Justice in Love

By Nicholas Wolterstorff

An eminent Christian philosopher's take on justice, rights, wrongs -- and what love has to do with it all

Love and justice have long been prominent themes in the moral culture of the West, yet they are often considered to be almost hopelessly at odds with one another. In this book acclaimed Christian philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff shows that justice and love are at heart perfectly compatible, and he argues that the commonly perceived tension between them reveals something faulty in our understanding of each. True benevolent love, he says, is always attentive to justice, and love that wreaks injustice can only ever be "malformed love."

Wolterstorff's Justice in Love is a welcome companion and follow-up volume to his magnificentJustice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton, 2010). Building upon his expansive discussion of justice in that earlier work and charitably engaging alternative views, this book focuses in profound new ways on the complex yet ultimately harmonious relation between justice and love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: May 3, 2011
• ISBN: 9781467434706

Nicholas Wolterstorff

Nicholas P. Wolterstorff is the Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology at Yale University, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, and author of many books including Until Justice and Peace Embrace (1983), Lament for a Son (1987), Divine Discourse (1995), Justice: Rights and Wrongs (2008), Justice in Love (2011), Art Rethought (2015), Acting Liturgically (2018), and Religion in the University (2019).

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Preface to the Paperback Edition

A NEW PRINTING OF A BOOK provides its author with the opportunity to say where he judges that his discussion could have been improved. Such second thoughts may be either the result of the author’s own reflections subsequent to his writing of the book or his response to misinterpretations and criticisms of what he said.

All three synoptic gospels report the episode in which Jesus declared that the greatest commandments in Torah were to love God above all and one’s neighbor as oneself. The Greek verb translated into English as love is agapaō. In the New Testament epistles, the Greek word translated as love is also almost always the verb agapaō or the noun agapē. It is for that reason that I, along with many others, use the term agapism to refer to that long tradition of ethical reflection which takes its bearings from what Jesus and the New Testament letter writers said about love. I stand in that tradition. I am an agapist.

A prominent theme in traditional discussions of the relation between love and justice is the theme of tension. It has commonly been held that there is motivational tension between the two: in acting out of love, one is not doing what one does because justice requires it; and conversely, in doing what one does because justice requires it, one is not acting out of love. Some writers have held that there is also directional tension between love and justice: acting out of love may direct one to do something that justice directs one not to do, and conversely.¹

In the twentieth century there emerged, within contemporary agapism in general, a movement that articulated more sharply than ever before a certain understanding of the love for the neighbor that Jesus enjoined, namely, love as gratuitous benevolence, and that developed in greater depth than ever before the traditional theme of tension between love and justice, both motivational and directional. In Justice in Love I called this movement within contemporary agapism in general modern day agapism.

I know of one reviewer who interpreted me as meaning to refer to contemporary agapism in general with the term modern day agapism, and who forcefully insisted that there were many contemporary agapists who did not hold the views that he took me to be attributing to all of them. There may well be readers in addition to this reviewer who have misinterpreted me in this way and who have similarly bridled at the inaccuracy of what they took me to be claiming about contemporary agapism in general.

The reviewer was correct in his insistence that there have been many contemporary agapists who did not hold the views that he took me to be attributing to all of them. For one thing, not all agapists of the contemporary period agreed that the love for the neighbor that Jesus enjoined is to be understood as gratuitous benevolence. I quoted the prominent ethicist Paul Ramsey as saying that among his fellow Christian ethicists a prominent alternative to the gratuitous benevolence interpretation was the mutual love interpretation — mutual love being love that both loves and seeks to be loved. In mutual love, self-referential motives … are co-present with other-regarding motives. After taking note of this alternative, Ramsey brusquely dismissed it in favor of the benevolence interpretation. Surely, he says, the benevolence interpretation is the more correct reading of Biblical and New Testament texts…. When the scripture enjoins: ‘Let love be among you,’ it does not mean, ‘Let among-you-ness" be among you.’ It is one thing to say, ‘Let mutual love be mutual,’ and quite another to say in the New Testament meaning of the word, ‘Let love be mutual.’ For the love in question takes its measure from Christ’s love for the church when he ‘gave himself up for her.’"²

Just as not all agapists of the contemporary period agreed that the love for the neighbor that Jesus enjoined is to be understood as gratuitous benevolence, so too not all agreed that there is tension between love and justice. Among those who did not understand agapic love as gratuitous benevolence, some understood it in such a way that there is neither motivational nor directional tension between love and justice. And among those who did interpret agapic love in such a way that there is motivational tension between love and justice, a good many held that there is no directional tension between them. Paul Ramsey was a prominent representative of this latter position. In general, the rejection of directional tension has been much more common among contemporary agapists than the rejection of motivational tension.

