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  1. CHOICE: an Objective, Voluntaristic Theory of Prudential Value.Walter Horn - 2020 - Philosophia 48 (1):191-215.
    It is customary to think that Objective List (“OL), Desire-Satisfaction (“D-S”) and Hedonistic (“HED”) theories of prudential value pretty much cover the waterfront, and that those of the three that are “subjective” are naturalistic (in the sense attacked by Moore, Ross and Ewing), while those that are “objective” must be Platonic, Aristotelian or commit the naturalist fallacy. I here argue for a theory that is both naturalistic (because voluntaristic) and objective but neither Platonic, Aristotelian, nor (I hope) fallacious. In addition, (...)
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  • Not Always Worth the Effort: Difficulty and the Value of Achievement.Sukaina Hirji - 2019 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 100 (2):525-548.
    Recent literature has argued that what makes certain activities ranging from curing cancer to running a marathon count as achievements, and what makes achievements intrinsically valuable is, centrally, that they involve great effort. Although there is much the difficulty-based view gets right, I argue that it generates the wrong results about some central cases of achievement, and this is because it is too narrowly focused on only one perfectionist capacity, the will. I propose a revised perfectionist account on which an (...)
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  • Scales for Scope: A New Solution to the Scope Problem for Pro-Attitude-Based Well-Being.Hasko von Kriegstein - 2018 - Utilitas 30 (4):417-438.
    Theories of well-being that give an important role to satisfied pro-attitudes need to account for the fact that, intuitively, the scope of possible objects of pro-attitudes seems much wider than the scope of things, states, or events that affect our well-being. Parfit famously illustrated this with his wish that a stranger may recover from an illness: it seems implausible that the stranger’s recovery would constitute a benefit for Parfit. There is no consensus in the literature about how to rule out (...)
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  • Which Desires Are Relevant to Well‐Being?Chris Heathwood - 2017 - Noûs 53 (3):664-688.
    The desire-satisfaction theory of well-being says, in its simplest form, that a person’s level of welfare is determined by the extent to which their desires are satisfied. A question faced by anyone attracted to such a view is, *Which desires*? This paper proposes a new answer to this question by characterizing a distinction among desires that isn’t much discussed in the well-being literature. This is the distinction between what a person wants in a merely behavioral sense, in that the person (...)
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  • Experienced Utility or Decision Utility for QALY Calculation? Both.Paige A. Clayton & Douglas P. MacKay - 2018 - Public Health Ethics 11 (1):82-89.
    Policy-makers must allocate scarce resources to support constituents’ health needs. This requires policy-makers to be able to evaluate health states and allocate resources according to some principle of allocation. The most prominent approach to evaluating health states is to appeal to the strength of people’s preferences to avoid occupying them, which we refer to as decision utility metrics. Another approach, experienced utility metrics, evaluates health states based on their hedonic quality. In this article, we argue that although decision utility metrics (...)
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  • Effort and Achievement.Hasko von Kriegstein - 2017 - Utilitas 29 (1):27-51.
    Achievements have recently begun to attract increased attention from value theorists. One recurring idea in this budding literature is that one important factor determining the magnitude or value of an achievement is the amount of effort the achiever invested. The aim of this paper is to present the most plausible version of this idea. This advances the current state of debate where authors are invoking substantially different notions of effort and are thus talking past each other. While the concept of (...)
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  • Eliminating ‘ life worth living’.Fumagalli Roberto - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 175 (3):769-792.
    This article argues for the elimination of the concept of life worth living from philosophical vocabulary on three complementary grounds. First, the basic components of this concept suffer from multiple ambiguities, which hamper attempts to ground informative evaluative and classificatory judgments about the worth of life. Second, the criteria proposed to track the extension of the concept of life worth living rest on unsupported axiological assumptions and fail to identify precise and plausible referents for this concept. And third, the concept (...)
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  • Why should Welfare ‘Fit’?Dale Dorsey - 2017 - Philosophical Quarterly 67 (269):685-24.
