This paper articulates and defends a novel hybrid account of well-being. We will call our view a Robust Hybrid. We call it robust because it grants a broad and not subservient role to both objective and subjective values. In this paper we assume, we think plausibly but without argument, that there is a significant objective component to well-being. Here we clarify what it takes for an account of well-being to have a subjective component. Roughly, we argue, it must allow that (...) favoring attitudes that are not warranted by the lights of objective values can ground benefits. Given this understanding, we show that there is an important and unrecognized expansion in the resources available to fully objectivist views: namely that such views can help themselves to the value of warranted love of objective goods. Such a move by the objectivist can help them respond to concerns that, on their view, a person’s well-being can be too alien to them. We next argue that, nonetheless, such objectivist views are still unconvincing due to their lack of a subjective component. This motivates a move from fully objective accounts to hybrid accounts. We show that many prominent hybrid theories in the literature are inadequate because they implausibly minimize the subjective component. This motivates a move to a robust hybrid view that has an expanded subjectivist component. We conclude with some remarks about the interrelation between the subjective and objective components in the hybrid account that we favor and a role for resonance in a theory of well-being other than serving as a hard constraint on any benefit. (shrink)

How should we understand the fundamental difference between objective and subjective theories of well-being? Authors typically presuppose some understanding of the divide but don’t do much to explain why that understanding is better than its rivals or gets at the heart of the distinction. We explicate criteria for a better account of the divide and use such criteria to critique extant understandings of the divide. We then propose and defend a new understanding of the divide, one that characterizes subjectivism in (...) terms of the normative role it grants to warrantless attitudes in grounding benefits to subjects. (shrink)

Metaethical realists and anti‐realists alike have typically assumed that deliberation about what to do is, at least sometimes, properly settled by the agent's evaluative attitudes—what she wants, likes, or values—rather than by any objective source of value out in the world. I argue that this picture of deliberation is not one that the deliberating agent herself can accept. Seen from within the first‐person perspective, the agent's own evaluative attitudes are not encountered as descriptive psychological facts, but are rather “transparent” to (...) the external world, conceived as a place already suffused with normative significance: they are her finding the relevant parts of the world to be desirable, valuable, and so on. And from the agent's own point of view, these attitudes can do the normative work involved in settling deliberation only because and insofar as they are understood as in this way a warranted response to this desirability or value. Attitudes that the agent does not experience as transparent in this way are attitudes from which she is alienated, and as such she cannot understand them as authoritative over her deliberation. What this means, I argue, is that deliberation about what to do involves a commitment to a particularly substantive form of metaethical realism. (shrink)

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 (...) been thought to enjoy the advantage of extensional adequacy—that is, the ability to account for all the reasons we intuitively think people have. This paper provides a novel argument against this assumption by considering a type of case wherein the relative strengths of the agent’s reasons can only be adequately explained by reference to what she cares about. Adding some further assumptions yields that there are at least some internally sourced reasons. (shrink)

In virtue of what do we enjoy episodes of pleasure? According to the phenomenological theory of pleasure, we enjoy pleasures in virtue of having certain kinds of phenomenal experiences. According to the attitude theory of pleasure, we enjoy pleasures in virtue of having a certain kind of pro-attitude. In this chapter, we show that the attitude theory faces a dilemma. The attitude that is relevant to pleasure—the desire, liking, or favoring—is either necessarily co-instantiated with certain phenomenology, or not. If the (...) attitude theorist denies that the relevant attitudes are phenomenologically enriched in this sense, then their theory has the problematic implication that pleasure can come radically apart from phenomenology. This leads to a *problem of hedonic inversion*. If the attitude theorist instead affirms that the relevant attitudes are phenomenologically enriched, then they undermine their main objection to the phenomenological theory of pleasure. This is the so-called *heterogeneity problem*, according to which pleasures do not feel alike. Either way, the attitudinal theorist faces a difficult challenge in their ongoing debate with phenomenological theorists. (shrink)