Tom Atchison's Dissertation on False Consciousness

• Chapter 6 - Real Interests

  • 6.1 Some preliminary observations

    • 6.1.1 Can we talk about false consciousness without imputing real interests?

    • 6.1.2 Marx and "interests"

    • 6.1.3 Ordinary language and ordinary judgements

    • 6.1.4 Four criticisms of 'real interests'

  • 6.2 Explanations of "interests"

    • 6.2.1 Revealed preferences

    • 6.2.2 Hedonism

    • 6.2.3 From actual to informed to rational preferences

    • 6.2.4 Objective lists and Aristotelian inquiries

  • 6.3 A pluralistic, contextual theory of value which still aims at objectivity

Chapter 6: Real Interests

Part of the schematic notion of false consciousness, as I have set it out, is that false consciousness obscures people's real interests. For the most part, the interests obscured are the interests of the oppressed (interests in struggling, or struggling more effectively, against their oppression), but, as I suggested in Chapter 2, oppressors, too, may have something to gain from social change (more than they realize), though also something to lose (more than their chains). But what is the scale on which we can measure these gains and losses? (Is there any such scale?) How can we identify people's real interests? In Chapter 3 I have already developed some distinctions and ideas relevant to this task. That is, we have already seen that it is possible to criticize desires and to criticize claims of need, for example, and these criticisms will sometimes be part of what is necessary to justify a claim about real (as opposed to apparent or immediate) interests. I have also suggested, in connection with Foucault's rejection of a concern for truth, that criticism and justification can be 'situated' without being imprisoned in a 'regime of truth'. Here I want to apply these ideas to the more ambitious project of explaining how it is possible to provide grounds for judgements about what is in someone's interest. We will have to acknowledge that this is often a messy and uncertain business, but neither is it always impossible or arbitrary.

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6.1 Some preliminary observations

6.1.1 Can we talk about false consciousness without imputing real interests?

In Democratic Theory and Socialism Frank Cunningham argues for an understanding of false consciousness that dispenses with the attempt to identify real or objective interests. False consciousness, he says, should be understood to include "false beliefs that sustain one's own oppression."[1] Such false beliefs may concern 'what is' or 'what could be' but not 'what is good'.[2] So we can talk about false consciousness when workers falsely blame immigrants for low wages and unemployment or when they falsely believe that their lack of success is due to their own inadequacies ( which leads them to conclude, again falsely, that they would do no better in a fairer social system), but we should not talk about false consciousness when cheerful and contented people fail to aspire to some changed situation which others think would be better for them. As Cunningham sees it, the only point of bringing 'objective interests' into the picture is to deal with this last sort of case, the case of "someone content in his or her 'oppression.'"[3] "Oppression" has to be in scare quotes here, because Cunningham defines it as "the unjustified thwarting of people's aspirations which is systematic -- that is, ongoing and pervasive across categories of people . . .."[4] So when people have no aspirations which are unjustly thwarted by their social circumstances, they are, by definition, not oppressed.

Cunningham recognizes that this conclusion can be troubling. He quotes Bernard de Mandeville on the desirability of keeping the "laborious poor" ignorant, since "knowledge both enlarges and multiplies our desires," and "the more a . . . peasant knows of the world and the things that are foreign to his labour or employment, the less fit he will be to go through the fatigues and hardships of it with cheerfulness and content."[5] Cunningham admits that "de Mandeville's cheerful poor are wronged when their aspirations are thus constrained, and it is 'not in their interests' to deny them desire-expanding knowledge."[6] But he then drops the matter, and when he returns to it several pages later, he denies that such constraint can be accomplished often enough to take seriously, especially "in present societies which raise false hopes and create desires that cannot be satisfied."[7] To import the idea of 'objective interests' into one's theory of false consciousness, just to handle this unlikely case, is unwise, he says, because all the extant explanations of 'objective interests' have difficulties, and the best ones open the door for paternalism and vanguardism. It is better to stick to the cases in which false beliefs are leading to the frustration of aspirations which are already present.

I have three comments on this view. First, I think many people have used terms like "objective interests" and "real interests" without meaning to bring in the kind of case Cunningham wants to exclude. C. Wright Mills, for example, does not suppose that people in 'mass society' are contented. He says they have 'troubles' but don't have a clear understanding of their sources and remedies. In "The Middle Classes in Middle-Sized Cities" he defines "objective interests" as "those allegiances and actions which would have to be followed if the accepted values and desires of the people involved in given strata situations are to be realized."[8] I take it that "the accepted values and desires of the people" are the ones they already have.

Second, I think Cunningham's account ignores the way that beliefs and aspirations interact. (See section 3.1.1 above.) He rightly notes that it is not easy to distinguish contentment from resignation or from the sort of satisfaction one can take in having made the best of a bad situation. But I think it is important, too, to distinguish between contentment which is grounded in false beliefs and contentment which is not. If I think that the available satisfactions are all I deserve or all it is realistic to expect out of human life, then I may be (or may become) content with them. Here is an example: In a discussion of workers' desire for job security, Cunningham has a hard time finding room for 'false contentment'. If we say that socialist revolution is in their interest because it is the only road to the sort of secure employment they want, then it is plausible to say that they have a false belief (about how best to get what they want), but it is not plausible to say that they are contented. They know their jobs are insecure and they don't like it. But if we suppose that they are contented with capitalism because they think that it does provide enough job security, that is, they are contented with the level of job security they already have, then they don't seem to have any false belief. In this case the present economic system does provide them with what they want, says Cunningham.[9] I see two possibilities for 'false contentment' here. The first is based on the possibility of short-sightedness. It is easy to be content with capitalism during a boom. One may know in some sense that the good times will come to an end sooner or later, but this knowledge is not as salient as one's present experience. So one is content with a level of job security one will later experience as inadequate. The second, and more interesting, possibility is that one's contentment with a fairly low level of job security might be conditional on a belief that any greater level would so impair business' 'flexibility' that the economy would come to a grinding halt. (I will assume that this belief is false.) It might seem that this is just Cunningham's first alternative again (the one wherein the workers didn't like what they had but didn't know how to get anything better). But I am supposing that a disliked situation can, over time, become an accepted one, if one perceives it as necessary. One can move from dissatisfaction through resignation and acceptance to contentment. (This is an instance of the process Elster calls 'adaptive preference formation'.) So when I get my pink slip, instead of grumbling about the greedy bosses who are shipping our jobs overseas, I shrug, say "That's the price of progress," and whistle as I make my way to the unemployment office. This description may seem fanciful (though I swear I have met such people), but this sort of case bears some resemblance to the all too real cases of battered women who make excuses for, and profess to love, their abusers. It is perverse to speak of contentment in those cases, but there is something more than resignation to a situation clearly perceived as unjust.

My third comment on Cunningham's view is this: while I agree that activists should diligently avoid paternalism and vanguardism, and that crude notions of objective interests and the 'correct line of march' can lead to authoritarian (and ineffectual) tactics, I don't think it is necessary to give up making judgements about interests to avoid those dangers. Nor do I think it is necessary to give up on the distinction between what people aspire to and what is in their interest, a distinction which seems to be part of our ordinary understanding of the concept of interests. I will say more about this below.

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6.1.2 Marx and "interests"

Marx does not use the term "interests" ("class interests," objective interests," etc.) in the way that later Marxists came to do. He is more likely to write of needs or of freedom, and he often works with a contrast between the inhuman, alienated, cramped or stunted, and the human, fully human, or developed. Agnes Heller insists that, for Marx, "interest" is a concept that makes good sense only within the horizon of capitalist society. "'Interest' is not for Marx a philosophical-social category of a general character. Interest as a motive of individual action is nothing but the expression of the reduction of needs to greed: in the philosophical generalization of the concept of interest, it is 'the standpoint of bourgeois society' that is reflected."[10] According to Heller, one makes no progress by moving from 'individual interest' to 'the general interest' or to 'class interests'. In Marx's vocabulary these terms refer to the abstract or reduced needs of people caught up in capitalist social relations, "above all the struggle for wages, which opens up for each worker the prospect of a greater material wealth in the narrow sense."[11] But these motives do not lead beyond capitalism. Heller's preferred term for the motives which do lead beyond capitalism is "radical needs." These, she says, are primarily the need for free time, the need for unalienated work, and the need for 'universality', i.e., the many-sided development of one's personality (as opposed to the one-sided development characteristic of specialized work in capitalism).[12]

Some ways of explaining "interests" may deserve to be rejected on this ground (as, in a sense, 'bourgeois'). What Elizabeth Anderson calls 'monistic' conceptions of value, which take what is good for me to be (or to be reducible to) some one thing (pleasure, utility, desire-satisfaction) may fall within the scope of Marx's criticism of Bentham in the German Ideology : "The apparent stupidity of merging all the manifold relationships of people in the one relation of usefulness, this apparently metaphysical abstraction arises from the fact that, in modern bourgeois society, all relations are subordinated in practice to the one abstract monetary-commercial relation."[13]

However, I will continue to frame this discussion in terms of 'interests', despite the limitations just noticed, because it is the term most commonly used in discussions of false consciousness and politics. It will be important, though, not to be misled by whatever economistic or utilitarian connotations the term may have. We might do better to speak of what is good for someone or of what action or policy would be best for them.

