To answer the Question, we need some kind of principles for what the state is supposed to do and not do in general. I?m going to assume without further argument that some form of liberal democracy is the ideal form of a state. The minimal principles that I will rely on could be supported by many different kinds of arguments. What makes a state liberal is that individuals have rights against the state and other individuals that are not trumped by the interests of the state or others. Some of these rights are negative in the sense that they limit the demands others can legitimately make of the right-holder, others positive in the sense that they require others to act in certain ways. Second, what makes a state democratic is, roughly, that decisions about how to use the powers of the state to promote the common good and implement people?s rights are made in a way that is reliably sensitive to everyone?s publicly defensible political preferences. For a traditional liberal, the justification for these principles isn?t that people are better off under liberal democracy, but rather that they are the requirements of respect for persons.
What these lofty principles tell us is in essence that if you?re making a decision about public policy, you need to take two things into consideration: what are people entitled to, and what do they want? Giving weight to these things is necessary for respect. So say you?re in charge of rewriting regulations about food and drink, and you encounter the chapter on soft drink sizes. Assume no rights issues are at stake ? no one has a right to buy or sell drinks in containers of any particular size. (It?s interesting why it?s okay to interfere with capitalist acts among consenting adults in this way, but leave it aside here.) Just by looking at the market, you can tell that people like the megajumbo size when watching a movie. Call the policy permitting this Jumbo. Yet you learn that consuming such drinks makes it highly likely that people become obese, which leads to all manner of health problems and unhappiness. So you think of a policy limiting the size of a container, which, behavioural economics tells us, makes it likely that people end up consuming less, and hence less obese. Call this policy Bloomberg.
Why would you adopt Bloomberg? Because it?s good for people. Bloomberg is a paradigmatic well-being based policy. But it conflicts with Jumbo, the policy that people prefer. Hence the Standard Objection to well-being based policy: Bloomberg is paternalistic. So here?s a candidate answer to the Question: well-being is irrelevant to public policy, because either people prefer a well-being promoting policy, in which case it is the preference that does the normative work, or they don?t, in which case well-being considerations should be given no weight, because doing otherwise would be paternalistic, and inconsistent with respect for persons. It?s okay to inform people about, say, the effects of soft drinks, and thereby potentially change their preferences between Jumbo and Bloomberg. But it?s not okay to promote well-being contrary to people?s rights or actual preferences.
In an important new paper, ?Normative Foundations for Well-Being Policy?, Dan Haybron and Valerie Tiberius attempt to respond to the Standard Objection, among other things. They defend weak welfarism, according to which promoting well-being should be one objective of public policy (5). This is consistent with respect for people, they contend, if and only if policies aimed at bettering people?s lives do so according to the beneficiaries? own standards, and do not impose some external standard of well-being on people (6). They call this view Pragmatic Subjectivism. According to it, ?even if value is objective, policymakers are not (in general) entitled to base policies on objective values; public decision-making procedures should be subjectivist in practice, whether or not values really are objective? (MS, 2).
Governments shouldn?t be in the business of declaring which theory of well-being is correct, Haybron and Tiberius argue. The alternative is to promote what people intrinsically value (for themselves, presumably). This is not the same as tracking people?s preferences, since preferences often come apart from values. So Pragmatic Subjectivism licenses policies that go against people?s actual preferences. Perhaps people value the health and abilities that come with not being obese, even if they prefer Jumbo; in that case, apparently, Pragmatic Subjectivism says a policy-maker should choose Bloomberg (or more precisely has at least some reason to do so). Since the policy tracks people?s values even though it goes against their preferences, it?s not disrespectful.
Let?s grant for the sake of the argument that Pragmatic Subjectivism is necessary and sufficient for respect for beneficiaries. Does it follow that well-being policy based on Pragmatic Subjectivism is consistent with the core principles of liberal democracy and respect for persons? No, because well-being policy involves not only the beneficiaries. It also involves the benefactors, people on whom the policy imposes a burden ? say a financial cost or restriction of freedom. The policy has to respect them as well. And it is questionable whether that is possible under Pragmatic Subjectivism.
To see why, consider first a case in which Benjamin is faring badly due to no fault of his own, and has a positive right to assistance from others. It?s thus, let?s assume, a legitimate goal of liberal democratic public policy to promote Benjamin?s well-being. According to Benjamin?s values, X is good for him. Is it consistent with respect for a benefactor, say Aino, to tax her in order to provide Benjamin with X? The answer, I claim, depends on whether X is actually good for Benjamin. After all, at the end of the day, what is at issue here is the legitimacy of state coercion in order to benefit others, of placing a potentially unwanted burden on Aino in the name of Benjamin?s well-being.