    One important proposal about the nature of well-being, prudential value or the personal good is that intrinsic values for a person ought to ‘resonate’ with the person for whom they are good. Indeed, virtually everyone agrees that there is something very plausible about this necessary condition on the building blocks of a good life. Given the importance of this constraint, however, it may come as something of a surprise how little reason we actually have to believe it. In this paper, (...)
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  • (1 other version)A Topical Bibliography of Scholarship on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.Thornton C. Lockwood - 2005 - Journal of Philosophical Research 30:1-116.
    Scholarship on Aristotle’s NICOMACHEAN ETHICS (hereafter “the Ethics”) flourishes in an almost unprecedented fashion. In the last ten years, universities in North America have produced on average over ten doctoral dissertations a year that discuss the practical philosophy that Aristotle espouses in his Nicomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics, and Politics. Since the beginning of the millennium there have been three new translations of the entire Ethics into English alone, several more that translate parts of the work into English and other modern (...)
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  • Up and Down with Aggregation.Bradford Hooker - 2009 - Social Philosophy and Policy 26 (1):126-147.
    This paper starts by addressing some objections to the very idea of aggregate social good. The paper goes on to review the case for letting aggregate social good be not only morally relevant but also sometimes morally decisive. Then the paper surveys objections to letting aggregate social good determine personal or political decisions. The paper goes on to argue against the idea that aggregate good is sensitive to desert and the idea that aggregate good should be construed as incorporating agent-relativity.
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  • Making good choices: toward a theory of well-being in medicine.Alicia Hall - 2016 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 37 (5):383-400.
    The principle of beneficence directs healthcare practitioners to promote patients’ well-being, ensuring that the patients’ best interests guide treatment decisions. Because there are a number of distinct theories of well-being that could lead to different conclusions about the patient’s good, a careful consideration of which account is best suited for use in the medical context is needed. While there has been some discussion of the differences between subjective and objective theories of well-being within the bioethics literature, less attention has been (...)
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  • Robots in aged care: a dystopian future.Robert Sparrow - 2016 - AI and Society 31 (4):1-10.
    In this paper I describe a future in which persons in advanced old age are cared for entirely by robots and suggest that this would be a dystopia, which we would be well advised to avoid if we can. Paying attention to the objective elements of welfare rather than to people’s happiness reveals the central importance of respect and recognition, which robots cannot provide, to the practice of aged care. A realistic appreciation of the current economics of the aged care (...)
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  • Against Welfare Subjectivism.Eden Lin - 2017 - Noûs 51 (2):354-377.
    Subjectivism about welfare is the view that something is basically good for you if and only if, and to the extent that, you have the right kind of favorable attitude toward it under the right conditions. I make a presumptive case for the falsity of subjectivism by arguing against nearly every extant version of the view. My arguments share a common theme: theories of welfare should be tested for what they imply about newborn infants. Even if a theory is intended (...)
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  • Introduction.Jukka Varelius & Michael Cholbi - 2015 - In Jukka Varelius & Michael Cholbi (eds.), New Directions in the Ethics of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia. Cham: Springer Verlag.
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  • Mental Illness, Lack of Autonomy, and Physician-Assisted Death.Jukka Varelius - 2015 - In Michael Cholbi & Jukka Varelius (eds.), New Directions in the Ethics of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia. Cham: Springer Verlag. pp. 59-77.
    In this chapter, I consider the idea that physician-assisted death might come into question in the cases of psychiatric patients who are incapable of making autonomous choices about ending their lives. I maintain that the main arguments for physician-assisted death found in recent medical ethical literature support physician-assisted death in some of those cases. After assessing several possible criticisms of what I have argued, I conclude that the idea that physicianassisted death can be acceptable in some cases of psychiatric patients (...)
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  • Prioritarianism for Global Health Investments: Identifying the Worst Off.Daniel Sharp & Joseph Millum - 2018 - Journal of Applied Philosophy:112-132.
