Can Existence Be Better for a Being Than Non-Existence? - Killing Happy Animals: Explorations in Utilitarian Ethics - page 89

level of zero and that this welfare level 'could not rise or fall given the
person's inherent capacities'. Bradley makes up the following example,
assuming hedonism:
Imagine Marsha is born without the capacity to feel pleasure or pain,
and never develops that capacity; imagine Greg is born with that
capacity, but due to his circumstances, he never actually feels any
pleasure or pain. Given Luper's account of responsiveness, Marsha is
relevantly like a shoe - she has no well-being level at all - while Greg
has a well-being level of zero. This just seems wrong. 13
Again, assuming hedonism, it makes sense to say that a living person without
any capacity of subjective feeling lacks a welfare level. Thus, Marsha might
indeed be like a shoe in this respect: she lacks a welfare level. Whether Greg
is also relevantly like a shoe depends on the 'circumstances' under which
he lives. If he can feel pleasure and pain, but simply happens to have only
neutral feelings, he still has a welfare level. Having only neutral feelings is
very unlikely to last long in responsive creatures. If Greg's capacity to feel
pleasure or pain has been knocked out, then he is relevantly like a shoe as
well. The example of Marsha and Greg does not dismiss Luper's claim that
having a welfare level is linked to responsiveness.
Bradley proposes a much weaker notion of responsiveness:
R: Person S is responsive at time t only if there is some world w and
some time t n such that S has a positive or negative well-being level
at <w, t n >. 14
I think that Bradley's notion of responsiveness is too inclusive. It implies
that dead people are responsive. Of course, Bradley welcomes this impli-
cation, because it allows him to attribute a welfare level of zero to dead
people without forcing him to do the same for shoes. However, Bradley
has offered no convincing argument for this move. As Luper has already
pointed out in reply to Bradley: 'Just because something (is the sort of
thing that) is such that its attaining goods or evils at some time is not
impossible, it does not follow that it has a welfare level at some given
time, or at every time.' 15 Neither does it follow from the fact that it is
metaphysically possible that someone has a welfare level at a time, that
this person actually does have a welfare level at that time.
4. The Argument from Disparity . This argument claims that if an alleged
instance of P=0 and an instance that has nothing to do with P-hood