Diotima: The Marist Undergraduate Philosophy Journal
still be true. The reason is simple. When I lack a welfare theory, I may not only be
undecided about which things are good for beings; I may also fail to see how
anything is good for them. If I am skeptical, or unaware, that beings have goods, I
will not buy any theory about the relative importance of those goods, and nor would
I have reason to.
The problem with UB then, is not merely practical, as Kahane indicates. It is
epistemic. It is not just that without a siren song about welfare, we would not know
how to act on UB if we accepted it — it is that we would have no reason to accept UB
without a concept of “good for.” If we could only acquire such a concept via some
contaminated siren song (see below), it follows that the justification for UB is
debunkable.
Now, some may think we can intuit a priori , or rationally, the concept “good
for.” I will not addr ess them here, for I am answering LRS, and I doubt they think
this. Indeed, LRS’ argument for hedonistic utilitarianism is premised in part on the
a posteriori claim that suffering is bad. And S’s long fixation on sentience as a
necessary and sufficient condition of value suggests he thinks that, if we were not
ourselves sentient, we would not form the concept of value, let alone welfare.
LRS (and Kahane) seem to assume that not having a welfare theory simply
means being undecided about what is good for us. But it could also mean being
undecided about welfare itself. But I also think it does mean this: taking it as the
default position that we do have goods is unfair to skeptics and nihilists about
welfare. The default should really be neither realism nor nihilism about welfare,
but a kind of agnosticism. From this neutral starting point, then, we can argue for
nihilism, skepticism, realism, or something else.
I must say, though, that skepticism and nihilism about welfare have the
advantage here, for the intuition that beings might not have goods (though they
have subjective likings) is difficult to debunk. By contrast, hedonism’s justification,
as Kahane (2014) shows, is easy to debunk (in the next section, I show why LRS’
defense fails), and likewise for the most appealing preference-based and objective
list theories, which tend to depend at least in part on things that would have been
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