    The available resources for global health assistance are far outstripped by need. In the face of such scarcity, many people endorse a principle according to which highest priority should be given to the worst off. However, in order for this prioritarian principle to be useful for allocation decisions, policy-makers need to know what it means to be badly off. In this article, we outline a conception of disadvantage suitable for identifying the worst off for the purpose of making health resource (...)
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  • Objectivity/Subjectivity of Values.Jason R. Raibley - 2014 - In Alex C. Michalos (ed.), Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research. Springer. pp. 4438-4443.
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  • Desire-Fulfillment Theory.Chris Heathwood - 2015 - In Guy Fletcher (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Well-Being. New York,: Routledge. pp. 135-147.
    Explains the desire-fulfillment theory of well-being, its history, its development, its varieties, its advantages, and its challenges.
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  • Children's Well-Being: A Philosophical Analysis.Anthony Skelton - 2015 - In Guy Fletcher (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Well-Being. New York,: Routledge. pp. 366-377.
    A philosophical discussion of children's well-being in which various existing views of well-being are discussed to determine their implications for children's well-being and a variety of views of children's well-being are considered and evaluated.
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  • Happiness is not Well-being.Jason R. Raibley - 2012 - Journal of Happiness Studies 13 (6):1105-1129.
    This paper attempts to explain the conceptual connections between happiness and well-being. It first distinguishes episodic happiness from happiness in the personal attribute sense. It then evaluates two recent proposals about the connection between happiness and well-being: (1) the idea that episodic happiness and well-being both have the same fundamental determinants, so that a person is well-off to a particular degree in virtue of the fact that they are happy to that degree, and (2) the idea that happiness in the (...)
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  • How Theories of Well-Being Can Help Us Help.Valerie Tiberius - 2014 - Journal of Practical Ethics 2 (2):1-19.
    Some theories of well-being in philosophy and in psychology define people’s well-being in psychological terms. According to these theories, living well is getting what you want, feeling satisfied, experiencing pleasure, or the like. Other theories take well-being to be something that is not defined by our psychology: for example, they define well-being in terms of objective values or the perfection of our human nature. These two approaches present us with a trade-off: The more we define well-being in terms of people’s (...)
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  • A Normatively Neutral Definition of Paternalism.Emma C. Bullock - 2015 - Philosophical Quarterly 65 (258):1-21.
    In this paper, I argue that a definition of paternalism must meet certain methodological constraints. Given the failings of descriptivist and normatively charged definitions of paternalism, I argue that we have good reason to pursue a normatively neutral definition. Archard's 1990 definition is one such account. It is for this reason that I return to Archard's account with a critical eye. I argue that Archard's account is extensionally inadequate, failing to capture some cases which are clear instances of paternalism. I (...)
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  • Utilitarianism, Welfare, Children.Anthony Skelton - 2014 - In Alexander Bagattini & Colin Macleod (eds.), The Nature of Children's Well-being: Theory and Practice. Springer. pp. 85-103.
    Utilitarianism is the view according to which the only basic requirement of morality is to maximize net aggregate welfare. This position has implications for the ethics of creating and rearing children. Most discussions of these implications focus either on the ethics of procreation and in particular on how many and whom it is right to create, or on whether utilitarianism permits the kind of partiality that child rearing requires. Despite its importance to creating and raising children, there are, by contrast, (...)
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  • The Strong-Tie Requirement and Objective-List Theories of Well-Being.William A. Lauinger - 2013 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16 (5):953-968.
    Many philosophers with hedonistic sympathies (e.g., Mill, Sidgwick, Sumner, Feldman, Crisp, Heathwood, and Bradley) have claimed that well-being is necessarily experiential. Kagan once claimed something slightly different, saying that, although unexperienced bodily events can directly impact a person’s well-being, it is nonetheless true that any change in a person’s well-being must involve a change in her (i.e., either in her mind or in her body). Kagan elaborated by saying that a person’s well-being cannot float freely of her such that it (...)
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  • Subjectivism without Desire.Dale Dorsey - 2012 - Philosophical Review 121 (3):407-442.
