Normativity, prudence and welfare

Philosophical Studies (2024) 181:1213–1235 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02144-4 Normativity, prudence and welfare Michael Ridge1 Accepted: 15 March 2024 / Published online: 29 April 2024 © The Author(s) 2024 Abstract Most discussions of discourse about welfare and discourse about prudence are a “package deal” when it comes to their normativity—either both or neither are normative. In this paper I argue against this conventional “package deal” assumption. I argue that discourse about welfare is not normative in one useful sense of that term, but that prudential discourse is normative. My argument draws in part on ideas from Derek Parfit’s account of personal identity. I then offer a novel positive account of the meaning of ‘welfare’. On the proposed account, the concept of welfare is not itself normative, in the sense of functioning directly to settle the thing to do. Even a global nihilist can coherently make claims about welfare. However, the concept of welfare is in a sense I will articulate “conditionally normative,” and this merely conditional normativity explains many of the data points which might seem to imply that welfare discourse is normative. Keywords Normativity · Prudence · Welfare · Well-being · Ought · Meaning · Personal Identity · Altruism While it is widely accepted in philosophy that some forms of moral discourse are “normative,” there is less of an orthodox view about the normativity of discourse about prudence and welfare.1 ‘Normative’ is, of course, a term of art and different theorists define it differently, so any investigation of the normativity of discourse about prudence and welfare would do well to begin by defining ‘normative’. On one useful gloss, the normativity of an area of discourse consists in the fact that 1 I use the term ‘welfare’ but others use ‘wellbeing’. I take it that these are interchangeable in ordinary discourse and it is a matter of taste which term one selects. The literature on prudential value seems to have no consistently favoured idiom. For the purposes of open access, the author has applied a ‘Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission. * Michael Ridge 1 University of Edinburgh, 92 Myreside Road, Edinburgh EH10 5BZ, UK 13 Vol.:(0123456789) 1214 M. Ridge judgments made in that idiom directly function to settle the thing to do, think or feel, on pain of irrationality or are conceptually linked in the right way to such judgments The normativity of moral discourse, for example, might then consist in the fact that first-person judgments of the form “I am morally required to perform this action” settle the agent on performing that action if they can, on pain of irrationality. Other moral judgments, like judgments about what outcomes are morally good or bad or what someone has moral reason to do, are normative in virtue of either themselves settling the thing to do (or think or feel) or standing in privileged inferential relations to judgments which do. For example, the fact that there is a moral reason to do something plausibly entails that if there is no reason not to do it then one morally ought to do it, where the latter settles the thing to do; similar inferential relations can easily be found for concepts like ‘morally good’ and ‘morally bad’. In this paper, I argue that while some forms of prudential discourse are indeed normative in this sense, discourse about welfare itself is not normative. On the view I defend here, the judgment expressed by “prudentially, I ought to eat less fatty food” is normative, but the judgment expressed by “eating less fatty food would maximize my long-term welfare” (or simply “eating less fatty food would be good for me”) is not normative. On the other hand, as I argue in Sect. 3, judgments about welfare do presuppose a certain sort of competence with normative concepts, and so in that more minimal sense they are normative. Distinguishing prudential concepts from the concept of welfare in this way is unorthodox; most theorists tend to treat the concept of welfare and prudential concepts as a “package deal” when it comes to their normativity. Indeed, claims about what would maximize my long-term welfare and claims about what I prudentially ought to do might seem to stand in conceptual entailment relations which make the distinction proposed here unstable. I argue that although there are interesting conceptual entailment relations here, they do not support the normativity of the concept of welfare, and the resulting view is not subject to any such instability. I begin by laying out what I take to be the strongest existing case for the normativity of both prudential discourse and welfare discourse taken as a “package deal.” I then explain why the arguments for this thesis are more convincing in the case of prudential discourse than in the case of discourse about welfare (Sect. 1). I then develop two objections to the thesis that judgments about welfare are normative (Sect. 2). These objections naturally lead to the question of just what the content of welfare judgments could be if they are not normative. A key challenge here is to develop a view of the content of welfare judgments that can accommodate the depth of seemingly normative disagreement about what welfare is. Hedonists, desire-fulfillment theorists and Aristotelians (for example) all seem to disagree deeply about the nature of welfare. One of the best arguments for the normativity of welfare judgment is that the sort of disagreement in play here is relevantly similar to the kinds of disagreement used to motivate the normativity of moral discourse. I develop a positive view of the content of welfare judgments which can explain why competence with the concept of welfare requires competence with normative concepts, and can explain the relevant patterns of disagreement, but does so in a way that explains why the concept of welfare is not a normative concept (Sect. 3). They key move is to understand the concept of welfare as being such that competence with it entails 13 Normativity, prudence and welfare 1215 accepting certain conditionals linking propositions about welfare to prudentially normative propositions but only on the further condition that there are any true prudentially normative propositions. 1 The case for the “package deal” My focus here will be on Guy Fletcher’s defense of what I am here calling the “package deal” in Dear Prudence (Fletcher, 2021). The “package deal” holds that both discourse about what one prudentially ought to do and discourse about welfare are normative, and indeed that both of those discourses are about the same “flavor” of normativity. I focus on Fletcher’s work because he offers the most sustained, systematic and convincing existing defense of the idea that what he characterizes as “prudential discourse” is normative. I should, however, note at the outset that Fletcher is far from alone in taking the v (...truncated)