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6.1.3 Ordinary language and ordinary judgements

The English language clearly permits a distinction between what a person prefers or wants or chooses and what would be in that person's best interest. The sense of "interest" in question is listed third in my Miriam Webster's Collegiate dictionary, which gives "benefit," and "advantage" as synonyms. If we take an Austinian tour through the web of definitions, we find that "advantage" is defined as "benefit or gain," "gain" as "resources or advantage acquired or increased," "benefit" as "something that promotes well-being," "well-being" as "the state of being happy, healthy, or prosperous : welfare," "welfare" as "the state of doing well esp. in respect to good fortune, happiness, well being, or prosperity." Collapsing these together we could say that what is in my interest is to acquire or experience whatever contributes to my well-being or happiness. There is little here to suggest that my interests must be tied in any very direct way to wants, desires, preferences, or actual choices. Clearly a policy or action may work to my advantage or promote my well-being better than the alternatives without my knowing that it will do so and, therefore, without my preferring it or choosing it.

In everyday political debate and discussion we can use this distinction (between what I choose or prefer and what is in my interest) to make a rather wide range of criticisms of people's actions (and failures to act). Suppose Jones has decided to work for the election of Smith to the legislature. His decision may be criticized on a number of very different grounds. At the most superficial level, Jones may be mistaken about the policies Smith intends to implement. Perhaps Smith does not support the tax reform legislation Jones mistakenly thinks he supports. Jones may also be mistaken about the consequences of the policies Smith does in fact endorse. Perhaps the bill Jones thinks will lower his taxes will in fact raise them. Here Jones' means, working for the election of Smith, are not effective in producing the outcome he prefers — lower taxes. Surely there are a host of ways our actions can fail to have the effects we intend them to have — and this is already enough to show the superficiality of an approach to politics which ignores the importance of people's beliefs about the best way to attain their longer range goals and focuses instead on the particular political outcomes their actions seem intended to produce.

At a slightly deeper level we might criticize Jones' support of Smith on the grounds that the beneficial effects of Smith's policies will be out­weighed by negative consequences Jones has overlooked or whose importance he has failed to appreciate. Smith will reform the tax structure, all right, and in a direction that favors people like Jones, but he will also impose regulations which will so impair the functioning of the economic system that Jones' income after taxes will actually drop. In this case the costs and benefits to Jones are being measured, so to speak, on the same scale: Jones' income. But people's interests cannot always be measured in dollars. Jones' error in supporting Smith may lie in the fact that the prosperity Smith's regime will bring to Jones (and to Jones' fellow citizens) will be accompanied by centralization and regimentation of economic decision-making and a curtailment of individual liberties (perhaps necessarily, under the circumstances; perhaps only because of Smith's preference for authoritarian solutions). The judgment that Jones was acting against his own real interests in supporting Smith's bid for power would in this case rest on the judgment that, beyond a certain level of wealth already attained by Jones, even substantial economic benefits are not worth a diminution of political liberties.

So far I have been discussing cases in which the person whose interests are in question could be expected to agree with the judgment made about those interests, if only he or she were apprised of the relevant facts and also careful to consider the importance he or she already attaches to them. But we must also recognize that there are cases in which we are willing to say that people, who are acquainted with the facts and with the importance of the facts as they currently evaluate them, are acting contrary to their interests because they don't attach the right importance to the facts even on reflection. Jones, in our last example above, may be aware that Smith's regime will curtail the liberties of the citizens but he may not find this important, because he does not, as we might say, know the true value of freedom. (Perhaps his authoritarian upbringing has given him no appreciation of this value, or perhaps his economic anxieties have temporarily distracted him.) In this kind of case the person whose interests are in question may be initially inclined to reject our interpretation of his or her situation and needs — and this need not shake our confidence in the interpretation, especially if we have some account of the causes of this narrowness of vision.

Judgements about interests are also common in a range of contexts where people have a responsibility for acting or deciding on behalf of others. Raising children is an obvious case. I have no doubt that it is in my son's interest to brush his teeth every night, whether he thinks so or not. He has no clear sense of the difference it will make to him later if he gets cavities in his teeth. He feels more strongly the inconvenience of the task. His mother and I can sensibly discuss and disagree about whether it would be better for him to watch less TV, to sign up for Karate or swim lessons, to attend a different school, to be indulged more or less in his choice of foods, and on and on. Parents must constantly consider (as we say ) "what is in the best interests of the child," and these interests often have little to do with catering to the child's current wants or aspirations. Similarly, professionals of various sorts must make judgements about what will best serve the interests of their clients. Sometimes the interests in question are limited and well-defined by the professional role. A criminal defense attorney need not consider my overall good, but only how to keep me from going to prison. The role of the professional may be limited to carrying out the wishes of a client. Sometimes, though, professionals must take a broader view and consider whether clients are failing to recognize their real interests or help clients figure out where their interests really lie. Some cases of this kind: Physicians may exhort their patients to change their habits or their life-styles for the sake of their health, or help them decide whether some activity is wise for someone with their health problems. Teachers may steer students away from career paths for which they have little aptitude, or encourage the development of skills and dispositions their students don't (yet) see as valuable. Psychologists, counselors, and social workers may deal not only with well-defined 'behavioral problems' but also with 'big' decisions about the desirability of continuing a marriage or a career, or they may decide that the client's 'presenting problem' is not what really needs to be solved in order to get their life back on track, but is only a symptom of some deeper malformation of their character or personality. Here again, people can discuss and disagree about what is really in the best interest of the client. Professionals can be found to have negligently failed to promote the interests of a client or to have actively sabotaged a client's interests (perhaps because a 'conflict of interest' led them astray), and this finding can have serious consequences (e.g., loss of license). (Similarly, in extreme cases, we can judge that it is 'in the best interests of the child' to be taken away from grossly negligent or abusive parents.)

No doubt the judgements we make in these and other such contexts are sometimes contentious, but, within limits, we do feel that people can make judgements that are not arbitrary, that attempt to get hold of real differences in the value of outcomes for individuals, and we have enough confidence in those judgements (sometimes) to let weighty decisions hinge on them.

Not only parents and professionals make judgements about interests. We make them constantly for ourselves and often enough about friends. In the latter case we may more often than not keep our judgements to ourselves, but sometimes it is incumbent on a friend to counsel against a decision he or she sees leading to disaster or to encourage a needed change. Seeing how bored I am with my job, a friend might try to persuade me (even against some resistance) that it is in my interest to look for more challenging work. Having seen my friend's last five disastrous relationships start with just this air of frenzied infatuation, I may try to tone down his enthusiasm for this new one.

Often these garden variety judgements about interests take people (including ourselves) as they are and as they have chosen to be, letting their own tastes and projects determine what will count as good for them. If I have decided to devote my life to becoming a classical pianist, then (assuming I have the talent) it is in my interest to practice hard, to cultivate certain social connections, to master certain pieces (even if I don't particularly like them), and so on. But notice the assumption about talent in that last sentence. Sometimes we think that what is in a person's interest is to give up on a project which is not feasible or which is costing too much (in one way or another). Though we are often willing to let a person's existing tastes, sensibility, projects, habits, personality, values, and so on, determine what we will say is in her interest, sometimes these strike us as unacceptable (in one way or another). Fear of flying can be inconvenient. It is often in people's interest to overcome it rather than give in to it. Racism can be inconvenient, too, but is, more importantly, immoral. Is it bad for me to treat others with undeserved contempt? I think so. It reflects, I am inclined to say, a lack of integrity. (It is not just a mistake. It is like a poison in the soul.) Less dramatically, what is best for a person may often involve new habits, expanded horizons, changed sensitivities, an uncomfortable transition to a better way of living, or the like.

I have assembled these examples to underline the point that making judgements about what is really in a person's interest is not an especially unusual activity or one that is indulged in only by radical social theorists or activists or totalitarians. But I don't imagine that these observations will satisfy the critics of 'real interests', and I will now turn to their complaints.