    Subjectivism about well-being holds that ϕ is intrinsically good for x if and only if, and to the extent that, ϕ is valued, under the proper conditions, by x. Given this statement of the view, there is room for intramural dissent among subjectivists. One important source of dispute is the phrase “under the proper conditions”: Should the proper conditions of valuing be actual or idealized? What sort of idealization is appropriate? And so forth. Though these concerns are of the first (...)
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  • The Hedonist's Dilemma.Dale Dorsey - 2011 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 8 (2):173-196.
    In this paper, I argue that hedonism about well-being faces a powerful dilemma. However, as I shall try to show here, this choice creates a dilemma for hedonism. On a subjective interpretation, hedonism is open to the familiar objection that pleasure is not the only thing desired or the only thing for which we possess a pro-attitude. On an objective interpretation, hedonism lacks an independent rationale. In this paper, I do not claim that hedonism fails once and for all. However, (...)
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  • (1 other version)In search of `the good life' for demented elderly.Maartje Schermer - 2003 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 6 (1):35-44.
    It may seem paradoxical to speak of the ‘goodlife’ for demented elderly. Many people consider dementia to be a life-wrecking disease and nursing homes to be terrible places. Still, it is relevant to ask how we can make life as good as possible for demented nursing home residents. This paper explores what three standard philosophical accounts of well-being — subjective preference theory, objectivist theories, and hedonism — have to say about the good life for demented people. It is concluded that (...)
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  • The Collapse of Virtue Ethics.Brad Hooker - 2002 - Utilitas 14 (1):22.
    Virtue ethics is normally taken to be an alternative to consequentialist and Kantian moral theories. I shall discuss what I think is the most interesting version of virtue ethics – Rosalind Hursthouse's. I shall then argue that her version is inadequate in ways that suggest revision in the direction of a kind of rule-consequentialism.
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  • Constructivist experimental philosophy on well-being and virtue.Matthew Braddock - 2010 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 48 (3):295-323.
    What is the nature of human well-being? This paper joins the ancient debate by rejuvenating an ancient claim that is quite unfashionable among moral philosophers today, namely, the Aristotelian claim that moral virtue is (non-instrumentally) necessary for human well-being. Call it the Aristotelian Virtue Condition (AVC). This view can be revived for contemporary debate by a state-of-the-art approach that we might call constructivist experimental philosophy, which takes as its goal the achievement of a reasonable constructivist account of well-being and takes (...)
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  • Authentic happiness.Greg Bognar - 2010 - Utilitas 22 (3):272-284.
    This article discusses L. W. Sumner's theory of well-being as authentic happiness. I distinguish between extreme and moderate versions of subjectivism and argue that Sumner's characterization of the conditions of authenticity leads him to an extreme subjective theory. More generally, I also criticize Sumner's argument for the subjectivity of welfare. I conclude by addressing some of the implications of my arguments for theories of well-being in philosophy and welfare measurement in the social sciences.
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  • (1 other version)Up and down with aggregation.Brad Hooker - 2009 - Social Philosophy and Policy 26 (1):126-147.
    This paper starts by addressing some objections to the very idea of aggregate social good. The paper goes on to review the case for letting aggregate social good be not only morally relevant but also sometimes morally decisive. Then the paper surveys objections to letting aggregate social good determine personal or political decisions. The paper goes on to argue against the idea that aggregate good is sensitive to desert and the idea that aggregate good should be construed as incorporating agent-relativity.
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  • Preferences, welfare, and the status-quo bias.Dale Dorsey - 2010 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 88 (3):535-554.
    Preferences play a role in well-being that is difficult to escape, but whatever authority one grants to preferences, their malleability seems to cause problems for any theory of well-being that employs them. Most importantly, preferences appear to display a status-quo bias: people come to prefer what they are likely rather than unlikely to get. I try to do two things here. The first is to provide a more precise characterization of the status-quo bias, how it functions, and how it infects (...)
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  • Perfectionism in moral and political philosophy.Steven Wall - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • (1 other version)Fairness.Brad Hooker - 2005 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 8 (4):329 - 352.