There are two possibilities: either X is genuinely good for Benjamin or it isn?t. Suppose it isn?t ? Benjamin is wrong about what?s good for him. (This is not to beg any questions against Haybron and Tiberius. Recall that they are only pragmatic subjectivists ? they don?t deny that there is a fact of the matter about what is good for someone, a fact about which a person may be mistaken.) It is easy to imagine Aino crying out: ?I don?t want to give a cent of my money to be used for something some schmuck thinks is good for him when it in fact is not good for him!? (Aino might think so even if she shares Benjamin?s conception of well-being ? she might consider herself fallible.) I think she would be right: it?s wrong to coerce people in the name of the merely perceived interests of others. That is, we don?t have a duty to provide people with what they regard as assistance, even if we have a duty to provide assistance. (This is related to the point that Scanlon made in ?Preference and Urgency? ? maybe Benjamin thinks what?s best for him is building a monument to his God.)
In discussion, Tiberius labelled this the Schmuck Objection. For all that it shows, it?s okay for the state to place a burden on Aino to genuinely promote Benjamin?s well-being. It?s not necessarily disrespectful to coerce us to carry out our duties toward others ? indeed, some political philosophers see the state as just a vehicle for us to carry out our duties toward each other. But this requires the state to do something proscribed by Pragmatic Subjectivism: find out what is actually good for people before making public policy, since if we have a duty, it?s to do what?s truly good for others. Haybron and Tiberius are surely right that this carries not only the risk of paternalism but also the risk of bureaucratic error ? the state, not just the citizens, is fallible in its conception of what is good for people. And so we get a dilemma: If a policy promotes what makes people better off according to a conception of well-being beneficiaries don?t share, it is potentially inconsistent with respect for persons, because paternalistic. (The Philosopher King objection.) If a policy promotes what makes people better off according to the beneficiaries? conception of well-being, it is potentially inconsistent with respect for persons, because it may impose an unjustifiable burden on the benefactors. (The Schmuck Objection.) A well-being policy must be based either on the beneficiaries? conception of well-being or an external one; hence, any well-being policy is potentially inconsistent with respect for persons.
This is very bad news for those who want to put well-being on the political agenda without giving up on liberal democracy. The answer to the Question is No. Is there some way to avoid this? Well, I think that both horns can possibly be somewhat dulled. The Schmuck Objection works only insofar as promoting what people regard as their good places burdens on others. That?s generally the case, but there may be exceptions. If we were able to identify obese and potentially obese people who regard health as intrinsically good for themselves, we could restrict the size of sodas sold to them in their own interest, while placing no corresponding restriction on the drink sizes of, say, fashion models and lanky hipsters. This kind of policy wouldn?t burden others, and might not be objectionably paternalistic ? it would be akin to lending people a hand at living according to their own values. (It might still be necessary to give them a say on whether they would prefer the government to do so, however.) But of course a ?Jumbo for skinnies, Bloomberg for fatties? regulation might be a stigmatizing and therefore otherwise disrespectful policy. So there doesn?t seem to be much room for Pragmatic Subjectivism in practice.
How about the other horn, then? When might it be okay for the government to settle on a conception of well-being and use it to guide policy even when it goes against the beneficiaries? preferences and values? Well, perhaps there is good reason to think that some people?s values are mistaken, just as there is good reason to think people?s preferences sometimes fail to align with their values. Even so, a government can?t be indifferent to considerations of well-being. We plausibly do owe it to each other, at the very least, to ensure people don?t fare very badly merely due to brute luck. For the state to help us carry out this responsibility, it will have to determine when someone is faring badly in a way that is sufficiently reliably to justify placing a burden on others, and in doing so, make value judgments that are as well-grounded as possible. I?ve already argued, in effect, that this responsibility can?t be delegated to the potential beneficiaries. (Nor is there any reason to think that the benefactors are better judges of value.) So who should governments turn to for settling questions of intrinsic value for policy purposes? Surely some additional weight should be given to the views of people who reflect on such things for a living ? most obviously us philosophers, but also novelists, artists, historians, perhaps even religious authorities in the community. It may be temperamentally easier for people in charge of policy to run a deliberative poll to determine what people actually value than to engage them in a deliberation about what is actually valuable, and then devise usable measures to study the effects of potential policies on welfare; alas, the latter is what a justifiable well-being policy calls for.
This view, call it Genuine Welfarism, is not a doctrine of philosopher kings. After all, promoting well-being is just one consideration in public decision-making in addition to negative rights and people?s actual, publicly defensible preferences. The main point is that if we?re going to promote well-being at cost to someone, we need to do our best to ensure that we?re really making people better off. In practice, this will often be indistinguishable from promoting what people value, since people often value things that are really valuable. For example, both Genuine Welfarism and Pragmatic Subjectivism will likely favour taking walkability into account in planning new neighbourhoods, even if it?s not given much weight in people?s actual preferences, since people underestimate its role in fostering a sense of community, an important determinant of happiness (cf. Haybron and Tiberius, 23). But Genuine Welfarism does so because people actually have reason to favour things that promote happiness, not because they think they do. This does involve a paternalistic element, but that is the price that beneficiaries must pay for the privilege of burdening benefactors.hanley ramirez Christian Bale visits victims Perez Hilton national weather service kristen stewart Christian Bale Sherman Hemsley
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