaten the desire-satisfaction view of well-being, and other forms of subjectivism.
It is wholly reasonable to regard these paradoxes as technical issues to be solved for views such as desire satisfactionism and similar. But it seems to me silly to regard them as reasons not to believe the desire satisfaction theory of wellbeing, or even to think leading approaches are substantively flawed. Would anyone say to themselves “Oh, now that I know of this objection, I shall move to the hedonistic view of wellbeing, on which you are happy to the extent you experience maximal pleasure”? I suspect no sane person would change their (ethically substantive) views as a result of this problem. Indeed, my colleague Kieran suggests that if anyone did change their view as a result of the puzzle, it would only be as a result of disgust that desire satisfaction and similar views allow ridiculous desires like “I want only nine of my desires satisfied” to count!
And here is why we needn’t think such views should change our ethical orientation. If someone says they endorse the desire satisfaction theory of wellbeing we know what they mean in the vast majority of cases, irrespective of this technical difficulty. Hence there must be some concept we could spell out, even if the details are beyond us, that would include as high-wellbeing people all and only those people with high-desire satisfaction. That’s the great thing about concepts, we can specify their inclusion or exclusion criteria at will. Concepts are cheap, you can rejig them at will to meet your intuitions. Doubtless, there will be numerous such concepts and we can pick which one we like most.
Now this doesn’t apply to other sorts of objections. For example, consider the ignorance objection to the desire satisfactionist account:
Sometimes we desire X, but only because we’re ignorant. For example, I want to drink what’s in that glass, but only because I think it’s water rather than gasoline.
This is more than merely a technical problem because the change it imposes to the desire satisfaction view will matter in everyday settings. 98% of the time, things won’t change, but the 2% of the time when things change will be ethically significant.
It seems very unlikely to me that the same is true of Davies's problems, which seem like a technical problem, likely to have a technical solution. Now I could be wrong about any of this. Maybe the best possible response to Davies paradox will involve substantial ethically relevant changes- but until that’s demonstrated, I don’t think the desire satisfactionist should lose any sleep.
There’s more work to be done here. Working out what objections are technical, and which cut to the heart of the ethics- how to draw the line- is important, and I think, worth doing.
Finally, I want to clarify that this isn’t an argument for know-nothingism. Technical objections help illuminate other issues, even if they aren’t immediately relevant to ethical behavior. Moreover, they can lead to other ideas which do have immediate implications for ethical behavior.
Footnote: (1) I use the word technical in this piece somewhat in line with its usual meaning, but somewhat by way of gesturing to a concept yet to be defined. There are of course objections that are ‘technical’ in other senses, but unlike the paradoxes Davies talks about, cut to the ethical heart.
EDIT: This helps clarify things: We know there must be some concept that can be applied at least to the vast majority of cases because we can apply the concept ourselves even despite this paradox, and do so consistently. That means there must be some rule or system even if it's to complex to spell out that would work in the core cases it needs to to be an action guiding theory.
This argument sounds to me like Thomas Kuhn's view of "normal science" applied to ethical frameworks rather than scientific paradigms. Just like most scientists are engaged in "puzzle solving" within a scientific paradigm, so most people are applying the ethical system which (they believe) most aligns with their values to the situations they see in their lives. But just as scientists try to "get rid" of anomalies in their theories by either ignoring them, or applying ad hoc modifications and tweaks, so too will most people ignore or pronounce an objection "too technical" to bother with.
If we accept that that scientists are generally trying to get at "The Truth", and they believe that's what they're doing even when their theories have contradictions, then I think we should extend the same courtesy towards people's ethical systems trying to get at "The Good." Just like scientific theories fail to explain everything, but allow their practitioners to generate new knowledge within the existing paradigm, so too do moral/ethical systems give a person reliable "answers" for what they should do, or explain why the world is the way it is. You could simply call this "normal" philosophy. So, to extend the analogy, calling an objection "too technical" is simply saying that the objection/anomaly is not enough to throw out the paradigm of the philosophical framework - no "philosophical revolution" is needed because of that quibble. So, unless the objector can come up with a more compelling framework that aligns more of my intuition/ideas, I'm unlikely to accept their objection as important (and I think that larger question of frameworks is what many people really want to get at anyway).
It reminds me of the time that we did symbolic logic and we were required to write out a logically valid formulation of the Ontological Argument using Frege notation. I pranked the class by raising my hand and saying that after writing our the syllogism I had suddenly been illuminated by faith in God and would be formally converting to Christianity next Sunday