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Show Chapter III. The Utility-Maximizing Model of Rationality: Informal Interpretations 116 3.3. Universality Now again assume, as in the single end interpretation of (U), that an agent's coherence set is nonvacuous, and consider further its universality. This means that on the one hand, it is conceptually possible for an agent to violate the set by pursuing an end not contained within it. On the other, its ordering subjects all meta-ends, including that of efficiency, to the same cost-benefit analysis by which all of an agent's object-ends must be mutually adjusted, regardless of particular content. So although this is not true merely by definition of having an end or of maximizing utility, utility-maximization in this sense is not just one more contingently valuable meta-end, but rather does have a special necessary and universal status. If utility-maximization is a necessary and universal meta-end, then it is an absolute meta-end. First, it is permanently superior in ranking to all of an 21 agent's other meta- and object-ends. Like moral side-constraints on action, utility-maximization is, first of all, an intentional object (conscious or otherwise) of goal-oriented behavior, i.e. it is an end. Second, it is an end that is not subject to revision or sacrifice for the sake of otherwise realizing any further object- or meta-ends. Rather, one must sacrifice, revise, or reschedule these other ends in order to maintain conformity to the constraints one's coherence set imposes, just as (U) requires. Failure to make such revisions results in violation of the set. Moreover, utility-maximization in this universal sense is a final meta-end, in that any considerations invoked to justify its imposition must be noninstrumental in nature. So I cannot convince you to organize all of your ends into a coherence set that maximizes utility by pointing out that it maximizes utility to do so. For this would make (U) on the coherence set interpretation either instrumental to some higher-order (U) on some other interpretation; or else redundant. Similarly, I cannot justify your satisfying a certain desire by pointing out that it satisfies that desire to do so. In Chapter II.2 we have already previewed Chapter VIII.2's argument below, that one may ramify orders of desire infinitely in recursive acts of selfevaluation, without meeting the requirement of rational justification. But quite independently of that argument, we can already see that invoking any such higher-order criterion of evaluation to rationally justify itself is merely redundant. Hence Chapter II's conclusion regarding desire applies here to utility-maximization: whatever the considerations are that justify organizing one's ends in order to maximize utility, these must be independent of utilitymaximizing considerations themselves. But within this model of rationality, utility-maximizing considerations are the only considerations available. So according to the coherence set interpretation of (U), any further 21 of the sort discussed by Robert Nozick in Chapter III of his Anarchy, State and Utopia and David Gauthier (op. cit. Note 1). © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
