Hassoun on Sufficiency and Contentment

Nicole Hassoun has given us a wide-ranging and comprehensive sufficientarian account of distributive justice (Hassoun 2004). Since I also favor the sufficientarian approach, we share a common starting point, and we are also in agreement on many secondary issues. Here, however, I'll confine my discussion to one aspect of her account by which I'm not (yet) convinced: namely, her test for what constitutes a minimally good life for any particular individual. The biggest challenge for any sufficientarian is to give a principled account of the sufficiency threshold. This challenge arises because most of the goods that matter to us can be arranged on continua that have no upper limits. It is always possible to have yet more money, yet more opportunities, and yet more friends, and it is at least arguable that however happy a person is, he can always be happier still. It's easy enough to pick out some point on each relevant continuum and say that it defines the minimum amount whose provision justice requires, but without an argument to back it up, any such selection will be merely stipulative and arbitrary. One major contribution of Hassoun's book is that it provides us with just such an argument. Reasonable, caring, free people should be content to live [that life]… The question is not whether the person one is deciding for will be content, as that person's preferences may be adaptive. Rather, the question is whether a reasonable, free, caring person would now (reflecting on, and considering but not occupying, another person's life) contentedly live that life as that person (p. 23). For brevity, I'll refer to this way of determining whether the goodness of a person's life makes it up to the sufficiency threshold as the contentment test. One obvious question about the contentment test is what the requisite form of contentment itself amounts to. Some elements of the notion seem clear enough: to be content with one's life is clearly to regard it as worth living, and contentment understood as an emotional state or mood involves a kind of placidity, an absence of agitation. However, beyond this, things get a bit murky because someone who unagitatedly regards his life as worth living may hold a variety of different attitudes toward the possibility of his life being or becoming (even) better. Are we to suppose that the contented person doesn't care about improvements at all? That he does care in the sense that he'd like and prefer that his life be better in certain or many ways, but simply isn't bothered that it isn't? Or is it that he would prefer to live an even better life but lacks the motivation to pursue one? And what of the comparative/non-comparative distinction? Whatever the relevant form of contentment amounts to, is it an attitude that one takes exclusively toward the overall quality of one's own life, or is it also influenced by the fact that other people's lives are better or worse than one's own? When we imagine the reasonable, free, and caring person's imagined level of contentment at the thought of living another's life, are we to imagine his imaginings as subject to the common human tendency of envy? If we are, does the envy enter via the psychology of the reasonable, free, and caring person himself or via that of the other person into whose life he is projecting himself? Because these different ways of interpreting the contentment test will yield divergent verdicts about the sufficiency of many lives, anyone who is seeking a definitive sufficiency threshold will have to settle on one or another of them. This by itself is not a serious problem: it means only that Hassoun will need to tell us more about which conception of contentment she has in mind. However, while it is easy enough to stipulate a precise interpretation of contentment, it may be harder to explain why just that interpretation should mark the dividing line between those toward whom society has and has not met its basic obligation. In the absence of a principled defense of the favored interpretation, Hassoun's account of the threshold will inherit some of the arbitrariness that her contentment test is intended to get us beyond. [T]he reasonable, free, caring person must fully understand the other person's circumstances, psychology, and history in deciding whether they would contentedly live as the other person (24). However, it is also true that any reasonable, free, and caring person will bring a psychology of his own to the imaginative exercise, and this, too, can be expected to affect his degree of contentment at the thought of living the other's life. Because the two sets of psychologies raise very different issues, I'll need to consider them separately. [r]easonable people see others people as moral equals and are appropriately impartial. Caring people attend, and respond, to others' interest appropriately. People have the relevant freedom when their judgments about life quality do not result from adaptive preference, coercion, nor constraint (12). And, hence, the question we must now ask is whether any of these traits, or any combination of them, will support the conclusion that everyone who possesses them will be content with roughly the same set of imagined lives. The first of the three traits, reasonableness, clearly requires that its possessor not see his own life as any more important than anyone else's. It requires, as well, the reasonable person “wants to cooperate and live with other people on fair terms” (78). Guided by these requirements, we may perhaps infer that no reasonable person can be content with a life that draws on so many resources and contains so many luxuries that similar lives cannot made available to all. However, even if this is true, it will at best show that the contentment test can be used to establish a social maximum (to which Hassoun is not committed), but not a social minimum (to which she is). To tell us anything about a social minimum, the trait of reasonableness would have to prevent its possessors from being content with their imagined lives when and because there were others whose lives are enriched by resources and luxuries that are unavailable to them. This implication would go far beyond anything that Hassoun wants to say, and is indeed something that she explicitly denies. Moreover, even if we grant that a reasonable person cannot be content with a life that is lived under conditions of inequality, nothing will follow about the lives with which he would and would not be content under conditions of equality. And, hence, at least when it is considered by itself, the trait of reasonableness does not seem capable of rendering everyone who possesses it content with the same set of imagined lives. But neither, it seems, will it help to add in the second of the three requisite traits, that