Switch to: References

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. Sentience, Vulcans, and zombies: the value of phenomenal consciousness.Joshua Shepherd - 2024 - AI and Society 39 (6):3005-3015.
    Many think that a specific aspect of phenomenal consciousness—valenced or affective experience—is essential to consciousness’s moral significance (valence sentientism). They hold that valenced experience is necessary for well-being, or moral status, or psychological intrinsic value (or all three). Some think that phenomenal consciousness generally is necessary for non-derivative moral significance (broad sentientism). Few think that consciousness is unnecessary for moral significance (non-necessitarianism). In this paper, I consider the prospects for these views. I first consider the prospects for valence sentientism in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • If I Could Talk to the Animals: Measuring Subjective Animal Welfare.Heather Browning - 2019 - Dissertation, Australian National University
    Animal welfare is a concept that plays a role within both our moral deliberations and the relevant areas of science. The study of animal welfare has impacts on decisions made by legislators, producers and consumers with regards to housing and treatment of animals. Our ethical deliberations in these domains need to consider our impact on animals, and the study of animal welfare provides the information that allows us to make informed decisions. This thesis focusses on taking a philosophical perspective to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   20 citations  
  • Aesthetic Hedonism and Its Critics.Servaas Van der Berg - 2020 - Philosophy Compass 15 (1):e12645.
    This essay surveys the main objections to aesthetic hedonism, the view that aesthetic value is reducible to the value of aesthetic pleasure or experience. Hedonism is the dominant view of aesthetic value, but a spate of recent criticisms has drawn its accuracy into question. I introduce some distinctions crucial to the criticisms, before using the bulk of the essay to identify and review six major lines of argument that hedonism's critics have employed against it. Whether or not these arguments suffice (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   31 citations  
  • The Value of Consciousness.Uriah Kriegel - 2019 - Analysis 79 (3):503-520.
    Recent work within such disparate research areas as the epistemology of perception, theories of well-being, animal and medical ethics, the philosophy of consciousness, and theories of understanding in philosophy of science and epistemology has featured disconnected discussions of what is arguably a single underlying question: What is the value of consciousness? The purpose of this paper is to review some of this work and place it within a unified theoretical framework that makes contributions (and contributors) from these disparate areas more (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   26 citations  
  • Consciousness and Moral Status.Joshua Shepherd - 2018 - New York: Routledge.
    It seems obvious that phenomenally conscious experience is something of great value, and that this value maps onto a range of important ethical issues. For example, claims about the value of life for those in a permanent vegetative state, debates about treatment and study of disorders of consciousness, controversies about end-of-life care for those with advanced dementia, and arguments about the moral status of embryos, fetuses, and non-human animals arguably turn on the moral significance of various facts about consciousness. However, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  • 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   29 citations  
  • The good life as the life in touch with the good.Adam Lovett & Stefan Riedener - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (5):1141-1165.
    What makes your life go well for you? In this paper, we give an account of welfare. Our core idea is simple. There are impersonally good and bad things out there: things that are good or bad period, not (or not only) good or bad for someone. The life that is good for you is the life in contact with the good. We’ll understand the relevant notion of ‘contact’ here in terms of manifestation: you’re in contact with a value when (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • The Value of Consciousness to the One Who Has It.Uriah Kriegel - forthcoming - In Geoffrey Lee & Adam Pautz (eds.), The Importance of Being Conscious. Oxford University Press.
    There is a strong intuition that a zombie’s life is never good or bad for the zombie. What explains this? In this paper, I consider five possible explanations of the intuition that a zombie’s life is never worth living, plus the option of rejecting the intuition. I point out the considerable costs of each option, though making clear which option strikes me as least problematic.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Well-being and Pluralism.Polly Mitchell & Anna Alexandrova - forthcoming - Journal of Happiness Studies.
    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. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • The ethics of digital well-being: a multidisciplinary perspective.Christopher Burr & Luciano Floridi - 2020 - In Christopher Burr & Luciano Floridi (eds.), Ethics of digital well-being: a multidisciplinary approach. Springer.
    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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • 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, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • Compassion and Beyond.Roger Crisp - 2008 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 11 (3):233-246.
    This paper is a discussion of the emotion of compassion or pity, and the corresponding virtue. It begins by placing the emotion of compassion in the moral conceptual landscape, and then moves to reject the currently dominant view, a version of Aristotelianism developed by Martha Nussbaum, in favour of a non-cognitive conception of compassion as a feeling. An alternative neo-Aristotelian account is then outlined. The relation of the virtue of compassion to other virtues is plotted, and some doubts sown about (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   31 citations  
  • Challenges for Principles of Need in Health Care.Niklas Juth - 2015 - Health Care Analysis 23 (1):73-87.