I now judge that I should have used a different term for the movement I had in mind than modern day agapism and that I should have been more emphatic than I was in saying that what I had in mind was only a movement within contemporary agapism, not contemporary agapism in general. Part One of the book is titled Benevolence-Agapism. It opens with the sentence, In the twentieth century there emerged, among Christian (especially Protestant) ethicists and theologians, a highly articulate and provocative version of agapism. In the next two sentences I spoke of what emerged as a movement. In a good many other passages I used the same terms, version of and movement within. To my mind, speaking of what I was referring to as a version of agapism and as a movement within agapism indicated quite clearly that it was not contemporary agapism in general that I was referring to. I concede, however, that I could have been more emphatic on the point.

When I was writing the book, I worked for some time with the term nygrenist agapism. Eventually I rejected it because it seemed to suggest that members of the movement were all followers of Anders Nygren. Though Nygren was certainly influential within the movement, not all members of the movement were followers of Nygren. In the book I now and then called the movement benevolence-agapism, as in the title of Part One. This term highlights the fact that at the core of the movement was the claim that what Jesus meant by agapē was gratuitous benevolence. But at the core of the movement was another claim as well, namely, that between gratuitous benevolence and justice there is not only motivational but also directional tension. The term conflict-benevolence agapism highlights both theses. It’s a clunky term! But for the sake of forestalling further misunderstanding I will, in the remainder of this preface, sacrifice aesthetics and call the movement in question conflict-benevolence agapism.

I repeat: what I called modern day agapism in the book, and will now call conflict-benevolence agapism, has two main theses: the thesis that the love for the neighbor that Jesus enjoined is to be understood as gratuitous benevolence, and the thesis that between gratuitous benevolence and justice there is both motivational tension and directional tension.

The main thesis of Justice in Love is that between love and justice there is no tension, neither motivational nor directional. The English term love refers to a number of distinctly different phenomena. When I claim that between love and justice there is no tension, the love I have in mind is that to which Jesus was referring — call it agapic love. Between agapic love, rightly understood, and justice, rightly understood, there is neither motivational nor directional tension. Well-formed agapic love often seeks to promote the flourishing of the one loved beyond what justice requires; but it never does less than what justice requires. A crucial step in the argument was my claim that the love Jesus had in mind was not gratuitous benevolence. Agapic love is not gratuitous benevolence.

When writing Justice in Love I decided that, rather than plunging straight ahead to develop my thesis that there is neither motivational nor directional tension between agapic love, rightly understood, and justice, rightly understood, I should first look with care into the writings of those members of the movement of conflict-benevolence agapism who had stated the opposing position most powerfully. I judged these to be Anders Nygren and Reinhold Niebuhr, with Søren Kierkegaard as their great nineteenth-century forebear.

Nygren argued that acting out of gratuitous benevolence sometimes perpetrates injustice, and that when it does one should say farewell to justice and continue in love. Niebuhr agreed with Nygren that gratuitous benevolence can come into conflict with justice; he argued that this happens most often in situations of large-scale conflict. However, on what one should do in such a situation he took the opposite position from Nygren; one should remain faithful to justice and postpone love. I called Niebuhr a non-classical representative of the movement of conflict-benevolence agapism on the ground that most representatives of the movement sided with Nygren rather than with him as to what one should do in cases of directional conflict. Given his prominence in the movement, it was perhaps ill-advised to call his position non-classical.

When I decided that, for the sake of its systematic rigor, I would discuss Nygren’s Agape and Eros, I was well aware of the fact that the book has been the object of withering criticism on multiple counts. In my experience, Nygren’s name is rarely mentioned without a dismissive comment being immediately added: bad intellectual history, bad biblical exegesis, bad theology, bad philosophy. There are self-identified Kierkegaardians, self-identified Barthians, self-identified Niebuhrians; I have yet to meet, or even to hear of, a self-identified Nygrenist. Some of those who have written about Justice in Love appear to have been offended by the mere fact that I gave Nygren the time of day.