of caring appropriately about the satisfaction of other people's interests. Put most simply, the problem here is that the life whose minimal goodness depends on whether the caring person is content with it is not the life of some other person, but rather a life that is relevantly like the life of some other person but that the caring person envisions as being his own. Because the crucial question is whether he would be content to live that life, the caring person's tendency to attend and respond appropriately to the interests of others is neither here nor there. And, hence, if any of required three traits is to enable us to get to the conclusion that all who possess them must be content with the same sets of imagined lives, it will have to be the last of them, the trait of being free. Because Hassoun understands freedom as a feature of a person's judgment, this suggestion does hold some initial promise. However, even if all free people have decent ranges of options and sufficient bargaining power, and even if none of them are subject to coercion or false consciousness or any other factor that will distort their judgment, it hardly follows that they will all exercise their judgment in the same way. So, to cite only the most obvious dimension of variation, one person whose judgments are unconstrained and authentically his own may be easygoing and accepting, while another may be driven and ambitious. The first person may regard the glass as half full while the second sees it as half empty. Of these different sorts of persons, the first can be expected to be content with many lives that the second would regard as profoundly unsatisfying. And, hence, even when the contentment test is augmented by the assumption that the parties whose contentment with their imagined lives is at issue are free as well as impartial and caring, it still appears to lack the specificity that it would need in order to provide a conceptually satisfying account of the sufficiency threshold. Here as above, the difficulty is far from conclusive. Just as it was possible for Hassoun to clarify the meaning of contentment by stipulatively adopting one or another precise definition of the term, so too might she secure the conclusion that all reasonable, caring, and free persons would be content with the same sets of lives by stipulating a much more precise account of their psychology. However, here as above, too, if the relevant stipulation were not in its turn backed by a principled argument, then any account of the sufficiency threshold that it supported would be no less arbitrary than the stipulation itself. The problems that arise when we turn to the personal psychology of those whose actual lives are up for evaluation are of a different order. Here there is an obvious advantage in requiring that the external parties envision themselves as having the very same properties and limitations as the persons whose lives they are thinking themselves into; for if this were not the case, then the fact that they would be content with those lives would tell us little about the value of the lives for the persons who must actually live them. But if the point is indeed to assess the value of those lives from the point of view of those who must live them, then it is unclear why adaptively formed preferences should be excluded from the psychological features that the external parties must imagine themselves as replicating. A preference's provenance is independent of its current durability or depth or strength, and as long as an adaptively formed preference is as durable and deep and strong as its non-adaptive counterparts, its frustration will diminish the quality of its possessor's lived experience as much as theirs will. This is not to deny that it is morally repulsive to suppose that an oppressor might validate his oppression by getting the oppressed to like it, but it is to suggest that avoiding this conclusion may require drawing back a good distance from a thought that appears to provide much of the motivation for Hassoun's contentment test—the thought, namely, that the goodness of a person's life is not something that can be determined in the abstract, but rather depends heavily on how suitable that life is for the person who must actually live it. The questions that are raised by adaptive preferences are of course not restricted to Hassoun's account. Similar problems will arise for all other theories that seek to tie either a person's well-being or the justice of his share of his society's goods to his own subjective states. This, clearly, is not the occasion to attempt a general resolution of these problems, but to end, I do want to note a distinction which may at least blunt their impact on Hassoun's account. Put most simply, the distinction that I have in mind is between using the contentment test to determine which already-existing individuals live minimally good lives and using it to evaluate the sufficiency of the lives that people would live under various alternative social arrangements. Of these two ways of using the test, the first will indeed confront us with an uncomfortable choice between granting authority to preferences formed in response to oppression and specifying the well-being thresholds of the previously oppressed in a way that fails to capture certain important elements of their well-being. This is one of the many messy problems of non-ideal theory, and I don't see any clean way of resolving it. But the other way of using the test, which pairs it with the aim of designing policies and institutions which will secure lives that are at least minimally good for as many people as possible, seems both more important for Hassoun's purposes and far less vulnerable to the current worry. Using the test this way will largely sidestep the problem of how to deal with adaptive preferences for two reasons: first, because very few of the future persons who will live under policies which are designed to elevate as many people as possible above the sufficiency threshold are likely to have formed adaptive preferences and, second, because our overall verdict about which policies and institutions will best serve this function seems very unlikely to be affected by the role that we assign to such preferences. Focusing on institutional design will not eliminate the need to follow Hassoun in requiring that those who must be content with the lives that are available under the relevant policies and institutions be different from the persons who will actually live them, but the reason for imposing this requirement will no longer be that the preferences of the actual individuals may be tainted by their adaptive origins. Instead, and more simply, the reason will be that those who will live the relevant lives are not yet on the scene, and so have no particular preferences to consult.