This paper distinguishes two interpretations of G. E. Moore''s principle of organic unities, which says that the intrinsic value of a whole need not equal the sum of the intrinsic values its parts would have outside it. A holistic interpretation, which was Moore''s own, says that parts retain their values when they enter a whole but that there can be an additional value in the whole as a whole that must be added to them. The conditionality interpretation, which has been (...) defended by Korsgaard, says that parts can change their values when they enter wholes, so no additional value is needed. The paper shows that the two interpretations, which differ on such apparently important issues as the nature of intrinsic value, can always yield the same conclusions about the overall value in a state of affairs, so there is in that sense nothing to choose between them. At the same time, though, the differences between the interpretations make sometimes one and sometimes the other more appropriate for expressing a given evaluative view. In this last connection the paper considers views about beauty, posthumous achievement, vices of disproportion, deserved and compassionate pain, and undeserved and malicious pleasure. (shrink)

The students and colleagues of Roderick Chisholm admired and respected Chisholm. Many were filled not only with admiration, but with affection and gratitude for Chisholm throughout the time we knew him. Even now that he is dead, we continue to wish him well. Under the circumstances, many of us probably think that that wish amounts to no more than this: we hope that things went well for him when he lived; we hope that he had a good life.

The cosmic perspective (or view sub specie aeternitatis) is associated with concerns about the meaning of life, our significance in the universe, and the universe’s indifference. I suggest that there is another important and common, albeit tacit, concern related to the cosmic view. Adopting the cosmic view can justifiably bring about a sense of disconnection from one’s life. Moreover, many of the explicit concerns we have regarding the cosmic view are issues that have a rational bearing upon this sense of (...) disconnection. As I argue, issues concerning our normative reasons (viewed from the cosmic perspective), our cosmic significance, and the universe’s vastness and indifference all warrant a sense of disconnectedness from our lives. At least, such disconnection is warranted for the duration of our attentive engagement with the cosmic view. But in small enough doses, this can be a good thing. The cosmic view and the sense of disconnection it brings about can foster experiences of awe. Awe, in turn, can promote a greater feeling of connection to the world around us and make us, as Bertrand Russell (1935/1973) would put it, less ‘trivial’ and ‘arrogant.’. (shrink)

We sometimes face personal choices that are so momentous they appear to give rise to an intrapersonal analogue to the non-identity problem. Where the non-identity problem presents as a problem for morality, the intrapersonal analogue presents as a problem for prudence. The analogy has been explored recently by Das and Paul, and although, as this paper argues, their analysis fails—there is no intrapersonal analogue for the non-identity problem—it functions to highlight a persistent and perplexing puzzle for prudential rationality. This paper (...) offers its own explanation: namely, that the phenomena that motivate the purported intrapersonal problem are better accounted for by conceiving prudence as disjunctive. To this end, I sketch a theory of two varieties of prudence. (shrink)

Typically, philosophers analysing well-being’s nature maintain three claims. First, that well-being has essential properties. Second, that the concept of well-being circumscribes those properties. Third, that well-being theories should capture them exhaustively and exclusively. This predominant position is called well-being monism. In opposition, contextualists argue that no overarching concept of well-being referring to a universally applicable well-being standard exists. Such a standard would describe what is good, bad, and neutral, for us without qualification. Instead, well-being research is putatively about several central (...) phenomena. If several phenomena are central, a proliferation of concurrently acceptable well-being theories and operationalisations is expected. However, contextualists are challenged to explain how those analysing well-being are not systematically talking past each other. In this paper, I address that challenge. The upshot is that contextualist well-being theories can be justifiably context-sensitive and applied to tailor-made policy-making efforts. I illustrate the benefits by connecting contextualism to the capability approach. (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)