I agree with many of the criticisms. There is indeed bad intellectual history in Nygren, bad biblical exegesis, bad theology, bad philosophy. Nonetheless, I remain convinced that he articulated the concept of agapic love as gratuitous benevolence with greater systematic rigor than anyone else, and that he, along with Niebuhr, argued more forcefully than anyone else that there is not only motivational but directional tension between love as gratuitous benevolence and justice.

Distinguish between primary justice and reactive or corrective justice. In my earlier book, Justice: Rights and Wrongs, I developed a general theory of primary justice. To the disappointment of some readers, my aim in Justice in Love was not to articulate a correspondingly general theory of love. Nor was it my aim to articulate a general account of the relation between justice and agapic love, though that’s what other readers were looking for. My primary aim, to repeat, was the more limited aim of addressing the theme of tension. More specifically, my primary aim was to argue that between agapic love, rightly understood, and justice, rightly understood, there is no tension. Agapic love rightly understood incorporates justice.

I had a secondary aim as well. The ethical orientation that I and others call agapism has been discussed primarily by theologians and Christian ethicists; it has seldom been discussed by philosophical ethicists. Most philosophical ethicists are either ignorant of it or have adopted a hands-off policy. It was my aim to bring agapism into the orbit of philosophical discussion and to do so in such a way that it would not seem like an alien intrusion.

In the introduction to Justice in Love I quote the philosophical ethicist William Frankena as saying in his well-known book Ethics,

there is an ethical theory that has been and still is widely accepted, especially in Judeo-Christian circles, the ethics of love. This holds that there is only one basic ethical imperative — to love — and that the others are to be derived from it…. We may call this view agapism. In spite of its prevalence, it is generally neglected in philosophical introductions to ethics like this, yet just because of its prevalence, it is desirable to … say something about it.

Frankena followed this comment with a chapter devoted to a discussion of agapism. In writing Justice in Love it was my aim to follow in Frankena’s footsteps and treat agapism as a theory on all fours with those ethical theories that are regularly discussed by philosophers.

One reason philosophical ethicists seldom pay attention to agapism is that the founding texts of agapism are religious rather than philosophical texts. An additional reason is that the founding texts are not systematic in the way that the founding texts of egoism, eudaimonism, and utilitarianism are systematic. The injunction by Jesus to love one’s neighbor as oneself occurs within the narratives told by the New Testament gospel writers; and the injunction is itself a quotation from the law code presented to ancient Israel by Moses on behalf of God. Interpreting such texts requires a very different set of hermeneutic skills from those developed by philosophers for interpreting philosophical texts.

Though these two considerations help to explain why most philosophers who are not ignorant of agapism have adopted a hands-off policy, I judge that they are not sufficient as an explanation. Not all philosophers shy away from interpreting and discussing religious texts, and not all shy away from texts that are not systematic. Augustine’s Confessions is a religious text with a narrative rather than a systematic structure; not all philosophers shy away from it.

Let me mention two additional considerations that seem to me to play a role in the hands-off policy of most philosophers with respect to agapism. Jesus is regarded by most Christians as having spoken with the authority of one who speaks on behalf of God. For that reason, most theologians and Christian ethicists do not offer reasons in favor of agapism and against alternative ethical orientations; they confine themselves to expounding agapism. Rather than offering philosophical arguments for the superiority of agapism to its alternatives they offer arguments to their fellow agapists for the superiority of their particular version of agapism. If challenged on their acceptance of agapism as such they would say, if not initially, then later, that they accept it because Jesus said, Love your neighbor as yourself.

Seldom do philosophers appeal to authority in this way — though de facto a good many Thomists take Aquinas as authoritative, a good many Kantians take Kant as authoritative, etc. Philosophers try to give arguments for their positions. They realize, however, that arguments run out at some point; and that they almost always run out without the position one is defending having gained the acceptance of all one’s fellow philosophers. At that point, philosophers appeal to what they commonly call intuition — which is just a way of saying that the position continues to seem true to one even though one has not succeeded in persuading all one’s fellow philosophers of its truth. No problem with appealing at the end of the argument to one’s personal intuition. Quite another matter to appeal at the end of the argument to the authority of some religious figure.

Nowhere in Justice in Love do I declare that I embrace agapism because I regard Jesus as having spoken with authority. I do regard Jesus as having spoken with authority; and I do embrace agapism for that reason. But here I offer reasons in favor of agapism and reasons against the alternatives, reasons that I hope a good many of my fellow philosophers will find convincing, or if not convincing, then at least worth taking seriously. I know in advance that not all of them will find my reasons convincing. In that respect, my defense of agapism is no different from the defense of alternative theories by their adherents. Utilitarians offer reasons for their position that fall far short of enjoying universal acceptance.

