Capability Satisficing: Doing Enough for Future People
Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress
August 6-9, 2009
Justin Weinberg
Department of Philosophy
University of South Carolina
jweinberg@sc.edu
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
Capability Satisficing / p.2
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 timedependence 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.
1
Parfit 1984, 351.
Capability Satisficing / p.3
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
2
3
Parfit 1984, ch.16.
Hanser 1990, 50.
Capability Satisficing / p.4
Some think that there is no such objection.4 They think that because of the timedependence claim we have no obligations to far future generations. Here, the nonidentity 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 personaffecting 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 personaffecting 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
4
Schwartz 1978.
Parfit 1984, 367
6
Hanser 1990, R. Weinberg 2008.
7
That is, it is a same number choice, or a choice in which the same number of people would exist under
each alternative. Parfit 1984, 356.
5
Capability Satisficing / p.5
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 wellknown 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 rights9 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
This is what Parfit’s “Q” says to do. Parfit 1984, 360.
Parfit 1984, 364.
10
Nussbaum (2006, 23) thinks Rawls solves the problem. Mulgan (2006,43-44)shows otherwise.
8
9
Capability Satisficing / p.6
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
11
Nussbaum 2006, 76-78. Note that these are capabilities, not actions or actual functionings. Nussbaum is
not saying that, for example, political participation is part of human flourishing; however, it runs contrary
to human flourishing to not be capable of participating in the political processes one is subject to.
12
Nussbaum 2006, 78.
Capability Satisficing / p.7
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.
13
For a critical survey of a number of versions of satisficing, see Bradley 2006. See also Byron 2004.
Parfit himself considers and rejects some versions of them, including one very similar to that considered
here which he calls “the valueless level.” See Parfit 1984, 412-16. Note that the strength of some of
Parfit’s objections to this view (like the variant, “A,” of what Parfit calls the “Absurd Conclusion”) depend
on knowledge about the entire future history of the universe. To the extent to which we think the worth of
guidance in the area of our obligations to future generations could not depend on such knowledge, we will
find these objections less powerful.
14
Capability Satisficing / p.8
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
15
Part of the strategy would be to rehearse the well-known difficulties of alternative views.
I leave aside consideration of those whose lives are not even worth living in this minimal sense.
17
See Parfit 1984, 408 and 412, where he entertains this distinction, using the terms of “personal” and
“moral” value.
16
Capability Satisficing / p.9
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
Capability Satisficing / p.10
answer” in the question of status quo versus change without implausibly denying that
such lives have at least subjective value.
4. Capability Satisficing and Subjective Value
Generally, CS holds that whenever we are faced with an exclusive choice between
creating either a deficient or a capable life, we have a reason to bring about the capable
life. However, there are exceptions: in cases in which we have a subjective reason to
bring about the deficient life instead of the capable life, and this subjective reason to
bring about the deficient life is stronger than the agent-neutral reason to bring about the
capable life, we may bring about the deficient life. Each of us is properly responsive to
both subjective and objective reasons, and sometimes the subjective ones are more
important.18 This issue comes up often in discussions about the very next generation, but
less so in discussions of far future generations. One might mate with someone who has a
genetic risk for creating offspring with deficient lives, rather than with a “genetically
optimal” mate, for reasons of love. A deaf woman may have strong identity-based
subjective reasons for seeking out a deaf sperm donor so she can increase her chances of
having a deaf child, reasons which outweigh the objective reason for seeking a hearing
donor, namely, that a child exist with a fuller set of capabilities.19 My account permits
acting on this subjective reason, if it is sufficiently strong. When it comes to distant
future generations, though, these subjective reasons weaken. While the aforementioned
18
See Nagel 1986, ch.8. In general, we can distinguish between the importance of a value and the
objectivity of the value.
19
Mundy 2002.
Capability Satisficing / p.11
deaf woman may have strong reasons for wanting a deaf child, it is questionable whether
she has reasons for wanting a deaf great-great-great-great-grandchild. (Maybe she is
worried about how awful pop music of the distant future will sound.)
Nonetheless, my acknowledgement that subjective values may properly override
objective ones may prompt us to revisit the decision between status quo and change, now
doubtful that CS gets us the “right” answer of change. One might ask, don’t we have a
subjective reason to choose status quo, namely that it will be less unpleasant or costly for
us? Yes, we have that reason, but the question is whether it is sufficiently strong to
outweigh countervailing reasons provided by the objective reasons to bring about capable
lives. In principle, it is possible to have a strong enough reason not to do anything about
environmental degradation; but it does not seem like we have that reason now.