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6.1.4 Four criticisms of 'real interests'

Four objections seem to me to capture the main lines of complaint directed against political uses of the notion of real interests by social critics and activists. Here I will simply describe these objections, postponing their assessment until a later stage of the discussion. The first two objections are stronger and weaker versions of skepticism about real interests. In its stronger form the skeptical complaint is that judgements about what is really in people's interest, at least as these judgements are made by social critics and activists, are entirely arbitrary. The judgements amount to nothing more than the imposition of the critics' values on the people who are alleged to be acting against their real interests. This is the view that was expressed by Polsby in his criticisms of the 'power elite' theory. He said, "For pluralists, the imputation of 'false class consciousness' suggests that the values of analysts are being imposed arbitrarily on groups in the community."[14] And "Alternatively, if a decision to regard an action as 'for' or 'against' one's 'real' class interests is not purely captious and personal, the researcher must provide us with some reasonably objective way of deciding the matter."[15] This second statement is conditional and doesn't quite say that these decisions are "captious and personal." But Polsby makes it clear that he thinks that the "reasonably objective way of deciding" has never been provided, so the charge of arbitrariness, then, sticks, in his view. Writing from a very different part of the intellectual world, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe express a virtually indistinguishable opinion: ". . . the concept of 'objective interest' . . . lacks any theoretical basis whatsoever, and involves little more than an arbitrary attribution of interests, by the analyst, to a certain category of social agents."[16] Unfortunately, when charges are made at this level of generality, it is hard to know just what is intended or just what is meant to be contrasted with "arbitrary." It may be that these writers have expressed themselves loosely and that they would not object to a more careful or nuanced attribution of objective interests, but I will take this first objection to involve a more thorough rejection of the concept. I will take it to say that whenever 'real' or 'objective' interests are attributed to people, and whenever someone claims to know what is really in a person's best interest, a value judgement is being made which could not possibly be rationally defended. (The appearance of rational debate and disagreement in our everyday talk about interests would rest, then, on agreement in our non-rational attitudes. Where attitudes are not shared, discussion will be fruitless, and there are no facts about what is good for people that could settle the dispute.) To say this about judgments regarding people's interests need not commit the critic to a wholesale subjectivism about normative judgements. One might want to say that moral rules or principles of justice have a different status and can be rationally defended. But judgements about interests, to repeat, are said by this first sort of critic to rest on attitudes which cannot be sensibly criticized or justified and are in that sense 'arbitrary'.

The second objection rests on a more moderate sort of skepticism. First I will explain the sort of skepticism I have in mind and then the objection that can be drawn from it. It is something of a commonplace for liberal political theory that there are rival and incompatible 'conceptions of the good'. Since disputes between these rivals are so intractable, a main task of liberal theory and of liberal societies is to develop a framework of rules and institutions which are neutral between the competing conceptions, so that people with very different ideas about the best way to live can still live together in one society, resolve their disputes, and avoid violence. The justification for this search for neutral principles is not that no conception of the good could possibly be correct, nor is it that we can have no grounds for believing that one conception is better than another. Rather, we need neutral principles for a practical reason: only neutral principles can win the allegiance of the adherents of the rival conceptions, and it is unrealistic to think that one conception could win over the adherents of the others through reasoned argument and persuasion. As Rawls puts it, "this practical answer does not imply either skepticism or indifference about philosophical, religious, or moral doctrines. We do not say that they are all doubtful or false, or address questions to which truth and falsehood do not apply. Instead, long historical experience suggests, and many plausible reflections confirm, that on such doctrines reasoned and uncoerced agreement is not to be expected."[17] So when Rawls sets up the 'original position' from which principles of justice are to be chosen, he allows the parties knowledge of "the general beliefs of social theory and moral psychology" and of "the procedures and conclusions of science, when these are well established and not controversial," but he does not allow the parties to know their conceptions of the good, and he certainly does not include his own conception (what ever it may be) among the general truths the parties are assumed to know.[18]

Now Rawls denies that his view implies skepticism and he denies that the doctrines which lead to competing conceptions of the good are 'doubtful'. But, as Brian Barry argues in Justice as Impartiality, it is not clear that it is consistent to believe at the same time that your own conception of the good is certainly true and that other people are not being unreasonable when they reject yours and hold on to theirs. The reasonableness of disagreement seems to imply at least some degree of doubt. So, to use Barry's terminology, a liberal theory of justice is committed to a 'moderate skepticism' about conceptions of the good, a skepticism which says that, while it is reasonable to believe that one or more of these conceptions is true, it is not reasonable to believe that any of them is certainly true. The degree of certainty in question is not, of course, absolute certainty. No such certainty is available for most of our beliefs, including the ones that liberals like Rawls and Barry are willing to take as part of the common stock of knowledge to be used in devising the neutral principles of justice. It is more like scientific certainty. If any conception of the good could be established to the degree that the settled and uncontroversial parts of natural science have been settled (Barry's example is the heliocentric theory of the solar system), then we could regard people who refused to accept that conception as unreasonable. But no conception of the good is so well supported. So none can be reasonably held with that degree of certainty.[19]

Now I can explain the objection to talk of real or objective interests which can be drawn from this moderate scepticism about conceptions of the good. The objection says that when political activists or theorists attribute real interests to people or to groups they must be appealing to one of these conceptions of the good, and by doing so they are bringing into their theory or their politics a degree of contentiousness that would be better kept out. Even if there is a 'fact of the matter' about what is in someone's interests, reasonable people will disagree about it, and their disagreement will be unresolvable in practice. So it will be better for the purposes of both theory and practice to keep to the interests people are already willing to acknowledge.

A third objection focuses on the fact that critical theorists often want to attribute real interests to people on the basis of their membership in relatively large social groups (the working class, the colonized, women). To do this, the critic says, is to ignore two facts. First, these groups are internally divided, and those divisions prevent the attribution of any common interest. The working class, for example, can be divided by skill level, type of work, employment status, size of firm, union membership, industry, and so on, and it is false to presume that members of these sub-groups share a common identity or a common interest. Second, each person is a member of more than one such large scale group. A worker also has a gender, a race, a sexual orientation, a religion, and so on, and none of these identities can be assumed to be primary or privileged when we are trying to identify that person's interests. So no clear assignment of real interests is possible.

Finally, a fourth objection says that talk of real interests leads all too easily to paternalism, vangaurdism, and authoritarianism. To suppose that people can have interests of which they are ignorant, and that others may know this, is to licence coercive measures (or manipulation or deceit) against these people's expressed desires "for their own good." Once we give up the liberal principle according to which each person is the best judge of his or her own interests, we set off down a path which has led to terrible crimes in the name of liberation.

I will not now proceed directly to a discussion of the merits of these four objections. Instead I will try to prepare the way for such a discussion by considering the various proposals that have been made as to how we should understand (define, elucidate) "real interests." I will start with simple and pretty obviously inadequate proposals, and work gradually toward what seems to me to be an adequate account. That account, which is largely taken from Elizabeth Anderson's 'rational attitude' theory of value, will enable us to see that judgements about people's interests can be reasonably objective, but also pluralistic, contextual, and fallible. Then I will try to show that the four objections just listed can all be, at least partially, turned aside. But I will also try to show that some of the objections have enough merit to suggest that real interests cannot be attributed as easily as some critical theorists have supposed, and that the complexity and indeterminacy of the judgements involved provides yet another reason to prefer a participatory model of critical theory to an educative or manipulative one.

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6.2 Explanations of "interests"

In this section I will review, fairly briskly, what I take to be the main strategies in the literature for explaining what it means to say that something (a policy, an action) is in a person's interest. Finer distinctions could be drawn within some of these types of explanations, and certainly much more could be said about their advantages and disadvantages, but we have other fish to fry.

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6.2.1 Revealed preferences

Pluralist political theorists (see 1.3) want to identify interests with "revealed preferences." Preferences are revealed by behavior, ideally by choices. If I vote for Smith, then what I want is for Smith to win, and life for the political scientist will be much easier if we can simply take that as the criterion of what is in my interest. (There may be some interesting differences between wants, preferences, and desires, but they are commonly treated as interchangeable, and for now, I will treat them that way too.) If I don't bother to vote, then I must not have any interest at stake in the election. Polsby says, "decisions affect people's interests differentially, and . . . people participate in those areas they care about the most. Their values, eloquently expressed by their participation, cannot, it seems to me, be more effectively objectified."[20] Economists, too, like this approach -- though they are more likely to use "welfare" or "utility" than "interests" as the term for what the preferences revealed in behavior enable them to get a handle on. The advantage, from their point of view, is that they can ignore the reasons for people's choices (leaving them to the psychologists), and get on with the business of building mathematical models.

