Conservatisms about the Valuable

ABSTRACT

Sometimes it seems that an existing bearer of value should be preserved even though it could be destroyed and replaced with something of equal or greater value. How can this conservative intuition be explained and justified? This paper distinguishes three answers, which I call existential, attitudinal, and object-affecting conservatism. I raise some problems for existential and attitudinal conservatism, and suggest how they can be solved by object-affecting conservatism.

KEYWORDS:

• conservatism
• G.A. Cohen
• replacement
• noninstrumental value
• valuing
• personal value

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 This is complicated by the fact that ideal utilitarians can appeal to the value of virtue and say that destroying a beautiful work of art makes the world worse in terms of this value. Rashdall himself, however, understands virtue in terms of the value of our motives, and thinks that this value can never make a difference to first-personal deliberation [Hurka 2014: 174]. Even independently of this, though, it is hard to see why destroying and then replacing a beautiful object should always be considered vicious, rather than virtuous, if it brings about a greater balance of (nonmoral) good—especially if the act comes from the motive of promoting the good.

2 Frick [2017] also interprets Cohen’s conservatism as a claim about noninstrumental value. This seems to answer at least one of Matthes’s [2013] objections to Cohen’s conservatism—namely, that it cannot account for seemingly irreplaceable bearers of extrinsic value.

3 I am using the mass noun reason in the ‘pro tanto’ sense, so that we can have reason to do something even if it’s not the case that we ought to do it (and even if we ought not to do it). This doesn’t necessarily imply that there is some fact that is the reason to do it (for discussion of the mass- and count-noun uses of reason, and of how they relate to each other, see Fogal [2016]). But I take it that, on Cohen’s view, the features that make something noninstrumentally valuable explain why we have reason to preserve it, and might thus be said to be the reasons to preserve it.

4 Just as something can be valuable either instrumentally or noninstrumentally, we can value a thing either instrumentally or noninstrumentally. I assume that Scheffler has in mind both noninstrumental value and noninstrumental valuing.

5 Although, as I suggest elsewhere [2019b], some of our deepest moral convictions might reveal that we do regard people in this way.

6 On caring, see Jaworska [2007] and Seidman [2009]. On for-someone’s-sake attitudes, see Rønnow-Rasmussen [2011: ch. 5].

7 This doesn’t entail incomparability between different people’s good, any more than the distinctness of a person’s height and width entail the incomparability of those dimensions.

8 For critique, see Rosati [2009] and Behrends [2011].

9 Even Sumner [1992: 8] is ‘prepared to think that mountains and stars can fare better or worse on some objective scale of perfection’; he just doubts that we have any reasons to want them to fare better, since they lack a point of view.

10 Frick [2020] makes a related claim about his ‘bearer-regarding’ and ‘state-regarding’ senses of ‘mattering’.

11 That is the reasoning of the authors cited in the previous sentence. For critique, see Arrhenius and Rabinowicz [2015] and Nebel [2019b]. Elsewhere [2019a], I offer a different view, on which it still cannot be better for someone to exist.

12 This point is in some ways similar to Shiffrin’s [2013] suggestion about the reduced value of the item. But my point is about the reduction of value for the item, not the reduction in value of the item.

13 The case for this double for-the-sake-of qualification regarding noninstrumental personal value (although not specifically regarding pleasure) is made by Rønnow-Rasmussen [2011: ch. 5].

14 I am grateful to Samuel Scheffler and two anonymous referees for helpful comments.