Gwen Bradford, Achievement

Abstract

Achievement clearly plays a significant role in people's lives in some form or another. We admire Nobel prize winners, Olympic athletes, scientists who make groundbreaking discoveries, great novelists, war heroes, musicians, and so forth. But when asked (1) what achievements consist in; and (2) what makes them valuable, giving a comprehensive answer is likely a more complicated task than first thought. These are questions that have not received as much philosophical attention as, for example, the nature of knowledge, pleasure, autonomy, and other typical nonmoral values. This should strike us as odd, given that achievement frequently appears alongside these values on "objective list" or "perfectionist" accounts of what constitutes well-being or a good life for a human.In this clearly written and well structured book, Gwen Bradford sets the task of answering precisely these questions in one of the first in-depth and systematic accounts of achievement and its value. Although the literature dealing with this topic is relatively small, the book engages with competing views from the likes of Thomas Hurka, Joseph Raz, and Simon Keller. In some respects, Bradford's own position complements that of these competing views. However, the most significant contribution that Achievement makes to this debate is to skillfully single out which aspects are worth developing and which are not. Ultimately, the book attempts to demonstrate that the current theories regarding the nature and value of achievement can take us only so far.In the first chapters of the book, Bradford seeks to give a descriptive account of what achievements consist in by considering their shared characteristics, arguing that contemporary accounts are unsatisfactory in overlooking this similarity. Bradford persuasively argues that for something to count as an achievement in the relevant sense, a number of conditions must be met. First, and least controversially, they must involve the successful attainment of one's goal. Although there may be some value to be found in certain failures (Bradford discusses this in the final chapter), and failures may involve some related achievements, achievement is taken to necessarily involve success.Second, achievement must involve the overcoming of significant difficulty, which Bradford characterizes in terms of "requiring some sufficient degree of effort." After all, successfully tying one's shoelace or raising one's arm do not intuitively count as achievements in the relevant sense (i.e., as worthy of admiration). It is likely that this is because they

Not Always Worth the Effort: Difficulty and the Value of Achievement

“…Hassan presses the relevance of this distinction for Bradford's view in his review of her book. See Hassan (, pp. 762–763).…”