Christine M. Korsgaard was kind enough to answer a few questions of mine. Here's an excerpt:
ERICH: I have the impression that some utilitarian philosophers are having an outsize impact on the world. I am thinking, for example, of Singer, Toby Ord, William MacAskill and Hilary Greaves who have been instrumental in founding the Effective Altruism movement, which is having a large impact on global poverty and health, factory farming and so on. Is this a correct observation, do you think? If so, is it something about utilitarianism that spurs concrete action of this sort? And does Kantianism not?
CHRISTINE: The idea of doing a lot of good has a lot of appeal. The Effective Altruism movement also appeals because of its focus on good you can do right now, and as an individual, at least as long as someone else is doing the complicated work of organizing the charity and distributing the proceeds effectively. The problem of global poverty requires a political solution; charity, no matter how extensive, can never be more than a band-aid. But it does have immediate results. I think utilitarianism has an advantage over Kantianism in the public sphere because it is, at least superficially, much easier to understand, and the theoretical problems with it that I described before are hard to see.
I haven't read her work myself and probably should, but I was told by someone that basically condition 3 or even having goal-directed behaviour is not necessary. I would hope it wouldn't be, because we could have a being who experiences good and bad and so has their own ends, but has no power to control what they experience and so would just be completely vulnerable and unable to pursue their own ends. Wouldn't such a being still matter? It seems like many young animals and (conscious) fetuses are in such a state. Maybe one way of putting it is that these experiences do in fact guide them to pursue their own (functional) good, but they are just unable to actually do so. But then what does it mean to say these experiences guide them to pursue their own good if they can't pursue their own good?
I also wonder what she has in mind by "functional" in "functional good". Do we need to decide what something's function is, if any, to define their goods and bads, and how do we do that? In my view, animals define their own goods and bads through their valenced experiences and/or desires, not just that they happen to experience their goods and bads or that their experiences guide them towards their own functional goods.
And what if their valenced experiences guided them to violate their own functional good?
It's interesting that she brings up artwork and the environment, too, as potential ends in themselves:
Thanks for the clarifications!
Maybe having valenced experiences means they have goods and bads, and not being able to pursue them makes them defective, regardless of what type of creature they are (e.g. if they were designed from scratch to lack the ability to pursu... (read more)