This paper develops an account of normative validity and illustrates it through poverty measures. Many ideas addressed below are legatees of Anna Alexandrova’s reflections on what she called “value-aptness” in measuring well-being. To my knowledge, she introduced the term “normative validity” (Alexandrova, 2017: 151). Still, my goal is to address normative validity in a broader context than she did, highlighting its significance not only for well-being but also for other concepts, particularly poverty. I will further discuss how normative validity can (...) provide deeper insights into an important debate in poverty measurement: that between normative-driven approaches like Amartya Sen’s and data-driven ones like Peter Townsend’s. (shrink)

Desire theories of well-being claim that how well someone’s life goes for them is entirely determined by the fulfilment and frustration of their desires. This thesis considers the viability of theories of this sort. It examines a series of objections that threaten to undermine these views. These objections claim that desire theories of well-being are incorrect because they have implausible implications. I consider four main objections over the course of this thesis. The first claims that these theories are incorrect because (...) they implausibly entail that self-sacrifice does not exist. The second claims that these theories are incorrect because they implausibly entail that severe depression does not diminish the well-being of those afflicted by this condition. The third claims that these theories are incorrect because they have implausible implications about the relative importance of fleeting desires, long-standing desires, and fluctuations in desire strength to well-being. The fourth claims that these theories are incorrect because they fail to capture the intuition that desire fulfilments which leave us disappointed and bereft of feelings of satisfaction do not improve well-being. In each of these cases, I find that desire theories of well-being have sufficient resources to refute these objections. The primary finding of this thesis is that many of the arguments against desire theories of well-being are unsuccessful. A secondary set of findings concern observations about the structure of human psychology. (shrink)

Francis Ysidro Edgeworth’s unduly neglected monograph New and Old Methods of Ethics (1877) advances a highly sophisticated and mathematized account of social well-being in the utilitarian tradition of his 19th-century contemporaries. This article illustrates how his usage of the ‘calculus of variations’ was combined with findings from empirical psychology and economic theory to construct a consequentialist axiological framework. A conclusion is drawn that Edgeworth is a methodological predecessor to several important methods, ideas, and issues that continue to be discussed in (...) contemporary social well-being studies. (shrink)

The question of how disability affects wellbeing has occupied a number of philosophers in recent years. However, this literature has proceeded without a careful examination of the fairly vast empirical research on the topic. In this paper, I review the scholarly literature and discuss some philosophically-relevant aspects of it. On average, those with disabilities have a significantly lower level of wellbeing than those without disabilities. Furthermore, there is strong evidence that this reduction in wellbeing is not due entirely to ableist (...) factors. Hence, I argue that it shows that the Mere Difference View of disability is most likely false. However, the literature indeed shows that disabled people typically live good lives. Thus, despite its rejection of the Mere Difference View, it still upholds a disability-affirmative view. These findings allow for a measured critique of some of Peter Singer’s writings on disability. (shrink)

We make the case that scientifically accurate and politically feasible responses to the climate crisis require a complex understanding of human cultural practices of niche construction that moves beyond the adaptive significance of culture. We develop this thesis in two related ways. First, we argue that cumulative cultural practices of niche construction can generate stable equilibria and runaway selection processes that result in long-term existential risks within and across cultural groups. We dub this the back of the invisible hand. Second, (...) we argue that the ability of cultural groups to innovate technological solutions to environmental problems is highly constrained in ways that are exacerbated by sustained intergroup conflict, inequality and by inherently unpredictable cascades in climate change and human migration patterns. After developing these theoretical points about human cultural practices of niche construction in detail, we conclude our discussion with some tentative practical suggestions about the way that cultural evolutionary history can more fruitfully be used in efforts to remit the climate crisis and contribute to sustainable practices of human climate change adaptation. (shrink)

A principal rationale for public policy is to address market failures. Pareto efficiency is therefore a highly common and relatively non-controversial evaluative criterion for many policy analyses and is discussed at length in policy analysis texts. This makes sense, for Pareto improvements involve making at least one person better off without making anyone worse off. Who could object to that? But does efficiency deserve the prominence it enjoys in public policy? Is one policy option better than another, at least in (...) one respect, simply because it is more Pareto efficient? Or, is efficiency valuable for some other reason? In this chapter, I discuss Pareto efficiency as an evaluative criterion and argue that it is a stand-in for a more foundational criterion: wellbeing. I begin with an overview of Pareto efficiency, discuss the various ways in which it is operationalized to evaluate policy options, and argue that it is valuable insofar as more efficient states of affairs promise more wellbeing than less efficient states of affairs. I then raise questions regarding whether the conception of wellbeing presupposed by Pareto efficiency – preference satisfaction – is a defensible conception of wellbeing. I go on to introduce three alternative conceptions of wellbeing which have been proposed and defended by both philosophers and policy scholars, namely, hedonism, objective goods views, and the capability approach, and suggest ways in which each can be operationalized as an evaluative criterion. I close by discussing four ‘theory-free’ approaches to thinking about the impact of policies on the quality of people’s lives. Such approaches reject the idea that there is one single theory of wellbeing that should be used to evaluate policy options, and instead develop ways to evaluate the impact of policies on people’s lives that are not grounded in a specific theory. (shrink)

