Desire satisfactionists are united by their belief that what makes someone well-off is the satisfaction of their desires. But this commitment obscures a number of underlying differences, since there are several theoretical choice points on the way to making this commitment precise. This article is about two of the most important choice points. The first concerns an epistemic requirement on well-being. Suppose that one's desire that P is satisfied. Must one also know (or believe, or justifiably believe) that one's desire (...) that P is satisfied in order to benefit from P? If so, there is an epistemic requirement on well-being. The second concerns the time at which one benefits. Well-being is a temporal phenomenon: given that one benefits from the satisfaction of one's desire that P, when does one benefit? Perhaps one benefits at the times at which one desires P, or the times at which P obtains, or both. I defend a view I call “concurrent awareness desire satisfactionism”: one benefits only at times at which both one desires P and P obtains (concurrence) and one benefits only if one is aware that one's desire is satisfied (awareness). I motivate this view by showing how it gives us solutions to many of the canonical problems facing desire satisfactionism. Then I put the two parts of the view together and explore some of its further implications. Ultimately, I conclude that well-being is an organic unity composed of a desiderative component, an epistemic component, and a worldly component, none of which are valuable on their own, but which are valuable when they are related in the right way. (shrink)

Many philosophers reject the view that well-being over a lifetime is simply an aggregation of well-being at every moment of one's life, and thus they reject theories of well-being like hedonism and concurrentist desire satisfactionism. They raise concerns that such a view misses the importance of the relationships between moments in a person's life or the role narratives play in a person's well-being. In this article, we develop an atomist meta-theory of well-being, according to which the prudential value of a (...) life depends solely on the prudential value of each moment of that life. This is a general account of momentary well-being that can capture different features of well-being that standard atomistic accounts fail to capture, thus allowing for the possibility of an atomism that is compatible with a variety of well-being theories. Contrary to many criticisms leveled against momentary well-being, this well-being atomism captures all of the important features of well-being. (shrink)

Temporal nihilism is the view that our lives won’t matter after we die. According to the standard interpretation, this is because our lives won’t make a permanent difference. Many who consider the view thus reject it by denying that our lives need to have an eternal impact. However, in this paper, I develop a different formulation of temporal nihilism revolving around the persistence of personal value itself. According to this stronger version, we do not have personal value after death, so (...) our past life no longer has wellbeing after we die. The standard objections to the standard interpretation don’t apply to this more nihilistic nihilism. I offer a new response according to which personal value persists after death because the person continues to exist. (shrink)

This dissertation argues that the desire satisfaction theory, arguably the dominant theory of well-being at present, fails to explain why depression is bad for a person. People with clinical depression desire almost nothing, but the few desires they do have are almost all satisfied. So it appears the theory must say these people are relatively well-off. A number of possible responses on behalf of the theory are considered, and I argue that each response either fails outright, or requires modifications to (...) the desire satisfaction theory which make the theory unattractive for other reasons. Advisors: Joseph Mendola and John Brunero. (shrink)

The shape of a life hypothesis holds that the temporal sequence of good or bad times in a life can itself be a valuable feature of that life. This is generally thought to be incompatible with additivism about lifetime well-being, which holds that lifetime well-being is fully determined by momentary well-being. This paper examines Dale Dorsey’s recent argument that these views are in fact compatible. I argue that accepting the conjunction of these views requires stronger commitments than Dorsey recognizes. After (...) arguing that these commitments are problematic, I conclude that we should reject the compatibility claim. (shrink)

This article addresses three questions about well-being. First, is well-being future-sensitive? I.e., can present well-being depend on future events? Second, is well-being recursively dependent? I.e., can present well-being depend on itself? Third, can present and future well-being be interdependent? The third question combines the first two, in the sense that a yes to it is equivalent to yeses to both the first and second. To do justice to the diverse ways we contemplate well-being, I consider our thought and discourse about (...) well-being in three domains: everyday conversation, social science, and philosophy. This article’s main conclusion is that we must answer the third question with no. Present and future well-being cannot be interdependent. The reason, in short, is that a theory of well-being that countenances both future-sensitivity and recursive dependence would have us understand a person’s well-being at a time as so intricately tied to her well-being at other times that it would not make sense to consider her well-being an aspect of her state at particular times. It follows that we must reject either future-sensitivity or recursive dependence. I ultimately suggest, especially in light of arguments based on assumptions of empirical research on well-being, that the balance of reasons favors rejecting future-sensitivity. (shrink)

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, (...) I aim to highlight that these are not mere notational variants, but in fact have quite different implications, so that this distinction is not one that the theorist of prudential value should ignore. More positively, I argue that the object view is better able to capture what is distinctive and appealing about subjective theories of prudential value, on any plausible account of what the central subjectivist insight is. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I argue that all extant theories of prudential value are either a) enumeratively deficient, in that they are unable to accommodate everything that, intuitively, is a basic constituent of prudential value, b) explanatorily deficient, in that they are at least sometimes unable to offer a plausible story about what makes a given thing prudentially valuable, or c) both. In response to the unsatisfactory state of the literature, I present my own account, the Disjunctive Hybrid Theory or DHT. (...) DHT answers to and remedies each of the above inadequacies in a way that no other approach can. This account has the following general structure:Disjunctive Hybrid Theory (DHT): Thing x is basically good for person P if and only if x is either a) cared about (sufficiently and in the right way) by P, b) a bearer of (the right kind of) attitude-independent value, or c) both.Although it follows other recent accounts in combining elements from objective and subjective theories, DHT is a hybrid theory of a quite new kind. This is because it denies both subjective necessity (the constraint that, if thing x is to be basically good for person P, P must have some pro-attitude toward x) and objective necessity (the constraint that, if thing x is to be basically good for person P, x must have some attitude-independent value). I argue that the rejection of both necessity claims is called for if we are to move beyond the enumerative and explanatory limitations of existing accounts.I begin by outlining the general structure of DHT. I then argue, against various recent authors, that desire-satisfactionism remains the most appealing subjectivist approach to prudential value, in that it is best able to capture the central subjectivist insight. This insight is that a person can confer prudential value upon things by caring about them (sufficiently and in the right way). The subjectivist strand of DHT will thus be a version of desire-satisfactionism, which must be interpreted in line with what I call the object, as opposed to the combo, view. I move on to further motivate and develop the second, objectivist strand of DHT. This part of the theory involves a commitment to robustly attitude-independent prudential goods. I close by addressing some puzzles for the theory, and considering some of its more specific applications. (shrink)

The philosophical study of well-being concerns what makes lives good for their subjects. It is now standard among philosophers to distinguish between two kinds of well-being: - lifetime well-being, i.e., how good a person's life was for him or her considered as a whole, and - temporal well-being, i.e., how well off someone was, or how they fared, at a particular moment in time or over a period of time longer than a moment but shorter than a whole life, say, (...) a day, month, year, or chapter of a life. Many theories have been offered of each of these kinds of well-being. A common view is that lifetime well-being is in some way constructed out of temporal well-being. This book argues that much of this literature is premised on a mistake. Lifetime well-being cannot be constructed out of temporal well-being, because there is no such thing as temporal well-being. The only genuine kind of well-being is lifetime well-being. The Passing of Temporal Well-Being will prove essential reading for professional philosophers, especially in moral and political philosophy. It will also be of interest to welfare economists and policy-makers who appeal to well-being. (shrink)

Explains the desire-fulfillment theory of well-being, its history, its development, its varieties, its advantages, and its challenges.

The shape of a life hypothesis holds, very roughly, that lives are better when they have an upward, rather than downward, slope in terms of momentary well-being. This hypothesis is plausible and has been thought to cause problems for traditional principles of prudential value/rationality. In this article, I conduct an inquiry into the shape of a life hypothesis that addresses two crucial questions. The first question is: what is the most plausible underlying explanation of the significance of a life’s shape? (...) The second question is: given its most plausible explanation, what does the shape of a life hypothesis teach us about the nature of prudential value? (shrink)

Many have offered accounts of the procreative asymmetry, the claim that one has no moral reason to create a life just because it would be happy, but one has moral reason not to create a life just because it would be miserable. I suggest a new approach. Instead of looking at the procreative asymmetry on its own, we can situate it within a broader landscape of asymmetries. Specifically, there are two other analogous asymmetries in the prudential and epistemic domains. The (...) prudential asymmetry says that one has no prudential reason to acquire a desire just because it would be satisfied, but one has prudential reason not to acquire a desire just because it would be frustrated. The epistemic asymmetry says that one has no epistemic reason to acquire a belief just because it is true, but one has epistemic reason not to acquire a belief just because it is false. The existence of these analogous asymmetries in these normative domains suggests the possibility of a unified account of all three asymmetries as instances of a more fundamental asymmetry of value-based reasons. This paper develops a working model of what such a unified account might look like. Such an account can give us a unified explanation of a variety of phenomena, reinforce the plausibility of each of these asymmetries, and give us a novel picture of how value gives us reasons that might extend beyond these three applications. (shrink)

According to internalism about prudential value, the token states of affairs that are basically good for you must be suitably connected, under the proper conditions, to your positive attitudes. It is commonly thought that any theory of welfare that implies internalism is guaranteed to respect the alienation constraint, the doctrine that you cannot be alienated from that which is basically good for you. The assumption is that because internalism requires a necessary connection between a subject’s positive attitudes and each state (...) of basic benefit to that subject, theories that imply internalism will only postulate goods that resonate with the subject. In this paper, I show that extant formulations of internalism do not have this desirable feature. The central defect of traditional formulations is that they do not respect an important but overlooked truth about alienation: namely, that even if a state of affairs is suitably connected to your positive attitudes, your negative attitudes can nonetheless render you alienated from it. By taking into account the relevance of the negative attitudes, I propose the new internalism—the view that x is basically good for you only if you have a net positive attitude towards it—as a way to advance our thinking about what is required to avoid alienating theories of welfare. (shrink)

How does good combine with bad? Most creatures are neither so blessed as to only enjoy good nor so cursed as to only suffer bad. Rather, the good and bad they receive throughout their lives combine to produce their overall quality of life. But it’s not just whole lives that have combined good and bad. Many stretches within contain both positive and negative occurrences whose value is joined to form the overall quality of that span of time. In a single (...) morning someone might wake up, brush their teeth, stub their toe groggily lumbering down the stairs, and have a sip of coffee that’s tasty but so hot they burn their tongue. These events are good and bad for them to various degrees, and their value comes together to form an overall value for them of that morning. A single moment, even, can have combined value from distinct pockets of good and bad that occur simultaneously. The tastiness of the coffee is good, but the pain of the heat is bad. They combine to form an overall value of the sipping moment – negative if the pain outweighed the flavor. Thus, wellbeing and illbeing combine. But how? How can someone rightly chastise themselves for sipping the overly hot coffee when it was, in fact, good because it was tasty? To pose the question starkly, a life can be bad, even so bad to not be worth living, and yet it can have many instances of good, where these goods are, in themselves, pure of any negativity. But how can good make something bad? (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)

This paper considers a new problem for desire theories of well-being. The problem claims that these theories are implausible because they misvalue the effects of fleeting desires, long-standing desires, and fluctuations in desire strength on well-being. I begin by investigating a version of the desire theory of well-being, simple concurrentism, that fails to capture intuitions in these cases. I then argue that desire theories of well-being that are suitably stability-adjusted can avoid this problem. These theories claim that the average strength (...) of a desire, and the length of time that it is held, both influence the extent to which its fulfilment or frustration affects well-being. I end by considering whether value-fulfilment theories of well-being have a more attractive response to this problem. I find that these theories have significant downsides that make them unappealing alternatives. (shrink)

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 (...) the century. (shrink)

The philosophical literature on well-being and the good life contains very little explicit discussion of what makes for a better or worse death. The purpose of this essay is to highlight some commonly held views about the good death and investigate whether these views are recognized by the leading theories of well-being. While the most widely discussed theories do have implications about what constitutes a good death, they seem unable to fully accommodate these popular good death views. I offer two (...) partial explanations for why these views have been neglected in discussions of well-being and make two corresponding recommendations for future work in the philosophy of well-being. (shrink)

Can a person’s degree of wellbeing be affected by things that do not enter her experience? Experientialists deny that it can, extra-experientialists affirm it. The debate between these two positions has focused on an argument against experientialism—the experience machine objection—but few arguments exist for it. I present an argument for experientialism. It builds on the claim that theories of wellbeing should not only state what constitutes wellbeing, but also which entities are welfare subjects. Moreover, the claims it makes about these (...) two issues should have a certain coherence with each other. I argue that if we accept a particular plausible answer to the second question—namely that all and only sentient beings are welfare subjects—extra-experientialist theories face a problem of coherence. While this problem can typically be solved, doing so will involve steps that are unattractive. On experientialist theories, on the other hand, the answer to these questions cohere perfectly. (shrink)

It is widely accepted by philosophers of well‐being that the shape or narrative structure of a life is a significant determinant of its overall welfare value. Most arguments for this thesis posit agent‐independent value in certain life shapes. The desire theory of well‐being, I argue, has all of the resources needed to account for the value that many philosophers have identified in lives with certain shapes. The theory denies that there is any agent‐independent value in shapes and, indeed, allows that (...) there can be both agent‐dependent value and agent‐dependent disvalue in the shapes commonly claimed to hold agent‐independent value. (shrink)

An important platitude about prudential rationality is that I should not refuse to sacrifice a smaller amount of present welfare for the sake of larger future benefits. I ought, in other words, to treat my present and future as of equal prudential significance. The demands of prudence are less clear, however, when it comes to one’s past selves. In this paper, I argue that past benefits are possible in two ways, and that this fact cannot be easily accommodated by traditional (...) approaches to prudential rationality. Against univocal accounts of prudential rationality, I hold that the possibility of past benefits suggests that a bias toward the present and future is defensible when it comes to some welfare goods, but that prudential reasons are temporally neutral between when it comes to the success or failure of one’s long-term projects. (shrink)

This article argues that a person’s well-being at a time and the goodness of her life are two distinct values. It is commonly accepted as platitudinous that well-being is what makes a life good for the person who lives it. Even philosophers who distinguish between well-being at a time and the goodness of a life still typically assume that increasing a person’s well-being at some particular moment, all else equal, necessarily improves her life on the whole. I develop a precise (...) statement of this standard assumption, and then show that it is subject to counterexamples. The possibility of such counterexamples depends only on premises similar to those sometimes invoked to argue that a person’s well-being over a long period is not simply the aggregate well-being of the shorter periods that compose the long period. The refutation of the standard assumption linking well-being and life-goodness entails that these are distinct and sometimes divergent values. As an alternative to the standard assumption, it is proposed that well-being is best understood as an ingredient in a good life. (shrink)

It is commonly thought that subjectivists about welfare must claim that the favorable attitudes whose satisfaction is relevant to your well-being are those that you would have in idealized conditions (e.g. ones in which you are fully informed and rational). I argue that this is false. I introduce a non-idealizing subjectivist view, Same World Subjectivism, that accommodates the two main rationales for idealizing: those given by Peter Railton and David Sobel. I also explain why a recent argument from Dale Dorsey (...) fails to show that subjectivists must idealize. Because Same World Subjectivism is a plausible non-idealizing view, subjectivists about welfare needn't idealize. (shrink)

Theories of well-being purport to identify the basic goods and bads whose presence in a person's life determines how well she is faring. Monism is the view that there is only one basic good and one basic bad. Pluralism is the view that there is either more than one basic good or more than one basic bad. In this paper, I give an argument for pluralism that is general in the sense that it does not purport to identify any basic (...) goods or bads. If I am right, then even if you cannot name a single basic good or bad, you can know that pluralism is true. (shrink)

It seems better to have a life that begins poorly and ends well than a life that begins well and ends poorly. One possible explanation is that the very shape of a life can be good or bad for us. If so, this raises a tough question: when can the shape of our lives be good or bad for us? In this essay, I present and critique an argument that the shape of a life is a non-synchronic prudential value—that is, (...) something that can be good or bad for us in a way that is not good or bad for us at any particular time. After distinguishing two interpretations of ‘the shape of a life’, I argue that the first type of shape can be good or bad for us at particular moments while the other cannot be good or bad for us at all. This suggests that the shape of a life gives us no reason to posit non-synchronic prudential values. (shrink)

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.

I argue that four-dimensionalism and the desire satisfaction account of well-being are incompatible. For every person whose desires are satisfied, there will be many shorter-lived individuals (‘person-stages’ or ‘subpersons’) who share the person’s desires but who do not exist long enough to see those desires satisfied; not only this, but in many cases their desires are frustrated so that the desires of the beings in whom they are embedded as proper temporal parts may be fulfilled. I call this the frustrating (...) problem for four-dimensionalism. In the first half of the paper I lay the groundwork for understanding the frustrating problem, and then in the second half, I will examine six possible responses to the frustrating problem on behalf of the four-dimensionalist, (i) the Parfit (1984) inspired claim that identity is not what matters, (ii) the personal pronoun revisionism of Noonan (2010), (iii) the indirect concern account of Hudson (2001), (iv) the sensible stages account of Lewis (1986), (v) a multiple-concepts account of desire satisfaction, and (vi) a No Desire View according to which subpersons have no mental states and thus no desires to frustrate. I argue that none of these solutions will help the four-dimensionalist; she does better to reject the desire satisfaction theory, while the defender of the desire satisfaction theory does better to reject four-dimensionalism. (shrink)

The experience machine was traditionally thought to refute hedonism about welfare. In recent years, however, the tide has turned: many philosophers have argued not merely that the experience machine doesn't rule out hedonism, but that it doesn't count against it at all. I argue for a moderate position between those two extremes: although the experience machine doesn't decisively rule out hedonism, it provides us with some reason to reject it. I also argue for a particular way of using the experience (...) machine to argue against hedonism – one that appeals directly to intuitions about the welfare values of experientially identical lives rather than to claims about what we value or claims about whether we would, or should, plug into the machine. The two issues are connected: the conviction that the experience machine leaves hedonism unscathed is partly due to neglect of the best way to use the experience machine. (shrink)

Desire satisfaction theories of well-being and deprivationism about the badness of death face similar problems: desire satisfaction theories have trouble locating the time when the satisfaction of a future or past-directed desire benefits a person; deprivationism has trouble locating a time when death is bad for a person. I argue that desire satisfaction theorists and deprivation theorists can address their respective timing problems by accepting fusionism, the view that some events benefit or harm individuals only at fusions of moments in (...) time. Fusionism improves on existing solutions to the timing problem for deprivationism because it locates death’s badness at the same time as both the victim of death and death itself, and it accounts for all of the ways that death is bad for a person. Fusionism improves on existing solutions to the problem of temporally locating the benefit of future and past-directed desires because it respects several attractive principles, including the view that the intrinsic value of a time for someone is determined solely by states of affairs that obtain at that time and the view that intrinsically beneficial events benefit a person when they occur. (shrink)

According to a subjectivist theory, normative reasons are grounded in facts about our desires. According to an instrumentalist theory, reasons are grounded also in facts about the relevant means to desired objects. These are distinct theories. The widespread tendency to conflate the normativity of subjective and instrumentalist precepts obscures two facts. First, instrumentalist precepts incorporate a subjective element with an objective one. Second, combining these elements into a single theory of normative reasons requires explaining how and why they are to (...) be combined. I argue that the most plausible justification for combining the two elements—which appeals to a theory of well‐being—exposes the inadequacy of the instrumentalist theory: The grounds required to justify the instrumentalist combination are also grounds for the normativity of prudential precepts and with them practical reasons that may have no internal connection to an agent's conative, motivational states. (shrink)

The fact that our attitudes change poses well-known challenges for attitude-sensitive wellbeing theories. Suppose that in the past you favoured your adventurous youthful life more than the quiet and unassuming life you expected to live as an old person; now when you look back you favour your current life more than your youthful past life. Which period of your life is better for you? More generally, how can we find a stable attitude-sensitive standard of wellbeing, if the standard is in (...) part defined in terms of unstable attitudes? In this paper, I introduce an ‘attitudinal matrix’ framework that will help us clear up the problems posed by changing attitudes across time. In particular, it will help us see what is at stake, which principles that can or cannot be combined, and what might be the best solution. I defend a very plausible candidate constraint on a solution to the challenge of changing attitudes, which I call ‘diagonalism’. It is argued that among the three main forms of substantive attitude-sensitive wellbeing theories – the attitude-version, the object-version, and the satisfaction-version – it is the satisfaction-version that can both satisfy diagonalism and provide the best account of temporal and lifetime wellbeing. (shrink)

According to a desire-satisfaction theory of well-being, the satisfaction of one’s desires is what promotes one’s well-being. Against this, it is frequently objected that some desires are beyond the pale of well-being relevance, for example: the desire to count blades of grass, the desire to collect dryer lint and the desire to make handwritten copies of War and Peace, to name a few. I argue that the satisfaction of such desires – I call them “quirky” desires – does indeed contribute (...) to a desirer’s well-being, when (and only when) the desirer is able to provide what Anscombe calls a desirability characterization of the object of the desire. One successfully provides such a characterization when one is able to describe the object of desire in such a way as to make comprehensible to others what she sees as positive, worthy of pursuit, in that object. To make the case, I consider common desires such as the desires to take a walk on the beach, drink a beer or listen to music. I argue that, although the well-being relevance of such common desires normally is not questioned, their satisfactions contribute to well-being just in case the same condition is met. I then argue by analogy with common desires that quirky desires are also relevant to well-being just in case that condition is met. After sketching this solution to the problem of quirky desires, I show that this response is better than other responses that have been given by desire theorists. I then develop several aspects of this account in response to objections that can be raised against it. Among these (to name a few) are the objection that my account does not apply to the well-being of infants and other inarticulate persons; the objection that intrinsic desires, such as for pleasure, cannot be given desirability characterizations; and the objection that desirability characterizations must advert to pleasure or to objectively good properties of the object of desire, so that my account reduces either to hedonism or to an objective view of well-being. (shrink)

We can imagine agents who would have the moral status to demand contractualist justification but still lack an especially strong claim against interference. In contrast, agents who can conceive of their lives in a temporally unified way have a distinctive, strong interest in non‐interference. This contrast helps illuminate the moral importance of self‐authorship. The upshot is that ordinary persons have a more general and less variable right against interference than is often supposed. Self‐authorship can also help appreciate the sense in (...) which the value of persons may be characterized as ‘self‐existent’. (shrink)

Wellbeing describes how good life is for the person living it. Wellbeing comes in degrees. Subjective theories of wellbeing maintain that for objects or states of affairs to benefit us, we need to have a positive attitude towards these objects or states of affairs: the Resonance Constraint. In this article, we investigate to what extent subjectivism can plausibly account for degrees of wellbeing. There is a vast literature on whether preference-satisfaction theory – one particular subjective theory – can account for (...) degrees of wellbeing. This is generally taken to be problematic. However, other subjective theories – namely, desire-satisfaction, judgment- and value-fulfillment theories – do not suffer from the same difficulties. We introduce two models of degrees of wellbeing a subjectivist can employ: the Relative and the Absolute Model, and defend the claim that both models face difficulties. In particular, we argue that a subjectivist theory should describe instances of depression as instances of low degrees of wellbeing. We also argue that a reduction of desires may sometimes improve one’s degree of wellbeing, an idea we call the Epicurean Intuition. We then argue that the Relative Model fails to account for the disbenefit of certain types of depression, while the Absolute Model fails to meet a central commitment of subjectivism – the Resonance Constraint – and is unable to accommodate the Epicurean Intuition. The upshot of the paper is that subjectivist theories cannot account for degrees of well-being in a plausible way. (shrink)

Subjectivism about well-being holds that an object contributes to one's well-being to the extent that one has a pro-attitude toward this object under certain conditions. Most subjectivists have contended that these conditions should be ideal. One reason in favor of this idea is that when people adapt their pro-attitudes to situations of oppression, the levels of well-being they may attain is diminished. Nevertheless, I first argue that appealing to idealized conditions of autonomy or any other condition to erase or replace (...) adaptive pro-attitudes is mistaken. Second, I show that the most natural version of subjectivism that does not appeal to any such idealizing condition can explain why the well-being of people having adaptive pro-attitudes should not be restricted to the fulfillment of these pro-attitudes. In sum, the existence of adaptive preferences does not militate in favor of the introduction of conditions of idealization but against it. (shrink)

This article explores the role of desires in the ethics of deception. The argument concentrates on intrinsic desires not to have false beliefs and on the resulting role of false beliefs as building-blocks, not just causes, of harm. If there is a duty of beneficence at all and desire fulfilment is at least a component of welfare, there is often a direct wrongness in causing a false belief.

Hyperagency objections appeal to the risk that cognitive enhancement may negatively impact our well-being by giving us too much control. I charitably formulate and engage with a prominent version of this objection due toSandel (2009)—viz., that cognitive enhancement may negatively impact our well-being by creating an “explosion” of responsibilities. I first outline why this worry might look prima facie persuasive, and then I show that it can ultimately be defended against. At the end of the day, if we are to (...) resist cognitive enhancement, it should not be based on a Sandel-style hyperagency argument. (shrink)

Stéphane Lemaire | : Subjectivists about well-being claim that an object is good for someone if and only if this individual holds a certain type of pro-attitude toward this object. In this paper, I focus on the dispute among subjectivists that opposes those who think that the relevant pro-attitudes are actual to those who think that they are counterfactual under some idealized conditions. My main claim is that subjectivism should be stringently actualist, though our actual pro-attitudes may be criticized from (...) an intrinsic perspective. To defend this claim, I first present three desiderata that a subjectivist theory of well-being should fulfil. Two of these desiderata result from the fact that a subjectivist theory of well-being should not be implicitly paternalist, while the other is that it should be able to play a normative role. I then show that several actualist theories that introduce light forms of idealization or other conditions that have a similar aim, fail to satisfy at least one of the antipaternalist desiderata. This gives some legitimacy to a very stringent version of actualism. I then describe three features of the kind of stringent actualism that I want to defend, which will explain the ability of what is good for someone to play its normative role. Finally, I show how these features allow us to deal with the classic objection that the objects of actual “defective attitudes” cannot be good for the holder of these pro-attitudes. | : Les subjectivistes à propos du bien-être soutiennent qu’un objet est bon pour un individu si et seulement si cet individu possède un certain type d’attitude positive à l’égard de cet objet. Dans cet article, je me concentre sur le débat à l’intérieur du camp subjectiviste qui oppose ceux qui pensent que les attitudes positives pertinentes sont actuelles à ceux qui pensent qu’elles sont contrefactuelles sous une condition d’idéalisation. Ma thèse principale est que le subjectivisme devrait être rigoureusement actualiste bien que nos attitudes positives actuelles puissent être critiquées d’un point de vue qui leur est interne. Afin de défendre cette position, je présente d’abord trois desiderata qu’une théorie subjectiviste du bien-être devrait satisfaire. Deux de ces desiderata résultent du fait qu’une théorie subjectiviste du bien-être ne devrait pas être implicitement paternaliste, alors que le troisième résulte de ce qu’elle devrait pouvoir jouer un rôle normatif. Je montre ensuite que plusieurs théories actualistes qui introduisent des formes modestes d’idéalisation ou d’autres conditions ayant la même visée échouent à satisfaire au moins un des desiderata anti-paternalistes. Une version très rigoureuse de l’actualisme subjectiviste s’en trouve ainsi légitimée. Je décris ensuite les trois aspects de l’actualisme rigoureux que je souhaite défendre et qui permettront d’expliquer dans quelle mesure ce qui est bon pour un individu peut jouer un rôle normatif. Enfin, je montre comment ces aspects nous permettent de répondre à l’objection classique selon laquelle les objets d’« attitudes défectives » actuelles ne peuvent être bons pour ceux qui ont ces attitudes. (shrink)

Preference-based theories of prudential value seem to generate an absurd result when combined with commonplace platitudes about prudential rationality: it would seem that if the satisfaction of our preferences is the source (or even a source) of prudential value, then prudential rationality must be neutral (in, at least, a troubling range of cases) between taking steps to achieve the objects of one's preferences and merely engineering one's preferences to take as their object(s) that which obtains. Either way, one seems to (...) conform to the prudential demand to promote one's well-being. But this is widely held to be counterintuitive. In this article, I argue that this verdict arises only given eminently controvertible interpretations of a preference-based axiology and of the constitution of prudential reasons. (shrink)