On page 132 of Hurka's Virtue, Vice, and Value, he makes the statement that any ratio one creates regarding a scale of value for properties such as pleasure and knowledge would be an arbitrary one (implying that it is thus useless), and that no comparison can actually be made between the two properties since one is not lexically greater than the other.
Soon afterward in the chapter, however, Hurka seems to make a similar "arbitrary" comparison himself, validating it because of the graphs he mentioned two chapters previous. On p. 134 Hurka explicitly states that "Whether a good is great or small, the positive value of loving it cannot exceed one-half its value, nor can the negative value of hating it." After justifying this by citing Fig. 3.7, Hurka states that "We need not commit ourselves to any such mathematically precise formulation...but it will help us to understand the principle if we take it to limit the values of attitudes in some such constant way."
I cannot help but find it odd that Hurka condemns the use of creating units by any standard just two pages prior to making this statement, especially considering that Hurka is trying to devise a method for measuring a comparison between things that are supposedly non-lexical. If we are not to commit to mathematical precision, then what is going on if not creating arbitrary units by which to compare by? And what exactly is the problem with using arbitrary units, provided they are used consistently?
Although Hurka's main idea regarding the intrinsic goodness or evil of virtue (that it is always less than the degree of goodness or virtue of the thing itself, p. 133) is understandable, he attempts to support it by creating a method he himself says is impractical, which is a major stumbling block to his argument.
2 comments:
While I am very anti-Hurka in many ways myself, the objection you're raising isn’t a valid objection – you’re missing the point of his rhetoric. He starts off by saying that we can’t make any such assumptions about which values for knowledge or pleasure are greater than the other because one is not lexically greater than the other. All he is saying with this statement is that it is not true that one of these things always has precedence over the other, regardless of how big or small the values are. This is relevant because Hurka wants to force virtue ethicists to say that the smallest amount of virtue will always be worth more than an infinite amount of pleasure. His view is that neither pleasure nor knowledge is always more important than the other. When he later says “imagine that their relation is 2:1 units” he’s just showing some way that we would conceivably look at the relation between the values – he doesn’t want to actually speculate what the relationship is though, because that’s a different topic entirely.
Hurka then brings up the recursive clause values, and how their value must be a fraction of their object’s value. Although he still doesn’t want to pinpoint what the exact value is in this book, he would be more willing to name a constant value for the relationship here than for knowledge and pleasure. He doesn’t want to state what the exact fraction is here because that would create possible entailments and objections that he doesn’t have to answer – all that’s really important is that the values of attitudes are less than the values of their objects.
I agree with the post that Hurka here is condeming his own idea. I could agree if he said "the value of loving something that is intrinsically good is always less than the actual good" is a relative term and therefore useful. However saying that it is half as useful i find to be rather arbitrary and therefore he is contradicting himself. However the way that it is phrased in the book seems to indicate that he does not mean to imply that it is what he actually means but rather that it is an example of an arbitrary number. One half is meant as an example, not as an actual way of quantifying the love of intrinsic good. He seems to think that there may be such a fraction should his idea be accurate however it is doubtful that it should be ever knows as there is no way to quantify pleasure.
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