In clinical ethics, there remains a great deal of uncertainty regarding the appropriateness of attempting cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) for certain patients. Although the issue continues to receive ample attention and various frameworks have been proposed for navigating such cases, most discussions draw heavily on the notion of harm as a central consideration. In the following, I use emerging philosophical literature on the notion of harm to argue that the ambiguities and disagreement about harm create important and oft-overlooked challenges for the (...) ethics of CPR. I begin by elucidating the standard account of harm, called the Counterfactual Comparative Account (CCA). I then show that three challenges to the CCA—preemptive harms, the harm of death, and non-experiential harms—are particularly salient when assessing potential harms for candidates of CPR and likely impact-related decision-making and communication. I extend this argument to explore how the ambiguities of harm might extend to other realms of clinical decision-making, such as the use and limitations of life-sustaining treatments. To address these challenges, I propose two strategies for identifying and minimizing the impact of such uncertainty: first, clinicians and ethicists ought to promote pluralistic conversations that account for different understandings of harm; second, they ought to invoke harm-independent considerations when discussing the ethics of CPR in order to reflect the nuances of such conversations. These strategies, coupled with a richer philosophical understanding of harm, promise to help clinicians and ethicists navigate the prevalent and difficult cases involving patient resuscitation and many other harm-based decisions in the clinical setting. (shrink)

Each person has a special relation to his or her own well-being. This rough thought, which can be sharpened in different ways, is supposed to substantially count against objectivist theories on which one can intrinsically benefit from, or be harmed by, factors that are independent of one’s desires, beliefs, and other attitudes. It is often claimed, contra objectivism, that one cannot be _alienated_ from one’s own interests, or that improvements in a person’s well-being must _resonate_ with that person. However, I (...) argue that every theory of well-being must allow that we can be alienated from our own well-being, and that sophisticated objectivists can accept and make use of a resonance constraint against their opponents. (shrink)

According to 2021 data, the United States’ opt-in system of posthumous organ donation results in seventeen Americans dying each day waiting for vital organs, while many good undonated organs go to the grave with the corpse. One of the most aggressive, and compelling, proposals to resolve this tragedy is postmortem organ conscription, also called routine salvaging or organ draft. This proposal entails postmortem retrieval of needed organs, regardless of the prior authorization or refusal of the deceased or his family. The (...) argument of most proponents of conscription relies heavily upon a denial of the possibility of posthumous harms. While I also deny the possibility of posthumous harms, I argue this denial fails to acknowledge other serious wrongs that could be done to the deceased person and his corpse. While the person can no longer be harmed, his _life_, in a roughly biographical sense, can be damaged. Humans highly value life in this sense, often more than biological life. Respect for this sense of life also informs appropriate treatment of particular human corpses, which already have special value beyond mere resource. I will argue that conscription proponents fail to appropriately value lives and human corpses. This failure can lead to multiple wrongs, among them a wrongful exploitation of the vulnerability of a person’s life and corpse and a disrespect of persons. While it is possible that some biographical lives could be made better, or at least less bad, by conscription, the judgments such decisions would require make conscription bad policy. (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)

This paper argues that relations of mutual recognition (love, respect, esteem, trust) contribute directly and non-reductively to our flourishing as relational selves. -/- Love is important for the quality of human life. Not only do everyday experiences and analyses of pop culture and world literature attest to this; scientific research does as well. How exactly does love contribute to well-being? This chapter discusses the suggestion that it not only matters for the experiential quality of life, or for successful agency, but (...) that it actualizes our nature as “relational selves” (Chen, Boucher & Kraus 2011). I defend a hybrid or pluralist theory, which sees humans not only as subjects of experiences, or agents, or valuers, but also as relational selves. Expanding from love to other interpersonal relations, thriving relations of mutual recognition (love, respect, esteem, trust), contribute directly and non-reductively to our flourishing as relational selves. The paper will start by putting forward the proposal (Section 2), and then discussing it in relation to important alternatives. The focus is on alternatives which hold that love, and other forms of mutual recognition, are important for well-being, but only indirectly. One kind of challenge against the constitutive role of relations to others for well-being comes from the traditional theories that accommodate relations in some indirect ways (Section 3). A second kind of challenge admits that perhaps love is central to well-being in a direct way, but do we have reason to believe that other forms of mutual recognition are as well? (Section 4) Yet another kind of challenge is that love matters for the quality of lives in some other way than contributing to its prudential value: love is good, but is it good for us? (Section 5) A fourth kind of challenge concerns what we are, and the nature of “essentialism” involved in the approach stressing relational selfhood: cannot, say, motherhood contribute to one’s good life even if motherhood is contingent and not essential? (Section 6). In debates on recognition the idea that mutual recognition is also relevant for well-being has been put forward, for example in Axel Honneth’s (1992, ch.9 ) ”formal” theory of good life. Whatever else constitutes good life, relations of recognition form its backbone (cf. Ikäheimo 2014). Surprisingly little however is written about mutual recognition and well-being in detail, or recognition in comparison to traditional theories of well-being. This chapter aims to fill some of that void, and at the same time defend the view that well-being is one of the normative notions with which mutual recognition has a constitutive relationship. (shrink)

