Francesco: First of all, it would be odd (prima facie) to buck-pass the concept of well-being. Well-being is "a" good, while the buck-passing account should be used for thin concepts like right or good.
Michele's answer: this may be true if we are dealing with a thik notion of well-being. But SCanlon defines well-being as "what makes a life a good life for the person who lives it" or as a concept at the same level of generality. This concept is quite thin, almost as thin as the concept of good.
Francesco: Second problem. Well-being is constituted or made of of other goods. This may be understood as an identity relation. For example, let us assume that hedonism is right, i.e. well-being is made of pleasure (and only of pleasure). In this case we might have :
property A (X non-derivatively contributes to well-being)
property B (X is pleasurable)
A = B
In the case of good, if a buck-passing account applies, we would have:
(let us assume pleasure is the only good thing)
Property B (X is pleasurable)
Property C (X is good)
Buck-passing (for properties)
C (X is good) = X has a property which gives us a reason to respond to it in a certain way
C not = to B
Francesco notices that the buck-passing view is sometimes understood as a claim about concepts, and sometimes as a claim about properties.
Michele: It sounds fine that the relation between pleasure and well-being need not be symmetric to the buck-passing relation between good and good things. Even if Scanlon does not provide a "buck-passing account" of the value of well-being, I want to know whether it follows from the buck-passing view and the fact that well-being is an inclusive and transparent good that well-being is valuable.
Michele: moreover I would like to understand if the facts that appear in reasons are intentional or extensional (I do not know really how to use these terms, but here is what I mean:)
"does the conjunction of the following two facts:
2. I have a reason to desire X
3. I have a reason to desire Y
even if I do not know, and I cannot possibly know that X = Y,
(at least in so far as Scanlon's view of reasons is in question)?"
if the answer is "yes" , it seems that we might have something like the following:
(let us assume, for the sake of the argument, that:
0. A is pleasurable
0a. "X is pleasurable" entails "X constitutes my well-being", or equivalently "X is a part of my well-being")
1a. A = a part of my well-being (follows from 0 and 0a)
2a. I have a reason to desire A (because A is pleasurable)
3a. I have a reason to desire (a part of) my well-being
this holds even if I do not know that 0a, even if I never think about 0a, and even if there is no way in principle for me to know 0a.
Francesco notices that we must distinguish between non-derivative and derivative reasons for something. For example if
Y= the biggest Italian expert on Rawls
and I am writing a thesis on Rawls, I have a non-derivative reason to visit Y (the major Italian expert on Rawls) and a derivative reason to go to talk with Maffettone.
Michele replies that the buck-passing view seems to apply to non-derivative and derivative reasons as well. In fact, if I have a derivative reason to go to talk with Maffettone, I can say that Maffettone is valuable (has a property, that of being the biggest Italian expert on Rawls) which gives me a reason to respect his opinions about Rawls.
As Francesco notices, we do not have to interpret the claim that well-being is a transparent good as entailing the claim that we can apply the buck-passing view to well-being. Well-being can be said to be constituted by things that are good for me; or we may have something like (contingent? a-priori but non trivial?) identity among properties.
Michele agrees and adds that, given that Scanlon does not claim to provide a buck-passing account of well-being, we must take his silence at face value and suppose that the relation between well-being and the goods that make it up is one of constitution or something else.
Michele also notices that, if this is true, Scanlon's claim about the transparency of well-being should be read as claims about the uses of concepts in the first-person point of view, claims that may lead, but do not explicitly lead to metaphysical conclusions about properties. On the contrary the buck-passing view can be read as a claim about properties.
Michele also notices another Scanlon's oddity:
Why does Scanlon NOT analyze the relation between well-being and the goods that make it up IN THE SAME WAY as the relation between the good and good things?
After all, the intuition behind the thesis that well-being is a transparent good is very similar to the intuitions that motivate the buck-passing account of good.In fact what justifies transparency is the idea that
the property "X is/constitutes/ my well-being" does not give me an (extra) reason to respond to X, beyond the reasons that derive from other properties of X.
and what justify the buck-passing account of the good is the idea that
the property "X is good" does not represent a reason to respond to X, beyond the reasons that derive from other properties of X.