5. Capability Satisficing Challenged
In this section I consider a number of objections to CS with the aim of defending and
clarifying the view.
a. When faced with a choice between in the farther future there being either no
lives at all or only deficient lives, does your view hold, implausibly, that we should
choose the former?
No. Since my view does not hold that the creation of deficient lives is itself
wrong, and since in this scenario the creation of the deficient lives comes at no cost to the
existence of good lives, we are permitted to choose the latter.
Capability Satisficing / p.12
b. But is that enough? Don’t our intuitions tell us not only that it is permitted, but
obligatory, to choose the latter?
If we had a reason to believe that those deficient lives would lead in subsequent
generations to capable lives, then we would have an obligation to bring those deficient
lives into existence. The obligation would arise from the instrumental value of the
deficient lives: instrumental to the creation of capable lives. Since it would be
overwhelmingly more likely for capable lives to arise from deficient lives than from no
lives, we can safely say that in choices like this we are required to choose the nonapocalyptic option.
c. Do we have a reason to bring about as many capable future lives as we can?
Would this lead to a “repugnant conclusion”?
The general idea behind CS is not entirely novel. It is to combine some form of
consequentialism with a normatively “thicker” conception of the good than is typically
employed. The result is a more attractive form of consequentialism that can avoid or
answer some challenges to the more standard views.20
When it comes to CS and the repugnant conclusion, I can admit that CS holds that
we do have an objectively grounded reason for bringing as many capable future lives into
existence as we can. However, because of the nature of capable lives, this will not lead to
a repugnant conclusion. This is for two reasons, both of which have to do with the
limitations to reproduction built into the capabilities approach. The first reason is that it
is likely that capabilities may diminish or disappear in overcrowded conditions,
20
Philip Pettit uses this strategy in a lot of his work. See Pettit 1988, for example.
Capability Satisficing / p.13
especially capabilities such as bodily health, integrity, political participation, interaction
with nature, and the possession of property. There is a point in population growth at
which the marginal additional life will be deficient, not capable.
The second reason is that being subject to a norm to bring about as many capable
lives as physically possible is inconsistent with having a flourishing, capable life,
especially for women, upon whom the social expectations for the care of these offspring
would likely fall. To be clear, it is not that having a lot of children is necessarily
inconsistent with one’s own flourishing. Rather it is the idea of being subject to social
norms and pressures which make this an expectation that threatens to undermine one’s
capability set, such as one’s capabilities for being able to interact with others with selfrespect, and one’s time for exercising other capabilities.
d. Suppose we had to choose between two policies:P1 would lead to 10 billion
people existing just below the threshold; P2 would lead to just 1 million people existing
just above the threshold. If we choose P2, we are sticking with our threshold point, but
as a result billions of people, all of whom would have had lives just slightly worse off,
will never come into existence. If we choose P1, we have compromised our threshold
point. We would also be subject to pressure from a slippery slope of similar pairwise
comparisons that would eventually have us claiming our ultimate preference is for
gazillions of people with lives barely worth living. So which should we choose?
These kinds of thought experiments work because they pick spots on the value
continuum that are fairly near each other. And they work especially well for satisficing
views that employ a hedonistic or desire-fulfillment theory of the good. When the good
Capability Satisficing / p.14
is pleasure or number of desires fulfilled, the continuum from less to more is smooth and
unbroken, and small differences are just that: small differences. By marking a point on
that continuum as a threshold, satisficing views risk making a moral mountain out of a
non-moral molehill.
The difficulty with pushing this move against CS is that its moral mountain is
actually mapping onto a non-moral mountain, or, if not mountain, a butte, or mesa, or
monadnock. Whatever geological metaphor we’re going with, the idea is that there is a
real, noticeable, and morally significant difference that is marked by CS’s threshold
point. You either have the full capability set and the kind of life that goes with it, or you
do not. There may be some skepticism that this marks a sufficiently important difference.
To reinforce this point, let me reiterate that CS’s theory of the good concerns capabilities,
not the exercise of those capabilities. Certainly there might not be much of a difference
in the overall life-quality of, for example, those who choose not to participate in the
political processes that affect their lives and those who do, or those who choose to make
time for play and those who do not. But to look at people’s choices is to look in the
wrong place. The question is whether there is a sufficient difference in the overall lifequality of those who are capable of participating in political processes and those who are
not, or those who are capable of play and those who are not, and the answer is clearly
yes. A lack of any one of the capabilities included by Nussbaum would mean that one’s
life would be significantly worse off in an important respect.21,22
21
Do the capabilities themselves admit of degrees? At least some of them do. Does this mean that the
mountain/mole hill problem can be reproduced at the level of the degrees to which a person possess a
capability? Some vagueness must be expected.
