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  1. The psychologically rich life.Lorraine L. Besser & Shigehiro Oishi - 2020 - Philosophical Psychology 33 (8):1053-1071.
    This paper introduces the notion of a “psychologically rich life”: a life characterized by complexity, in which people experience a variety of interesting things, and feel and appreciate a variety of deep emotions via firsthand experiences or vicarious experiences. A psychologically rich life can be contrasted with a boring and monotonous life, in which one feels a singular emotion or feels that their lives are defined by routines that just aren’t that interesting. Our discussion considers how it is that the (...)
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  • Deservingness Transfers.Knut Olav Skarsaune - 2020 - Utilitas 32 (2):209-218.
    This article seeks to cause trouble for a brand of consequentialism known as ‘desertarianism’. In somewhat different ways, views of this kind evaluate outcomes more favourably, other things equal, the better the fit between the welfare different people enjoy and the welfare they each deserve. These views imply that we can improve outcomes by redistributing welfare to fit desert, which seems plausible enough. Unfortunately, they also imply that we can improve outcomes by redistributing desert to fit welfare: in other words, (...)
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  • 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 (...)
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  • Suffering Pains.Olivier Massin - 2019 - In Michael S. Brady, David Bain & Jennifer Corns (eds.), Philosophy of Suffering: Metaphysics, Value, and Normativity. London: Routledge. pp. 76-100.
    The paper aims at clarifying the distinctions and relations between pain and suffering. Three negative theses are defended: 1. Pain and suffering are not identical. 2. Pain is not a species of suffering, nor is suffering a species of pain, nor are pain and suffering of a common (proximate) genus. 3. Suffering cannot be defined as the perception of a pain’s badness, nor can pain be defined as a suffered bodily sensation. Three positive theses are endorsed: 4. Pain and suffering (...)
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  • 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 (...)
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  • Good and Good For You: An Affect Theory of Happiness.Laura Sizer - 2010 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 80 (1):133-163.
    Philosophers tended to identify happiness with either subjective psychological states or conditions (feelings, emotions or a set of judgments), or with the objective conditions of a life—how well the life is going for the person living it. Each approach captures different but important features of our intuitions, making it difficult to accept either a purely subjective or objective view. This has led some philosophers to suggest that these are not competing accounts of one thing, ‘happiness,’ but accounts of several different (...)
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  • Autonomy and the Moral Authority of Advance Directives.Eric Vogelstein - 2016 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 41 (5):500-520.
    Although advance directives are widely believed to be a key way to safeguard the autonomy of incompetent medical patients, significant questions exist about their moral authority. The main philosophical concern involves cases in which an incompetent patient no longer possesses the desires on which her advance directive was based. The question is, does that entail that prior expressions of medical choices are no longer morally binding? I believe that the answer is “yes.” I argue that a patient’s autonomy is not (...)
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  • Happiness in prison.Sabrina Intelisano - unknown
    In this thesis I am going to explore the relationship between happiness and imprisonment. I will discuss three theories of happiness - hedonism, life satisfaction theories and emotional states theories. I will argue that the main problem of these theories is that they take happiness to consist only of psychological states. Because of this, I will turn my attention towards those theories that evaluate happiness in terms of how well life is going for the person who is living it. I (...)
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  • Pains as reasons.Manolo Martínez - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (9):2261-2274.
    Imperativism is the view that the phenomenal character of the affective component of pains, orgasms, and pleasant or unpleasant sensory experience depends on their imperative intentional content. In this paper I canvass an imperativist treatment of pains as reason-conferring states.
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  • The State’s Duty to Ensure Children are Loved.Luara Ferracioli - 2014 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 8 (2):1-19.
    Do children have a right to be loved? An affirmative answer faces two immediate challenges: (i) a child's basic needs can be met without love, therefore a defence of such a right cannot appeal to the role of love in protecting children's most basic needs, and (ii) since love is non-voluntary, it seems that there cannot be a corresponding duty on the part of parents to love their child. In this essay, I defend an affirmative answer that overcomes both of (...)
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  • Nozick's experience machine is dead, long live the experience machine!Dan Weijers - 2014 - Philosophical Psychology 27 (4):513-535.
    Robert Nozick's experience machine thought experiment (Nozick's scenario) is widely used as the basis for a ?knockdown? argument against all internalist mental state theories of well-being. Recently, however, it has been convincingly argued that Nozick's scenario should not be used in this way because it elicits judgments marred by status quo bias and other irrelevant factors. These arguments all include alternate experience machine thought experiments, but these scenarios also elicit judgments marred by status quo bias and other irrelevant factors. In (...)
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  • Pleasure, Desire, and Oppositeness.Justin Klocksiem - 2010 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy (2):1-7.
    Why is pain the opposite of pleasure? Several theories of pleasure and pain have substantial difficulty explaining this basic feature. Theories according to which pleasure and pain are individual sensations or features of sensations have particular difficulty, since it is difficult to understand how pairs of sensations could be opposites. Some philosophers argue that the pain is the opposite of pleasure because pain and pleasure are fundamentally a matter of desire and aversion, and desire and aversion are clear opposites. I (...)
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  • Unprincipled Ethics.Gerald Dworkin - 1995 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 20 (1):224-239.
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  • Welfare and Posthumous Harm.Douglas W. Portmore - manuscript
    WHEN ONE ASSUMES, as I will, that death marks the irrevocable end to one’s existence, it is difficult to make sense of the idea that a person could be harmed or benefited by events that take place after her death. How could a posthumous event either enhance or diminish the welfare of the deceased, who no longer exists? Yet we find that many people have a prudential (i.e., self-interested) concern for what’s going to happen after their deaths.1 People are, for (...)
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  • Intrinsic vs. extrinsic value.Michael J. Zimmerman - 2019 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Intrinsic value has traditionally been thought to lie at the heart of ethics. Philosophers use a number of terms to refer to such value. The intrinsic value of something is said to be the value that that thing has “in itself,” or “for its own sake,” or “as such,” or “in its own right.” Extrinsic value is value that is not intrinsic.
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  • Desire satisfactionism and hedonism.Chris Heathwood - 2006 - Philosophical Studies 128 (3):539-563.
    Hedonism and the desire-satisfaction theory of welfare are typically seen as archrivals in the contest over identifying what makes one's life go best. It is surprising, then, that the most plausible form of hedonism just is the most plausible form of desire satisfactionism. How can a single theory of welfare be a version of both hedonism and desire satisfactionism? The answer lies in what pleasure is: pleasure is, in my view, the subjective satisfaction of desire. This thesis about pleasure is (...)
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  • Epistemic Normativity & Epistemic Autonomy: The True Belief Machine.Spencer Paulson - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (8):2415-2433.
    Here I will re-purpose Nozick’s (1974) “Experience Machine” thought experiment against hedonism into an argument against Veritic Epistemic Consequentialism. According to VEC, the right action, epistemically speaking, is the one that results in at least as favorable a ratio of true to false belief as any other action available. A consequence of VEC is that it would be epistemically right to outsource all your cognitive endeavors to a matrix-like “True Belief Machine” that uploads true beliefs through artificial stimulation. Rather than (...)
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  • Can we outsource all the reasons?Hrishikesh Joshi - 2022 - Philosophical Studies (12):1-16.
    Where does normativity come from? Or alternatively, in virtue of what do facts about what an agent has reason to do obtain? On one class of views, reason facts obtain in virtue of agents’ motivations. It might seem like a truism that at least some of our reasons depend on what we desire or care about. However, some philosophers, notably Derek Parfit, have convincingly argued that no reasons are grounded in this way. Typically, this latter, externalist view of reasons has (...)
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  • Utility, Progress, and Technology: Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the International Society for Utilitarian Studies.Michael Schefczyk & Christoph Schmidt-Petri (eds.) - 2021 - Karlsruhe: KIT Scientific Publishing.
    This volume collects selected papers delivered at the 15th Conference of the International Society for Utilitarian Studies, which was held at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in July 2018. It includes papers dealing with the past, present, and future of utilitarianism – the theory that human happiness is the fundamental moral value – as well as on its applications to animal ethics, population ethics, and the future of humanity, among other topics.
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  • Perfectionist Bads.Gwen Bradford - 2021 - Philosophical Quarterly 71 (3):586-604.
    Pain, failure and false beliefs all make a life worse, or so it is plausible to think. These things and possibly others seem to be intrinsically bad—no matter what further good comes of them they make a life worse pro tanto. In spite of the obvious badness, this is difficult to explain. While there are many accounts of well-being, few are up to the challenge of a univocal explanation of ill-being. Perfectionism has particular difficulty. Otherwise, it is a theory that (...)
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  • 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. (...)
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  • Normative Virtue Ethics.Rosalind Hursthouse - 1998 - In Roger Crisp (ed.), How Should One Live?: Essays on the Virtues. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 19-33.
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  • Affect, Rationalization, and Motivation.Jonathan Cohen & Matthew Fulkerson - 2014 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 5 (1):103-118.
    Recently, a number of writers have presented an argument to the effect that leading causal theories make available accounts of affect’s motivational role, but at the cost of failing to understand affect’s rationalizing role. Moreover, these writers have gone on to argue that these considerations support the adoption of an alternative (“evaluationist”) conception of pleasure and pain that, in their view, successfully explains both the motivational and rationalizing roles of affective experience. We believe that this argument from rationalization is ineffective (...)
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  • Pleasure.Leonard D. Katz - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Pleasure, in the inclusive usages most important in moral psychology, ethical theory, and the studies of mind, includes all joy and gladness — all our feeling good, or happy. It is often contrasted with similarly inclusive pain, or suffering, which is similarly thought of as including all our feeling bad. Contemporary psychology similarly distinguishes between positive affect and negative affect.[1..
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  • (1 other version)An unconnected Heap of duties?David McNaughton - 1996 - Philosophical Quarterly 46 (185):433-447.
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  • The problem of defective desires.Chris Heathwood - 2005 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 83 (4):487 – 504.
    The desire-satisfaction theory of welfare says, roughly, that one's life goes well to the extent that one's desires are satisfied. On standard 'actualist' versions of the theory, it doesn't matter what you desire. So long as you are getting what you actually want – whatever it is – things are going well for you. There is widespread agreement that these standard versions are incorrect, because we can desire things that are bad for us -– in other words, because there are (...)
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  • Can Subjectivism Account for Degrees of Wellbeing?Willem van der Deijl & Huub Brouwer - 2021 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24 (3):767-788.
    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 (...)
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  • Agency and the open question argument.Connie S. Rosati - 2003 - Ethics 113 (3):490-527.
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  • Clearing our Minds for Hedonic Phenomenalism.Lorenzo Buscicchi & Willem van der Deijl - forthcoming - Review of Philosophy and Psychology:1-16.
    What constitutes the nature of pleasure? According to hedonic phenomenalism, pleasant experiences are pleasant in virtue of some phenomenological features. According to hedonic attitudinalism, pleasure involves an attitude—a class of mental states that necessarily have an object. Consequently, pleasures are always _about_ something. We argue that hedonic attitudinalism is not able to accommodate pleasant moods. We first consider this argument more generally, and then consider what we call _the globalist strategy response_ to the possible objectless of moods, namely that pleasant (...)
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  • (1 other version)Desire-Satisfaction Theories of Welfare.Chris Heathwood - 2005 - Dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst
    Theories of welfare answer the ancient question, What makes a person's life go well? Prominent among these are desire-satisfaction or preferentist theories, according to which welfare has to do ultimately with desire. This dissertation aims to criticize some recent popular arguments against standard desire-satisfaction theories of welfare, to develop and defend a novel version of the desire-satisfaction theory capable of answering the better objections, to defend the thesis that pleasure is reducible to desire, and to demonstrate an interesting link between (...)
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  • Six theses about pleasure.Stuart Rachels - 2004 - Philosophical Perspectives 18 (1):247-267.
    I defend these claims: (1) 'Pleasure' has exactly one English antonym: 'unpleasure.' (2) Pleasure is the most convincing example of an organic unity. (3) The hedonic calculus is a joke. (4) An important type of pleasure is background pleasure. (5) Pleasures in bad company are still good. (6) Higher pleasures aren't pleasures (and if they were, they wouldn't be higher). Thesis (1) merely concerns terminology, but theses (2)-(6) are substantive, evaluative claims.
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  • Das (vermeintliche) Ungenügen des Hedonismus.Moritz Hildt - 2018 - Zeitschrift Für Ethik Und Moralphilosophie 1 (1):75-89.
    ZusammenfassungDer Hedonismus ist aus der gegenwärtigen Debatte um das gute Leben als ernstzunehmende Position nahezu verschwunden. Die dabei vorherrschende Kritiklinie wirft dem hedonistischen Ansatz ein systematisches Ungenügen vor: Er sei eine zu schlichte Theorie, um all das angemessen abbilden zu können, was ein menschliches Leben zu einem glücklich-gelungenen macht. In einer kritischen Auseinandersetzung mit zwei prominenten Fassungen dieser Kritiklinie – einerseits Carlyles Vorwurf, der Utilitarismus sei eine „Philosophie für Schweine“, und Mills Versuch einer Antwort darauf, andererseits Nozicks Gedankenexperiment der „Erlebnismaschine“ (...)
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  • Extrinsic attitudinal pleasure.Thomas A. Blackson - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 159 (2):277-291.
    I argue for an alternative interpretation of some of the examples Fred Feldman uses to establish his theory of happiness. According to Feldman, the examples show that certain utterances of the form S is pleased/glad that P and S is displeased/sad that P should be interpreted as expressions of extrinsic attitudinal pleasure and displeasure and hence must be excluded from the aggregative sum of attitudinal pleasure and displeasure that constitutes happiness. I develop a new interpretation of Feldman’s examples. My interpretation (...)
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  • Why Knowledge is Special.Shane Ryan - 2017 - Philosophy 92 (2):249-269.
    I argue against Greco's account of the value of knowledge, according to which knowledge is distinctively valuable vis-à-vis that which falls short of knowledge in virtue of its status as an achievement and achievements being finally valuable. Instead, I make the case that virtuous belief is also an achievement. I argue that the nature of knowledge is such that knowledge is finally valuable in a way that virtuous belief is not, precisely because knowledge is not simply a success from ability. (...)
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  • On the Objectivity of Welfare.Alexander F. Sarch - unknown
    This dissertation is structured in such a way as to gradually home in on the true theory of welfare. I start with the whole field of possible theories of welfare and then proceed by narrowing down the options in a series of steps. The first step, undertaken in chapter 2, is to argue that the true theory of welfare must be what I call a partly response independent theory. First I reject the entirely response independent theories because there are widely-shared (...)
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  • An Adamsian Theory of Intrinsic Value.Scott Hill - 2011 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 14 (3):273-289.
    In this paper I develop a theological account of intrinsic value drawn from some passages in Robert Merrihew Adams’ book Finite and Infinite Goods. First I explain why Adams’ work on this topic is interesting, situate his theory within the broader literature on intrinsic value, and draw attention to some of its revisionist features. Next I state the theory, raise some problems for it, and refine it in light of those problems. Then I illustrate how the refined theory works by (...)
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  • The Objectivity of Wellbeing.Matt Ferkany - 2012 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 93 (4):472-492.
    Subjective theories of wellbeing place authority concerning what benefits a person with that person herself, or limit wellbeing to psychological states. But how well off we are seems to depend on two different concerns, how well we are doing and how well things are going for us. I argue that two powerful subjective theories fail to adequately account for this and that principled arguments favoring subjectivism are unsound and poorly motivated. In the absence of more compelling evidence that how things (...)
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  • An Argument for Hedonism.Ole Martin Moen - 2016 - Journal of Value Inquiry 50 (2):267-281.
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  • An objection to attitudinal hedonism.Peter de Marneffe - 2003 - Philosophical Studies 115 (2):197 - 200.
    This article argues that attitudinal hedonism is false as atheory of what is intrinsically good for us because it impliesthat nothing is intrinsically good for someone who does nothave the psychological capacity for the propositional attitudeof enjoyment even if he has other important mental capacitiesthat humans have.
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  • Feldman on the Nature and Value of Pleasure.Michael J. Zimmerman - 2007 - Philosophical Studies 136 (3):425-437.
    Part of a book symposium on Fred Feldman's *Pleasure and the Good Life*.
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