In some musical genres, professional performers play live shows many times a week. Arduous touring schedules bring encounters with wildly diverse audiences across many different performance ecologies. We investigate the kinds of creativity involved in such repeated live performance, kinds of creativity that are quite unlike songwriting and recording, and examine the central factors that influence musicians’ wellbeing over the course of a tour. The perspective of the professional musician has been underrepresented in research on relations between music and wellbeing, (...) with little attention given to the experience of touring. In this case study, we investigate influences on positive and negative performance experiences for the four professional musicians of Australian pop/rock band Cloud Control. Geeves conducted intensive cognitive ethnographic fieldwork with Cloud Control members over a two-week national Australian tour for their second album, Dream Cave (2013). Adapting a Grounded Theory approach to data analysis, we found the level of wellbeing musicians reported and displayed on tour to be intimately linked to their creative performance experiences through the two emergent, overarching and interdependent themes of Performance Headspace (PH) and Connection with Audience (CA). We explore these themes in detail and provide examples to demonstrate how PH and CA can feed off each other in virtuous ways that positively shape musicians’ wellbeing, or loop in vicious ways that negatively shape musicians’ wellbeing. We argue that their creative practice, in thus re-enacting musical performance afresh in each venue’s distinctive setting, emerges within unique constraints each night, and is in a sense a co-creation of the crowd and the band. (shrink)

Current methods of operationalizing concepts of misinformation in machine learning are often problematic given idiosyncrasies in their success conditions compared to other models employed in the natural and social sciences. The intrinsic value-ladenness of misinformation and the dynamic relationship between citizens' and social scientists' concepts of misinformation jointly suggest that both the construct legitimacy and the construct validity of these models needs to be assessed via more democratic criteria than has previously been recognized.

Assumptions about obesity—e.g., its connection to ill health, its causes, etc.—are still prevalent today, and they make up what I call the medical model of fatness. In this paper, I argue that the medical model was established on the basis of insufficient evidence and has nevertheless continued to be relied upon to justify methodological choices that further entrench the assumptions of the medical model. These choices are illegitimate in so far as they conflict with both the epistemic and social aims (...) of obesity research. I conclude the paper with a partial solution to these epistemic and social shortcomings. (shrink)

It is commonplace that care should be patient-centered. Nevertheless, no universally agreed-upon definition of patient-centered care exists. By consequence, the relation between patient-centered care as such and ethical principles cannot be investigated. However, some research has been performed on the relation between specific models of patient-centered care and ethical principles such as respect for autonomy and beneficence. In this article, I offer a detailed case study on the relationship between specific measures of patient-centered care and the ethical principle of respect (...) for autonomy. Decision Quality Instruments (DQIs) are patient-centered care measures that were developed by Karen Sepucha and colleagues. The model of patient-centered care that guided the development of these DQIs pays special attention to the ethical principle of respect for autonomy. Using Jonathan Pugh’s theory of rational autonomy, I will investigate how the DQIs relate to patient autonomy. After outlining Pugh’s theory of rational autonomy and framing the DQIs accordingly (Part I), I will investigate whether the methodological choices made while developing these DQIs align with respect for autonomy (Part II). My analysis will indicate several tensions between DQIs and patient autonomy that could result in what I call “structural paternalism.” These tensions offer us sufficient reasons, especially given the importance of the ethical principle of respect for autonomy, to initiate a more encompassing debate on the normative validity of Decision Quality Instruments. The aim of the present paper is to highlight the need for, and to offer a roadmap to, this debate. (shrink)

Bayne and Carter argue that the mode of consciousness induced by psychedelic drugs does not fit squarely within the traditional account of modes as levels of consciousness, and favor instead a multi-dimensional account according to which modes of consciousness differ along several dimensions—none of which warrants a linear ordering of modes. We discuss the assumption that psychedelic drugs induce a single or paradigmatic mode of consciousness, as well as conceptual issues related to Bayne and Carter’s main argument against the traditional (...) account. Finally, we raise a set of questions about the individuation of dimensions selected to differentiate modes of consciousness that could be addressed in future discussions of the multi-dimensional account. (shrink)