This paper presents a new analysis of the concept of non-instrumental need, and, using it, demonstrates how a need-satisfaction theory of well-being is much more plausible than might otherwise be supposed. Its thesis is that in at least some contexts of evaluation a central part of some persons’ well-being consists in their satisfying certain “personal needs”. Unlike common conceptions of other non-instrumental needs, which make those out to be moralised, universal, and minimal, personal needs are expansive and particular to particular (...) persons, generated rather by persons’ non-moral personal commitments. Against objections to the contrary, I show how these are genuine necessities, since unlike mere desires and freely escapable aims, personal needs constitute objective, inescapable, and non-compensable practical requirements. The personal-need-satisfaction theory of well-being combines objectivity with subject-dependence in novel ways, and motivates well-being pluralism at the level of individual agency. Implicating necessity as it does in the structure of individual well-being, this account presents a robust challenge to ethical and political theories that rely on the intrapersonal aggregation of well-being to be unproblematic. (shrink)

Does our life have value for us after we die? Despite the importance of such a question, many would find it absurd, even incoherent. Once we are dead, the thought goes, we are no longer around to have any wellbeing at all. However, in this paper I argue that this common thought is mistaken. In order to make sense of some of our most central normative thoughts and practices, we must hold that a person can have wellbeing after they die. (...) I provide two arguments for this claim on the basis of postmortem harms and benefits as well as the lasting significance of death. I suggest two ways of underwriting posthumous wellbeing. (shrink)

Determining the precise nature of the connection between preference, choice, and welfare has arguably been the central project in the field of welfare economics, which aims to offer a proper guide for economists in the making of policy decisions that affect people’s welfare. The two leading approaches here historically – the revealed preference and latent preference approaches – seem equally incapable of so guiding economists. I argue that the deadlock here is due to welfare economists’ failure to recognize a crucial (...) distinction between two senses of “preference.” I analyze and defend these senses of “preference,” and argue that each shares a close connection with just one of choice and welfare. This analysis reveals how economists should conceive of both the connections between “preference,” choice, and welfare, and the proper roles of these concepts in welfare economics. I conclude by showing this analysis to best explain the plausibility of two leading alternative approaches from Hausman and Sugden. (shrink)

Commentary on Kyle Johannsen, Wild Animal Ethics (Routledge, 2020). I want to unpack what we should understand by wild animal well-being, and how different interpretations of what matters about it shape the sorts of interventions we endorse. I will not offer a theory of wild animal well-being or even take a stance on the best approach to theories of well-being as they pertain to wild animals. My aim is to bring into view a concern that WAE has largely overlooked: agency (...) and freedom. To Johannsen’s credit, the issue of liberties does feature in his Wild Animal Ethics (2020) (36–39, 41, 47). The interventions that he favors are those that, for a given amount of harm prevention, involve fewer liberty infringements. Liberties can act, to an extent, as constraints on permissible interventions. For all that, Johannsen’s primary focus remains welfare in a sense that does not appear to give much consideration to agency. Fortunately, his approach is open-ended enough to accommodate some of my concerns. My hope is that he sees them as possible ways of specifying the duties of beneficence, if not justice, that he rightly argues we have to wild animals. (shrink)