    The main body of this paper assesses a leading recent theory of fairness, a theory put forward by John Broome. I discuss Broome's theory partly because of its prominence and partly because I think it points us in the right direction, even if it takes some missteps. In the course of discussing Broome's theory, I aim to cast light on the relation of fairness to consistency, equality, impartiality, desert, rights, and agreements. Indeed, before I start assessing Broome's theory, I discuss (...)
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  • (1 other version)Distributive justice and basic capability equality: 'Good enough' is not good enough Richard J. Arneson.Richard Arneson - 2004
    Amartya Sen is a renowned economist who has also made important contributions to philosophical thinking about distributive justice. These contributions tend to take the form of criticism of inadequate positions and insistence on making distinctions that will promote clear thinking about the topic. Sen is not shy about making substantive normative claims, but thus far he has avoided commitment to a theory of justice, in the sense of a set of principles that specifies what facts are relevant for policy choice (...)
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  • Desire satisfactionism and hedonism.Chris Heathwood - 2006 - Philosophical Studies 128 (3):539-563.
    Hedonism and the desire-satisfaction theory of welfare are typically seen as archrivals in the contest over identifying what makes one's life go best. It is surprising, then, that the most plausible form of hedonism just is the most plausible form of desire satisfactionism. How can a single theory of welfare be a version of both hedonism and desire satisfactionism? The answer lies in what pleasure is: pleasure is, in my view, the subjective satisfaction of desire. This thesis about pleasure is (...)
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  • Pleasure, Pain, and Pluralism about Well-Being.Eden Lin - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.
    Pluralistic theories of well-being might appear unable to accommodate just how important pleasure and pain are to well-being. Intuitively, there is a finite limit to how well your life can go for you if it goes badly enough hedonically (e.g. because you never feel any pleasure and you spend two years in unrelenting agony). But if there is some basic good distinct from pleasure, as any pluralistic theory must claim, then it seems that you could be made arbitrarily well off (...)
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  • Telic Perfectionism and the Badness of Pain.Antti Kauppinen - forthcoming - In Mauro Rossi & Christine Tappolet (eds.), Perspectives on Ill-Being. Oxford University Press.
    Why is unpleasant pain bad for us? Evidently because of how it feels. This bit of commonsense is a challenge for well-being perfectionism, since pain doesn’t look anything like failure to fulfill human nature. Here, I sketch a new version of perfectionism that avoids this problem. To explain what is basically good for us, it appeals to the capacities whose functioning defines who we are, or our subjective nature, instead of human nature. I argue that these capacities have a telic (...)
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  • Alienation, Resonance, and Experience in Theories of Well-Being.Andrew Alwood - 2023 - Philosophia 51 (4):2225-2240.
    Each person has a special relation to his or her own well-being. This rough thought, which can be sharpened in different ways, is supposed to substantially count against objectivist theories on which one can intrinsically benefit from, or be harmed by, factors that are independent of one’s desires, beliefs, and other attitudes. It is often claimed, contra objectivism, that one cannot be _alienated_ from one’s own interests, or that improvements in a person’s well-being must _resonate_ with that person. However, I (...)
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  • A Puzzle of Prudence: Reason to Prioritize Current Goals.Dong-Yong Choi - 2021 - Cheolhak-Korean Journal of Philosophy 146:171-190.
    Some goals have special significance to agents. For instance, an agent could find her life worth living because she is pursuing her current goal, and the agent could also think that her previous life has no value because she did not pursue the current goal. If an agent’s current goal has special importance to the agent, then in terms of prudence the agent’s decision to obtain her current goal could be permissible even in the case where achieving her previous goal (...)
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  • Why Be a Subjectivist about Wellbeing?Peter Königs - 2022 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 52 (2):165-179.
    Subjectivism about wellbeing rests on the idea that what is good for a person must ‘fit’ her, ‘resonate’ with her, not be ‘alien’ to her, etc. This idea has been called the ‘beating heart’ of subjectivism. In this article, I present the No-Beating-Heart Challenge for subjectivism, which holds that there is no satisfactory statement of this idea. I proceed by first identifying three criteria that any statement of the idea must meet if it is to provide support for subjectivism: Distinctness, (...)