This paper argues that relations of mutual recognition (love, respect, esteem, trust) contribute directly and non-reductively to our flourishing as relational selves. -/- Love is important for the quality of human life. Not only do everyday experiences and analyses of pop culture and world literature attest to this; scientific research does as well. How exactly does love contribute to well-being? This chapter discusses the suggestion that it not only matters for the experiential quality of life, or for successful agency, but (...) that it actualizes our nature as “relational selves” (Chen, Boucher & Kraus 2011). I defend a hybrid or pluralist theory, which sees humans not only as subjects of experiences, or agents, or valuers, but also as relational selves. Expanding from love to other interpersonal relations, thriving relations of mutual recognition (love, respect, esteem, trust), contribute directly and non-reductively to our flourishing as relational selves. The paper will start by putting forward the proposal (Section 2), and then discussing it in relation to important alternatives. The focus is on alternatives which hold that love, and other forms of mutual recognition, are important for well-being, but only indirectly. One kind of challenge against the constitutive role of relations to others for well-being comes from the traditional theories that accommodate relations in some indirect ways (Section 3). A second kind of challenge admits that perhaps love is central to well-being in a direct way, but do we have reason to believe that other forms of mutual recognition are as well? (Section 4) Yet another kind of challenge is that love matters for the quality of lives in some other way than contributing to its prudential value: love is good, but is it good for us? (Section 5) A fourth kind of challenge concerns what we are, and the nature of “essentialism” involved in the approach stressing relational selfhood: cannot, say, motherhood contribute to one’s good life even if motherhood is contingent and not essential? (Section 6). In debates on recognition the idea that mutual recognition is also relevant for well-being has been put forward, for example in Axel Honneth’s (1992, ch.9 ) ”formal” theory of good life. Whatever else constitutes good life, relations of recognition form its backbone (cf. Ikäheimo 2014). Surprisingly little however is written about mutual recognition and well-being in detail, or recognition in comparison to traditional theories of well-being. This chapter aims to fill some of that void, and at the same time defend the view that well-being is one of the normative notions with which mutual recognition has a constitutive relationship. (shrink)

Philosophers, psychologists, economists and other social scientists continue to debate the nature of human well-being. We argue that this debate centers around five main conceptualizations of well-being: hedonic well-being, life satisfaction, desire fulfillment, eudaimonia, and non-eudaimonic objective-list well-being. Each type of well-being is conceptually different, but are they empirically distinguishable? To address this question, we first developed and validated a measure of desire fulfillment, as no measure existed, and then examined associations between this new measure and several other well-being measures. (...) In addition, we explored associations among all five types of well-being. We found high correlations among all measures of well-being, but generally correlations did not approach unity, even when correcting for unreliability. Furthermore, correlations between well-being and related constructs (e.g., demographics, personality) depended on the type of well-being measured. We conclude that empirical findings based on one type of well-being measure may not generalize to all types of well-being. (shrink)

Thick concepts, namely those concepts that describe and evaluate simultaneously, present a challenge to science. Since science does not have a monopoly on value judgments, what is responsible research involving such concepts? Using measurement of wellbeing as an example, we first present the options open to researchers wishing to study phenomena denoted by such concepts. We argue that while it is possible to treat these concepts as technical terms, or to make the relevant value judgment in-house, the responsible thing to (...) do, especially in the context of public policy, is to make this value judgment through a legitimate political process that includes all the stakeholders of this research. We then develop a participatory model of measurement based on the ideal of co-production. To show that this model is feasible and realistic, we illustrate it with a case study of co-production of a concept of thriving conducted by the authors in collaboration with a UK anti-poverty charity Turn2us. (shrink)

In this paper we focus on some new normativist positions and compare them with traditional ones. In so doing, we claim that if normative judgments are involved in determining whether a condition is a disease only in the sense identified by new normativisms, then disease is normative only in a weak sense, which must be distinguished from the strong sense advocated by traditional normativisms. Specifically, we argue that weak and strong normativity are different to the point that one ‘normativist’ label (...) ceases to be appropriate for the whole range of positions. If values and norms are not explicit components of the concept of disease, but only intervene in other explanatory roles, then the concept of disease is no more value-laden than many other scientific concepts, or even any other scientific concept. We call the newly identified position “value-conscious naturalism” about disease, and point to some of its theoretical and practical advantages. (shrink)

Naturalistic accounts of mental disorder aim to identify an objective basis for attributions of mental disorder. This goal is important for demarcating genuine mental disorders from artificial or socially constructed disorders. The articulation of a demarcation criterion provides a means for assuring that attributions of 'mental disorder' are not merely pathologizing different forms of social deviance. The most influential naturalistic and hybrid definitions of mental disorder identify biological dysfunction as the objective basis of mental disorders: genuine mental...

The books’ goal is to answer the question: Do the weaknesses of value-free economics imply the need for a paradigm shift? The author synthesizes criticisms from different perspectives (descriptive and methodological). Special attention is paid to choices over time, because in this area value-free economics has the most problems. In that context, the enriched concept of multiple self is proposed and investigated. However, it is not enough to present the criticisms towards value-free economics. For scientists, a bad paradigm is better (...) than no paradigm. Therefore, the author considers whether value-based economics with normative approaches such as economics of happiness, capability approach, libertarian paternalism, and the concept of multiple self can be the alternative paradigm for value-free economics. This book is essential reading to everyone interested in the current state of economics as a discipline. (shrink)

Global lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic have offered many people first-hand experience of how their daily online activities threaten their digital well-being. This article begins by critically evaluating the current approaches to digital well-being offered by ethicists of technology, NGOs, and social media corporations. My aim is to explain why digital well-being needs to be reimagined within a new conceptual paradigm. After this, I lay the foundations for such an alternative approach, one that shows how current digital well-being initiatives can (...) be designed in more insightful ways. This new conceptual framework aims to transform how philosophers of technology think about this topic, as well as offering social media corporations practical ways to design their technologies in ways that will improve the digital well-being of users. (shrink)