While research on meaningfulnesss in life is becoming increasingly popular in analytic philosophy, there is still a dearth of literature on the topic of meaninglessness. This is surprising, given that a better understanding of the nature of meaninglessness may help to illuminate features of meaningfulness previously unobserved or misunderstood. Additionally, the topic of meaninglessness is interesting in its own right - independent of what it can tell us about meaningfulness. In my dissertation, I construct and defend my own conception of (...) meaninglessness. -/- I adopt Thaddeus Metz's (2013) analysis of meaninglessness presented in his new book, Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study. For Metz, meaninglessness is not the absence of meaningfulness but a positively bad state to be in - one that can detract from the overall meaningfulness of a life. I distinguish between the following: negative meaning (i.e., meaninglessness as a dis-value), positive meaning (i.e., meaningfulness), and lives that lack positive meaning. I defend a conception of negative meaning. In contrast, most conceptions of meaninglessness are conceptions of lives where positive meaning is absent. Philosophers defending these conceptions have yet to acknowledge the existence of negative meaning. I explain why conceptions of meaninglessness (as the absence of positive meaning) are inadequate and I provide support for the existence of negative meaning. (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)

Prudential hedonism is a school of thought in the philosophy of welfare that says that only pleasure is good for us in itself and only pain is bad for us in itself. This dissertation concerns an especially austere form of prudential hedonism: basic prudential hedonism (BPH). BPH claims that all pleasure is good for us in itself, and all pain is bad for us in itself, without exception; that all pleasures feel fundamentally alike, as do all pains; and that the (...) amount of welfare in a person’s life can (in principle) be calculated just by adding up the amount of pleasure it contains and subtracting the amount of pain. The dissertation presents a positive argument for the claim that pleasures and pains are defined by common phenomenal properties, defends BPH against a battery of objections, and outlines an argument for accepting BPH on the grounds that it is simpler than competing views. (shrink)

What, if anything, do we owe others as a basic minimum? Sufficiency theorists claim that we must provide everyone with enough – but, to date, few well-worked-out accounts of the sufficiency threshold exist, so it is difficult to evaluate this proposition. Previous theories do not provide plausible, independent accounts of resources, capabilities, or welfare that might play the requisite role. Moreover, I believe existing accounts do not provide nearly enough guidance for policymakers. So, this article sketches a mechanism for arriving (...) at an account of the minimally good life that can help locate the sufficiency threshold. (shrink)

There are presently two approaches to the study of well-being. Philosophers typically focus on normative theorizing, attempting to identify the things that are ultimately good for a person, while largely ignoring empirical research. The idea is that empirical attention cannot be directed to the right place without a rigorous theory. Meanwhile, social scientists typically focus on empirical research, attempting to identify the causes and consequences of well-being, while largely ignoring normative theorizing. The idea is that conceptual and theoretical clarity will (...) come with time and more data. This paper argues that neither is a good approach to the study of well-being. The traditional philosophical approach underappreciates the vital importance of empirical investigation, while the atheoretical empirical approach underappreciates the vital importance of normative theorizing. The proposed solution is to bring these methods together. Well-being research should be interdisciplinary. The paper proposes a “conceptual engineering” approach as a novel alternative. This approach involves an iterative process of normative theorizing, empirical investigation, and conceptual revision, with the aim of articulating concepts and theories of well-being that optimally suit particular interests and purposes. (shrink)

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. (...) Pluralism is a stance that explicitly drives towards accommodating and nurturing the richness and diversity of well-being, both as a concept and as an object of inquiry. We show that well-being science manifests a contingent pluralism at the level of methodology, whereas philosophy of well-being has largely rejected pluralism at the conceptual level. Recently, things have begun to change. Within philosophy, conceptual monism is under attack. But so is methodological pluralism within science. We welcome the first development, and bemoan the second. We argue that a joined-up philosophy and science of well-being should recognise the virtues of both conceptual and methodological pluralism. Philosophers should embrace the methodological justification of pluralism that can be found in the well-being sciences, and scientists should embrace the conceptual reasons to be pluralist that can be found in philosophical debate. (shrink)