But this is clearly an inadequate approach to thinking about people's interests. It rules out by definition the possibility that anyone ever makes a mistake. In the economic context, for example, it rules out the possibility that a consumer might buy a product and then conclude that she had wasted her money. In the political context it rules out the possibility of realizing in hindsight that one had voted against one's interests. As Adam Przeworski puts it, "Voters have preferences over outcomes, yet parties do not propose outcomes, only policies. But how are voters, whose utility is derived from outcomes, to decide among parties that offer policies ? Something is obviously missing."[21]

Another problem is that the expression of preferences may be dishonest or strategic. Elster says, "The expression of preferences is an action, which is presumably guided by these very same preferences. It is then far from obvious that the individually rational action is to express those preferences as they are."[22] Here is an example: A legislator might vote for an amendment which, in her view, made the amended bill worse, in order to make it more likely that the whole bill would be defeated.

Symbolic or expressive motives may also lead to 'counter-preferential' choices. In contexts like voting, where my choice is very unlikely to decide the outcome, a rational actor may choose on the basis of 'expressive returns'.[23] That is, my motive for voting for candidate A may not be that I want him to win. It may be that I can thereby express my admiration for his style or his values (or whatever), even though I expect his policies to run against my interests. This choice is rational because the contribution of my vote to the likelihood of his victory is so small that my expected utility from that aspect of my choice is negligible and thus easily outweighed by whatever small satisfaction I derive from expressing myself in this way.

Finally, the revealed preference view ignores the possibility that people may act in order to promote the interests of others.

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6.2.2 Hedonism

I will join what is by now a very large crowd in brusquely dismissing hedonism, the view that what is ultimately in my interest is that I experience pleasant or desired states of mind. It is not plausible to suppose that it would be in my interest to be given a drug which would keep me in a euphoric trance for the rest of my life or to be hooked up to a machine which would simulate for me all the experiences I might want to have.[24] More prosaically, I can sensibly want to know painful truths, and I care about what actually happens to my children, not just about my experience of its happening.

Can we save hedonism by admitting that this is true (my desires are for states of affairs, not just experiences) and saying that the criterion of the value (to me) of those states of affairs is the amount of pleasure they bring me? Suppose we say: what is in my interest is what maximizes my satisfaction in the long run. This does allow for the possibility of mistakes. I could think that one outcome would please me more than another and be wrong. But what do we mean by "satisfaction"? If we take satisfaction to be some introspectable sensation or feeling whose intensity and duration could provide a measure of gratification, then it seems obvious that it cannot be the sole criterion of value. I can rationally choose an option which gives me less of that sensation and more of something else (truth, beauty, lucidity etc.). Moreover, there are pretty clearly a multitude of pleasurable feelings and sensations not easily compared, with no common measure of their value.

If 'satisfaction' is understood broadly enough so that the proposed criterion is plausible, then it stops doing any real work. To the diversity of goods which it may be in my interest to acquire there corresponds the diversity of kinds of satisfaction I may seek — and these may include the satisfaction I may take in knowing that I have done a good job, in ordering my own affairs rather than being under someone else's direction, in discovering the truth, in participating in certain social relationships, and so on. In this sense, to say that something would give me satisfaction is just to say that it is worth pursuing (and that I am, or can become, able to appreciate its worth). The satisfaction is not the criterion of value. It is, at best, an accompaniment to it.[25]

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6.2.3 From actual to informed to rational preferences

A more plausible view is that what is in my interest is to get what I actually want. In the language of 'policies' and 'outcomes', we could say that policy A is more in my interest than policy B, whenever I prefer the outcome of A to the outcome of B. But several difficulties carry over from the revealed preference explanation. It still seems reasonable to suppose that I might be mistaken about the desirability of the outcomes, so that I could regret getting what I thought I wanted. And I still may prefer an outcome, not because it is in my interest, but because it is good for others or required by principles I endorse. The second difficulty is usually removed by simply stipulating that the only preferences or wants we will count are those that concern what happens to ourselves or, as Derek Parfitt puts it, those which are "about our own lives."[26] It is tricky to get this stipulation just right, because it seems wrong to exclude desires for social relationships like friendship, and, once these are in place, they may involve some sacrifices of my narrowly selfish interests, without being contrary to my interests in a larger sense. My interests can be connected to the welfare of others and to the quality of the relationships between and among us.[27]

The possibility of being mistaken about what I want suggests that we should move from actual wants to informed wants. We should, that is, say that what is in my interest is to get what I would want if I were well informed about what the results of the various options would be and how these would affect whatever else I cared about. How much and what kind of information do I need in order to count as well informed? As Frank Cunningham says, "Omniscience is the safest candidate."[28] Rawls seems to adopt this very high standard, and then to accept that we will always fall far short of it, and hence will always be in some doubt as to what is really best for us.[29] Others settle for less. Dahl says, "A person's interest or good is whatever that person would choose with fullest attainable understanding of the experience resulting from that choice and its most relevant alternatives."[30] As to the kind of information, one kind that is ruled out is what we might call evaluative information, i.e., information about what is really good for the person. The point of the explanation of "interests" is to arrive at that kind of information. More generally, the project of devising an acceptable explanation is usually taken to require that the conditions built into the explanation be 'naturalistic'. That is, we want to specify conditions under which the person will choose what is best for them without building evaluative conclusions into those very conditions. (The problem is that this does not seem to be possible, as I will shortly argue.) But aside from evaluative information, it seems we should include every sort that might conceivably be relevant to the decision. Rawls, whose theory is among the most thoroughly developed of this kind, explicitly includes knowledge of the consequences of carrying out each feasible plan, knowledge of what one really wants, knowledge of the relative intensity of one's desires, and knowledge of the causal history of one's desires (which may lead one to revise them), among other sorts. Moreover, it seems clear that this knowledge should not be dryly propositional. The consequences must be "adequately realized in the imagination," as Rawls puts it.[31] Connolly holds out for the choice one would make after having actually experienced the results.[32]

Of course no amount or kind of information will produce the right sort of preference unless it is well used, so Rawls, at least, adds conditions aimed at ensuring competent deliberation. For example, he says, "it is assumed that there are no errors of calculation or reasoning, and that the facts are correctly assessed."[33] And with conditions of this kind added, we arrive at the idea of a rational preference (or desire). Rawls calls his theory "goodness as rationality." Anderson calls theories of this type "rational desire theories."

This sort of theory is a great improvement over the others we have surveyed. It allows for the possibility of mistakes, since I might not have all the relevant information or I might fail to make good use of what I had. It does not entirely privilege my current wants or desires, since it allows that I might reject some of these after I understand how they conflict with others or how I came to have them. And by including the requirement that I vividly imagine the various alternatives it seems to allow for the possibility of 'false contentment' we worried about above (6.1.1). If I am contented with my current situation, perhaps adequately realizing a better situation in my imagination would lead me to prefer it. At the same time, this way of explaining what is in people's interest does tie interests fairly closely to their own desires and values rather than imposing some external standard. So it is an attractive view.

But I don't think that it is an acceptable one. First, no matter how much information and calculation a person has available, he or she may still fail to desire what is good for them because they are depressed or self-hating or beaten down by oppression. It is hard to see how naturalistically described rationality conditions could rule these failures out. As Elizabeth Anderson suggests, we seem to need to import 'thick' evaluative concepts into Rawls 'thin' theory of the good in order to specify the 'right' degree of self regard. "Valuing oneself too much can also lead one to desire things that are not good for oneself. Vanity and egotism tend to pose obstacles to the appreciation of friendship and other relations that are constitutive of personal well-being."[34] On the other hand, for similar reasons I may continue to desire what is bad for me, even in the face of information and deliberation. An addict may crave his fix in the face of any amount of information about its deleterious effects. We can stipulate that this means he has not adequately deliberated, but is there a naturalistic description of the process of deliberation that can guarantee the desired result? Couldn't an addict cooly and calmly consider all the relevant information, calculate correctly the long-term effects of his habit, vividly imagine what it would be like to kick the habit,and so on, and still be so much in the grip of his addiction that he chose to continue it?[35]

There is a more pervasive problem, as well. This sort of theory assumes that once information and deliberation have done their work, we will have ironed out all the conflicts between our desires and attained a consistent preference ordering. But naturalistically described conditions may not be sufficient to accomplish this result. The case of addictions has already given us one sort of conflict, between the craving for the drug and the desire for health. But there are other sources of conflict: conflicts between the demands of different social roles (e.g., work and family), between different projects one may have taken on, between different ideals one may find attractive. And both of the conflicting motivations may survive rational reflection of the kind this theory calls for. Rawls seems to acknowledge this possibility when he says, "Sometimes there is no way to avoid having to assess the relative intensity of our desires. Rational principles can help us do this, but they cannot always determine these estimates in a routine fashion."[36] But it is not plausible to say that, when I have conflicting desires, I should act on the desire which is most intense, if we mean by "intense" a felt quality of the desire. It will often be in my interest to resist my intense cravings in favor of other 'quieter' motives. If "intense" just means "more important," then we need to know how the relative importance of desires is to be assessed. Nor will it help to appeal to second-order desires here. Second order desires, too, can be bad for a person. "One can be afflicted by second-order desires which persist from early childhood indoctrination, but which one no longer endorses."[37] Anderson concludes (and I agree), "One might say that the authoritative, value-signifying preference is the preference one endorses, all things considered. But if this formula is to transcend the limitations of the second-order preference criterion, it must include among the things considered standards external to rational desire itself, to determine which preferences signify action-guiding values."[38]

It may help to reinforce these last considerations, if we see how Rawls' version of rational desire theory has evolved into something rather different. There are several places in Rawls' book where his theory of 'goodness as rationality' seems to be showing signs of strain, where ideas which are supposed to be fitting into a naturalistic account of rational deliberation seem to be functioning more like ideals or norms.