There are presently two approaches to the study of well-being. Philosophers typically focus on normative theorizing, attempting to identify the things that are ultimately good for a person, while largely ignoring empirical research. The idea is that empirical attention cannot be directed to the right place without a rigorous theory. Meanwhile, social scientists typically focus on empirical research, attempting to identify the causes and consequences of well-being, while largely ignoring normative theorizing. The idea is that conceptual and theoretical clarity will (...) come with time and more data. This paper argues that neither is a good approach to the study of well-being. The traditional philosophical approach underappreciates the vital importance of empirical investigation, while the atheoretical empirical approach underappreciates the vital importance of normative theorizing. The proposed solution is to bring these methods together. Well-being research should be interdisciplinary. The paper proposes a “conceptual engineering” approach as a novel alternative. This approach involves an iterative process of normative theorizing, empirical investigation, and conceptual revision, with the aim of articulating concepts and theories of well-being that optimally suit particular interests and purposes. (shrink)

Medical ethics would be better if people were taught to think more clearly about well-being or the concept of what is good for a person. Yet for a variety of reasons, bioethicists have generally paid little attention to this concept. Here, I argue, first, that focusing on general theories of welfare is not useful for practical medical ethics. I argue, second, for what I call the “theory-without-theories approach” to welfare in practical contexts. The first element of this approach is a (...) focus on examining important and relatively uncontroversial constituents of welfare as opposed to general theories. The second key element is a framework for thinking about choice in relation to welfare, a framework I refer to as “the mild objectivity framework.” I conclude with illustrations of the way in which the “theory without theories approach” can improve thinking in medicine. (shrink)

What is a valid measuring instrument? Recent philosophy has attended to logic of justification of measures, such as construct validation, but not to the question of what it means for an instrument to be a valid measure of a construct. A prominent approach grounds validity in the existence of a causal link between the attribute and its detectable manifestations. Some of its proponents claim that, therefore, validity does not depend on pragmatics and research context. In this paper, I cast doubt (...) on the possibility of a context-independent causal account of validity (what I call unconditional validity). I assess several versions, arguing that all of them fail to judge the validity of measuring instruments correctly. Because different research purposes require different properties from measuring instruments, no account of validity succeeds without referring to the specific research purpose that creates the need for measurement in the first place. (shrink)

Suppose you want to do as much good as possible. What should you do? According to members of the effective altruism movement—which has produced much of the thinking on this issue and counts several moral philosophers as its key protagonists—we should prioritise among the world’s problems by assessing their scale, solvability, and neglectedness. Once we’ve done this, the three top priorities, not necessarily in this order, are (1) aiding the world’s poorest people by providing life-saving medical treatments or alleviating poverty (...) itself, (2) preventing global catastrophic risks, such as those posed by nuclear war or rogue artificial intelligence, and (3) ending factory farming. These claims are both plausible and striking. If correct, they should prompt a stark revision of how we approach our altruistic activities. However, the project of determining how to do the most good—as opposed to say, whether we should do the most good—has only recently, within the last ten years, become the subject of serious academic attention. Many key claims have not yet been carefully scrutinised. This is a cause for concern: are effective altruists doing good badly? In this thesis, I critique and develop some of the latest claims about how individuals can do the most good. I do this in three areas: the value of saving lives (preventing premature deaths), how best to improve lives (making people happier during their lives), and cause prioritisation methodology (frameworks for determining which problems are the highest priorities). In each case, I raise novel theoretical considerations that, when incorporated, change the analysis. Roughly speaking, my main conclusions are (1) saving lives is not as straightforwardly good we tend to suppose, may not be good at all, and is not clearly a priority; (2) happiness can be measured through self-reports and, based on the self-reported evidence, treating mental health stands out as an overlooked problem that may be an even more cost-effective way to improve lives than alleviating poverty; (3) the cause prioritisation methodology proposed by effective altruists needs to be moderately reconceptualised and, when it is, it turns out it is not as illuminating a tool as we might have thought and hoped. (shrink)

It is a commonly expressed sentiment that the science and philosophy of well-being would do well to learn from each other. Typically such calls identify mistakes and bad practices on both sides that would be remedied if scientists picked the right bit of philosophy and philosophers picked the right bit of science. We argue that the differences between philosophers and scientists thinking about well-being are more difficult to reconcile than such calls suggest, and that pluralism is central to this task. (...) Pluralism is a stance that explicitly drives towards accommodating and nurturing the richness and diversity of well-being, both as a concept and as an object of inquiry. We show that well-being science manifests a contingent pluralism at the level of methodology, whereas philosophy of well-being has largely rejected pluralism at the conceptual level. Recently, things have begun to change. Within philosophy, conceptual monism is under attack. But so is methodological pluralism within science. We welcome the first development, and bemoan the second. We argue that a joined-up philosophy and science of well-being should recognise the virtues of both conceptual and methodological pluralism. Philosophers should embrace the methodological justification of pluralism that can be found in the well-being sciences, and scientists should embrace the conceptual reasons to be pluralist that can be found in philosophical debate. (shrink)

