The psychological condition of being happy is best understood as a matter of a person's emotional condition. I elucidate the notion of an emotional condition by introducing two distinctions concerning affect, and argue that this “emotional state” view is probably superior on intuitive and substantive grounds to theories that identify happiness with pleasure or life satisfaction. Life satisfaction views, for example, appear to have deflationary consequences for happiness’ value. This would make happiness an unpromising candidate for the central element in (...) a theory of well-being, as it is in L. W. Sumner's work. Yet on an emotional state conception, happiness may prove to be a key constituent of well-being. the emotional state view also makes happiness less vulnerable to common doubts about the importance of happiness, and indicates that mood states are more important for well-being than is generally recognized.Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.Ernest Hemingway. (shrink)

This paper carries forward the conceptual clarification of normative theories of business ethics ably begun by Hasnas in the January 1998 issue of BEQ. This paper proposes a normatively neutral framework for discussing and assessing such normative theories. Every normative theory needs to address these seven issues: it needs to specify a moral principle that identifies (1) recommended values and (2) the grounds for accepting those values. It also must specify (3) a decision principle that business people who accept the (...) theory can use. It must determine (4) who the normative theory applies to and (5) whose interests need to be considered. It must also outline (6) in what contexts it applies, and (7) what legal and regulatory structures it assumes. Once clarified, this paper applies the framework to the normative versions of stockholder theory, stakeholder theory, and ISCT. It is concluded that ISCT is the most promising normative theory currently under discussion, but that there are some major issues that ISCT has not dealt with yet. (shrink)

Over the last decades, empirical research on subjective well-being in the social sciences has provided a major new stimulation of the discourse on individual happiness. Recently this research has also been linked to economics where reported subjective well-being is often taken as a proxy measure for individual welfare. In our review, we intend to provide an evaluation of where the economic research on happiness stands and of three directions it might develop. First, it offers new ways for testing the basic (...) assumptions of the economic approach and for going about a new understanding of utility. Second, it provides a new possibility for the complementary testing of theories across fields in economics. Third, we inquire how the insights gained from the study of individual happiness in economics affect public policy. (shrink)

This paper argues that, in light of Dead Sea apple cases, we should reject desire-fulfillment welfare theories (DF theories). Dead Sea apples are apples that look attractive while hanging on the tree, but which dissolve into smoke or ashes once plucked. Accordingly, Dead Sea apple cases are cases where an agent desires something and then gets it, only to find herself disappointed by what she has gotten. This paper covers both actual DF theories and hypothetical (or idealized) DF theories. On (...) actual DF theories the agent’s well-being is determined by her actual desires, while on hypothetical DF theories the agent’s well-being is determined by the desires that she would have if she were fully and vividly informed with respect to non-evaluative information. Various actual and hypothetical DF theory responses to Dead Sea apple objections are considered, and all such responses are argued to be inadequate. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for the following conclusions: 1. The widely shared beliefs that in utilitarianism and consequentialism (a) the good has priority over the right and (b) the right is derived from the good, are both false. 2. The most plausible components of utilitarianism that are used to present it as an intuitively compelling moral theory - welfarism, consequentialism and maximization - do not in fact support utilitarianism because they do not establish that the best state of affairs (...) is the one with the highest sum total of the non-moral good. These components cannot determine which state of affairs is the best and therefore leave it entirely open whether one should opt for distribution-insensitive utilitarianism or a distribution-sensitive welfarist consequentialism. Since this is left open, it is not the case that distribution-insensitive utilitarianism is the default option and every deviation from it towards a more just distribution needs to be defended against utilitarianism. Rather, in light of our moral intuitions and the persistence of the objection from justice against utilitarianism, it seems to be the other way round, that distribution-sensitivity is the default option and any deviation from it bears the burden of proof. (shrink)