In the preceding paragraph I was addressing my fellow philosophers, suggesting that the fact that most people who accept agapism probably do so because it was propounded by someone whom they regard as having spoken with religious authority is not a good reason for philosophers to ignore this ethical orientation. I dare say that, on the other hand, there are theologians and Christian ethicists who earnestly desire that philosophers would continue to ignore agapism. The prospect of philosophers treating agapism as one ethical theory among others feels to them like sacrilege. To treat it thus is to defile revelation with the clammy hand of reason. Agapism is not to be defended with reasons devised by philosophers but to be accepted because Jesus commanded us to love our neighbors as ourselves.

My response to this protest is, why assume that there is nothing to be said for agapism other than that Jesus commanded us to love our neighbors as ourselves? May it not be the case that when we think hard about agapism, we come to see that it expresses and organizes deep moral convictions shared by many? One does not have to accept it for that reason; one is free to accept it solely on the authority of Jesus. But something important will have been brought to light.

I judge that there is yet another reason for the hands-off policy of most philosophers toward agapism. Theologians and Christian ethicists have often presented agapism as if it were a sui generis ethical orientation. Agapism, they have said, is an ethic for Christians, not for human beings in general. And whereas other ethical orientations take as their basic concept duty, well-being, desire-satisfaction, and the like, agapism is said or assumed to be unique in that it takes love as its basic concept. In the passage that I quoted from Frankena, Frankena assumes that agapism is unique in that it holds that there is only one basic ethical imperative — to love — and that the others are to be derived from it.

In the course of my discussion in Justice in Love I challenge the assumption that agapism is an ethic just for Christians. Jesus’ injunction to love one’s neighbor as oneself holds for all human beings. And I argue that when love is understood as seeking someone’s good as an end in itself, then love is not only the fundamental concept in agapism but the fundamental concept in most ethical theories, this in spite of the fact that most of them do not use the term love very often. What fundamentally differentiates egoism, eudaimonism, utilitarianism, and agapism from each other is that they have different understandings of someone’s good and that each affirms a distinct rule of application, as I call it, that is, a rule that specifies whose good is to be sought as an end in itself and under what conditions.

A number of readers have challenged my claim that agapism is an ethical orientation distinct from eudaimonism and have insisted that it is, instead, a species of eudaimonism. Often this insistence is motivated by allegiance to the views of Aquinas. I have wondered whether, in other cases, it is perhaps motivated by the desire I share, namely, to bring agapism within the sphere of philosophy. Given that eudaimonism was first developed by the ancient philosophers, to treat agapism as a species of eudaimonism is to treat it as a species of a position that is already well-esteemed by philosophers.

Whether or not agapism is a species of eudaimonism depends mainly on how one understands eudaimonism. In my Justice: Rights and Wrongs, I presented my understanding at length. I presented it again, more briefly, in the first chapter of this present book.³ It’s tempting, here in this new preface, once again to explain and defend my understanding of eudaimonism in the hope of persuading the yet-unpersuaded that agapism is not a version of eudaimonism. I realize, however, that that hope is almost certainly vain. So let me confine myself to taking note of an explanation of eudaimonism that I commonly hear but that I regard as seriously inadequate.

It is often said that eudaimonism is the doctrine that we should each seek to live our lives well, along with the doctrine that virtue is an indispensable constituent of the well-lived life. Eudaimonism, so described, is regularly contrasted with theories of ethics that focus on actions rather than on a person’s life as a whole, and with theories that focus on decisions rather than on virtues.

On this interpretation of eudaimonism, agapism is indeed a version of eudaimonism. But so are the other ethical orientations that I mentioned, egoism and utilitarianism. Each of these can be formulated as a theory concerning lives rather than individual actions; and each can incorporate a theory of the virtues relevant to acting in accord with that particular theory. Egoism, eudaimonism, utilitarianism, agapism — they are all theories concerning the good of human being and concerning whose good one should seek as an end in itself and under what conditions. What differentiates them from each other is that they have different views on these matters.