    What challenges must a principle of need for prioritisations in health care meet in order to be plausible and practically useful? Some progress in answering this question has recently been made by Hope, Østerdal and Hasman. This article continue their work by suggesting that the characteristic feature of principles of needs is that they are sufficientarian, saying that we have a right to a minimally acceptable or good life or health, but nothing more. Accordingly, principles of needs must answer two (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   23 citations  
  • Disability and the Goods of Life.Stephen M. Campbell, Sven Nyholm & Jennifer K. Walter - 2021 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 46 (6):704-728.
    The so-called Disability Paradox arises from the apparent tension between the popular view that disability leads to low well-being and the relatively high life-satisfaction reports of disabled people. Our aim in this essay is to make some progress toward dissolving this alleged paradox by exploring the relationship between disability and various “goods of life”—that is, components of a life that typically make a person’s life go better for her. We focus on four widely recognized goods of life (happiness, rewarding relationships, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • Is pleasure all that is good about experience?Willem Deijl - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (7):1-19.
    Experientialist accounts of wellbeing are those accounts of wellbeing that subscribe to the experience requirement. Typically, these accounts are hedonistic. In this article I present the claim that hedonism is not the most plausible experientialist account of wellbeing. The value of experience should not be understood as being limited to pleasure, and as such, the most plausible experientialist account of wellbeing is pluralistic, not hedonistic. In support of this claim, I argue first that pleasure should not be understood as a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • Monism and Pluralism about Value.Chris Heathwood - 2015 - In Iwao Hirose & Jonas Olson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Value Theory. New York NY: Oxford University Press USA. pp. 136-157.
    This essay discusses monism and pluralism about two related evaluative notions: welfare, or what makes people better off, and value simpliciter, or what makes the world better. These are stipulatively referred to as 'axiological value'. Axiological value property monists hold that one of these notions is reducible to the other (or else eliminable), while axiological value property pluralists deny this. Substantive monists about axiological value hold that there is just one basic kind of thing that makes our lives or the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   16 citations  
  • Against the Fundamentality of GOOD.Nandi Theunissen - forthcoming - Journal of Philosophy.
    The argument that is in question in this article concerns the would-be dependence of one form of value on another. When something is intrinsically good for someone, which is to say, directly beneficial for them, it is so because it is good simpliciter. Proponents of the argument have so-called ‘perfectionist’ values chiefly in mind: worthwhile artworks, striking natural formations, intellectual and scientific achievements. They contend that the fact that engaging with perfectionist goods is non-instrumentally good for people depends on the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • From the Heterogeneity Problem to a Natural‐Kind Approach to Pleasure.Antonin Broi - 2023 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 104 (2):274-300.
    The heterogeneity problem, which stems from the alleged difficulty of finding out what all pleasant experiences have in common, is largely considered as a substantial issue in the philosophy of pleasure, one that is usually taken as the starting point for theorizing about the essence of pleasure. The goal of this paper is to move the focus away from the heterogeneity problem and toward an alternative approach to pleasure. To do this, I first show that, although the approach stemming from (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Whole-Life Welfarism.Ben Bramble - 2014 - American Philosophical Quarterly 51 (1):63-74.
    In this paper, I set out and defend a new theory of value, whole-life welfarism. According to this theory, something is good only if it makes somebody better off in some way in his life considered as a whole. By focusing on lifetime, rather than momentary, well-being, a welfarist can solve two of the most vexing puzzles in value theory, The Badness of Death and The Problem of Additive Aggregation.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • Succeeding competently: towards an anti-luck condition for achievement.Hasko von Kriegstein - 2019 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 49 (3):394-418.
    ABSTRACTAchievements are among the things that make a life good. Assessing the plausibility of this intuitive claim requires an account of the nature of achievements. One necessary condition for achievement appears to be that the achieving agent acted competently, i.e. was not just lucky. I begin by critically assessing existing accounts of anti-luck conditions for achievements in both the ethics and epistemology literature. My own proposal is that a goal is reached competently, only if the actions of the would-be-achiever make (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • (F)utility Exposed.Roberto Fumagalli - 2019 - Philosophy of Science 86 (5):955-966.
