Capability Satisficing / p.18
Capability Satisficing: Doing Enough for Future People
Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress
August 6-9, 2009
Justin Weinberg
Department of Philosophy
University of South Carolina
My appearance here today is highly improbable. No, I am not talking about my delayed flight, nor my poor sense of direction. It’s just that if my parents hadn’t decided to sneak out to a tiny island off the coast of Connecticut one specific Fall day in the 1970s for some private time, I would never have been conceived. If I wasn’t ever conceived, I would never have been born, and if I hadn’t been born, then it would have been really difficult to get into this conference. Had my parents instead gone elsewhere, or stayed at my grandmother’s house on the shore, they might have made a baby. But that baby would have been someone else, no more me than my brother is. For I am the product of a unique meeting of a specific sperm and egg, and had my parents conceived moments earlier or later than they actually did, a different sperm would have met the egg, and a different person would have arisen in my place. But I am lucky. Rather than the countless others who could have been conceived, I was.
This observation about the contingency of our existence has been dubbed by Derek Parfit the “time dependence claim”: had a person’s parents not conceived her when they in fact did, that person would not have come into existence.[1] The time dependence claim is very interesting, but it also is very disturbing, and not just because it forces us to think about our parents having sex. What makes it really disturbing is that it renders false many widely held beliefs about the morality of certain actions.
1. Choices about the Future
Suppose we’re in a position to choose between two policies that would have differential effects on future generations. The first policy, status quo, would entail no changes in our current behavior, yet its long-term effects would lead to great environmental degradation many generations from now, which would lead to a much lower quality of life for those future people. The second policy, change, would entail some mildly costly changes to our behavior. Its long-term effects, though, would be to prevent further environmental degradation, which would lead to the people of far future generations enjoying an average quality of life similar to ours now. If asked which policy we would choose, we would likely choose change over status quo.
Why? One reason likely to be offered is the following: if we choose status quo, then we will be harming future generations. We will be making them worse off than they otherwise could have been, had we instead chosen change. But here is where the time-dependence claim comes in and says “sorry, but that is not true; virtually no one will be harmed by choosing status quo.” Instead, what really happens is the following. Each choice of policy will affect people’s patterns of behavior. Suppose we choose change. Its higher taxes on gasoline (we’ll suppose) and regulations regarding energy use may affect how much one drives, or where one goes, or what kind of car one might buy. Over many generations, it will have an effect on who people meet, who people mate with, who people conceive children with and when, what those children are like, who they meet and mate with, and so on. Ultimately, choosing change will cause the existence of a population of persons—call them the future change people—who would not have existed had we instead chosen status quo. So if we choose the status quo, we are not making any people worse off than they would have been. (Indeed, on the assumption that they have lives that are worth living—in the sense that they do not prefer to never have been born—it might be thought a benefit to them that they have been brought into existence.) What we are instead doing is bringing into existence a different set of people—the future status quo people—who are worse off than the future change people. We are causing some people to exist, rather than other people. To say that choosing the status quo harms future generations, then, would be like saying that my giving you 1 coconut rather than giving some other person 3 coconuts harms you. Surely it does not—unless, of course, it causes you to have an unsatisfiable urge to juggle.
So we are left with a problem, which, following Parfit, has come to be called the non-identity problem.[2] Matt Hanser phrases the problem this way: “What is the moral objection to a choice that causes someone to be badly off, if that person (a) has a life worth living, and (b) would not have existed had the choice not been made?”[3]
Some think that there is no such objection.[4] They think that because of the time-dependence claim we have no obligations to far future generations. Here, the non-identity problem makes “all the difference” to our moral judgments. Others, including Parfit, think that the non-identity problem should make “no difference” to our moral judgments.[5] On this latter view, the non-identity problem can be neutralized.
There are two ways of neutralizing the non-identity problem: deflation and avoidance. The deflation strategy holds that the non-identity problem really isn’t a problem at all.[6] I am not convinced by the deflationary strategy, but I do not have time in this paper to explain why.
The non-identity problem gains purchase for us because we are attracted to what are called narrow person-affecting theories of value. If a theory of value is person-affecting in this sense then according to it something cannot be good unless it is good for someone, and that something cannot be bad unless it is bad for someone. So the other way to neutralize the non-identity problem—to prevent it from preventing us from declaring status quo the wrong choice, for example—is to give up narrow person-affecting theories of value. This is the avoidance strategy, and it is taken up by utilitarians and other consequentialists. According to utilitarianism, assuming that our choice between status quo and change is a choice between populations containing the same number of people,[7] the right choice is change, since the future change people would be better off than the future status quo people, resulting in more total goodness. [8] The difficulty with this utilitarian move, of course, is that utilitarianism faces several well-known objections which for reasons of time I will not go into.
The task, then, is to find a view that will prevent the non-identity problem from giving us the wrong answer in cases like status quo v. change yet will also avoid the difficulties that confront utilitarianism and other forms of maximizing consequentialism.