Capability Satisficing / p.15
e. CS, like any satisficing view, “permits agents to bring about a submaximal
outcome in order to prevent a better outcome from obtaining.”
In a recent article Ben Bradley advances this criticism against “every version” of
satisficing.23 One of the attractions of maximizing consequentialist views is, as Samuel
Scheffler puts it, “anyone who resists [such views] seems committed to the claim that
morality tells us to do less good than we are in a position to do”—and that sounds
strange.24 It sounds strange because there are very many very badly-off people, and it
seems odd that morality would give us privileged folks a free pass on helping them out.
What does not seem strange is the idea that morality would allow me to refrain from, say,
making Eddie Murphy happier—nothing against Eddie Murphy; it is just that he already
is happy and has a lot of material resources at his disposal. Even if I were in a position to
make him somewhat happier than he currently is, which is questionable, no one who is
not already in the firm grip of a theory would think I am acting wrongly when I fail to do
so. When it comes to Murphy, it is morally okay for me to do less good than I am in a
position to do.
CS permits us to do less good than we are in a position to do. But whether e will
have any traction against CS depends on whether our relation to future people with
22
An alternative reply would, like the response to b, above, advert to the possible instrumental value
deficient lives have towards the production of capable lives. If we thought that ultimately if we chose P1
instead of P2 we would have a greater chance of producing, in the really long run, more than one million
capable lives, that would give us a reason to choose P1. However, if the numbers in these comparisons
represent temporally extended populations (e.g., all those who would ever live from 500 years from now
until the end of humanity) then this reply would not be available to us.
23
Bradley 2006, 98.
24
Scheffler 1988, 1.
Capability Satisficing / p.16
capable lives is more like our relationship with the very badly-off, or more like my
relationship with Eddie Murphy.
I suggest it is more like the latter. If we meet the aims of CS, future people will
be doing rather well. It is not obvious to me that we would be acting wrongly by
refraining from doing more for them. Additionally, because these future people are far
away from us in time, and we don’t know the particulars of their lives, it is unclear
whether we are in a position to do much more for them than ensure they meet the CS
threshold, in which case the moral loss allowed by CS relative to a maximizing view (if it
is indeed a moral loss) is not likely to be very large.
f. CS is ad hoc.
To say that a set of ideas is ad hoc is to say they are endorsed in order to provide a
solution to a specific problem and do no fit in a certain way with a relevant larger set of
ideas. Whether this constitutes an objection to CS will depend on which larger set of
ideas it fails to fit in with, and how.
It is true that CS is not meant to be an entire moral theory; it is instead supposed
to be an account of right action in regard to far future generations. We are in a peculiar
kind of relationship towards future people, and it should not be surprising that because of
this the proper account of our obligations towards them differs from accounts about our
obligations towards our contemporaries or our own children.25 Indeed, if we think that
the correct moral theory is one the prescriptions of which are sensitive to differences in
25
On the ways in which different relationships yield different duties see, for example, Ross 1950, 19.
Capability Satisficing / p.17
circumstances, then the CS’s distinctiveness shows that it may fit well with our
metanormative considerations.
Further, what counts in favor of CS is not just that it gets us the right answer in
cases like change v. status quo. It fits in with other theoretical and practical
considerations. Like other consequentialist views, it does not deflate the non-identity
problem. Yet it is compatible with the intuition that it is not in itself wrong to bring
about “suboptimal” lives, since it recognizes the subjective value each of our own lives
has for us. It avoids standard objections to maximizing consequentialist views. And by
incorporating a more robust conception of value, it avoids standard objections to other
satisficing views.
6. Concluding Remarks
It will take a bit more scrutiny to determine whether Capability Satisficing ultimately
finds its way into “Theory X” – Parfit’s name for the moral theory that avoids every
imaginable problem, including those problems only imaginable by Parfit. It may not be
able to overcome each and every objection, but perhaps it does well enough.
Capability Satisficing / p.18
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Byron, Michael, ed. 2004. Satisficing and Maximizing. Cambridge: Cambridge
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Hanser, Matthew. 1990. “Harming Future People.” Philosophy and Public Affairs
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Mulgan, Tim. 2006. Future People. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mundy, Liza. 2002. “A World of Their Own.” Washington Post Magazine, March 31.
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Nussbaum, Martha. 2006. Frontiers of Justice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
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Parfit, Derek. 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pettit, Philip. 1988. “The Consequentialist Can Recognise Rights,” Philosophical
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