In this new preface I have addressed a few of the more consequential misunderstandings and disagreements that Justice in Love has evoked. It would be a mistake to close having taken note only of misunderstandings and disagreements. I have been deeply gratified by the fact that most reviewers and correspondents have judged the book to make a significant contribution to our understanding of the relation between love and justice. I was especially moved by the reviewer who said that it makes a very original contribution to the discussion, and that it is clear and imaginative, as well as devout, learned, and humane.⁴ No author could want more!

NICHOLAS WOLTERSTORFF

1. I am indebted to Paul Weithman for the very useful terms motivational tension and directional tension. See his review of Justice in Love in Faith and Philosophy 30.2 (April 2013): 213-21.

2. These passages from Ramsey are quoted on p. 24 of the present volume.

3. I also do so in my essay, Augustine’s Rejection of Eudaimonism, in Augustine’s City of God: A Critical Guide, ed. James Wetzel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 149-66.

4. Paul Weithman, in the review mentioned.

Preface

TWO CONCEPTS LONG PROMINENT in the moral culture of the West are those of love and justice. One can imagine a society in which either or both of these was absent; in such a society, nobody would think in terms of love or nobody would think in terms of justice. In our society, most of us think in terms of both.

We are the present day recipients of two comprehensive imperatives issued by the writers of antiquity that employ these concepts. One is the imperative to do justice, coming to us from both the Athens-Rome strand of our heritage and the Jerusalem strand. Do justice, said the prophet Micah in a well-known passage. The ancient Roman jurist Ulpian said that we are to render to each person his or her right or due (ius). The other imperative comes to us only from the Jerusalem strand: love your neighbor as yourself, even if that neighbor is an enemy. Do not return evil for evil, said Jesus. The ancient Greek writers praised eros-love and philia-love. Jesus, quoting the Torah, enjoined agape-love.

These two imperatives, do justice and love your neighbor as yourself, do not reveal on their face how they are related to each other. It is this, plus their persistence and prominence in our inheritance, that accounts for the fact that over and over the question has been raised, what do justice and love have to do with each other? And it was the persistence and prominence of the question that made it natural for me to project a chapter on the relation between justice and love when planning my book Justice: Rights and Wrongs.¹ But Justice became too long for any additional chapters. And in any case it became clear to me, after no more than preliminary reflection, that a serious treatment of the topic would require not a chapter but a book.

Prominent in the literature on justice and love is the theme of tension or conflict. Sometimes this theme takes the form of writers arguing that one cannot follow the two imperatives simultaneously; they are inherently conflictual. To act out of love is perforce not to treat the recipient as one does because justice requires it; to treat someone as one does because justice requires it is perforce not to be acting out of love. At other times the theme takes the form of writers arguing that following the love-imperative will sometimes wreak injustice, or arguing that following the justice-imperative will sometimes be unloving.

The examples offered of unjust love fall, for the most part, into three categories. The way generosity is sometimes dispensed is unjust. The way in which benevolent paternalism is sometimes exercised is unjust. And a persistent charge against forgiveness, mercy, pardon, amnesty, commutation of sentence, and the like is that, in mercifully foregoing or diminishing punishment of the wrongdoer, justice is violated. This charge is at the center of the controversies swirling around truth and reconciliation commissions of the past thirty years or so.

There are different kinds of justice, as there are different kinds of love. So a question that naturally comes to mind, once one has noted the prominence of the agonistic theme in the literature, is what kind of justice and what kind of love do writers see as coming into conflict with each other?

With respect to justice, all kinds: commutative, distributive, corrective; they all turn up in discussions about justice and love. Not so for love. Among the various phenomena that we use the English word love to refer to is that of being drawn or attracted to something on account of its worth or excellence — as when one says, I love the late Beethoven string quartets. That’s not the kind of love that those who write about love and justice have in mind. Invariably they are thinking of love as benevolence, generosity, charity. Admittedly most writers don’t say this; they don’t clearly differentiate love as benevolence from other kinds of love and declare that it is love as benevolence that they have in mind. But close attention to what they say reveals that it is in fact always benevolence that they are talking about.

The response of some writers to the perceived tension between the justice-imperative and the love-imperative is to prefer love to justice. They propose eliminating the concept of justice from our moral culture, or giving priority to love over justice whenever there is conflict, or confining the use of the category of justice to a few, carefully delimited, situations. The response of others is the opposite, to prefer justice to love.

Rather than accepting tension between these two imperatives as an unalterable fact of life, I argue in the following pages that our perception of tension between them is the sign of something having gone wrong in our understanding of them. I propose and argue for a way of understanding love and a way of understanding justice such that the two imperatives are fully in harmony with each other.

