Is good enough enough?
Do the consequences of our actions have to be the best available? Not necessarily. It might be enough if they are simply good enough.
Imagine Jim is preparing to move and is selling his home. Imagine further that he lists his house at a price which, while perhaps not the maximum amount for which he could sell it, would be nevertheless be sufficient and satisfactory. Is this decision irrational? Is his ability to be satisfied with less than the most money he could potentially get for his house irrational?
If you can answer those questions in the negative, you subscribe to the possibility of what philosophers and economists sometimes call rational individual satisficing, that is, the idea that it is possible for a rational individual to simply have modest desires.
In the moral domain, the philosopher Michael Slote offers the following example:
A medic attending the wounded on the battlefield may attend to the first (sufficiently) badly wounded person he sees without considering whether there may be someone in even worse shape nearby, and from a common-sense moral standpoint such behavior seems perfectly acceptable.
I mentioned last Friday that satisficing forms of consequentialism may permit us to favor our personal projects in our actions while still fulfilling our moral obligations in a way that vanilla forms of maximizing utilitarianism don’t. Satisficing consequentialism (SC) actually addresses several common ways in which maximizing or optimizing consequentialism don’t connect with our usual notions about morality:
- SC allows us to choose actions which do a sufficient amount of good, without obliging us to choose the course of action by which we will do absolutely the most good.
- SC allows less than the absolute best to be morally permissible and can treat it as praiseworthy when an agent goes “above and beyond.” (Consider that under maximizing act-consequentialism it is our duty to be saints).
- SC allows us to have personal projects, and to act on them as long as the amount of good our actions bring about can be deemed sufficient.
- SC also allows us to have personal motives, even if these motives are not themselves optimific.
On Wednesday, I’ll look at some of the shortfalls of SC.
| Tagged with: | Consequentialism, Design Ethics, Maximizing, Moral Philosophy, Satisficing, The Magazine Ad Example, Utilitarianism |
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