According to the experience requirement on well-being, differences in subjects’ levels of welfare or well-being require differences in the phenomenology of their experiences. I explain why the two existing arguments for this requirement are not successful. Then, I introduce a more promising argument for it: that unless we accept the requirement, we cannot plausibly explain why only sentient beings are welfare subjects. I argue, however, that because the right kind of theory of well-being can plausibly account for that apparent fact (...) about welfare subjects even if the requirement is false, this argument does not succeed. I tentatively conclude that no compelling case can be made for the requirement. (shrink)

What, if anything, directly detracts from well-being? Objective list theorists affirm basic goods such as knowledge, friendship, and achievement, but it is less clear what they should say about opposing bads. In this paper, I argue that false beliefs, unhealthy relationships, and failed projects are not basic bads and do not directly detract from well-being. They can have bad effects or elements, or block the realization of basic goods, but do not themselves carry negative weight with respect to well-being. This (...) is shown by comparing cases where these bads are present and absent, examining their relation to negative overall well-being, and considering the role of these bads in the pursuit of positive goods. (shrink)

advanced directivesend-of-life decisionsharming the deadposthumous reproductiontransplant ethics.

‘Hybrid’ theories of personal good, defended by e.g. Parfit, Wolf, and Kagan, equate it, not with a subjective state such as pleasure on its own, nor with an objective state such as knowledge on its own, but with a whole that supposedly combines the two. These theories apply Moore's principle of organic unities, which says the value of a whole needn't equal the sum of the values its parts would have by themselves. This allows them, defenders say, to combine the (...) attractions of purely subjective and purely objective views. This common understanding of the theories is, however, mistaken. At the most fundamental level they don't combine a subjective and an objective element but two objective ones. Once this is understood, their attraction as hybrid theories diminishes: the value in their wholes may be just the sum of the values in their parts. (shrink)

David Benatar argues that being brought into existence is always a net harm and never a benefit. I disagree. I argue that if you bring someone into existence who lives a life worth living (LWL), then you have not all things considered wronged her. Lives are worth living if they are high in various objective goods and low in objective bads. These lives constitute a net benefit. In contrast, lives worth avoiding (LWA) constitute a net harm. Lives worth avoiding are (...) net high in objective bads and low in objective goods. It is the prospect of a LWA that gives us good reason to not bring someone into existence. Happily, many lives are not worth avoiding. Contra Benatar, many are indeed worth living. Even if we grant Benatar his controversial asymmetry thesis, we have no reason to think that coming into existence is always a net harm. (shrink)

In earlier work I defended Intrinsic Attitudinal Hedonism—a view about what makes for individual personal welfare. On this view, a person’s level of welfare is entirely determined by the amounts of intrinsic attitudinal pleasure and pain he or she takes in things. The view seems to run into trouble in cases involving individuals who take their pleasure in disgusting, immoral things; and in cases involving individuals who take their pleasure in things that really don’t actually happen; and in cases involving (...) individuals who enjoy pleasures but who lead meaningless lives; and in cases involving individuals whose lives fail to manifest an attractive narrative structure. After sharpening up the objections, I introduce a distinction between Pure Welfare Narrowly Conceived and Enriched Welfare Broadly Conceived. I go on to claim that if this distinction is recognized, we will be able to say that each of the objections rests on the fallacy of equivocation. If, years ago, I had been more sensitive to the distinction between Pure Welfare and Enriched Welfare I would have been able to respond to the objections in a more coherent and effective way. I present that response here. In an appendix, I compare my current view with a related view defended by Shelly Kagan in ‘Me and My Life’. (shrink)

Most philosophers these days assume that more matters for well-being than simply mental states. However, there is an important distinction that is routinely overlooked. When it is said that more matters than mental states, this could mean either that certain mind-independent events count when it comes to assessing the prudential value of a life (the mind-independent events thesis or MIE), or it could mean that it is prudentially important for individuals to have the right kind of epistemic relation to life (...) events (the positive value of knowledge thesis or PVK). This chapter first aims to convince theorists of the importance of the distinction between MIE and PVK, or, more precisely, the importance of distinguishing questions about which non-mental objects (or events or facts) have intrinsic welfare value (if any do) and questions about which epistemic relations (knowledge, justified true belief, true belief) have intrinsic welfare value (if any do). This chapter also raises serious doubts about the way in which contemporary desire theories handle the extra-mental components of welfare, and offers some tentative answers to the question: what should a theorist of welfare say about these matters? (shrink)