One such place is in the account of "primary goods." In A Theory of Justice, primary goods are those which are so generally useful that any rational plan will need to make use of them. Rawls lists rights and liberties, opportunities and powers, income and wealth, and self-respect. He says "Whatever one's system of ends, primary goods are necessary means," and he stipulates that we must always prefer more of them to less.[39] Rawls introduces these as a device for making the choice of principles of justice in the original position more manageable. And if we imagine choosing behind a veil of ignorance, then I think it would be hard to reject any of the primary goods. But when we have come out from behind the veil, it is not so obvious that all are required (especially not obvious that I must always prefer more of them to less). Are all the civil and political liberties useful to people no matter what their goals or their conception of the good? Or is Rawls antecedently committed to the priority of liberty and straining to find a justification for it?

A similar question can be raised about the Aristotelian Principle. The Aristotelian Principle says that people have a "higher order desire" for activities which are complex or which utilize more of their abilities — "a desire to engage in more complex or demanding activities of any kind as long as they are within our reach."[40] Given this fact about human nature it is rational for people to choose a plan of life which aims at developing their abilities and at allowing for participation in activities which exercise those abilities. Rawls supposes that if this tendency is thwarted people will find their lives 'dull and empty' and will lose their 'vitality and zest'.

It is tempting to object that people do not always prefer complexity even when it is within their grasp. Sometimes simplicity (rude or artful) is prized for its own sake (and not merely because it frees our energies for complications of another sort). "''Tis a gift to be simple" sing the Shakers, and the Zen master, queried about the path to enlightenment, points us to "drawing water and hewing wood." A skilled musician may prefer to exercise his talents within a simple form.

So it is hard to accept Rawls claim that this principle is a universal empirical generalization. At best it is a correct description of the preferences of most people. But how does it bear on those who are exceptions to it? Since it is meant to be an empirical generalization, it might seem that it has no grip on someone who is content with a simple life. But consider Rawls' discussion of the "fanciful case" of someone who despite his intelligence enjoys only the activity of counting blades of grass.[41] Rawls says that the rational plan for such a person would give an especially prominent place to this activity provided that he is not neurotic and that "there is no feasible way to change his condition." These provisos suggest that the Aristotelian Principle is not merely empirical. This able fellow, ex hypothesis, does not prefer more demanding activities even after experiencing them. Why should his preference structure be changed, if possible, to bring it into line with that posited by the principle? Perhaps the Aristotelian Principle embodies a conception of the good -- of what it is to be more fully human.

Something of this sort also seems to be behind Rawls' discussion of dominant ends. He writes, "when the dominant end is clearly specified as attaining some objective goal such as political power or material wealth, the underlying fanaticism and inhumanity are manifest . . . Although to subordinate all our aims to one end does not strictly speaking violate the principles of rational choice (not the counting principles anyway), it still strikes us as irrational, or more likely as mad. The self is disfigured and put in the service of one of its ends for the sake of system."[42] Here also it seems as if a conception of goodness as involving more than rationality is present (or a concept of rationality as involving more than the familiar principles of rational choice).

Rawls might have good reasons to want to treat these principles as norms rather than empirical generalizations. It might help him deal with one of the weakness in deliberative rationality as a theory about what is good for us. Earlier we noticed that Rawls supposed I could "adequately realize in imagination" the alternatives open to me. But, as Susan Babbitt has pointed out, if the person I am now is very different from the person I would be if I were living in some very different way, then it's not clear what to count as adequately imagining that alternative.[43] I may not be able to imagine it. Babbitt is especially interested in cases where people have been damaged by oppression, so that they do not have the self-assurance or sense of agency required to choose the alternatives Rawls (and we) might like them to choose, even if in some sense they can imagine those alternatives. Rawls seems to suppose that we have an autonomous self which can then, given adequate information, choose the necessary means to preserving and developing that sort of selfhood. But it is not obvious that a person who has failed to develop that sort of self would choose the conditions which would enable her to develop one (become one).

I think Rawls does suppose something like this autonomous self. His starting point is the idea that we think of ourselves as "free and equal moral persons." Moral persons have capacities for 1) a conception of their own good (i.e., a rational plan of life), and 2) a sense of justice (i.e., "a normally effective desire to apply and to act upon the principles of justice"). Such persons are "free and equal rational beings." They can express this nature only by acting on freely chosen rational principles (acting autonomously), not by acting on principles chosen "because of [their] social position or natural endowments or in view of the particular kind of society in which [they] live or the specific things they happen to want."[44]

Given that this kind of autonomy is what best expresses our nature, we can criticize those who fail to place a very high priority on pursuing or maintaining the social and psychological bases of autonomy. We can say that people who don't understand liberties and opportunities as valuable to their life plan are simply failing to see what is required for them to fully be who they really are (free and equal moral persons). Likewise, the primary good of self-respect, a psychological good, but one which requires social support, can be seen as a condition of autonomy. Self-esteem requires appreciation and respect from some community of other people. So to fail to want a social world wherein I can get that kind of respect and esteem is to fail to be rational (and to betray, or fail to express, my nature).

This is important in understanding Rawls' account of paternalism. He says that we are never justified in transforming someone, just because, after we're done, they accept their new state. Any paternalistic interventions must also 1) be "justified by the evident failure or absence of reason or will" and 2) "guided by the principles of justice and what is known about the subjects more permanent aims and preferences or by the account of primary goods." Rawls also says that methods of education must honor these constraints. This might seem to rule out 'emancipation' whenever narrowly rational and informational criteria are satisfied. (This is what Babbitt is worried about.) But "failure of reason or will" could also include failure to understand the value of autonomy and self-respect, and I think this way of understanding the phrase fits better with Rawls' conception of "moral personhood."

So the theory of 'goodness as rationality' as developed in A Theory of Justice has an ambiguity. Can we really treat the status of the primary goods and the Aristotelian Principle, and the condemnation of the pursuit of dominant ends, as empirical claims about what people in fact want? Or do they need to have a normative force in order to rule out choices made from a 'damaged' position? If they do have a normative force, deriving from our understanding of ourselves as 'moral persons,' i.e., 'free and equal rational agents,' then what is the status of the claim that we are (or ought to be) such persons? A Theory of Justice left these questions unresolved, but Rawls has given clear answers in his more recent writings, and they imply that his theory of the good can no longer be classified as a rational desire or rational preference theory, if it ever could.

In "Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory" Rawls explains that the preference of the parties in the original position for the primary goods is no longer to be justified by claiming that these goods are needed as means to any ends they might have. Now their preference for these goods is to be explained in terms of their conception of themselves as moral persons with "highest-order interests" in developing their moral powers. These powers are the same ones specified above: a capacity for a sense of justice and a capacity to form, to revise, and to rationally pursue a conception of the good. Liberties, especially, are desired because of their necessary role in developing and exercising our moral powers. (We may also note that Rawls now has an explanation of the source of his conception of ourselves as free and equal moral persons, a notion which seemed to drop from the sky in the context of A Theory of Justice. It is to be understood as a conception which is imbedded in the common sense of a democratic culture like ours. All talk of "Archimedean points" is now gone, replaced by "our shared understandings.")