    In recent years, several authors have called to ground descriptive and normative decision theory on neuro-psychological measures of utility. In this paper, I combine insights from the best available neuro-psychological findings, leading philosophical conceptions of welfare and contemporary decision theory to rebut these prominent calls. I argue for two claims of general interest to philosophers, choice modellers and policy makers. First, severe conceptual, epistemic and evidential problems plague ongoing attempts to develop accurate and reliable neuro-psychological measures of utility. And second, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • An Assessment of Recent Responses to the Experience Machine Objection to Hedonism.Dan Weijers & Vanessa Schouten - 2013 - Journal of Value Inquiry 47 (4):461-482.
    Prudential hedonism has been beset by many objections, the strength and number of which have led most modern philosophers to believe that it is implausible. One objection in particular, however, is nearly always cited when a philosopher wants to argue that prudential hedonism is implausible—the experience machine objection to hedonism. This paper examines this objection in detail. First, the deductive and abductive versions of the experience machine objection to hedonism are explained. Following this, the contemporary responses to each version of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   16 citations  
  • What do our intuitions about the experience machine really tell us about hedonism?Sharon Hewitt - 2010 - Philosophical Studies 151 (3):331 - 349.
    Robert Nozick's experience machine thought experiment is often considered a decisive refutation of hedonism. I argue that the conclusions we draw from Nozick's thought experiment ought to be informed by considerations concerning the operation of our intuitions about value. First, I argue that, in order to show that practical hedonistic reasons are not causing our negative reaction to the experience machine, we must not merely stipulate their irrelevance (since our intuitions are not always responsive to stipulation) but fill in the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  • The Irrelevance of Harm for a Theory of Disease.Dane Muckler & James Stacey Taylor - 2020 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 45 (3):332-349.
    Normativism holds that there is a close conceptual link between disease and disvalue. We challenge normativism by advancing an argument against a popular normativist theory, Jerome Wakefield’s harmful dysfunction account. Wakefield maintains that medical disorders are breakdowns in evolved mechanisms that cause significant harm to the organism. We argue that Wakefield’s account is not a promising way to distinguish between disease and health because being harmful is neither necessary nor sufficient for a dysfunction to be a disorder. Counterexamples to the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • Is Well-being Measurable After All?Anna Alexandrova - 2016 - Public Health Ethics 10 (2).
    In Valuing Health, Dan Hausman argues that well-being is not measurable, at least not in the way that science and policy would require. His argument depends on a demanding conception of well-being and on a pessimistic verdict upon the existing measures of subjective well-being. Neither of these reasons, I argue, warrant as much skepticism as Hausman professes.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • Artificial wisdom: a philosophical framework.Cheng-Hung Tsai - 2020 - AI and Society:937-944.
    Human excellences such as intelligence, morality, and consciousness are investigated by philosophers as well as artificial intelligence researchers. One excellence that has not been widely discussed by AI researchers is practical wisdom, the highest human excellence, or the highest, seventh, stage in Dreyfus’s model of skill acquisition. In this paper, I explain why artificial wisdom matters and how artificial wisdom is possible (in principle and in practice) by responding to two philosophical challenges to building artificial wisdom systems. The result is (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Mood and Wellbeing.Uriah Kriegel - 2025 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 68 (1):1-24.
    The two main subjectivist accounts of wellbeing, hedonism and desire-satisfactionism, focus on pleasure and desire (respectively) as the subjective states relevant to evaluating the goodness of a life. In this paper, I argue that another type of subjective state, mood, is much more central to wellbeing. After a general characterization of some central features of mood (§1), I argue that the folk concept of happiness construes it in terms of preponderance of good mood (§2). I then leverage this connection between (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Ethics of digital well-being: a multidisciplinary approach.Christopher Burr & Luciano Floridi (eds.) - 2020 - Springer.
    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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • The Case for Stance Dependent Reasons.David Sobel - 2019 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 15 (2).
    Many philosophers maintain that neither one’s reasons for action nor well-being are ever grounded in facts about what we desire or favor. Yet our reasons to eat a flavor of ice cream we like rather than one we do not seem an obvious counter-example. I argue that there is no getting around such examples and that therefore a fully stance independent account of the grounding of our reasons is implausible. At least in matters of mere taste our “stance” plays a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • 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, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  • Anthropocentrism in Climate Ethics and Policy.Katie McShane - 2016 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 40 (1):189-204.
    Most ethicists agree that at least some nonhumans have interests that are of direct moral importance. Yet with very few exceptions, both climate ethics and climate policy have operated as though only human interests should be considered in formulating and evaluating climate policy. In this paper I argue that the anthropocentrism of current climate ethics and policy cannot be justified. I first describe the ethical claims upon which my analysis rests, arguing that they are no longer controversial within contemporary ethics. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Are Measures of Well-Being Philosophically Adequate?Willem van der Deijl - 2017 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 47 (3):209-234.