The standard view in current philosophy of creativity says that being creative has two requirements: being novel and being valuable. The standard view on creativity has recently become an object of critical scrutiny. Hills and Bird have specifically proposed to remove the value requirement from the definition, as it is not clear that creative objects are necessarily valuable or creative people necessarily praiseworthy. In this paper, I argue against Hills and Bird, since eliminating the element of value from the explanation (...) of creativity hinders the understanding of the role that creative products play in actual epistemic practices, which are fundamentally normative. More specifically, I argue that the terms ‘creativity’ and ‘creative’ function as thick epistemic concepts when employed by competent epistemic agents in practice, that is, these concepts have both a descriptive and an evaluative content that cannot be disentangled from one another. Accordingly, I suggest that philosophers should prefer thick accounts over thin accounts of creativity. A thick account of creativity is one that endorses the standard view at its basis, but further develops it in two ways: by stressing the entanglement of the value and novelty requirements; by permitting to encompass a range of domain-specific characterizations of such entanglement for different epistemic situations. In order to take the first steps in the development of such a thick account of creativity, I look at the domain of scientific practices as a case in point, and try to spell out what the thickness of creative instances typically entails here. Namely, I identify the worthy novelty of creative models and methods with their potential to clarify a tradition, with fruitfulness, and with the fulfilment of exploratory aims. (shrink)

This article presents the first thematic review of the literature on the ethical issues concerning digital well-being. The term ‘digital well-being’ is used to refer to the impact of digital technologies on what it means to live a life that isgood fora human being. The review explores the existing literature on the ethics of digital well-being, with the goal of mapping the current debate and identifying open questions for future research. The review identifies major issues related to several key social (...) domains: healthcare, education, governance and social development, and media and entertainment. It also highlights three broader themes: positive computing, personalised human–computer interaction, and autonomy and self-determination. The review argues that three themes will be central to ongoing discussions and research by showing how they can be used to identify open questions related to the ethics of digital well-being. (shrink)

This chapter serves as an introduction to the edited collection of the same name, which includes chapters that explore digital well-being from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, psychology, economics, health care, and education. The purpose of this introductory chapter is to provide a short primer on the different disciplinary approaches to the study of well-being. To supplement this primer, we also invited key experts from several disciplines—philosophy, psychology, public policy, and health care—to share their thoughts on what they (...) believe are the most important open questions and ethical issues for the multi-disciplinary study of digital well-being. We also introduce and discuss several themes that we believe will be fundamental to the ongoing study of digital well-being: digital gratitude, automated interventions, and sustainable co-well-being. (shrink)

This chapter serves as an introduction to the edited collection of the same name, which includes chapters that explore digital well-being from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, psychology, economics, health care, and education. The purpose of this introductory chapter is to provide a short primer on the different disciplinary approaches to the study of well-being. To supplement this primer, we also invited key experts from several disciplines—philosophy, psychology, public policy, and health care—to share their thoughts on what they (...) believe are the most important open questions and ethical issues for the multi-disciplinary study of digital well-being. We also introduce and discuss several themes that we believe will be fundamental to the ongoing study of digital well-being: digital gratitude, automated interventions, and sustainable co-well-being. (shrink)

Social and medical scientists frequently produce empirical generalizations that involve concepts partly defined by value judgments. These generalizations, which have been called ‘mixed claims’, raise interesting questions. Does the presence of them in science imply that science is value-laden? Is the value-ladenness of mixed claims special compared to other kinds of value-ladenness of science? Do we lose epistemically if we reformulate these claims as conditional statements? And if we want to allow mixed claims in science, do we need a new (...) account of how to reconcile values with objectivity? Alexandrova (2017, 2018) offers affirmative answers to these questions. In responding to Alexandrova’s arguments, this discussion note motivates negative ones and in doing so casts new light on mixed claims. (shrink)

What is it to be mentally healthy? In the ongoing movement to promote mental health, to reduce stigma, and to establish parity between mental and physical health, there is a clear enthusiasm about this concept and a recognition of its value in human life. However, it is often unclear what mental health means in all these efforts and whether there is a single concept underlying them. Sometimes, the initiatives for the sake of mental health are aimed just at reducing mental (...) illness, thus implicitly identifying mental health with the absence of diagnosable psychiatric disease. More ambitiously, there are high-profile proposals to adopt a positive definition, identifying mental health with psychic or even overall well-being. We argue against both: a definition of mental health as mere absence of mental illness is too thin, too undemanding, and too closely linked to psychiatric value judgments, while the definition in terms of well-being is too demanding and potentially oppressive. As a compromise, we sketch out a middle position. On this view, mental health is a primary good, that is, the psychological preconditions of pursuing any conception of the good life, including well-being, without being identical to well-being. (shrink)

Generating an account that can sidestep the disagreement among substantive theories of well-being, while at the same time still providing useful guidance for well-being public policy, would be a significant achievement. Unfortunately, the various attempts to remain agnostic regarding what constitutes well-being fail to either be an account of well-being, provide useful guidance for well-being policy, or avoid relying on a substantive well-being theory. There are no theory-free lunches in well-being policy. Instead, I propose an intermediate account, according to which (...) well-being is constituted by endorsed veridical experiences. This account refers back to theories of well-being but does so as agnostically as possible. An intermediate account of well-being is meant as a policy guiding compromise between the different theories of well-being that make claims regarding what constitutes well-being. An intermediate account does as well as can be hoped for in providing a basis for well-being policy. (shrink)

