A Thirsty fox once saw some fine
Ripe grapes that hung on a tall vine
“Just what I’m longing for!” cried he,
And sprang to get them eagerly.
Alas! the clusters hung so high,
He could not reach them. By and by,
Finding his efforts all in vain,
His longing turned into disdain;
“They’re only fit,” snarled he, “for Apes.
What do I want with sour grapes!”- The Hereford Aesop
A prominent argument against a moral framework oriented around preference satisfaction is that preferences are prone to distortion due to one’s situation. The fox, asked about his preference for grapes at the end of his efforts-all-in-vain, reports an affirmative distaste for them. A welfarist, it is argued, who sought the best allocation of fruits among the attendees at the forest animal cocktail party, would find nothing wrong in allocating no grapes to the fox, based on this revealed distaste. So the fox is deprived of grapes he doesn’t want, so what?
A non-Aesop example of this phenomenon—commonly termed “adaptive preferences”—might be the case of women who have become accustomed to life in a culture that subjects them to systematic oppression. What response is appropriate if these women report that they have no preference for greater autonomy or more equal rights? Professor David Weisbach, speaking with the Law & Philosophy Workshop, argued that phenomena that look like adaptive preferences can readily be explained within the welfarist framework as stable preferences under changed circumstances. In general, this looks a lot like learning, a phenomenon for which the welfarist has developed analytical tools.
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