This thesis is a contribution to the ethical justification for clinical research with children. A research subject’s participation in a trial is usually justified, in part, by informed consent. Informed consent helps to uphold the moral principle of respect for persons. But children’s limited ability to make informed choices gives rise to a problem. It is unclear what, if anything, justifies their participation in research. Some research ethicists propose to resolve this problem by appealing to social utility, proxy consent, arguments (...) explaining why it is permissible to expose children to some harm, and an argument concerning the appropriate balance between research harms and benefits. I argue that each of these is a necessary part of the justification for research with children, but that the argument concerning harms and benefits is under-developed. It relies on the concept of minimal risk, but minimal risk is inadequately justified. I propose an interpretation of minimal risk. I defend the idea that minimal risk should be interpreted according to the risks of daily life. I reject the most prominent defense of daily life, which claims that daily risks are morally relevant because they replace, rather than add to, the risks a child would ordinarily face. Instead, I propose that these risks are part of a reasonable trade-off between personal safety and our ability to pursue meaningful lives. I then examine whose daily life should be captured in the concept of minimal risk. I reject arguments that minimal risk should refer to healthy children or the subjects of the research and propose instead that the referent should be children who are not unduly burdened by their lives. I argue that children are not unduly burdened when they fare well and defend the idea that children fare well when they possess sufficiently high degrees of the substantive goods of childhood. I conclude by analyzing a controversial case study using my interpretation of minimal risk. I draw on this case to argue that my interpretation offers clear guidance for research ethics review and contributes to a determination that is more plausible than its rivals. (shrink)

The paper critically discusses the moral view that neurotechnological behavioural treatment for criminal offenders should only be offered if it is in their best interests. First, I show that it is difficult to apply and assess the notion of the offender's best interests unless one has a clear idea of what ‘best interests’ means. Second, I argue that if one accepts that harmful punishment of offenders has a place in the criminal justice system, it seems inconsistent not to accept the (...) practice of offering offenders treatment even when the state will harm them in applying the treatment. Finally, leading penal theories like consequentialists and retributivists would not accept that the offender's best interests, at least in certain situations, impose a necessary condition for the treatment of an offender. (shrink)

In this paper, I will develop a set of boulesic-doxastic tableau systems and prove that they are sound and complete. Boulesic-doxastic logic consists of two main parts: a boulesic part and a doxastic part. By ‘boulesic logic’ I mean ‘the logic of the will’, and by ‘doxastic logic’ I mean ‘the logic of belief’. The first part deals with ‘boulesic’ concepts, expressions, sentences, arguments and theorems. I will concentrate on two types of boulesic expression: ‘individual x wants it to be (...) the case that’ and ‘individual x accepts that it is the case that’. The second part deals with ‘doxastic’ concepts, expressions, sentences, arguments and theorems. I will concentrate on two types of doxastic expression: ‘individual x believes that’ and ‘it is imaginable to individual x that’. Boulesic-doxastic logic investigates how these concepts are related to each other. Boulesic logic is a new kind of logic. Doxastic logic has been around for a while, but the approach to this branch of logic in this paper is new. Each system is combined with modal logic with two kinds of modal operators for historical and absolute necessity and predicate logic with necessary identity and ‘possibilist’ quantifiers. I use a kind of possible world semantics to describe the systems semantically. I also sketch out how our basic language can be extended with propositional quantifiers. All the systems developed in this paper are new. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to give an outline of a value theory suitable for climate ethics, based on a perfectionist account on the convergence between prudential values and moral responsibility. I claim that such a convergence may generate a system of values that specify norms and obligations and attribute responsibility towards future generations, and thereby provides us with a measure of acceptable political action.

Welfare in economics is generally conceived of in terms of the satisfaction of preferences, but a general, comparable index measure of welfare is generally not taken to be possible. In recent years, in response to the usage of measures of subjective well-being as indices of welfare in economics, a number of economists have started to develop measures of welfare based on preference-satisfaction. In order to evaluate the success of such measures, I formulate criteria of policy-relevance and theoretical success in the (...) context of preference-satisfaction measures of welfare. I present a detailed case study of the methodological choices put forward in a prominent generalized proposal for measuring welfare through preferences recently published in the American Economic Review. I contrast this with an alternative welfare measure which also uses preferences to weight aspects of welfare: the ICECAP-A measure. I assess the methodology of both approaches in detail and argue that the two goals of a preference... (shrink)