    The concept of well-being is increasingly gaining acceptance as an object of science, and many different types of well-being measures have been developed. A debate has emerged about which measures are able to capture well-being successfully. An important underlying problem is that there is no unified conceptual framework about the nature of well-being—a hotly debated topic of philosophical discussion. I argue that while there is little agreement about the nature of well-being in philosophy, there is an important agreement on some (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • A Reformed Division of Labor for the Science of Well-Being.Roberto Fumagalli - 2022 - Philosophy 97 (4):509-543.
    This paper provides a philosophical assessment of leading theory-based, evidence-based and coherentist approaches to the definition and the measurement of well-being. It then builds on this assessment to articulate a reformed division of labor for the science of well-being and argues that this reformed division of labor can improve on the proffered approaches by combining the most plausible tenets of theory-based approaches with the most plausible tenets of coherentist approaches. This result does not per se exclude the possibility that theory-based (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Duties Regarding Nature: A Kantian Environmental Ethic.Toby Svoboda - 2015 - Routledge.
    In this book, Toby Svoboda develops and defends a Kantian environmental virtue ethic, challenging the widely-held view that Kant's moral philosophy takes an instrumental view toward nature and animals and has little to offer environmental ethics. On the contrary, Svoboda posits that there is good moral reason to care about non-human organisms in their own right and to value their flourishing independently of human interests, since doing so is constitutive of certain virtues. Svoboda argues that Kant’s account of indirect duties (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • Which Problem of Adaptation?Willem van der Deijl - 2017 - Utilitas 29 (4):474-492.
    One widespread argument against the efficacy of subjective well-being as a measure of well-being is the adaptation problem as formulated by Sen and Nussbaum: the phenomenon that people may adapt to deprivation and find satisfaction or happiness in objectively bad circumstances. It is not generally noticed that there are two distinct arguments for why the phenomenon of adaptation is a problem for subjective well-being as a measure of well-being. The Axiological Adaptation Argument is a counter-example to theories of well-being that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • Fit and Well-Being.Teresa Bruno-Niño - 2024 - Utilitas 36 (1):16-34.
    In this paper, I argue for Fit, a prudential version of the claim that attitudes must fit their objects, the claim that there is an extra benefit when one's reactions fit their objects. I argue that Fit has surprising and powerful consequences for theories of well-being. Classic versions of the objective list theory, hedonism, desire views, and loving-the-good theories do not accommodate Fit. Suitable modifications change some of the views substantially. Modified views give reactions a robust role as sources of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • The Role of Pleasure in Well-Being.Ben Bramble - 2015 - In Guy Fletcher (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Well-Being. New York,: Routledge.
    What is the role of pleasure in determining a person’s well-being? I start by considering the nature of pleasure (i.e., what pleasure is). I then consider what factors, if any, can affect how much a given pleasure adds to a person’s lifetime well-being other than its degree of pleasurableness (i.e., how pleasurable it is). Finally, I consider whether it is plausible that there is any other way to add to somebody’s lifetime well-being than by giving him some pleasure or helping (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Sourcing Stability in a Time of Climate Change.Kenneth Shockley & Andrew Light - 2014 - Environmental Values 23 (2):199-217.
    Anthropogenic climate change poses a direct and imminent threat to the stability of modern society. Recent reports of the probable consequences of climate change paint a grim picture; they describe a world environmentally much less stable than the world to which we have become accustomed. As we begin to adapt to our changing climate, we will need to identify new sources for the stability necessary for a flourishing society. I suggest that this stability should come from the ideals of the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  • Beauty, The Social Network.Dominic McIver Lopes - 2017 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 47 (4):437-453.
    Aesthetic values give agents reasons to perform not only acts of contemplation, but also acts like editing, collecting, and conserving. Moreover, aesthetic agents rarely operate solo: they conduct their business as integral members of networks of other aesthetic agents. The consensus theory of aesthetic value, namely that an item’s aesthetic value is its power to evoke a finally valuable experience in a suitable spectator, can explain neither the range of acts performed by aesthetic agents nor the social contexts in which (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Well-being and virtue.Dan Haybron - 2007 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 2 (2):1-28.
    Perfectionist views of well-being maintain that well-being ultimately consists, at least partly, in excellence or virtue. This paper argues that such views are untenable, focusing on Aristotelian perfectionism. The argument appeals, first, to intuitive counterexamples to perfectionism. A second worry is that it seems impossible to interpret perfection in a manner that yields both a plausible view of well-being and a strong link between morality and well-being. Third, perfectionist treatments of pleasure are deeply implausible. Fourth, perfectionism rests on a misunderstanding (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  • Can science help discover the nature of well-being?Antonin Broi - 2025 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 47 (1):1-20.