I think it is a measure of the seriousness of Rawls' effort to get his theory to accommodate the moral facts that he seems to have been driven beyond his "rational choice" starting point to include these more Kantian ideas in the theory of the good itself (and not only in the 'theory of the right'). But it is also a measure of the inadequacies of 'rational preferences' as an account of what is good for people or what is in their interests.[45]

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6.2.4 Objective lists and Aristotelian inquiries

The apparent impossibility of making any of the 'want-based' explanations of interests work has led many writers to try to develop what Meyerson calls a "want-independent conception of interests."[46] Some of these writers simply specify (or begin) a list.[47] So Parfitt calls them "objective list theorists." But, as Diana Meyers points out, "survival and well-being constitute the controlling principles for generating all such lists."[48] So other writers concentrate on describing a method for discovering what will really promote our survival and well-being. They may then leave the construction of a list to future research. Aristotle is sometimes taken to have shown us how to proceed, at least in part. What some writers take from Aristotle is the idea that we can figure out what is good for people through some kind of investigation of human nature or of the kind of creature a human being is.[49]

For example, in Modern Political Philosophy Alan Brown argues that, "political philosophy must rest on an objective theory of the good," and Aristotle has shown us the right way to go about constructing such a theory. "In his Ethics, Aristotle argued that by identifying man's nature in sufficient detail we shall discover to a fairly determinate extent the nature of man's good or well-being -- or, as it is sometimes translated, 'human flourishing'. The idea is that in virtue of the kind of being man is, there are certain modes of living that are characteristic of him -- and we can then say that these things are suited to him or fitting. That is, they are constitutive of the good life."[50]

Alan Gilbert has argued that Marx is best understood as an Aristotelian of this sort. Tracing "the Aristotelian lineage of Marx's eudaimonism," he notices that "Marx's particular views about such issues as justice, property, slavery, and the treatment of women differ dramatically from Aristotle's."[51] But this does not mean that Marx is not fundamentally an Aristotelian, because the difference can be understood as stemming from a disagreement about facts and not about "moral premises" or about method.[52] The facts in question concern human needs and capacities and can be used to underwrite "objective moral judgements" and "a conception of the good society."[53] Our conception of the good society differs from Aristotle's because we have made progress in discovering the real extent and nature of those needs and capacities.

Other writers recommend much the same strategy without attributing it to Aristotle. Denise Meyerson says that "there are facts about what is in an individual's interests, that we should look for them in what causes that person to function effectively, and that a true psychological theory will uncover those causes."[54] She notes that this explanation of interests allows that each person's good might be different. But Marx assumed that there was a common human nature and that the good life was the same for everyone, and she is willing to agree. She is not, however, willing to commit herself to Marx's particular conception of what that human good is: free, creative, productive activity.

One final example: In Needs Garrett Thomson develops a view which, like those just mentioned, stresses that we have a nature which gives shape to our interests. He defines "interests" as "the reasons which lie behind a person's non-instrumental desires." If I want to go hiking with some friends, for example, then the object of my desire is the hiking trip, but the interest which lies behind that desire would be a more stable motivational pattern like an urge to exercise or to get outdoors or to seek human companionship. Some of my interests will be more or less inescapable. They are part of my nature. I won't be able to change them by any reasonable strategy of character planning. I will be stuck with them. These inescapable interests, then, form the core of what is valuable for me, of my good.

Now, I do not want to wholly reject this approach to explaining what is in people's interest or what is good for them. But I do want to say that it cannot play the sort of foundational role that these writers seem to assign to it. There is no human need which is so natural or inescapable or biological or universal that it cannot be reasonably discounted or overridden in the appropriate circumstances. This is obviously true when we are thinking about sacrificing ourselves for others. But, as Diana Meyers argues, it is also true when we are choosing what is good for ourselves. If I am forced to choose between debilitating medical treatments that will prolong my life, but make it impossible for me to continue work on my life's projects (perhaps I am an artist or a scientist), or an earlier death from my untreated illness, it may be in my interest to forgo the treatment. My choice of a project, if it is autonomous and not, say, foisted on me by pushy parents, may have more value to me than a longer life.[55] ("Death before dishonor!" provides, perhaps, an easier route to this conclusion.)

We can relate this point to Thomson's account of basic interests in the following way: Thomson says that my basic interests are those which are inescapable for me. But he recognizes that literal inescapability will not get him where he wants to go. So he says "inescapable" should be interpreted as "literally inalterable" or the self alteration required could be "in some way discountable." "If a person needs friendship, it does not count against the claim that this need is inescapable, if we can rid the person of his need by torturing him, causing him brain damage, or turning him into a psychopath."[56] I am no advocate of turning people into psychopaths. But it does seem to me that, once this notion of "discountability" is brought in, basic interests are no longer natural in the same sense. Now, instead of being able to serve as a foundation for judgements about what is good for me, ascription of basic interests will have to rest on judgements about which forms of self-alteration are or are not discountable, and under what circumstances.

Let's explore some of the possibilities for deriving an account of what is good for people from human nature. In what we might call the empirical sense of the term, "human nature" encompasses everything that human beings do or suffer. More generally, whatever any creature does is 'natural' for it. Even those of its behaviors which have deleterious effects on its physical health or its ability to reproduce or its happiness are nonetheless 'natural.' In this sense, human nature does not include the ability to leap tall buildings at a single bound, but it does include crime, cowardice, irrationality, brutality, laziness, gluttony, depression, suicide, etc. Vice is no less in accord with human nature than virtue, and if virtue is statistically less frequent, then vice is what is normal or natural for human beings. There is no easy move, indeed no move at all, from 'human nature' in this sense to 'human flourishing' or to any conclusions about what would constitute a good life.

I think we can do a little better than this. As James Wallace points out in his book Virtues and Vices, biologists do manage somehow to make distinctions between normal and defective or diseased organisms. They bring to this task a complex set of background beliefs and concepts. (If they were truly starting from scratch, on another planet say, it would be a lot harder to make these distinctions.) But they get the job done, and those distinctions have fairly unproblematic application to humans, too.[57] So 'physical health' can be explicated in terms of the proper or normal functioning of various organs or systems of the body, and their proper functioning involves their ability to accomplish the tasks for which "nature has designed them." (Healthy lungs, for example, are able to take in air and to transmit oxygen from that air to the blood -- a result which is essential for the success of other important bodily functions.) We can, that is, identify a number of components of normal or even good physiological functioning -- organs and systems operating as they should -- and in this way make some judgements about what is good for us that are as objective as they need to be. Smoking is bad for your lungs, and aerobic exercise is good for your heart, for example.

Various extensions of the concept may be grafted on to this ('mental health,' 'emotional health,' 'a healthy family life,' or even 'a healthy society'), but these are often question-begging in the context of an attempt to provide a foundation for normative judgements, since it is not so clear what is to count as the proper functioning of minds, families, or societies. The more strictly medical or biological concept of health is not so obviously question-begging, but on the other hand it doesn't provide much information about what is in our interest.

Meyerson recommends that we look to psychology for information about our interests, so let's think about that. It does seem to be possible to develop an understanding of human mental health, analogous to our understanding of physical health, by specifying the functions of the mind. This may sound ambitious, but I think certain functions are fairly unproblematic. A healthy human mind, unlike one, say, in the late stages of senility, can remember, can recognize, can decide what to do, can respond to a standard range of stimuli, can speak a natural language, and so on. Psychology may be able to tell us something about how to avoid impairing these basic functions. Of course, Meyerson is hoping for much more than this kind of information. She is hoping to learn such things as "it will only bring you distress if you persist in trying to follow in your ambitious father's footsteps."[58] But I don't think this sort of insight can ever be forthcoming from a science of human mental functioning. Insights at this level are too closely tied to variable and contestable ideas about what counts as a healthy emotional life, what sorts of emotional responses are 'appropriate', and so on. (Think, in this connection, of the way that ideas about childrearing have changed over the past hundred years, in part, I would argue, in tandem with ideas about what counts as an emotionally healthy adult. When my father was an infant, for example, his mother was instructed by the 'experts' not to pick him up when he cried and to feed him on a strict schedule. This made him, from my point of view, rather emotionally 'dysfunctional'. But by many standards he is a highly functioning, indeed successful, man. Perhaps those experts were right. ) Once we get past some pretty basic sorts of mental functioning, we start to need to make judgements about what to count as healthy that are much less obvious, and which have been made very badly in the past. In the ante-bellum South, psychiatrists discovered a disease called "drapetomania" that afflicted slaves with a desire to run away. Only a few decades ago psychiatry and psychology seemed to be engaged in enforcing norms about sexuality and gender roles that most of us no longer find defensible.[59]

I am inclined to think that there is a broader point here. It looks to me as if, whenever people try to move from an account of human nature to an account of human interests (beyond the physiological basics), somehow they always smuggle in their ideas about favored forms of life. Aristotle looked around and took much of what he saw to be 'natural'. (The patriarchal family, etc.) Sometimes his modern followers make the same mistake. So, for example, Alan Brown tells us, as an example of how to "produce a political philosophy [by] derive[ing] institutional forms from their basis in characteristic human activities and relations", that "monogamous marriage might be based in the aptness of 'pair-bonding.'"[60] Thomas Fleming's The Politics of Human Nature draws on anthropology and psychology in more or less the way recommended by Meyerson, et al., to argue that we must reestablish all these old norms on the grounds that no successful society has ever gotten by without, for example, male dominance. This is a danger of taking 'functioning' as one's central concept. Social animals have functions principally as a consequence of their social roles. If we derive our nature (and our notion of what should count as our flourishing) from our function and (covertly) derive our functions from our social forms of life, it will be all too easy for us, as it was for Aristotle, to certify the 'naturalness' and 'rationality' of the existing social institutions.

