The Common Good and Sympathetic Projection

After discussing the beginnings of his ethical theory, Taylor goes on to explain how his theory handles conflicts of desires. To do this Taylor imagines first what is the greatest good for a man which he concludes is the satisfaction of all his desires. This however is impossible given that certain desires conflict with one another in that the satisfaction of one means that the other is thwarted. Given this fact, Taylor believes that the best possible scenario for man is the satisfaction of as many desires as possible. For example, suppose that a parched man comes upon a poisoned well. One of his desires is to quench his thirst by taking a drink, yet this conflicts with his stronger desire which is to continue living. As a result, the good for this man is to not drink from the poisoned well.

Taylor then takes this conception from the internal case and applies it to conflicts of desires between individuals. In such a case the COMMON GOOD (capitalized to emphasize its importance to Taylor) is the satisfaction of as many people's desires as possible with the absolute minimum being thwarted. Thus, in a situation where a child wishes to play with firearms and explosives and his family desires to live in a safe home, the common good would clearly be for the family's desire to be satisfied at the expense of the child. Given his conception of good and evil I can clearly see how he comes to such conclusions. However, what I can not see (yet) is why anyone would have a reason to act for the common good when it is not in their favor. This is sort of the problem that Hobbes faces as you said in your comment. Nevertheless though, this is only the foundation for Taylor whereas it is the whole thing for Hobbes.

Therefore, Taylor believes that all institutions, practices, laws, etc. are to be evaluated in terms of this conception of the common good. An institution that satisfies more desires than it thwarts is good, while one that does the opposite is evil. However, it is not as simple as this. Taylor does consider the strength of desires and believes that the strength must be taken into account as well. In some ways the view that he is giving sounds as though it will face problems similar to those faced by utilitarianism, but this is not the case as Taylor believes that certain desires (such as the desire to live) are in most cases always stronger than the desire to take life which means that just because a lot of people desire to kill another person it is not entailed that it would be good for them to do so.

Yet, determining the strength of another person's desire is not very easy all the time, so Taylor asks that we adopt the Hare-like idea which he calls SYMPATHETIC PROJECTION (again, capitalized because it is important down the line for Taylor) which, more or less, imagining yourself in that person's shoes. Or, more precisely, imagining that you had the desires that they do and then determining how strong such desires would be i.e. if wondering about slavery then one ought to imagine the desires of a potential slave and a potential slave-owner and take it from there.

This is essentially Taylor's foundation and though, as you have commented, it sounds a bit like Hobbes, this is not where he finishes. There is a lot to come. As a quick side note to your comment on my last post, I do not exactly see how reason could be more than a tool. Though it could be used for determining which desires to cultivate and which to try to eliminate it could only do so as a result of one having desires about their desires. (This reminds me a of way that compatiblists try to get out of determinism by talking about preferences about preferences that does not seem to work.) In other words, I may foster my desire to study philosophy but that is only because it is the sort of desire I desire to have. Nevertheless, I certainly find your point interesting about the possibility of one desiring to stack rocks, etc. It would seem that even though one desires such things they do not seem to be very good or even good for the person. Though I am not sure... We might think that they are good for that person because maybe he is a simple man and we still might say that though they are good for him they would not as good as other desires for some reason or another. At any rate, I think that Taylor could accomodate this on his conception of the Common Good by saying that the stacking stones desire is similar to the drinking desire (in the poisoned well example) and that some other, higher desire would be like the staying alive desire. Just a thought.