Two Distinctions in Goodness

The subject line is the title to a 1996 essay by Christine Korsgaard which has rocked my philosophical world and which is highly recommended if you can get your hands on it. Here, I thought I would share my (quickly-written) summary of the article and its main points:

Korsgaard draws a pair of distinctions between a) intrinsic/extrinsic goodness and b) instrumental/non-instrumental goodness. (For my COW readers: it helps to picture Thomson's grid pairing off absolute/relative and objective/subjective, and then substitute these category pairs on that sort of grid, and you'll get the picture.) This distinction makes a new concept of value possible: the extrinsic, non-instrumental good. The essential idea of this category is that of things whose goodness depend upon meeting certain conditions, but which things, if goods (if meeting those conditions), are not instrumental goods for any further purpose. So, Korsgaard gives the example of a painting: a painting can be a good, but it is not a good that is for something-- if it has value, it has value just as the aesthetic object that it is. So its goodness, if any, is non-instrumental. But a painting's having its particular goodness is nevertheless, Korsgaard thinks, conditional on its being viewable, or on not being hidden away forever in a dark closet, or some such (or so Korsgaard would say--not sure I would articulate the condition quite as she does, but I'm giving her example, not the half-dozen of my own I've thought of since).

 

The beauty of all this is that it does two things we want out of a theory of value, which two things are often enough thought to be at odds: first, this account preserves space for our sense that the goodness of goods somehow has to do with the sorts of creatures we (contingently) are -- the conditions of the goodness of some x in a particular case often enough has something to do with features of our creaturehood. Second, this account allows us to say that the goodness of good x's are complete in themselves-- we do not have to try to make every good thing the servant of some further end. We do not have to say, for example -- and always implausibly -- that the goodness of any good depends upon whether it gives pleasure or maximizes preference-satisfaction, as if we could have no further opinion on what it was appropriate to take pleasure in (or to prefer), or as if we were hedonists who actually thought that our pleasures were fungible, or as if we would recommend getting into the experience machine. And neither do we have to insist that x's are good in abstraction from the conditions of human experience. So the concept of the extrinsic, non-instrumental good is a powerful one that potentially bridges the gap between two heretofore competing visions of goodness.

 

As if this wasn't progress enough, Korsgaard exploits this category by then adding in an additional Kantian twist. She teaches that it is a sufficient condition for the goodness of any x that it is rationally willed. (We'll want to know what account to give of "rationally willed," but leave that aside and assume we have a suitable independent account-- I actually don't know the answer here.) Any such x will of course be in the category of extrinsic, non-instrumental good. And this fuller picture, if adopted, now shows / explains several otherwise puzzling features of moral experience:

 
1) How it could be proper that people can have inconsistent personally chosen ends (people rationally choose differently, and rationally choosing differently is the ultimate sufficient condition of something's being good) 

2) Why it is that an x can be special just in virtue of someone caring for it

3) Why it can be so hard to explain of one's own chosen-ends what it is about that end which demands its choosing (in short, there may be no feature of the thing which demands its choosing-- but, still, the thing may be good, and non-instrumentally so)

4) Nevertheless, why we have the sense that our choices are, well, ends, i.e., non-instrumental goods (because, on this picture, they are not for anything)

 

More needs to be said before we have the full picture of morality and ethics. But, like I said, I think that this is progress. It is the Kantian stuff that worries me the most, although I will confess to being drawn towards it-- it explains a lot that needs explaining, and does so fairly parsimoniously. But I have not yet finished my reflective scrutiny.

 

Anyway, whether or not you go the full Kantian way with Korsgaard, just in having suggested the possibility of extrinsic-cum-non-instrumental good, it seems to me that Korsgaard delivers into your hands a powerful conceptual tool for use in your own philosophical reflection.