GOODNESS AND THE EVALUATION OF PERSONS

Research base on
Andreas T. Schmidt – Princeton University
Philip Pettit - Princeton University
Derek Parfit - All Souls College, Oxford University
Shelly Kagan - Yale University
John Rawls – Harvard University
Elinor Mason - The University of California, Santa Barbara

2021.12
Summary
• What makes a person good or bad?
u Vague idea: Doing good – making the world a better place – makes one a better

person.
u It is not the case that a person is good to the extent that his/her existence brings

about good or to the extent that her actions do good.

u A theory of the good is absent.

• Structure
u This research slides will show the process of argumentation of the answer above.

u A PROPORTIONAL PRINCIPLE is shown to be the most plausible candidate

Motivation of the idea of being good by doing good
Under a philosophical treatment

• It is the goodness of a person’s acts rather than intentions, asseverations, motivation, and
so on – that should influence how we judge that person.
• People whose charitable actions or scientific inventions have positive effects on the world
are often judged more favorably as persons accordingly (even unknown precise motivation
or character).

• Effective altruism are committed to using evidence and reason to determine the most
effective ways to do good. They do shift the focus away from motives and virtues towards
how much good one does.
• Virtue Consequentialism – being a good person is about being virtuous and, second,
character traits are virtues, if they have good consequences.
Principle Structural Discussion - Motivation
Derive judgements about how good a person is from judgements about goodness of outcomes

• Virtue Consequentialism Thought 1: Moral evaluations are principally a matter of feeling.

• Virtue Consequentialism Thought 2: Thin benefits are important, but they do not exhaust the
value had by virtuous dispositions. Modally robust interpersonal values play an important
part for overall goodness (and thus the associated notion of doing good).
• Being good is fundamentally about doing good.
• Being good is meant to work without identifying specific individual character traits and
dispositions – including virtues.
• Analysis does not make any assumptions about axiology to see weather a plausible principle
to link being good and doing good.
Principle Structural Discussion –Desiderata
Based on John Rawls’s reflective equilibrium methodology (must match)

• Relevant Goodness Desideratum – include all relevant goodness

associated with the person being evaluated, which good
consequences matter for our evaluation
• Responsibility Desideratum – evaluate person by only taking
account the goodness properly attributable to the very person
under consideration
• Coherence Desideratum – cohere with a number of more
specific intuitions and beliefs
Principle Clarifications
• Being a good person is not to be equivalent to having a good
character or being a virtuous person.
• The goodness of persons in terms of betterness, that is, as a scalar
notion.
• How to rank persons in terms of betterness within a time span.
The idea is that how good or bad a person is can change over
time.
The existence principle
A person is good to the extent that her existence brings about good

• Person P is at least as good as Person Q, iff the difference in goodness

between the world in which P exists and the nearest possible world in which
P does not is at least as great as that corresponding difference for Q.
• There are three reasons why the Existence Principle does not fulfil the
Responsibility Desideratum (must avoid):
1. Evil Demon Problem: Imagine that an evil demon will inflict a lot of harm on the
world, if and only if Maria comes into existence;
2. Grandmother Problem: Stalin is a comparatively bad person and his grandmother
was similarly bad on the existence principle;
3. Abilities Problem: People’s difference in abilities to do good.
The Act Principles
Goodness

• Objective Act Principle: fails to meet the responsibility desideratum

P is at least as good a person as Q during time span T, iff P’s acts within T bring
about as much good (during and after T) in total as Q’s acts within T.

• Subjective Act Principle: evidence-relative, not actual consequences of

an act that matter, not belief-relative goodness, not get around the
abilities problem
P is at least as a good person as Q during T, iff P’s acts within T have, in total, at
least as much expected goodness as Q’s acts in T.
The Act Principles
Rightness

• The rightness principle:

P is at least as good a person as Q in T, iff the number of right acts done by P in T
is at least as great as Q’s number of right acts in T， where rightness is
determined by subjective act-consequentialism.
• Subject consequentialist rightness: an act is right, if and only if there is
no other act with higher expected goodness.
• The rightness principle seems to meet the responsibility desideratum,
but it cannot fulfil the relevant goodness desideratum since the factor
in how bad one’s wrong actions are is neglected.
The Proportionality Principle
Proportional expected goodness

• The Proportionality Principle:

P is at least as good a person as Q during T, iff the proportional expected goodness of
P’s courses of action during T is at least as great as that of Q’s courses if action during
T.
• Expected goodness gets round the evil demon and the grandmother
problem.
• The proportionality element avoids the abilities problem. The principle
includes all relevant information about goodness/badness while also fulfilling
the responsibility desideratum.
• Being a good person is a function of the goodness of outcomes.
The Proportionality Principle
Proportional expected goodness

• Formula 1
𝑀!=𝐸𝐺" /𝐸𝐺#$
• “𝐸𝐺" ” stands for the expected goodness of the actual course of action.
• “𝐸𝐺#$ ”stands for the expected goodness of the best possible course of
action.
• The higher this number, the better one is as a person.
• If the level of expected goodness is negative for the best possible course
action, then level of personal goodness would increase the worse actual
course of action is (because both numbers would be negative).
The Proportionality Principle
Proportional expected goodness

• Formula 2
𝐸𝐺! − 𝐸𝐺"#
𝑀2 =
𝐸𝐺$# − 𝐸𝐺"#
• “𝐸𝐺"# ” stands for the expected goodness of the worst possible course of action.
• The higher one’s number on M2, the better one is as person.
• For the time span, the fresh starts account constructs proportional expected goodness
during a time span as a function of the expected goodness of the different combinations of
actions at different decision-points.
• This formula does not include the probability with which a person will act certain ways, which
avoid a person’s personality factor.
• The proportionality principle plausibly meets the relevant goodness desideratum and the
responsibility desideratum, but still need to argue with the coherence desideratum.
The Coherence Desideratum in the Proportionality Principle
• The link between good beliefs/motivation and high proportional expected goodness is merely empirical and
thus open to refutation.
• The Proportionality Principle does not provide necessary and sufficient conditions for betterness rankings.
Beliefs/Motivation need to add further principles that spell out the “other things being equal condition”.
• A pro tanto version:
P is at least as good a person as Q during T, iff the proportional expected goodness of P’s courses of action during T is at least as great as
that of Q’s courses if action during T and all other things are equal.

• The Proportionality Principle will not be defined in extreme cases.

• The tiny difference in terms of expected goodness influences judgement of how good a person is overall. We
need to balance different goodness principles with each other.
• As long as we take sufficiently long time spans, nearly all real-life examples will be such that a person make
significant axiological difference.

• Thus, “Good persons do good” is powerful and intuitive. The Proportionality Principle provides the
intuitively right ranking.
Conclusions (Practical)
• A person is good to the extent that her actual courses of action are high in
proportional expected goodness.
• A plausible all-things-considered theory of what makes a person good requires
further principles.
• To be a good person it not only matters how much good one does, but also how
much more one could do.
1. What one has to do to be good changes with circumstances.
2. A person’s power, economic resources, and physical and cognitive abilities matter
greatly for an evaluation of goodness.
3. A person’s responsiveness to available evidence will greatly influence the extent to which
that person will do proportional expected good across time.