In Part One I argue for the desirability of a compatibilist way of understanding the relation between the two imperatives; in Part Two I work out such an understanding. Then in Part Three and Part Four I analyze cases of perceived conflict between love and justice. Is it true that forgiveness is inherently unjust, as many have charged? What makes generosity sometimes unjust? What makes benevolent paternalism sometimes unjust? What accounts for the malformations of love represented by unjust generosity and unjust paternalism? For that, so I argue, is what they are, malformations of love. Love that perpetrates injustice is malformed love.

Let me emphasize that this is neither a discourse on justice with some ancillary reflections on love, nor is it a discourse on love with some ancillary reflections on justice. My Justice: Rights and Wrongs, is an expansive discussion of justice; those who expect a similarly expansive discussion of love in this companion volume will be disappointed. My focus is on the relation between justice and love; there is much about love that falls outside that focus.

Parts of this volume were delivered as lectures at Azusa Pacific University, Columbia Theological Seminary, Geneva College, Oxford University, Regent College, Tyndale College, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Tennessee, the University of Virginia, and Western Theological Seminary. I thank these institutions for the honor of being invited to give the lectures and for the vigorous and helpful discussions that they provoked. And I thank the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture (University of Virginia), of which I am a senior fellow, for financial support and for the extraordinarily pleasant atmosphere it provides for thinking, reading, and writing.

1. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION

IT WAS ALMOST INEVITABLE that we in the West would return over and over to the topic of love and justice in our literature, our philosophy, our theology. As I observed in the Preface, the topic was placed on our agenda by two comprehensive imperatives handed down to us from antiquity: the imperative to do justice and the imperative to love one’s neighbor as oneself.

It was by no means inevitable, however, that justice in the former imperative and love in the latter would be understood in such a way that the most pervasive theme in discussions about love and justice would be the theme of conflict. But so it is. The perceived conflict includes, but goes deeper than, incidents of unjust love and incidents of unloving justice. It is said or assumed that to act out of love is not to act as one does because justice requires it, and that to act as one does because justice requires it is not to act out of love. Some then choose love, whether or not they perpetrate injustice in so doing; some choose justice, whether or not they are unloving.

My argument in this volume is that when these two imperatives are rightly understood, they are not in conflict. To suppose that they are is to misunderstand either justice in the justice-imperative or love in the love-imperative — or both. Where so many for so long have thought they saw conflict, I aim to show harmony.

Comprehensive though the justice-imperative may be, nobody has ever proposed that seeking justice should constitute the whole of one’s ethical orientation. Not so for love. Many have held that love should be the totality of one’s orientation toward one’s fellow human beings. The Greek word most commonly used in the Septuagint and New Testament for love is agapē. For that reason, this ethical orientation has come to be called agapism. My goal in this first chapter is to introduce, in preliminary fashion, that ethical orientation which is agapism.

I think the best way to get a sense both of the structure and the significance of agapism is to contrast it with the three alternative ethical orientations most commonly discussed by philosophers: namely, egoism, eudaimonism, and utilitarianism. In order to do this, we must first identify and distinguish certain types of goods. It would not be a mistake to think of our entire subsequent discussion as all about different kinds of goods and different ways of being related to those different kinds of goods.

WELLBEING, AND WHAT IS GOOD FOR SOMEONE

Every ethical system, whether embedded in the practices of a society or articulated by some theorist, employs the idea of certain states and events in a person’s life as good for that person.¹ Likewise every ethical system employs the idea of certain actions and activities on the part of a person as good for that person. My being of good health is one of the states in my life that is good for me; my listening to a good performance of a Beethoven string quartet is one of the activities that is good for me. The states and events in a person’s life that are good for the person, combined with the actions and activities of that person that are good for him or her, together make up the whole of what is good for that person.

Let us agree that if some state or event in a person’s life is good for that person, then it is a good in that person’s life, a life-good. So too for the actions and activities a person performs that are good for her: those are goods in her life, life-goods.

Some of the states and events in a person’s life that are good for him or her are intrinsically good; some are instrumentally good. So too for the actions and activities that he or she performs. Something is an instrumental good for someone just in case it makes a causal contribution to something else that is a good for him or her; something is an intrinsic good for someone just in case its being good for her does not consist at all, or not only, in its being an instrumental good for her. If getting bifocal eye glasses would be good for me, it would obviously not be an intrinsic but an instrumental good for me; its worth for me lies entirely in the fact that bifocals will bring about the good for me of my being able to see better.

