Antti Kauppinen (University of Helsinki), "Coherence and Well-Roundedness: Comment on Amy Berg’s ‘Do Good Lives Make Good Stories?’"

By Antti Kauppinen

Is it good for us if the different parts of our lives are connected to each other like the parts of a story? My answer is – and this may not surprise people who know philosophers – that it depends on what we mean by this. Let’s start with a basic distinction. Many people think that the value of a life for a person depends, in part, on its global features, and not just on the value of its parts considered in isolation. Here are two common contenders for value-relevant global features:

Coherence

Other things being equal, it is better for a subject if the things they do somehow hang together and thus form some sort of unity.

Well-Roundedness

Other things being equal, it is better for a subject if the things they do somehow form a rich panoply that involves the use of diverse capacities in diverse activities.

On the face of it, there’s a tension between these two prima facie attractive theses, as vague as they are. While both are appealing, perhaps we should give up one for the other. I think that’s in effect what Amy Berg argues for in her brand-new critique of certain forms of Coherence. (In the following, I’ll call her ‘Amy’, since I know her slightly, and it’s friendlier!) She presses the point that trying to maintain a unity to our lives can be “stultifying and constraining”, making it too hard to change course and pushing us towards one-dimensional lives that lack refreshing variety. On the other hand, if Coherentists try to accommodate the value of well-roundedness, their view (well, my view!) threatens to become otiose. This is a formidable challenge. Here, I want to indicate how it might nevertheless be possible to reconcile Coherence and Well-Roundedness – and why it doesn’t mean we should consciously try to LIVE A GREAT STORY, as she reports being advised by an Instagrammer.

Let’s start by fleshing out Coherence a bit more to understand the tension better. Here, it has been popular to appeal to some form of narrative unity. After all, what stories do is relate a number of different events to each other to form an intelligible whole whose parts make reference to each other. In the literature, there’s two common ways to cash out this idea:

Recountism

People make their lives coherent by recounting them to themselves and others, thus forging a unity among disparate states and events, which may then guide their future choices in a direction that makes sense in light of the past.

Relationism

People’s lives are coherent to the extent that the different things they do and experience at different times mutually inform each other, so that their earlier pursuits shape later ones and later ones complete and complement earlier ones. Recounting a life may involve finding a narratable unity among disparate states and events.

Something like recountism has been defended by Connie Rosati and Helena de Bres (from whom I borrow the labels), and by many psychologists. Relationism has been defended by at least me, and perhaps David Velleman. Amy focuses on the latter, and I’ll do likewise. I can’t here discuss all of her arguments – I urge everyone to read the paper – but I’ll try to address a few central thought experiments.

But first, I want to establish some ground rules that derive from the other-things-being-equal nature of the claims about the value of global features. After all, nobody claims that coherence or well-roundedness is the only good-making feature of a life. It’s no counterexample to well-roundedness if a really successful life centered around the opera is better than some more well-rounded life, since other goods can outweigh these global ones. Of course, if just any amount of local goods can outweigh coherence, it’s of little theoretical interest and no practical relevance, since no two actual lives will be just the same in other respects. So the claims should really say that if two lives are roughly equal in other good-making features, a more coherent or well-rounded one is better. This gives rise to what I’ll call

The Standard Operating Procedure

To test whether a feature makes a meaningful difference to the value of a life for a subject, compare two scenarios that differ in terms of that feature, but are otherwise roughly equal in terms of good-making (and bad-making) features.

With this in mind, let’s turn to Amy’s paper. Surprisingly, she doesn’t directly employ SOP. I suspect that part of the explanation is that her real quarry isn’t Coherence after all, but a related view about decision-making procedures (a distinction she notes on p. 20). For example, on pp. 7-8, she gives the example of Michael the chemistry teacher, who faces a series of choices about using his free time, each of which involves doing either something chemistry- or teaching-related or something unrelated. She then argues that Michael is likely to miss out on important goods like diversity, novelty, and resilience if he makes choices on the basis of what he expects to make for coherence (in the form of thematic unity) in his life – basically, if he aims to make his life be about chemistry. Or, as she puts it in her introduction in this newsletter, “If we try to turn our lives into good stories, we may find ourselves making choices that are bad for us” (my emphasis).

I’ll come back in a moment to the core issue of narrative and variety (let’s just note for now that repetitiveness doesn’t necessarily make for a good story). But first I want to emphasize that Coherence really is a claim about prudential value, not decision procedures. As such, it doesn’t say anything about how Michael should go about making his mind – it doesn’t say that people should consciously try to LIVE A GREAT STORY. To be sure, even if this is granted, it’s fair for Amy to turn around and demand Coherentists to give a plausible account of how to make what I’ve called story-regarding choices without thinking in these terms. And she’s right in thinking this challenge hasn’t been met so far. My own view is that the situation is parallel to Act Consequentialism and decision procedures: we should employ whichever method gives just the right weight to narrative features. My suspicion is that this will in practice involve focusing on commitments and values that go beyond what we think would yield positive experience for us. These commitments and values will have been shaped by our past choices and experiences, and abiding by them will tend to promote coherence – we’re less likely to abandon our friends and partners at the first hint of trouble, for example. In contrast, consciously trying to live a great story is in fact likely to lead us astray if our conception of a prudentially good life story is mistaken, as the case of Madame Bovary shows, among others. But this really needs to be worked out, and Amy is right to put pressure on us about it.

