UCLA

The topic of my dissertation is merit recognition, recognition for good action or thought. To start, I introduce the question that motivates the dissertation: what is the value of recognition for us? Recognition is, in various ways, instrumentally valuable for us. But we care about recognition not just as a means. This is not, I suggest, a mistake. Merit recognition is good in itself for us as part of good in itself action. The second and third sections of my first chapter begin to make a case for thinking that merit recognition is part of good in itself helping. And my second chapter aims to be a first step towards arguing that merit recognition is part of a kind of good thinking. In the second section of my first chapter, I make a case for thinking that small acts of helping between friends aim at merit recognition and include it when they succeed. Friends do small acts of beneficence together by doing them for each other. The beneficiary’s seeing the benefactor’s helping as good for the reason that it is is her part of shared friendly helping. In the third section of the first chapter, I suggest that we can find, in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (EN) discussion of friendship, the idea that helping generally (not just within friendship) aims at merit recognition and includes it when it succeeds. In order to find this idea in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics discussion of friendship, I do a couple of things. First, I make a case for thinking that perfect friendship, friendship between two people who each have complete virtue, is the only relationship of equality in which parties love each other as good that Aristotle is interested in in the Nicomachean Ethics. It is this relationship that Aristotle means to consider the value of in EN Book IX section 9. Second, I offer some critiques of proposals that have been made about how the first part of the concluding section of EN Book IX section 9, 1169b29-1170a12, can be understood as argument that a virtuous person needs a friend to be happy. Third, I make my own suggestion about how we can understand the entire concluding section of EN Book IX section 9, 1169b29-1170b19, as argument that a virtuous person needs a friend to be happy. We can do this, I suggest, if we suppose that Aristotle thinks that the small-scale activity of practical virtue aims to be seen as good for the reason that it is by a character friend and is completed by such recognition. At the end of the second chapter, I raise the possibility that the most blessed person, for Aristotle, will not spend all of the time for serious activity she has contemplating. If this is true, then we might interpret Aristotle in EN Book IX section 9 as suggesting that beneficence from a friend makes available a valuable and unique kind of self-awareness. In the second chapter of my dissertation, I turn to testimony and to beginning to think about how merit recognition might be part of a kind of good thinking. My second chapter is primarily an in-depth discussion of an account of testimony coming from Richard Moran. Testimony, as Moran (2018) understands it, aims at merit recognition and includes merit recognition when it succeeds. To show this, after presenting the basics of Moran’s account of testimony, I discuss Burge’s (1993/2013) account of the warrant we have to believe what comes to us from interlocution. Like Burge, Moran thinks that telling gives reason for belief because telling is subject to certain norms. A person should tell p, for Moran, only if she believes and is in a position to know p. Telling, as Moran understands it, is an act that aims at a hearer’s believing on the basis of trust, not as a product, but as its proper finishing, I say. A hearer who believes what a teller tells on the basis of trust, believes on the basis of a reason, the goodness of which depends directly on the teller’s reason for believing what she tells. In my second chapter, I consider how this is true and connect my discussion of this to Burge’s (1993/2013) idea that when a hearer knows something on the basis of interlocution, we need to look at the hearer’s “extended body of justification” to evaluate her warrant (p. 251). At the end of my second chapter, I make a small suggestion about the point of telling. When we tell, we act for a reason that we have in a way that others can see and believe directly on the basis of such seeing what our reason supports believing. Because, with respect to many of our reasons, telling is the only thing we might do to act for them in this way, the point of telling, we might say, is allowing us to act for our reasons in this way. There is, we might think, a good realized through acting for our reasons in ways that others can see and believe directly on the basis of such seeing what our reasons support believing that telling makes available.