This paper builds upon, but substantially revises, John Harsanyi's concept of ‘extended preferences’. An individual ‘history’ is a possible life that some person (a subject) might lead. Harsanyi supposes that a given spectator, formulating her ethical preferences, can rank histories by empathetic projection: putting herself ‘in the shoes’ of various subjects. Harsanyi then suggests that interpersonal comparisons be derived from the utility function representing spectators’ (supposedly common) ranking of history lotteries. Unfortunately, Harsanyi's proposal has various flaws, including some that have (...) hitherto escaped scholarly attention. In particular, it ignores the limits of personal identity. If the subject has welfare-relevant attributes that the spectator cannot acquire without changing who she is, full empathetic identification of the latter with the former becomes impossible. This paper proposes instead to usesympathyas the attitude on a spectator's part that allows us to make sense of her extended preferences. Sympathy – an attitude of care and concern – is a psychological state quite different from empathy. We should also allow for hetereogeneity in spectators’ extended preferences. Interpersonal comparisons emerge from a plurality of sympathetic spectators, not (as per Harsanyi) from a common empathetic ranking. (shrink)

Aldo Leopold, the modern father of ethical holism, embraced the moral principle that the deontic status of an action is determined by its effect on the integrity, stability, and beauty of the bioti...

The health gradient among those who are by historical standards both remarkably healthy and well-off is of considerable moral importance with respect to benevolence, justice and the theory of welfare. Indeed it may help us to realize that for most people the good life lies in close and intricate social ties with others which can flourish only when inequalities are limited. The health gradient suggests that there is a story to be told in which egalitarian justice, solidarity, health and well-being (...) go hand-in-hand. (shrink)

The Quality of Life: Aristotle Revised, by KrautRichard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. x + 249.

Abstract:Robert Sugden has suggested a normative standard of freedom as ‘opportunity’ that is supposed to help realign normative economics – with its traditional rational choice orientation – with behavioural economics. While allowing preferences to be incoherent, he wants to maintain the anti-paternalist stance of orthodox welfare economics. His standard, though, presupposes that people respond to uncertainty about their own future preferences by dismissing any kind of self-constraint. We argue that the approach lacks psychological substance: Sugden's normative benchmark – the ‘responsible (...) person’ – can hardly serve as a convincing role model in a contractarian setting. An alternative concept is introduced, and some implications are briefly discussed. (shrink)

This thesis is the first step in a research project which aims to develop an accurate and robust theory of global justice. The thesis concerns the content of our duties of global justice, under strict compliance theory. It begins by discussing the basic framework of my theory of global justice, which consists in two aspects: duties of minimal wellbeing, which are universal, and duties of fairness and equality, which are associative and not universal. With that in place, it briefly discusses (...) the nature of duties of fairness and equality. I shall argue that they are associative, because they are derived from the form of cooperation at hand; and that there are three kinds of them in our contemporary world: states, local cooperation and trans-state cooperation. It is from their forms of cooperation that these duties are derived. After that, the thesis focuses exclusively on duties of minimal wellbeing. Against the usual account of these duties - the human-flourishing account - I argue for my human-life account. This account argues that the function of these duties is to secure a human life for individuals; and it begins with a Razian conception of wellbeing, which states that the wellbeing of an individual is fundamentally constituted by: (a) the satisfaction of his biological needs, and (b) his success in whole-heartedly pursuing socially defined and determined goals and activities which are in fact valuable. An account of what constitutes a human life is then derived from this conception of wellbeing – it is a life that consists in having a level of wellbeing that is higher than the satisfaction of biological needs, where this is constituted by the pursuit of goals and activities with a sense of what is worth doing; and this in turn consists in: (a) being able to forms ideas of what is worth doing, (b) being able to revise them in light of further reasons, and (c) being able to coordinate one's actions according to them. I then determine the specific objects of duties of minimal wellbeing (means for the satisfaction of biological needs, education, physical security, freedom of belief, association and expression, freedom of non-harmful conduct, and minimal resources), by determining what is involved in securing such a human life for individuals. (shrink)

