Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Academic Blogs -> Legal Theory Blog

OR PHONE (866) 635-1838 for Bankruptcy Help, (866) 635-6190 for Divorce,
(866) 635-2689 for Personal Injury or (866) 635-9402 for Criminal Defense

Find a Local Lawyer

Bankruptcy (866) 635-1838
Divorce (866) 635-6190
Personal Injury (866) 635-2689
Criminal Defense (866) 635-9402

Academic

: Legal Theory Blog

Chappell on Bronsteen, Buccafusco, and Masur on Welfare & Happiness

By Lawrence Solum

ADVERTISEMENTS

Over at Philosophy Etc., Richard Chappell has some interesting things to say about John Bronsteen, Chris Buccafusco, and Jonathan Masur's paper, Welfare as Happiness. There are many fine points made in this post, but there are two points where I am unsure about his characterizations of their positions:

First, Chappell states that "the paper's main argument" [is] that hedonism must be true because our lives are constituted by subjective experiences, and hence nothing can affect our life unless it affects our experiences . . . " This argument was the focus on my blog post, but it is one of many topics considered in the paper.

Second, Chappell characterizes Bronsteen, Buccafusco, and Masur as hedonists. That is not a label they apply to their own theory. Here is what they say:

We equate human welfare with the subjective, individual experience of positive feeling. On this view, the correct measure of welfare for a period of any duration, from a couple of minutes to an entire lifetime, is the aggregate of a person?s moment-by-moment experiences of positive and negative feeling.

They include "pleasure" among the positive feels and "pain" among the negative ones, but it isn't clear that their theory is equivalent to hedonism.

Here is a taste of Chappell's post:

In Solum's follow-up post, the authors set out their core argument as follows:

each of us has a veil of experience, and anything that happens outside that veil of experience and never affects it (even indirectly) has no effect on our lives.

Here they appear to confuse the metaphysical question whether an event "affects" you, in the sense of altering your intrinsic properties, with the normative question of welfare: whether it "affects" you in the sense of being an event that you have self-interested reasons to care about. (In fairness, I think even Shelly Kagan may have once made a similar mistake.) These are wildly different questions, and if one thinks that they are linked in any way, this would require substantial argument. It is far from obvious that welfare supervenes on our intrinsic properties. (Presumably only hedonists will believe this.)

Chappell's formulation, which focuses on the relationship between well-being and those things that one has self-interested reasons to care about captures something quite important.

Read the whole post!

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on May 17, 2009 (boomark / email).