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6.3 A pluralistic, contextual theory of value which still aims at objectivity

Let's take stock. No view which ties interests too closely to preferences (or wants or desires) seems satisfactory. What is good for us is not all and only what we prefer, or even what we would prefer, if.... On the other hand, the more we are driven to idealize preferences to get them in line with our intuitions the more it seems as if the preferences are carrying very little of the weight of the argument. It has all shifted to the conditions we are building in to our notion of an ideally rational choice. Where do these come from? For Rawls they seem to come from a Kantian conception of ourselves as moral persons. This in turn is to be understood as a theoretical construct by the moral theorist in order to help systematize 'our' moral intuitions. Despite the occasional references in A Theory of Justice to Archimidean points, Rawls appeal to 'reflective equilibrium' between our theory and our moral intuitions seems to make his theory a 'situated' one in the end, as his subsequent writings make clear. It is a theory for those who share his moral intuitions or those who share enough of them to permit a fruitful discussion of the differences.

The neo-Aristotelians are more ambitious, in a way. They want to be able to read off from human nature some conception of what is really good for creatures such as ourselves. But I have tried to show how this effort, when it goes beyond the biological basics, fails. And even the basics must sometimes yield their priority. (It is not necessarily contrary to my interest to sacrifice some fingers and toes, or to risk my life, in order to try to fulfill my lifelong dream of climbing a major Himalayan peak.)

Where does this leave us? Is there some other sort of theory or account that could give us a criterion for separating the warranted claims about real interests from the unwarranted ones? I think there is a better account of the nature of evaluative judgements. But it will not give us any simple criterion for identifying what is really in people's interests. Indeed, it will tell us that making such judgements will often be a complex and contestable business. I believe, however, that this is not a defect of the account so much as it is a result of features of human life which must be accommodated. The account I have in mind is put forward by Elizabeth Anderson in her book Value in Ethics and Economics. She calls her view a 'rational attitude theory of value', and this may give the impression that it is only a variation on the rational desire theory we examined above. This is not so. There are, at least, eight important differences between her theory and the rational desire theory.

First, as the name signals, value is understood to be the object of many attitudes, not just desire or preference. There are a wide variety of evaluative attitudes: awe, delight, amusement, respect, admiration, enjoyment, love (including at least: erotic, romantic, parental, friendly, fraternal), appreciation, interest (in the sense of 'finding something interesting'), and more.

Second, these attitudes, unlike desire or preference, have some content. They are 'thick' states of mind not bare or thin wanting. Consequently their appropriateness can be rationally appraised. (This is why she calls them "rational attitudes.") We can ask if it really makes sense to admire a person for that quality or to love one's dog in that way.

Third, building on Kant's distinction between price and dignity, Anderson claims that there are a variety of modes of valuing. In roughly declining order we love our intimates, we respect persons, we give consideration to animals, we use and appreciate fine tools, and we use and discard or are indifferent to junk. A key question in this theory is whether our actions are adequately expressing the kind of valuation that a thing (person, etc.) calls for, whether, for example, we are behaving disrespectfully by displaying towards a person attitudes appropriate for tools or animals.

Fourth, there are a plurality of worthy ideals which contain conceptions of what kinds of people we aspire to be and what kinds of communities we want to be part of. "There is a great diversity of worthwhile ideals, not all of which can be combined in a single life."[61] Ideals include being "an exemplary mother, a U.S. marine, a suave sophisticated cosmopolitan, or a zealous missionary."[62] Not everyone will endorse every ideal, and some deserve criticism and rejection, but we can understand the appeal even of ideals we reject. Ideals are second-order valuations that permit us to organize and revise other evaluative feelings and attitudes. Like other evaluative conceptions and attitudes ideals can be rationally assessed and criticized. Different people will rationally adopt different ideals depending on their histories, temperaments, resources, and so on.

Fifth, valuing is a social activity which is necessarily imbedded in social practices. I cannot honor someone outside of a social practice which provides standards for honoring people and understandings of what will count as expressions of honor.

Sixth, we are not simply stuck with the normative practices that we already have. These have changed and will continue to change partly in response to criticism and calls for reform.

Seventh, action is rational, not to the extent that it produces any particular kind of result (happiness, preference satisfaction, wanted states of affairs), but to the extent that it adequately expresses our values. Of course this often will involve producing results of one kind or another, as when I express my affection for someone by buying them a gift which I hope will please them. (But it's the thought that counts.) The overall norms for evaluating actions are a) that I act in a way that adequately expresses all the values at play in my decision context and b) that my actions fit into a coherent narrative. These norms can rarely be satisfied completely.

Eighth, given the plurality and incommensurablity of values, rationality cannot be any kind of maximization. Instead we must try to organize our activities and resolve conflicts by bringing to bear whatever higher order values make sense under the circumstances. The strategies available might include criticizing and rejecting some of the conflicting values, considering the bearing on our choice of the ideals we are committed to, considering how different choices would push forward the story of our life, and so on. There is no guarantee that there will be a best choice or even a decent one.

What place does this view have for anything like objectivity? Doesn't it make value depend on the attitudes we happen to have? This question seems to imply that the attitudes are optional or arbitrary. On Anderson's view, certain attitudes can be rationally required by the valuable creatures in my situation. Persons, as it were, demand respect. If the only attitudes involved were mere likings or preferrings, then the theory would be subjectivist. But the attitudes are rational, so "there are significant constraints on what can be a sensible object of other modes of valuation, such as love, respect, or admiration."[63]

Further, we can argue about whether and how our rational evaluative attitudes do make sense. Such discussion is itself a practice with standards. The standards are those of a free and open discussion. But there is no hope of giving a 'naturalistic' account of what those standards are (as Habermas tries to do with his idea of an ideal speech situation). They must be described 'thickly'. For example: "No bullying." The idea that such a discussion is appropriate for working out these kinds of disagreements is a rather recent and fragile historical phenomenon, not something transcendentally guaranteed. The idea is supported by such reflections as these: We all have something to learn from the perceptions of others. No one is immune from mistakes. When people are excluded from discussion their perspective is rarely adequately represented by others, and so on.

Within a reflective discussion of this kind, people can offer reasons which may undermine others' evaluative commitments, reasons they will themselves find persuasive. These fall into three basic kinds: internal criticism, relying on shared intuitions and commonsense knowledge; scientific strategies, which might show, for example, that an ideal is not feasible or that an evaluative practice rests on untenable causal beliefs (like biological race theories) or that there are viable alternatives to a practice justified on grounds of necessity; finally, criticism can appeal to anomalous or novel experiences that don't fit neatly into people's current vocabularies of evaluation.

This is different from other 'coherence accounts' in emphasizing the social nature of justification. The model of an individual adjusting the system of his or her judgements and principles to attain equilibrium expects too much of individuals' unaided powers of reflection. "Every person has reason to take seriously the judgements of others just from the fact that any individual's point of view, no matter how reflective and informed, is still limited by his personal biography and particularity."[64] So this view is both more modest and more ambitious than other non-foundational accounts. It is more modest in that it does not hold out for systematicity (everything fitting into an orderly whole). It is more ambitious in that it aims at agreement on a point of view common to all concerned parties (not just equilibrium in an individual's belief system).

Anderson's theory is richer than I have been able to convey here, but this gives us, I think, the essential points. Now, what account of interests can we give, if this is how we understand the nature of evaluation and justification? First, like some of the more sophisticated rational desire theories, this view implies that my good will be tangled up with the good of the other people (and pets and so on) that I value and with the communities and practices I inhabit. Second, though any or all of the sorts of goods listed by 'objective list theories' could and normally would be part of what is in my interest, their status would be contingent on my circumstances and the values at play in those circumstances. Third, since people are quite properly committed to different and incompatible ideals, different people will often have different interests, i.e., there is a limit to the commonality of people's interests and to the possibility of specifying the interests we have as people or as members of large and amorphous social groups. Fourth, my conception of what is in my interest will be revisable and criticizable in light of all the strategies of criticism listed above.