In this paper I’ll argue that a kind of satisficing consequentialism that makes use of a theory of the good based on the capability theory of Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen is able to do this successfully. I call the view capability satisficing (CS). It gives us the correct answer in the choice between status quo and change. It avoids the difficulties associated with other versions of maximizing and satisficing consequentialism. And in the choice between whether the non-identity problem should make all the difference or no difference at all to our moral judgments, it sets out a middle path that is able to neutralize the most objectionable implications of the problem.
Space limitations prevent me from describing the alternative approaches to this task that have had various defects exposed, such an appeal to rights[9] or to Rawls’s theory.[10] What I will do is briefly describe the capabilities that Nussbaum has identified as necessary for a flourishing life and then introduce CS. CS relies on a controversial theory of value for which I will not be able here to provide a full independent defense. My defense here only consists in showing how the theory it is a part of, CS, succeeds at the task at hand. After describing CS more fully, I will address a number of objections to it.
2. Capabilities
The capabilities approach holds that there are necessary preconditions of flourishing, understood as the possession of certain capabilities. Briefly, the current formulation of Nussbaum’s list of capabilities are: life; bodily health; bodily integrity; using the senses, imagination, and thought; forming emotional attachments; forming a conception of the good and reasoning carefully about one’s life; affiliating with others with self-respect and nonhumiliation; living with concern for nonhuman parts of nature; playing; participating in political processes that affect one’s life; holding property; and having opportunities for material advance and cooperation.[11] As Nussbaum puts it, “the basic idea is that with regard to each of these, we can argue, by imagining a life without the capability in question, that such a life is not a life worthy of human dignity.”[12] It is not the case that in order to have a flourishing life people must be exercising these capabilities, nor is it the case that the list of capabilities is supposed to specify one conception of a good life. Rather, the capabilities make a variety of good lives available to those who possess them. Now I am not going to insist that good lives are necessarily unavailable to those who do not possess these capabilities, or possess each of them to the fullest extent. No one attracted to a theory should rule out the possibility of being surprised by the real world. But, given some common normative standards and what we know about human life and moral inquiry, the capabilities approach may give us our best general account of flourishing human lives. When dealing with distant future persons—persons about whom we have no personal connection and about whom we know very little—some generalization about the good is unavoidable.
If we accept this theory of the good, we can put the choice between change and status quo as a choice between future populations that will have, respectively, more or fewer persons with the adequate set of capabilities.
3. Capability Satisficing Introduced
A satisficing view holds that an act or policy is the right one when it results in a sufficient amount of goodness, or reaches some specified minimal threshold of value. It is best understood in contrast with maximizing views, which hold that an act or policy is the right one when it results in maximal goodness. For the sake of space I must leave aside a discussion of the varieties of satisficing.[13] Some satisficing approaches to our obligations to future generations have been attempted.[14] However, the capabilities approach can be used effectively to render an appealing satisficing view, CS, which withstands the strongest objections.
Notice two distinctive features of CS. The first is its characterization of the minimum threshold. The second is in the way it assigns value to different kinds of future lives.
CS specifies the minimum threshold of value as the possession of the set of capabilities, detailed by Nussbaum, which are reasonably believed to be necessary for a flourishing life. It further holds that lives at or above this threshold, capable lives, have agent-neutral, or objective, value. To say that these lives have agent-neutral value is to say that everyone has a reason to bring them about. It may be a defeasible reason, as we will see, but it is a reason that all persons have.
Claims of value are notoriously difficult to defend, and I cannot mount a full defense here.[15] What I can do is sketch the view and show why the view may be worth defending.
Lives below the capable threshold we can call deficient lives. Deficient lives may be worth living, in the sense that the people living them prefer existence to never having existed.[16] From the perspective of those living them, deficient lives are valuable. But they lack the objective value of capable lives. They have only agent-relative, or what we can call subjective, value.
CS, then, attributes moral weight to the distinction between worth-living and worth-creating, and only capable lives are of the latter sort.[17] Each future person’s existence may be a good to that person; but that good does not necessarily provide us now with a reason to create that person.
This leaves us with the following account of CS: in choices that affect further future generations, we should choose the alternative that we expect will bring about the greatest number of capable lives.
Let us see how CS handles the choice between status quo and change.
CS says that it would be wrong to choose status quo instead of change. This is because choosing status quo would create a distant future populated by more persons whose lives are deficient, instead of more persons whose lives are capable. We face an exclusive choice between these kinds of lives. CS holds that we all have a reason to bring about distantly future capable lives. Meanwhile, none of us has a reason to bring about distantly future deficient lives. So were we to choose status quo rather than change, we would be going against what we have most reason to do. Thus, CS matches our intuitions about this choice.
Note that CS does not ignore the non-identity problem: it does not hold that choosing status quo is wrong because it harms future people by giving them lives that are deficient rather than capable. CS does not presume that we have made these people worse off than they could have been. Rather, because of the exclusivity of the choice, if we choose status quo, we are unable to create capable lives.
If we could bring about deficient lives at no opportunity cost, nothing in CS holds that it would be wrong to cause these deficient lives to exist. By saying that it would not be wrong to cause deficient lives to come into existence, then, CS is able to get the “right answer” in the question of status quo versus change without implausibly denying that such lives have at least subjective value.