The view that it is better for life to be created free of disability is pervasive in both common sense and philosophy. We cast doubt on this view by focusing on an influential line of thinking that manifests it. That thinking begins with a widely-discussed principle, Procreative Beneficence, and draws conclusions about parental choice and disability. After reconstructing two versions of this argument, we critique the first by exploring the relationship between different understandings of well-being and disability, and the second (...) by more briefly focusing on the idea of a significant reason. By placing these results against the broader historical and ongoing contexts in which the lives of those with disabilities have been deemed of inferior quality, we conclude with a call for greater humility about disability and well-being in thought and practice. (shrink)

Childhood looms large in our understanding of human life as it is a phase through which all adults have passed. Childhood is foundational to the development of selfhood, the formation of interests, values and skills and to the lifespan as a whole. Understanding what it is like to be a child, and what differences childhood makes, are essential for any broader understanding of the human condition. The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children is an outstanding reference source (...) to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting subject and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors the Handbook is divided into five parts: ¿ Being a child ¿ Childhood and moral status ¿ Parents and children ¿ Children in society ¿ Children and the state. Questions covered include: What is a child? Is childhood a uniquely valuable state, and if so why? Can we generalize about the goods of childhood? What rights do children have, and are they different from adults¿ rights? What gives people a right to parent? What role, if any, ought biology to play in determining who has the right to parent a particular child? What kind of rights can parents legitimately exercise over their children? What roles do relationships with siblings and friends play in the shaping of childhoods? How should we think about sexuality and disabilility in childhood, and about racialised children? How should society manage the education of children, and what values should inform such practices? What is a good school? How are children¿s lives affected by being taken into social care? The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of childhood, political philosophy and ethics as well as those in related disciplines such as education, psychology, sociology, social policy, law, social work, youth work, neuroscience and anthropology. (shrink)

There are roughly two philosophical literatures on “happiness,” each corresponding to a different sense of the term. One uses ‘happiness’ as a value term, roughly synonymous with well-being or flourishing. The other body of work uses the word as a purely descriptive psychological term, akin to ‘depression’ or ‘tranquility’. An important project in the philosophy of happiness is simply getting clear on what various writers are talking about: what are the important meanings of the term and how do they connect? (...) While the “well-being” sense of happiness receives significant attention in the contemporary literature on well-being, the psychological notion is undergoing a revival as a major focus of philosophical inquiry, following on recent developments in the science of happiness. This entry focuses on the psychological sense of happiness (for the well-being notion, see the entry on well-being). The main accounts of happiness in this sense are hedonism, the life satisfaction theory, and the emotional state theory. Leaving verbal questions behind, we find that happiness in the psychological sense has always been an important concern of philosophers. Yet the significance of happiness for a good life has been hotly disputed in recent decades. Further questions of contemporary interest concern the relation between the philosophy and science of happiness, as well as the role of happiness in social and political decision-making. (shrink)

This paper provides an account of mid-level models, which calibrate highly theoretical agent-based models of scientific communities by incorporating empirical information from real-world systems. As a result, these models more closely correspond with real-world communities, and are better suited for informing policy decisions than extant how-possibly models. I provide an exemplar of a mid-level model of science funding allocation that incorporates bibliometric data from scientific publications and data generated from empirical studies of peer review into an epistemic landscape model. The (...) results of my model show that on a dynamic epistemic landscape, allocating funding by modified and pure lottery strategies performs comparably to a perfect selection funding allocation strategy. These results support the idea that introducing randomness into a funding allocation process may be a tractable policy worth exploring further through pilot studies. My exemplar shows that agent-based models need not be restricted to the abstract and the a-priori; they can also be informed by real empirical data. (shrink)

Typically, philosophers analysing well-being’s nature maintain three claims. First, that well-being has essential properties. Second, that the concept of well-being circumscribes those properties. Third, that well-being theories should capture them exhaustively and exclusively. This predominant position is called well-being monism. In opposition, contextualists argue that no overarching concept of well-being referring to a universally applicable well-being standard exists. Such a standard would describe what is good, bad, and neutral, for us without qualification. Instead, well-being research is putatively about several central (...) phenomena. If several phenomena are central, a proliferation of concurrently acceptable well-being theories and operationalisations is expected. However, contextualists are challenged to explain how those analysing well-being are not systematically talking past each other. In this paper, I address that challenge. The upshot is that contextualist well-being theories can be justifiably context-sensitive and applied to tailor-made policy-making efforts. I illustrate the benefits by connecting contextualism to the capability approach. (shrink)

1. 1.1. Suffering is bad. This is why, ceteris paribus, there are strong moral reasons to prevent suffering. Moreover, typically, those moral reasons are stronger when the amount of suffering at st...