Theories of well-being that give an important role to satisfied pro-attitudes need to account for the fact that, intuitively, the scope of possible objects of pro-attitudes seems much wider than the scope of things, states, or events that affect our well-being. Parfit famously illustrated this with his wish that a stranger may recover from an illness: it seems implausible that the stranger’s recovery would constitute a benefit for Parfit. There is no consensus in the literature about how to rule out (...) such well-being-irrelevant pro-attitudes. I argue, first, that there is no distinction in kind between well-being-relevant and irrelevant pro-attitudes. Instead, well-being-irrelevant pro-attitudes are the limiting cases on the scale measuring how much of a difference pro-attitudes make to the subject’s well-being. Second, I propose a particular scalar model according to which the well-being-relevance of pro-attitudes is measured by either their hedonic tone, or by the subject’s conative commitment. (shrink)

While Nozick and his sympathizers assume there is a widespread anti-hedonist intuition to prefer reality to an experience machine, hedonists have marshalled empirical evidence that shows such an assumption to be unfounded. Results of several experience machine variants indicate there is no widespread anti-hedonist intuition. From these findings, hedonists claim Nozick's argument fails as an objection to hedonism. This article suggests the argument surrounding experience machines has been misconceived. Rather than eliciting intuitions about what is prudentially valuable, these intuitive judgements (...) are instead calculations about prudential pay-offs and trade-offs. This position can help explain the divergence of intuitions people have about experience machines. (shrink)

An overview of the hedonistic theory of wellbeing.

Values are incommensurable when they cannot be measured on a single cardinal scale. Many philosophers suggest that incommensurability can help us solve the problems of population ethics. I agree. But some philosophers claim that populations bear incommensurable values merely because they contain different numbers of people, perhaps within some range. I argue that mere differences in how many people exist, even within some range, do not suffice for incommensurability. I argue that the intuitive neutrality of creating happy people is better (...) captured by a version of average utilitarianism. But this view is problematic. So I suggest a version of total utilitarianism that avoids the repugnant conclusion by appealing to incommensurable dimensions of wellbeing. (shrink)

Transmission views of testimony hold that a speaker's knowledge or justification can become the audience's knowledge or justification. We argue that transmission views are incompatible with the hypothesis that one's epistemic state, together with one's practical circumstances, determines what actions are rationally permissible for an agent. We argue that there are cases where, if the speaker's epistemic state were transmitted to the audience, then the audience would be warranted in acting in particular ways. Yet, the audience in these cases is (...) not so warranted, as their strength of justification does not come close to the speaker's. (shrink)

This article argues for the elimination of the concept of life worth living from philosophical vocabulary on three complementary grounds. First, the basic components of this concept suffer from multiple ambiguities, which hamper attempts to ground informative evaluative and classificatory judgments about the worth of life. Second, the criteria proposed to track the extension of the concept of life worth living rest on unsupported axiological assumptions and fail to identify precise and plausible referents for this concept. And third, the concept (...) of life worth living is not shown to serve any major evaluative or classificatory purpose besides those served by already available axiological concepts. By eliminating the concept of life worth living, philosophers will free themselves of the task of addressing ill-posed axiological questions and ground reflection about the worth of life on more rigorous conceptual foundations. (shrink)

I distill three somewhat interrelated approaches to the ethical criticism of humor: (1) attitude-based theories, (2) merited-response theories, and (3) emotional responsibility theories. I direct the brunt of my effort at showing the limitations of the attitudinal endorsement theory by presenting new criticisms of Ronald de Sousa’s position. Then, I turn to assess the strengths of the other two approaches, showing that that their major formulations implicitly require the problematic attitudinal endorsement theory. I argue for an effects-mediated responsibility theory , (...) holding that the strongest ethical criticism that can be made of our sense of humor is that it might indicate some omission on our part. This omission could only be culpable in so far as a particular joke could do harm to oneself or others. In response to Ted Cohen’s doubts that such a mechanism of harm is forthcoming, I argue that the primary vehicle of the harmful effects of humor is laughter. (shrink)

