Against Achievements
Why they're not intrinsically valuable
Disclaimer: Obviously achievements are instrumentally valuable — they’re valuable because of other things that they cause.
Recently someone gave me a case in which one’s life is devoid of achievement and overflowing with failure despite being happy. They ask if the person is well off. Many people think that the answer is no. I think the answer is clearly yes — achievements are valuable because of what they achieve, not for their own sake. Here I’ll present a bevy of arguments against the intrinsic value of achivements.
1 Lopsided Lives Worries
If we say that achieving something is intrinsically good then if you had enough achievements it could offset any finite amount of misery. Thus, even as you experience more suffering each moment than was experienced during the holocaust and never have pleasure, as the achievements that you have go to infinity then you could be arbitrarily well off. This has been argued persuasively by Pummer. Various ways of trying to avoid this don’t succeed, as Pummer — and me in a currently unpublished paper — argue.
2 Paradox
Ben Bradley has a paradox for views that say achievements are good.
The paradoxes for true beliefism and achievementism work the same way. To get a paradox for achievementism, we just imagine a person whose achievement or project involves having his life go badly for him. Sometimes, that project or goal will be completed or achieved if and only if it is not completed or achieved.
To clarify suppose that an achievement that one wants to have is for their child to have a better life than they do. Suppose their child will have a welfare level of 2000 and they will have a welfare level of 1999. However, if they have a higher welfare level than their children then they will achieve that goal, which will increase their welfare level to 2005. Thus, they will get the welfare boost which increases their welfare level, which means they no longer get the boost, which lowers their welfare level, resulting in a paradox.
3 Leveling Down
The leveling down objection is generally applied to views that hold equality has intrinsic value. The objection is as follows — if inequality is intrinsically bad then raising the welfare levels of the well-off would be in some ways bad. But this is implausible — nothing about that seems to be bad.
But you can get the same thing with the view that achievement is intrinsically good. To see this, suppose one wants their children to have a better life than they did. On this account, there would be something good about torturing the parents to death in ways that bring pleasure to no one, if that would make their children have a better life than they did. This is not plausible. Similarly, it would imply that there would be something good about a dictator taking over the world and enslaving everyone, even if it brought him no pleasure, as long as that was his goal.
4 When Are Achievements Good?
There’s an open question — one that’s been pressed by Bradley — of when objective list goods make a person better off. One might think that they make a person better off when the achievement is actually achieved. But this gives the odd result that one’s well-being can fluctuate after their death. I won’t belabor the point, for I’ve already made it here.
Conclusion
The view that achievements are intrinsically good has superficial plausibility. However, when examined, it is revealed to be extremely implausible. There are of course other worries, but these worries are, I think, enough to doom the view.