    In recent years the study of well-being has attracted considerable attention, fostering hope that the scientific community will ultimately succeed in discovering its very nature, thereby emulating successful scientific projects in other disciplines. However, there have been recurring worries about how to measure and define well-being. In this context, Hersch (Br J Philos Sci 73:1045–1065, 2022) has recently argued that we could progressively alleviate these worries through an iterative dialogue between theory and measurement, by seeing them as stemming from a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Une défense de l'hédonisme axiologique.Antonin Broi - 2022 - Dialogue 61 (2):325-346.
    L'hédonisme axiologique a une longue histoire en philosophie. Pourtant, il garde une mauvaise réputation qui lui vaut d’être parfois écarté sans ménagement de la discussion philosophique. Cet article se propose de défendre l'hédonisme axiologique en exposant les principaux arguments en sa faveur et en répondant aux principales critiques et confusions dont il fait l'objet. Une attention particulière sera portée aux arguments établissant la spécificité du plaisir et du déplaisir par rapport à toutes les autres choses — amitié, savoir, justice, etc. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Decision Sciences and the New Case for Paternalism: Three Welfare-Related Justificatory Challenges.Roberto Fumagalli - 2016 - Social Choice and Welfare 47 (2):459-480.
    Several authors have recently advocated a so-called new case for paternalism, according to which empirical findings from distinct decision sciences provide compelling reasons in favour of paternalistic interference. In their view, the available behavioural and neuro-psychological findings enable paternalists to address traditional anti-paternalistic objections and reliably enhance the well-being of their target agents. In this paper, I combine insights from decision-making research, moral philosophy and evidence-based policy evaluation to assess the merits of this case. In particular, I articulate and defend (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • Measurement Scepticism, Construct Validation, and Methodology of Well-Being Theorising.Victor Lange & Thor Grünbaum - 2023 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10.
    Precise measurements of well-being would be of profound societal importance. Yet, the sceptical worry that we cannot use social science instruments and tests to measure well-being is widely discussed by philosophers and scientists. A recent and interesting philosophical argument has pointed to the psychometric procedures of construct validation to address this sceptical worry. The argument has proposed that these procedures could warrant confidence in our ability to measure well-being. The present paper evaluates whether this type of argument succeeds. The answer (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • The Problem of Evil in Virtual Worlds.Brendan Shea - 2017 - In Mark Silcox (ed.), Experience Machines: The Philosophy of Virtual Worlds. London: Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 137-155.
    In its original form, Nozick’s experience machine serves as a potent counterexample to a simplistic form of hedonism. The pleasurable life offered by the experience machine, its seems safe to say, lacks the requisite depth that many of us find necessary to lead a genuinely worthwhile life. Among other things, the experience machine offers no opportunities to establish meaningful relationships, or to engage in long-term artistic, intellectual, or political projects that survive one’s death. This intuitive objection finds some support in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Can desire-satisfaction alienate our good?Willem van der Deijl - 2023 - Journal of Value Inquiry 57 (4):687-700.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Classic Hedonism Reconsidered.Vivian Feldblyum - 2024 - Utilitas 36 (3):193-210.
    Few views have seen a more precipitous fall from grace than hedonism, which once occupied a central position in the history of ethics. Recently, there have been efforts to revive interest in the view, including well-motivated pleas for contemporary ethicists to at least take the view seriously. In this article, I argue for the seriousness of hedonism on metaethical grounds. Taking J.S. Mill's argument for hedonism as a test case, I show that historically, classic hedonism was grounded metaethically via a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • What's Wrong with the Experience Machine?Christopher Belshaw - 2012 - European Journal of Philosophy 22 (4):573-592.
    Nozick's thought experiment is less effective than is often believed. Certainly, there could be reasons to enter the machine. Possibly, life there might be among the best of all those available. Yet we need to distinguish between two versions. On the first, I retain my beliefs, memories, dispositions, some knowledge. On the second, all these too are determined by the scientists. Nozick alludes to both versions. But only on the first will machine life have appeal.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Scaling Happiness.Jelle de Boer - 2014 - Philosophical Psychology 27 (5):703-718.
    This paper focuses on a particular method which is used in contemporary empirical happiness studies, namely measuring people’s happiness by scoring their emotions (Kahneman is a prominent scholar). I examine the presupposition in this field that emotion scores can be added or subtracted, that throughout affective space runs a straight axis that plots hedonic tone or pleasure.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations