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Show Chapter III. The Utility-Maximizing Model of Rationality: Informal Interpretations 112 the extent to which minimizing expenditures may conflict with her wish to live a simple lifestyle. Simplicity may dictate weaving her own cloth, chopping firewood, drawing rain water from a bucket on the fire escape, growing her own fruits and vegetables, etc. How much time, energy and resources is Myrtle willing to devote to these activities for the sake of simplicity before they come into conflict with her desire to get things done efficiently? This is the kind of question that Myrtle's calculations should be able to answer. Henceforth I shall use the term efficiency to refer to the single (meta-) end interpretation of (U), and the term utility-maximization to refer to the coherence set interpretation of (U) within which all of an agent's ends, both object-ends and meta-ends, including the meta-end of efficiency, must be situated. (U) in the coherence set sense remains a meta-end because organizing, balancing, and scheduling all of one's ends are themselves an object of goal-directed deliberative activity, i.e. they constitute an end. And (U) in this sense is a meta-end because it is a style or manner in which one may achieve each of one's object-ends, i.e. such that the achievement of some one object-end advances, or at least does not obstruct, the achievement of any of one's other object-ends. The resulting conception of a coherence set appears to be universal. First, it applies to the totality of any agent's ends, regardless of content. Second, it subjects any particular end or meta-end, including that of efficiency, to the same cost-benefit analysis by which all of the agent's other ends must be mutually adjusted. It also thereby illuminates the sense in which utilitymaximization in this universal, cost-benefit sense is not just one more contingently valuable meta-end, but rather does have a special value-neutral, logically necessary status. For when Myrtle asks herself at what point she should trade off the meta-end of efficiency against the meta-end of simplicity, she is really asking herself whether the cost of efficiency - i.e. sacrificing simplicity - may or may not outweigh its benefits; and whether, in fashioning her lifestyle, it really maximizes her utility to be efficient. Since at bottom efficiency just is maximizing utility, this question may seem at first glance to have a paradoxical ring to it. But it is no more problematic than the question whether satisfying a certain desire itself is satisfying. In either case, there is no special difficulty about evaluating a lower-order value from the reflexive standpoint of that same value as a higher-order criterion. Efficiency as a meta-end that adverbially modifies an agent's achievement of various object-ends may be one such meta-end among many, all of which are subject to the higher-order regulating constraint of utility-maximization, itself an overriding meta-end of special status. The resulting conception of a coherence set also seems to be nonvacuous, in that it is conceptually possible for an agent to violate it, i.e. fail to maximize utility, by failing to thus order all of her ends. She might include in the set an © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