Now I will return to the four objections set out above (6.1.4), and see what sort of response to them is possible on this understanding of interests.

The first objection was that judgements of interests were entirely arbitrary, resting on non-rational attitudes that could not be sensibly criticized or discussed. This objection clearly fails. The attitudes which correlate with value on this view are rational. They are not mere likings. They can be assessed and discussed and revised in light of a wide variety of considerations, including criteria internal to the practices which establish norms for expressing those values, but also including standards and strategies of criticism from outside those practices.

The second objection was that judgements about people's interests would inevitably bring into play disputed conceptions of the good, conceptions which might be justifiable in principle, but which would be highly contentious in practice. This objection cannot be so easily turned aside. It is very unclear, from the account we have given, how much convergence of views it is reasonable to expect. The sorts of conversations which are supposed to be the test of the validity of judgements seldom, if ever, take place. Anderson is convinced that the tools of criticism she has described are very powerful and would produce all the agreement that is appropriate. Some divergence of views is to be expected, given that different ways of living are appropriate for people who are different from one another, especially if they are committed to different ideals. In principle we would acknowledge two cases: one that of legitimate diversity of ideals and practices, and the other that of disagreement about what is really in someone's interest, a disagreement which could be rationally resolved. In practice, it might be hard to tell the difference. Anderson's answer would be that in the latter case there would be critical strategies which could show that the person was mistaken about his or her interests, whereas in the former case there would not (there would be no legitimate criticism of their properly divergent ideal). Again, I'm not sure the difference between these cases will be detectable in practice. At any rate, there will, it seems to me, be a range of fairly unproblematic cases in which judgements about interests will be widely shared (whether because the ideals in question are widely shared or because the interests in question are basic enough to belong to people committed to a wide range of ideals), and there will be another range of cases in which claims to make such judgements will be problematic, even if the disagreement is ultimately resolvable in principle. So this objection partly stands.

The third objection was that activists and theorists who attributed interests to people on the basis of their membership in large scale groups were ignoring the complexity of the social world. Insofar as this is true it will have to be accepted and will substantially complicate political theory and practice. How far it is true cannot be settled in advance. This is so for two reasons. 1) We need to investigate the particular circumstances to get any grip on the degree to which one aspect of people's social circumstances (class-exploitation, say) is of over-riding importance. (Importance would, in principle, be assessed from the common point of view achieved in open discussion.)

2) Future events and decisions are unknown. This includes two sub-reasons. a) Given the element of self-determination in rational deliberation, where part of the process consists in people giving quite properly divergent answers to questions like, "Do I want to be the kind of person who prizes that?," or "Can I respect myself if I become the sort of person for whom that project is central?", what is now in a person's interest may appear only retrospectively as future decisions reshape his or her identity and priorities. (These would not be arbitrary decisions, but they would be made in light of personal characteristics and histories.) b) Events can make a difference, too. Marx predicted the growth and progressive immiseration of the proletariat, as all other classes got smaller, businesses consolidated, and the business cycle grew more exaggerated. Class-based politics would become more pressing, more obviously of over-riding importance, if those predictions were to come true. On the other hand, if socialist movements repeatedly came to power and repeatedly failed to build a viable 'post-capitalist' society, so that it became impossible to believe in the feasibility of socialism (it is already difficult), then one form of class based politics would have been proved wrong, and current claims that working people have a real interest in overthrowing capitalism would be, in hindsight, seen to be mistaken. (These reflections can serve as a reminder that claims about real interest can be just as controversial when they are based on implausible causal beliefs as when they are based on rejected attributions of aspirations or values.)

Is there any reason to think that attributing interests on the basis of, say, class position must be wrong? Laclau and Mouffe think so, because they think that only a 'teleological theory of history' can justify such attributions. The justification would be that the sort of development sketched above (immiseration, etc.) would forcibly unify the working class. They say that only an economically determinist theory of history can do this job. If there is any need for politics or belief to play an autonomous role, then the 'dispersal of subject positions' will prevail. But why should this be so? Why couldn't class relations, or, more generally, social structures, that are the product (in part) of political and ideological struggle, still be an important determinant of the opportunities available to a person? (Here it is tempting to remind Laclau and Mouffe, as Terry Eagleton does, of 'social positions' like "third galley slave from the front on the port side," a position which seems to carry a pretty clear interest in getting out of it, if at all possible.[65])

Also, Laclau and Mouffe assume that class interests can be important only if they trump all other interests (interests based on race or gender, say). But why? They may have a very legitimate case against Marxist dismissal or shallow incorporation of other projects of emancipation, but that is not their argument. They want to reject the concept of objective interests. Perhaps they are simply thinking that 'over-ridingness' is part of what Marxists have wanted to insist on when they have attributed objective class interests to people. And that is true. But it need not be carried forward in that spirit. We could acknowledge that a person might have diverse or conflicting interests arising from multiple 'subject positions'.

Further complaints about attributing interests on the basis of social positions have come from "Third World Women" -- another questionable category. Many writers have challenged the claim that 'women' face a common oppression and a common enemy and thus share a common interest. Anne Phillips says that at one point women who rejected this 'common interest' and defined themselves in terms of race, class, or nationality were accused of having 'false consciousness', but that feminists have since taken the problem seriously and acknowledged the centrality of other divisions. Phillips herself, however, is willing to talk of "an objective common interest" in improved access to every sphere, an interest which stems from the universality of sex segregation. But she thinks one cannot go beyond this to a 'women's position' on ecology or peace or abortion.[66] From the point of view of the account of valuation developed here, however, the mere existence of sex segregation would not be enough to establish an interest in overcoming it. We would have to look and see how it was maintained and what sorts of ideals were in play. We could not say a priori that a gendered division of labor or of social functions was oppressive or irrational.

An example of how this 'looking and seeing' might be done is described by Chandra Mohanty. She, too, is skeptical about generalizing on the basis of a gendered division of labor. "For instance, how is it possible to refer to 'the' sexual division of labor, when the content of this division changes radically from one environment to the next."[67] Division of labor (or segregation of spheres, in Phillips' language) does not automatically mean 'oppression.' We cannot assume that separation or division carries with it a value difference. Mohanty objects (rightly) to the lumping together of people who are culturally very different into categories like "Third World women," "African women," "Islamic women," to the tendency of Western feminists to see these groups as unchanging (outside history) except in response to colonialism, and to the tendency to place their practices "on a scale which is normed through Eurocentic assumptions" (i.e. traditional/modern, underdeveloped/developed) and which conveniently overlooks the effects of Western power on 'Third World' conditions of life.

Well and good. But when Mohanty comes to endorse a piece of western feminist scholarship which she finds appropriately contextualized, she describes a study of a group of lacemakers in a town in India, which seems able to deploy pretty familiar feminist and Marxist categories of analysis. According to Mohanty, an "ideology of the housewife" has defined these women's work as 'non-work', and contributed to their exploitation. And, under the pressure of "pauperization" the women are beginning to question their sex-segregation. Mohanty praises the author of this study for her willingness to undertake a detailed analysis of these women's local situation in its economic, social, and ideological dimensions. But the point I would like to underline is that, having done this, the author is able to discover that the women do have an objective interest in overcoming their confinement to the home. (They would actually get paid if they did their work in the 'public' sphere from which their customs bar them.) It is an interest that they are just beginning to recognize, and it stands in some tension with their commitment to the norms of their culture, but it is there nonetheless (or so Mohanty is willing to say, at any rate).

I conclude that the problem of multiple and cross-cutting social identities or positions, though it clearly makes the business more complicated, need not disable us from attributing interests to people.

Finally, I return one last time to the issue of paternalism, authoritarianism, and vangaurdism. First, a simple point of logic. It does not follow, from the fact that a policy is in my interest, that it is in my interest to have that policy rammed down my throat, or to be deceived into choosing that policy, or any such thing. Second, part of the standard repertoire of goals of critical social theory is the promotion of autonomy. This can serve as something of a bulwark against the temptations posed by notions of 'objective interests', since it is highly unlikely that autonomy can be promoted coercively. But, more importantly, if the possibility of attributing interests to people is explained in the way we have endorsed here, then there is built into our understanding of how to justify that attribution a commitment to a non-manipulative, non-hierarchical, participatory process. And it is explicitly part of our understanding that this is not a process which can be safely simulated or imagined. Only actual dialogue can keep our attributions on track.

I conclude that this way of explaining how to justify real interests stands up fairly well to the objections posed. In Chapter 7, however, I will entertain some final doubts.

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