In “Well-Being and Pluralism” (2021), Polly Mitchell and Anna Alexandrova defend conceptual pluralism about well-being. Conceptual pluralism about well-being holds that there are multiple, irreducible concepts of well-being that are employed in different contexts, all equally legitimate as concepts of well-being. Moreover, “Conceptual pluralism about well-being entails that there is no single essence which characterises all and only instances of well-being.” (Mitchell and Alexandrova, 2021, p. 2422) Conceptual monism about well-being, on the other hand, holds, at a minimum, that there (...) is some essence that unites all legitimate uses of ‘well- being’. In this paper, I will argue that there is a version of conceptual monism about well-being, the network theory of well-being defended by Michael Bishop in his book The Good Life (2015), that can secure all of the benefits of Mitchell and Alexandrova’s conceptual pluralism, namely accommodating the wide range of uses of “well-being” in the sciences of well-being and in ordinary language. Mitchell and Alexandrova’s argument for pluralism depends on the inability of a monistic theory of well-being to account for this diversity of conceptions of well-being and the diversity of instruments used to measure well-being in the sciences. Bishop’s network theory, like Mitchell and Alexandrova’s pluralism, is designed to accommodate the scientific study of well-being. Because of this, it avoids the pitfalls of traditional, monistic conceptions of well-being despite its monistic credentials. I conclude with two novel arguments for the network theory. (shrink)

Philosophers of well-being have tended to adopt a foundationalist approach to the question of theory and measurement, according to which theories are conceptually before measures. By contrast, social scientists have tended to adopt operationalist commitments, according to which they develop and refine well-being measures independently of any philosophical foundation. Unfortunately, neither approach helps us overcome the problem of coordinating between how we characterize well-being and how we measure it. Instead, we should adopt a coherentist approach to well-being science.

In recent times, there has been a surge of interest in, and enthusiasm for, contextualist views about prudential discourse — thought and talk about what has prudential value or contributes to someone’s well-being. In this paper I examine and reject two cases for radical forms of prudential contextualism, proposed by Anna Alexandrova and Steve Campbell. Alexandrova holds that the semantic content of terms like ‘well-being’ and ‘doing well’ varies across contexts. Campbell proposes that there are plural prudential concepts at play (...) in prudential discourse (and in philosophical reflection upon such discourse) and that we find evidence of this in the conflicting commitments of prudential discourse. ​The negative aim of the paper is to show that Alexandrova and Campbell have not given us a good case for ambitious forms of contextualism about prudential discourse. The positive aim of the paper is to provide alternative, aspectualist, explanations of the features of prudential discourse that their discussions highlight. (shrink)

Supervised machine learning has found its way into ever more areas of scientific inquiry, where the outcomes of supervised machine learning applications are almost universally classified as predictions. I argue that what researchers often present as a mere terminological particularity of the field involves the consequential transformation of tasks as diverse as classification, measurement, or image segmentation into prediction problems. Focusing on the case of machine-learning enabled poverty prediction, I explore how reframing a measurement problem as a prediction task alters (...) the primary epistemic aim of the application. Instead of measuring a property, machine learning developers conceive of their models as predicting a given measurement of this property. I argue that this _predictive reframing_ common to supervised machine learning applications is epistemically and ethically problematic, as it allows developers to externalize concerns critical to the epistemic validity and ethical implications of their model’s inferences. I further hold that the predictive reframing is not a necessary feature of supervised machine learning by offering an alternative conception of machine learning models as measurement models. An interpretation of supervised machine learning applications to measurement tasks as _automatically-calibrated model-based measurements_ internalizes questions of construct validity and ethical desirability critical to the measurement problem these applications are intended to and presented as solving. Thereby, this paper introduces an initial framework for exploring technical, historical, and philosophical research at the intersection of measurement and machine learning. (shrink)

Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in the benefits of anxiety. Among these is the proposal that anxiety is a moral emotion. If it is, we ought to cultivate it. But people who are anxious are also less happy. So it seems that asking people to be morally better persons involves asking them to be less happy than they might otherwise be. In this paper, I consider ways to avoid this consequence, all of which rely on emotion regulation. (...) Emotion regulation is supposed to balance one’s anxiety sufficiently so as to have relatively little impact on one’s happiness. As it turns out, emotion regulation is not as simple a solution as one might think. People who are very good at regulating their moral emotions do so at a cost: they assist others in need less and think of other people in demeaning or dehumanizing ways. This shows that using emotion regulation to maximize aspects of happiness—particularly happy feelings—reduces, rather than enhances, one’s moral goodness. One might therefore think that aiming towards equanimity instead promises a better solution since we avoid the over-exertion of emotion regulation and its consequent negative effects. Although that is true, we are still stuck with the problem that the ways people typically reduce their negative reactions to others that suffer—which I show is a form of moral emotions—are highly morally problematic. If we are to hope to solve the apparent conflict between cultivating anxiety and being happy, I argue, we need to take a different approach. Instead of proceeding by thinking about emotions in an almost atomistic way, according to which we experience only one definable type at a time, which can be understood statically, we must think of emotion more holistically. That is, we should consider more carefully the context in which an emotion occurs, how it unfolds over time, what other emotions arise alongside it or are otherwise connected to it, and the significance to the person of the experience as a whole. Such a richer picture of person’s affective experience in morally relevant situations shows how emotion regulation can be deployed without leading to the morally problematic thoughts and actions described earlier. I use empathic distress as an example of moral emotions to exemplify why such an approach does more justice to the phenomena, in addition to being friendlier to anxiety-positive views. (shrink)