It seems that we should want to avoid becoming intellectually disabled. It is common for philosophers to infer from this that those of us without intellectual disabilities are intrinsically better off than individuals with intellectual disabilities, and that there are consequently stronger moral reasons for others to preserve our lives than to preserve the lives of intellectually disabled individuals. In this article, I argue against this inference from what states we should prefer for ourselves to how much moral reason others (...) have to maintain these states on our behalves. I argue that there is an important sense in which an outcome contributes to our well-being to a certain degree, namely the extent to which others should want it out of care for us, which plays a central role in determining the moral priority of ensuring the outcome for us over ensuring distinct outcomes for others. But an outcome's contribution to our well-being in this sense can come apart from the extent to which we should prefer it for ourselves. (shrink)

The values-based approach to welfare holds that it is good for one to realize goals, activities, and relationships with which one strongly (and stably) identifies. This approach preserves the subjectivity of welfare while affirming that a life well lived must be active, engaged, and subjectively meaningful. As opposed to more objective theories, it is unified, naturalistic, and ontologically parsimonious. However, it faces objections concerning the possibility of self-sacrifice, disinterested and paradoxical values, and values that are out of sync with physical (...) and emotional needs. This paper revises the values-based approach, emphasizing the important—but limited—role consciously held values play in human agency. The additional components of human agency in turn explain why it is important for one’s values to cohere with one’s fixed drives, hard-wired emotional responses, and nonvolitionally guided cognitive pro- cesses. This affords promising responses to the objections above. (shrink)

An encyclopedia entry on hedonistic theories of value and welfare -- the view, roughly, that pleasure is the good.

Many philosophers with hedonistic sympathies (e.g., Mill, Sidgwick, Sumner, Feldman, Crisp, Heathwood, and Bradley) have claimed that well-being is necessarily experiential. Kagan once claimed something slightly different, saying that, although unexperienced bodily events can directly impact a person’s well-being, it is nonetheless true that any change in a person’s well-being must involve a change in her (i.e., either in her mind or in her body). Kagan elaborated by saying that a person’s well-being cannot float freely of her such that it (...) is affected by events that do not affect her (Kagan 1992, 169–189). These two claims—that well-being is necessarily experiential and that changes in well-being must involve changes in the person—are two different ways of specifying the general intuition that a person’s well-being must be strongly tied to her. This general intuition imposes an adequacy constraint on welfare theorizing: To be adequate, a welfare theory cannot allow that someone can be directly benefited by events that are not strongly tied to her. Call this the strong-tie requirement. The strong-tie requirement is easily satisfied by welfare hedonism, but it poses problems for desire-fulfillment welfare theories and objective-list welfare theories. Though a great deal has been written about desire-fulfillment welfare theories in relation to the strong-tie requirement, not as much has been written about objective-list welfare theories in relation to the strong-tie requirement. This paper argues that objective-list welfare theories can satisfy the strong-tie requirement, though probably only if they take a perfectionist form, as opposed to a brute-list form. (shrink)

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 (...) go for us cannot directly constitute our wellbeing, I conclude that wellbeing is objective. (shrink)

In this chapter I explore what painful art can tell us about the nature and importance of human welfare. My goal is not so much to defend a new solution to the paradox of tragedy, as it is to explore the implications of the kinds of solutions that I find attractive. Both nonhedonic compensatory theories and constitutive theories explain why people seek out painful art, but they have troublesome implications. On some narrow theories of well-being, they imply that painful art (...) is bad for us. Accordingly, we may rightly wonder if it rational for people to watch melodramas or to listen to love songs. One might think that we should generally avoid unpleasant works of art. This implication flirts with absurdity. I show how it can be avoided by making a distinction between well-being and worth. (shrink)