What is the relation between virtue and wellbeing? Our claim is that, under certain conditions, virtue necessarily tends to have a positive impact on an individual’s wellbeing. This is so because of the connection between virtue and psychological happiness, on the one hand, and between psychological happiness and wellbeing, on the other hand. In particular we defend three claims: that virtue is constituted by a disposition to experience fitting emotions, that fitting emotions are constituents of fitting happiness, and that fitting (...) happiness is a constituent of wellbeing. What follows is that, under certain conditions, virtue disposes the individual to experience wellbeing-constituting states. We end with a discussion of two objections that may be raised against our proposal. (shrink)

One important ethical issue for health promotion and public health work is to determine what the goals for these practices should be. This paper will try to clarify what some of these goals are thought to be, and what they ought to be. It will specifically discuss two different approaches to health promotion, such as, behavior change and empowerment. The general aim of this paper is, thus, to compare the behavior-change approach and the empowerment approach, concerning their immediate goals or (...) aims, and to morally evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of these two goal models, in relation to the ultimate goal of health promotion. The investigation shows that the behavior-change approach has several moral problems. First of all, it is overly paternalistic and often disregards the individual’s or group’s own perception of what is important—something that also increases the risk of failed interventions. Furthermore, it risks leading to ‘victim blaming’ and stigmatization, and to increased inequalities in health, and it puts focus on the ‘wrong’ problems, i.e., behavior instead of the ‘causes of the causes’. It is thereafter shown that the empowerment approach does not have any of these problems. Finally, some specific problems for the empowerment approach are discussed and resolved, such as, the idea that empowering some groups might lead to power over others, the objection that the focus is not primarily on health, and the fact that empowered people might choose to live lives that risk reducing their health. (shrink)

Subjective measures of well-being—measures based on answers to questions such as ‘Taking things all together, how would you say things are these days—would you say you're very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy these days?’—are often presented as superior to more traditional economic welfare measures, e.g., for public policy purposes. This paper aims to spell out and assess what I will call the argument from directness: the notion that subjective measures of well-being better represent well-being than economic measures do (...) because subjective measures (and subjective measures alone) are direct measures of well-being. My main thesis is that the argument begs the question against proponents of economic measures: it is based on a premise that they reject and that is no less in need of justification than the conclusion of the argument, namely, the proposition that well-being is constituted by subjectively experienced mental states. If subjective measures can be defended as valid measures of well-being at all, I will maintain, it is because they are (imperfect) indirect measures of well-being. (shrink)

Ist es moralisch verantwortbar, Menschen mit technischen Eingriffen zu verbessern? Der Aufsatz versucht diese Frage zu beantworten, indem zwei Gefahren für Verbesserungswillige beleuchtet werden: der Verlust der Menschlichkeit und der unerwünschte Wandel der individuellen Persönlichkeit. Sodann wird ein „Liberalismus mit Auffangnetz“ als Lösung des Problems vorgestellt, die eine unterschiedliche Bewertung von reversiblen und irreversiblen Eingriffen vornimmt. Im letzten Schritt wird überprüft, wie weit diese Konzeption auch anwendbar ist, wenn Eltern ihre Kinder verbessern lassen wollen, also ein „informed consent“ nicht vorausgesetzt (...) werden kann. Dabei werden Argumente zurückgewiesen, die Habermas gegen eine Verbesserung von Kindern vorgebracht hat. (shrink)

Social scientists have engaged extensively with the empirical findings of the Easterlin-paradox. However, any statement regarding the meaning and implications of the paradox are derived only through the mediation of normative assumptions. The paper renders these assumptions explicit (and, therefore, open for political discussion), a necessary step in legitimizing the Easterlin paradox as a compass for politics. Based on the analysis of the assumptions lurking behind the common implications of the paradox, the paper opens the door to alternative implications of (...) the paradox. Thus, it refers to other normative assumptions that combine together the assumptions discussed - and is therefore regarded as pluralist in essence - and singles out one particular strong variant - the ‘dual necessity’ variant. This strong assumption, invariably overlooked in the literature, is defined here and its significant political implications for the Easterlin paradox illustrated. (shrink)