Amy does also directly criticize Relationism, for example in her final thought experiment, which involves three characters, Andy, Becca, and Crystal, whose lives differ from each other in many ways, containing different goods in addition to having a different degree of coherence. (I’ll be addressing this departure from SOP soon.) Andy’s life, centered around his progress through the ranks of a labor union, is the most strongly narratively unified, while Crystal’s is the least unified and most diverse. Here’s her scenario:

Crystal

In Crystal’s view, the main point of life is to try everything once. Over the years, she has a number of jobs, from social worker to barista to car salesperson. She’s talented enough at all of them, and she appreciates the distinctive skills she learns at each (appreciating others’ lives and struggles, knowing how to roast coffee perfectly, honing her powers of persuasion), but she doesn’t want to be tied down to just one career. Crystal has a few consistent hobbies; she always has a cat or two at home, and she loves to pick out a tune on her banjo. She watches documentaries about all sorts of things: astronomy for a while, then philosophy, then art history. She’s dedicated to each pursuit for as long as she does it; she thinks it’s important to throw herself into all that life has to offer. Early in her life, Crystal decided marriage and kids weren’t for her; she’s a dedicated serial monogamist, entering a variety of short- and long-term relationships over the years. These relationships have their ups and downs, as all relationships do, but Crystal is generally happy in them. (16)

Amy’s argument is that while narrativists are committed to saying that Andy’s life is clearly best, that is not the case: “people structure those goods in many different ways, and narrativism unduly constrains which lives count as good ones” (17). Crystal’s life, too, can be good, while Andy’s life is “missing adventure, novelty, and spontaneity” (17).

Does this thought experiment show that Coherence (especially in its Relationist form) is not true? I don’t think so. First, and most obviously, the mere fact that Crystal can lead a good life with low coherence (which it indeed has on a natural reading) doesn’t mean that coherence isn’t a good-making feature, as long as enough of other good-making features are present. Second, when comparing Andy’s and Crystal’s lives, were not just comparing lives with different levels of coherence, but, by stipulation, lives that contain different kinds of other goods, like adventure and novelty. But this is where SOP is really important. Without following it, we can’t isolate the potential effect of coherence, so we can’t conclude that it doesn’t make a difference (or that it does). Note also that high coherence as such doesn’t entail the absence of adventure and novelty – think of the life of an explorer or a movie director or an author like Hemingway. So we need to look beyond Amy’s descriptions of Andy and Crystal to really decide what we think of Coherence.

So let’s make use of SOP here. Amy’s definitely right in holding that Relationism entails that Crystal’s life would be better for her if it were more like Andy’s life while being otherwise roughly equal. To settle whether it’s correct, we need to compare two Crystals, whom I’ll call Crystal- and Crystal+. Because Amy’s scenario is so long and complex, I’m going to focus on a couple of aspects of their lives and simplify things as far as possible. Here we go:

Crystal-

Crystal- has worked as a social worker, barista, and then as a car salesperson. She learned distinctive skills she learns at each (appreciating others’ lives and struggles, knowing how to roast coffee perfectly, honing her powers of persuasion), but what she learned and did as a social worker in no way informed what she did as a barista – she might as well never have been one – and doesn’t make any difference to how she sells cars. She watches documentaries about all sorts of things: astronomy for a while, then philosophy, then art history. She’s dedicated to each pursuit for as long as she does it, but then completely forgets about it. Having done philosophy gives her no insight into art history, nor does it lead her to rethink anything about astronomy. The different times in and aspects of her life are thus wholly independent and isolated from each other.

Crystal+

Crystal+ has worked as a social worker, barista, and then as a car salesperson. She learned distinctive skills she learns at each (appreciating others’ lives and struggles, knowing how to roast coffee perfectly, honing her powers of persuasion), and what she learned and done as a social worker significantly informed what she did as a barista – she was able to relate to certain customers better and served them better as a result – and also helps her make conscientious choices about when to make a hard sell in the car trade. She watches documentaries about all sorts of things: astronomy for a while, then philosophy, then art history. She’s dedicated to each pursuit for as long as she does it, but each is also shaped by what she’s done before and the other things that are going on in her life right now. Having done philosophy gives her insights into art history, and her later interests lead her to appreciate new things about astronomy. Different times in and aspects of her life thus mutually inform each other, so that earlier pursuits shape later ones and later ones complete and complement earlier ones.

In this pair of cases, Relationism unambiguously says that Crystal+ is doing better than Crystal-, assuming other things are roughly equal. If that’s true, Coherence is true. And I think it is. (Here it is natural to ask why it is in itself good for us for our lives to be unified in this way. Perhaps it’s because what’s good for us depends on our nature, and it’s an important aspect of our nature that we’re temporally extended agents rather than a series of momentary selves.)

I won’t go on (this has already gotten too long), but I want to finish by emphasizing the congruence between Coherence, as I understand it, and Well-Roundedness. I argued a long time ago that it’s naïve to understand coherence in terms of a life centered around one big goal or a set of pursuits that amount to more of the same. The kind of unity that confers prudential value to a life is unity in diversity – which of course requires diversity. It’s the kind of thing that I suspect Hegel talked about in different contexts, and the kind of thing that Nozick highlights in his discussion of organic unity when he says that “The more diverse the material that gets unified (to a certain degree), the greater the value” (1981, 416). It is to Amy’s credit that she pushes Coherentists to flesh out in more detail what this amounts to. I hope my example of two Crystals begins to show that even the very simple account I’ve assumed here isn’t empty or otiose, but has clear implications for concrete situations. I believe that once we understand coherence along these lines, the attractiveness of a well-rounded life doesn’t count against the importance of a prudentially good life story, but rather provides further support for it.