The distinction between instrumental and intrinsic goods makes reference to causation. A parallel distinction can be made concerning the relation among intended actions within the action-plans of persons. A person may intend to do something because he judges that performing that action will be a means to something else that he wants to bring about. Alternatively, he may do it not at all, or not only, as a means to something else but for its own sake; in the latter case, it is an end in itself for him.

It is commonly assumed nowadays that something is good for someone just in case it contributes positively to his or her wellbeing or welfare.² This seems to me correct. When we say such things as Exercising regularly would be good for you and It would be good for me to get bifocals, we mean that exercising regularly would contribute to your wellbeing, as would getting bifocal glasses to mine. So let me use the term wellbeing-goods for both the states and events in a person’s life that are good for the person and the actions and activities of a person that are good for him or her.

We can make sound judgments about whether or not something is good for someone without being able to explain what it is for something to be good for someone. One of the challenges facing the theorist, however, is to explain this idea; and that has proved difficult. Robert Adams observes that explaining what human well-being consists in — what it is for something to be good for a person is in fact one of the most difficult tasks of ethical theory.³ In this book I will not attempt that task.

A negative point is worth making, however. A position widely shared nowadays, in the debates concerning the nature of wellbeing, is that what makes something intrinsically good for a person is that it bears some connection to the satisfaction of that person’s desires or preferences. Those attracted to this position have found it difficult to specify exactly what that connection is. In What Is Good and Why: The Ethics of Well-Being, Richard Kraut offers what seems to me a decisive objection to the position — an objection that saves us the labor of scrutinizing all the different accounts that have been proposed, concerning the supposedly essential connection between wellbeing and desire-satisfaction, to see whether any of them work. He observes that we speak of something as good for a plant and that, in doing so, we use the term good for in the same sense that we do when we apply it to human beings. But plants don’t have desires.⁴ In my discussion, I will assume that Kraut is right about this; something’s being good for someone has no essential connection to desire-satisfaction.

All ethical systems, in addition to employing the idea of states and events, actions and activities, in a person’s life that are good for him or her, also employ the idea of acting so as to bring about some wellbeing good in the life of someone or other. Bringing about some wellbeing-good in someone’s life may either be an end in itself in the structure of one’s action or activity, or a mere means to something else.

Among the diverse phenomena that we use the English word love to refer to, prominent is that of seeking to promote some wellbeing-good of someone or other as an end in itself. Every ethical system operates with the idea of love so understood. Most systems do not call it love; but whether or not they call it love, every ethical system operates with the idea.

RULES FOR THE PROMOTION OF WELLBEING: EGOISM, EUDAIMONISM, AND UTILITARIANISM

Ethical systems do not just have the ideas mentioned; they apply them. In particular, they apply them in formulating rules as to which wellbeing-goods of which persons one may or should seek to bring about, and under what conditions and in what manner. One of the most fundamental points of difference among such systems concerns which rules of application are correct.

I must explain how I will be using the terms should and may in my discussion. In ordinary English, should and ought often function as synonyms, as do may and permitted. I will not be using them as synonyms. When I say that S may do X, or that it is acceptable for S to do X, I will mean that it would be a good thing for S to do X; and when I say that S should do X, I will mean that, of the alternatives on offer, doing X is the best thing for S to do. By contrast, when I say that S ought to do X, I will mean that it is morally obligatory for S to do X; and when I say that it is permissible for S to do X, I will mean that it is not morally obligatory for S to refrain from doing X.

The assumption underlying this regimentation of language is that not everything one should do is something that one is morally obligated to do. When a friend asks me for advice on whether he should apply for some position advertised in the newspaper, I may say that I think he should apply. Usually I will not mean that he is obligated to apply; I mean that applying for the position is the best thing for him to do in his circumstance. On the other hand, if one is morally obligated to do something, then one should do it; moral obligation trumps other considerations.

The rule of application easiest to explain and grasp is that of ethical egoism. The egoist holds that the only wellbeing-goods one should seek as ends in themselves to bring about are one’s own; only as a means to the enhancement of one’s own overall wellbeing should one seek to bring about some wellbeing-good of another. The well-lived life is the life animated entirely by self-love.

Eudaimonism, the position of almost all the ancient Greek and Roman ethical theorists, is