Topics Value

Question Let's say I want to justify my work or vocation by citing virtue X. (X might be practical value, social utility, human happiness, etc.) Must my particular work effect virtue X, or is it sufficient that my line of work effect X generally, my personal lack of any contribution notwithstanding. For example: Let's say I'm a scientist who, despite a great deal of effort, never discovers or creates or accomplishes anything useful. Could I justify my work by saying, "Science is useful"? (After all, even if science is useful generally, nothing I've done personally is useful.) [You can imagine analogous scenarios involving any pursuit, e.g., poetry or investment banking.]

Accepted:
November 15, 2007

Comments

One makes career choices on the basis of many reasons (or, in some cases, rationalizations!), but surely it cannot be required that one be able to forecast the degree to which one's own activity within the profession will succeed or fail in reaching some particular goal. Of course, when I decided to become a professional philosopher, I hoped that in some ways, my own work and thought would make a contribution to the field--but I could hardly be assured of that or take it for granted. So, it seems plain to me that one pursues a valuable activity because the activity itself is valuable--and not because one can anticipate that one's own participation in the activity will be valuable, or add value to the activity itself.

The sort of justification you seem to have in mind is retrospective: Can one really justify a life choice on the basis of the value of what is chosen, or is a life choice only justified (retrospectively) if one can show that his or her choice had produced real value within the chosen field? I can imagine one finding one's life (again, retrospectively) disappointing if one looks back and realizes that all of one's efforts have produced little of actual value. But even so, one is in no position to judge that one's efforts would have been more useful or worthwhile elsewhere, as those paths were not taken.

But I tend to think that someone who finds themselves disappointed by a certain lack of success, in retrospect, is probably measuring success too narrowly. Take your scientist, for example. Did he or she interact with the scientific community in ways that helped others make discoveries? Did he or she help others to see (or even see more clearly) the very value of scientific endeavor that led him or her into choosing a life of scientific inquiry? In his or her life as a scientist, was value added via his or her children, who could witness the parent's dedication (despite the scientist's lack of personal achievement)? Surely most people end up making some difference in the world, especially if they work in a profession that is itself valuable. So I think the question will turn out to be much less about making no difference, and will instead turn on how much difference counts. In the grand scheme of things, few of us make much of a difference in the relevant sense, and so I am very disinclined to measure the value of a human life on the basis of a measure that would count only a very few lives as actually having been worth living.