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  • Well-Being as Need Satisfaction.Marlowe Fardell - 2022 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 21 (3).
    This paper presents a new analysis of the concept of non-instrumental need, and, using it, demonstrates how a need-satisfaction theory of well-being is much more plausible than might otherwise be supposed. Its thesis is that in at least some contexts of evaluation a central part of some persons’ well-being consists in their satisfying certain “personal needs”. Unlike common conceptions of other non-instrumental needs, which make those out to be moralised, universal, and minimal, personal needs are expansive and particular to particular (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Well‐being, part 1: The concept of well‐being.Eden Lin - 2022 - Philosophy Compass 17 (2):e12813.
    Philosophy Compass, Volume 17, Issue 2, February 2022.
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  • (2 other versions)Well‐being, part 2: Theories of well‐being.Eden Lin - 2022 - Philosophy Compass 17 (2):e12813.
    Theories of well-being purport to identify the features of lives, and of intervals within lives, in virtue of which some people are high in well-being and others are low in well-being. They also purport to identify the properties that make some events or states of affairs good for a person and other events or states of affairs bad for a person. This article surveys some of the main theories of well-being, with an emphasis on work published since the turn of (...)
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  • Can desire-satisfaction alienate our good?Willem van der Deijl - 2023 - Journal of Value Inquiry 57 (4):687-700.
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  • Being Sure and Living Well: How Security Affects Human Flourishing.J. A. M. Daemen - 2024 - Journal of Value Inquiry 58 (1):93-110.
    This paper analyses how security affects well-being. Security is understood as someone’s sureness of enjoying some good in the future; well-being is treated as a matter of human flourishing. Security can contribute to our well-being in various ways: if we are in fact bound to enjoy a good, in principle this is positive for our flourishing in the future; if we also believe that we will enjoy this good, we can be more efficient in pursuing our well-being; if we also (...)
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  • Can I Get A Little Less Satisfaction, Please?Michael Plant - manuscript
    While life satisfaction theories (LSTs) of well-being are barely discussed in philosophy, they are popular among social scientists and wider society. When philosophers have discussed LSTs, they are taken to be a distinct alternative to the three canonical accounts of well-being—hedonism, desire theories, the objective list. This essay makes three main claims. First, on closer inspection, LSTs are indistinguishable from a type of desire theory—the global desire theory. Second, the life satisfaction/global desire theories are the only subjectivist accounts of well-being (...)
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  • Well-Being as Harmony.Hasko von Kriegstein - 2020 - In David Kaspar (ed.), Explorations in Ethics. Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 117-140.
    In this paper, I sketch out a novel theory of well-being according to which well-being is constituted by harmony between mind and world. The notion of harmony I develop has three aspects. First there is correspondence between mind and world in the sense that events in the world match the content of our mental states. Second there is positive orientation towards the world, meaning that we have pro-attitudes towards the world we find ourselves in. Third there is fitting response to (...)
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  • On Two Interpretations of the Desire-Satisfaction Theory of Prudential Value.Joseph van Weelden - 2019 - Utilitas 31 (2):137-156.
    This article considers two different ways of formulating a desire-satisfaction theory of prudential value. The first version of the theory (the object view) assigns basic prudential value to the state of affairs that is the object of a person’s desire. The second version (the combo view) assigns basic prudential value to the compound state of affairs in which (a) a person desires some state of affairs and (b) this state of affairs obtains. My aims in this article are twofold. First, (...)
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  • Calculating qalys: Liberalism and the value of health states.Douglas MacKay - 2017 - Economics and Philosophy 33 (2):259-285.
    The value of health states is often understood to depend on their impact on the goodness of people's lives. As such, prominent health states metrics are grounded in particular conceptions of wellbeing – e.g. hedonism or preference satisfaction. In this paper, I consider how liberals committed to the public justification requirement – the requirement that public officials choose laws and policies that are justifiable to their citizens – should evaluate health states. Since the public justification requirement prohibits public officials from (...)
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