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 (...) intuitions suggesting that some psychological responses are indeed relevant to welfare. Then I reject the entirely response dependent theories because there are other central intuitions suggesting that our welfare is not determined solely by our psychological responses. Thus I reach the preliminary conclusion that welfare must involve some response independent (or objective) component. The next step is to consider the most promising theories in the partly response independent category. In particular, I formulate, refine and ultimately reject what seem to be the main monistic theories that have been proposed in this category. In chapter 4, I reject the Adjusted-Enjoyment Theories of Welfare because they cannot account for the claim that a life containing no pleasure or pain can still contain a positive amount of welfare (e.g. if it’s a particularly successful life). Then in chapters 5-7, I discuss Desire Satisfaction theories of welfare. I argue that even the most promising of these theories – e.g. Worthiness Adjusted Desire Satisfactionism – are problematic because they cannot accommodate the claim that a life containing no success with respect to worthwhile projects can still contain a positive amount of welfare (e.g. if it’s a particularly pleasant life). Finally, I suggest that in order to accommodate the intuitions that led to the rejection of all these other theories of welfare, what is needed is a multi-component theory. In the final chapter, I formulate a multi-component theory that is particularly promising. Not only does it avoid the problems of the monistic theories discussed earlier, but, by incorporating a number of novel mathematical devices, it avoids problems that undermine several other initially promising multi-component theories of welfare. (shrink)

I defend the theory that one's life is meaningful to the extent that one promotes the good. Call this the good cause account (GCA) of the meaning of life. It holds that the good effects that count towards the meaning of one's life need not be intentional. Nor must one be aware of the effects. Nor does it matter whether the same good would have resulted if one had not existed. What matters is that one is causally responsible for the (...) good. I argue that the best theory of the meaning of life should clearly distinguish between subjective fulfillment and objective meaningfulness. The GCA respects the distinction. And it is superior to its leading rivals in the recent literature, most notably those of Erik Wielenberg and Susan Wolf. (shrink)

One of the many arguments against capital punishment is that execution is irrevocable. At its most simple, the argument has three premises. First, legal institutions should abolish penalties that do not admit correction of error, unless there are no alternative penalties. Second, irrevocable penalties are those that do not admit of correction. Third, execution is irrevocable. It follows that capital punishment should be abolished. This paper argues for the third premise. One might think that the truth of this premise is (...) self-evident. But in his paper “Is the Death Penalty Irrevocable?” Mike Davis argues that it is false: the death penalty is not irrevocable. While Davis’ argument is itself somewhat compelling, it receives additional support from work in the metaphysics of death, specifically the literature on posthumous harm. Strengthened in this way, the argument deserves careful consideration. I begin with a quick sketch of Davis’ argument, then show how the Pitcher-Feinberg theory of posthumous harm enables a more robust argument against the irrevocability of capital punishment, defending their theory of harm against standard objections in the literature. Having established the coherency of the robust argument, I conclude that it nevertheless fails to make the case against irrevocability. This is because it ignores the full set of practical requirements incumbent on legal institutions that wrongly punish someone. (shrink)

There are roughly two philosophical literatures on “happiness,” each corresponding to a different sense of the term. One uses ‘happiness’ as a value term, roughly synonymous with well-being or flourishing. The other body of work uses the word as a purely descriptive psychological term, akin to ‘depression’ or ‘tranquility’. An important project in the philosophy of happiness is simply getting clear on what various writers are talking about: what are the important meanings of the term and how do they connect? (...) While the “well-being” sense of happiness receives significant attention in the contemporary literature on well-being, the psychological notion is undergoing a revival as a major focus of philosophical inquiry, following on recent developments in the science of happiness. This entry focuses on the psychological sense of happiness (for the well-being notion, see the entry on well-being). The main accounts of happiness in this sense are hedonism, the life satisfaction theory, and the emotional state theory. Leaving verbal questions behind, we find that happiness in the psychological sense has always been an important concern of philosophers. Yet the significance of happiness for a good life has been hotly disputed in recent decades. Further questions of contemporary interest concern the relation between the philosophy and science of happiness, as well as the role of happiness in social and political decision-making. (shrink)