The goal of this dissertation is to reconstruct, critically evaluate, and apply the pluralism of Paul Feyerabend. I conclude by suggesting future points of contact between Feyerabend’s pluralism and topics of interest in contemporary philosophy of science. I begin, in Chapter 1, by reconstructing Feyerabend’s critical philosophy. I show how his published works from 1948 until 1970 show a remarkably consistent argumentative strategy which becomes more refined and general as Feyerabend’s thought matures. Specifically, I argue that Feyerabend develops a persuasive (...) case against rationalism, or the thesis that there exist normative and exclusive rules of scientific rationality. In Chapter 2, I reconstruct Feyerabend’s pluralism and detail its relationship to his humanitarianism and epistemological anarchism. I understand Feyerabend’s pluralism as the combination of the principles of proliferation and tenacity. I show the evolution and justification of these principles from Feyerabend’s early papers until the late 1970s. In Chapter 3, I defend Feyerabend’s pluralism from its most prominent criticisms. I then clarify that Feyerabend’s pluralism amounts to a conception of the logic of theory pursuit and modify his view using insights from C.S. Peirce, Pierre Duhem, and Michael Polanyi. From Peirce, I show how economic, sociological, and value-laden features of theory pursuit may be used to constrain proliferation and tenacity. From Duhem and Polanyi, I try to show the proper role of tacit knowledge within a Feyerabendian framework. Finally, I show what implications Feyerabend’s pluralism has for models of distributing funds within scientific communities. I contend that it provides a more promising model that the ‘well-ordered science’ proposal advanced by numerous philosophers and social scientists. Specifically, I aim to understand what taking Feyerabend’s pluralism seriously entails for principles of balancing funding allocation decisions and the role of peer-review in evaluating the potential success of research proposals. I conclude by suggesting future lines of research for further analyzing and applying Feyerabend’s pluralism. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine the viability of avoiding value judgments encoded in thick concepts when these concepts are used in economic theories. We focus on what implications the use of such thick concepts might have for the tenability of the fact/value dichotomy in economics. Thick concepts have an evaluative and a descriptive component. Our suggestion is that despite attempts to rid thick concepts of their evaluative component, economists are often not successful. We focus on the strategy of explication to (...) remove the evaluative component of thick concepts and argue that often economists either have to make value judgments or are unable to individuate out the phenomenon under analysis. We support our claim with a case study, namely the concept of addiction in Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy’s Theory of Rational Addiction (1988). One consequence of our analysis is that theories containing thick concepts could commit economists to making value judgments and as such undermine the fact/value dichotomy. (shrink)

Recent trends in the debate about natural kinds tend towards increasingly permissive and practice-oriented views. I argue that while these accounts—which I characterize using Boyd’s ([1991]) term ‘enthusiasm’—offer several helpful insights, they often lack the normative force that they want to have; that is, they cannot provide an account of what makes something a good or bad, better or worse, kind for scientific pursuits. I argue that such accounts can regain a minimal sense of normativity in two ways. The first, (...) which has already been widely embraced by theorists, is to index the appropriateness of a scientific kind to the domain within which it is situated. While this is a good solution, it is not clear how it can be applied in interdisciplinary and cross-domain research pursuits, which are increasingly common. The second way of regaining normativity—which is especially, but not exclusively, effective for such cross-domain pursuits—is to attend to the stage at which scientific research is occurring. (shrink)

Machine Learning (ML) is on the rise in medicine, promising improved diagnostic, therapeutic and prognostic clinical tools. While these technological innovations are bound to transform health care, they also bring new ethical concerns to the forefront. One particularly elusive challenge regards discriminatory algorithmic judgements based on biases inherent in the training data. A common line of reasoning distinguishes between justified differential treatments that mirror true disparities between socially salient groups, and unjustified biases which do not, leading to misdiagnosis and erroneous (...) treatment. In the curation of training data this strategy runs into severe problems though, since distinguishing between the two can be next to impossible. We thus plead for a pragmatist dealing with algorithmic bias in healthcare environments. By recurring to a recent reformulation of William James’s pragmatist understanding of truth, we recommend that, instead of aiming at a supposedly objective truth, outcome-based therapeutic usefulness should serve as the guiding principle for assessing ML applications in medicine. (shrink)

This paper contributes to the interdisciplinary theory of collective affective niche construction, which extends the extended mind (ExM) thesis from cognitive to affective phenomena. Although theoretically innovative, the theory lacks a detailed psychological account of how collective affectivity is scaffolded. It has also been criticized for its uncritical assumption of the subject qua the autonomous user of the affective scaffolding as disposable resources, abstracting away from embedded subjectivity in particular techno-political arrangements. We propose that the social motivation hypothesis, an account (...) grounded in recent empirical and theoretical developments in psychology as well as in the classic theory of moral sentiments, will address the former criticism by explicating the basic mechanisms of human social orientation at work in collective affective niche construction. We also begin to address the latter normative criticism in mobilizing a so-called we-mode approach to collective emotion. To make these theoretical dialectics salient, we study social media as a case of collective affective niches, focusing on the impact on subjective well-being. Finally, we briefly identify promising future directions in building a normative theory of affective niche construction on the collective level. (shrink)