Well-being measurements are frequently used to support conclusions about a range of philosophically important issues. This is a problem, because we know too little about the intervals of the relevant scales. I argue that it is plausible that well-being measurements are non-linear, and that common beliefs that they are linear are not truth-tracking, so we are not justified in believing that well-being scales are linear. I then argue that this undermines common appeals to both hypothetical and actual well-being measurements; I (...) first focus on the philosophical literature on prioritarianism and then discuss Kahneman’s Peak-End Rule as a systematic bias. Finally, I discuss general implications for research on well-being, and suggest a better way of representing scales. (shrink)

In the recent well-being literature, various theory-free accounts of well-being have been proposed to ground informative evaluations of policies’ welfare implications without relying on any specifi...

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

This essay criticizes the proposal recently defended by a number of prominent economists that welfare economics be redirected away from the satisfaction of people's preferences and toward making people happy instead. Although information about happiness may sometimes be of use, the notion of happiness is sufficiently ambiguous and the objections to identifying welfare with happiness are sufficiently serious that welfare economists are better off using preference satisfaction as a measure of welfare. The essay also examines and criticizes the position associated (...) with Daniel Kahneman and a number of co-authors that takes welfare to be ‘objective happiness’ – that is, the sum of momentary pleasures. (shrink)

In traditional decision theory, utility is regarded as a mathematical representation of preferences to be inferred from agents hedonic experiences. Some go as far as to contend that utility is literally computed by specific neural areas and urge economists to complement or substitute their notion of utility with some neuro-psychological construct. In this paper, I distinguish three notions of utility that are frequently mentioned in debates about decision theory and examine some critical issues regarding their definition and measurability. Moreover, I (...) provide various empirical and conceptual reasons to doubt that economists should base decision theoretic analyses on some neuro-psychological notion of utility. (shrink)

This paper examines the increasingly popular view that new insights from the science of subjective well-being (SSWB) should play a prominent role in the determination of public policy. Though there are instrumental reasons for caring about societal happiness too, these political aspirations of the SSWB appear to be mostly intrinsically motivated. As the intrinsic value of happiness is endorsed across the political happiness as a fitting response to the state of the world, authenticity, and merit – it is shown that (...) different views of the conditionality of the intrinsic value of happiness have widely diverging policy implications, which greatly undermines the political aspirations of the SSWB. (shrink)

This paper provides a philosophical assessment of leading theory-based, evidence-based and coherentist approaches to the definition and the measurement of well-being. It then builds on this assessment to articulate a reformed division of labor for the science of well-being and argues that this reformed division of labor can improve on the proffered approaches by combining the most plausible tenets of theory-based approaches with the most plausible tenets of coherentist approaches. This result does not per se exclude the possibility that theory-based (...) and coherentist approaches may be independently improved or amended in the years to come. Still, together with the challenges that affect these approaches, it strengthens the case for combining the most plausible tenets of those approaches. (shrink)

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