Well-Being

First published Tue Nov 6, 2001; substantive revision Wed Sep 15, 2021

Well-being is most commonly used in philosophy to describe what isnon-instrumentally or ultimately goodfor a person. Thequestion of what well-being consists in is of independent interest,but it is of great importance in moral philosophy, especially in thecase of utilitarianism, according to which the only moral requirementis that well-being be maximized. Significant challenges to the verynotion have been mounted, in particular by G.E. Moore and T.M.Scanlon. It has become standard to distinguish theories of well-beingas either hedonist theories, desire theories, or objective listtheories. According to the view known as welfarism, well-being is theonly value. Also important in ethics is the question of how aperson’s moral character and actions relate to theirwell-being.

1. The Concept

Popular use of the term ‘well-being’ usually relates tohealth. A doctor’s surgery may run a ‘Women’sWell-being Clinic’, for example. Philosophical use is broader,but related, and amounts to the notion of how well a person’slife is going for that person. A person’s well-being is what is‘good for’ them. Health, then, might be said to be aconstituent of my well-being, but it is not plausibly taken to be allthat matters for my well-being. One correlate term worth noting hereis ‘self-interest’: my self-interest is what is in theinterest of myself, and not others.

The philosophical use of the term also tends to encompass the‘negative’ aspects of how a person’s life goes forthem. So we may speak of the well-being of someone who is, and willremain in, the most terrible agony: their well-being is negative, andsuch that their life is worse for them than no life at all. The sameis true of closely allied terms, such as ‘welfare’, whichcovers how a person is faring as a whole, whether well or badly, or‘happiness’, which can be understood—as it sometimeswas by the classical utilitarians from Jeremy Bentham onwards, forexample—to be the balance between good and bad things in aperson’s life. But note that philosophers also use such terms inthe more standard ‘positive’ way, speaking of‘ill-being’, ‘ill-faring’, or, of course,‘unhappiness’ to capture the negative aspects ofindividuals’ lives. Most philosophical discussion has been of‘goods’ rather than ‘bads’, but recently moreinterest has been shown in the latter (e.g. Kagan 2015; Bradford2021).

‘Happiness’ is often used, in ordinary life, to refer to ashort-lived state of a person, frequently a feeling of contentment:‘You look happy today’; ‘I’m very happy foryou’. Philosophically, its scope is more often wider,encompassing a whole life. And in philosophy it is possible to speakof the happiness of a person’s life, or of their happy life,even if that person was in fact usually pretty miserable. The point isthat some good things in their life made it a happy one, even thoughthey lacked contentment. But this usage is uncommon, and may causeconfusion.

Over the last few decades, so-called ‘positive psychology’has hugely increased the attention paid by psychologists and otherscientists to the notion of ‘happiness’. Such happiness isusually understood in terms of contentment or‘life-satisfaction’, and is measured by means such asself-reports or daily questionnaires. Is positive psychology aboutwell-being? As yet, conceptual distinctions are not sufficiently clearwithin the discipline. But it is probably fair to say that many ofthose involved, as researchers or as subjects, are assuming thatone’s life goes well to the extent that one is contented withit—that is, that some kind of hedonistic account of well-beingis correct. Some positive psychologists, however, explicitly rejecthedonistic theories in preference to Aristotelian or‘eudaimonist’ accounts of well-being, which are a versionof the ‘objective list’ theory of well-being discussedbelow. A leader in the field, Martin Seligman, for example, hassuggested that, rather than happiness, positive psychology shouldconcern itself with positive emotion, engagement, relationships,meaning and accomplishment (‘Perma’) (Seligman 2011).

When discussing the notion of what makes life good for the individualliving that life, it is preferable to use the term‘well-being’ instead of ‘happiness’. For wewant at least to allow conceptual space for the possibility that, forexample, the life of a plant may be ‘good for’ that plant.And speaking of the happiness of a plant would be stretching languagetoo far. (An alternative here might be ‘flourishing’,though this might be taken to bias the analysis of human well-being inthe direction of some kind of natural teleology.) In that respect, theGreek word commonly translated ‘happiness’(eudaimonia) might be thought to be superior. But, in fact,eudaimonia seems to have been restricted not only toconscious beings, but to human beings: non-human animals cannot beeudaimon. This is becauseeudaimonia suggests thatthe gods, or fortune, have favoured one, and the idea that the godscould care about non-humans would not have occurred to mostGreeks.

It is occasionally claimed that certain ancient ethical theories, suchas Aristotle’s, result in the collapse of the very notion ofwell-being. On Aristotle’s view, if you are my friend, then mywell-being is closely bound up with yours. It might be tempting, then,to say that ‘your’ well-being is ‘part’ ofmine, in which case the distinction between what is good for me andwhat is good for others has broken down. But this temptation should beresisted. Your well-being concerns how well your life goes for you,and we can allow that my well-being depends on yours withoutintroducing the confusing notion that my well-being is constituted byyours. There are signs in Aristotelian thought of an expansion of thesubject or owner of well-being. A friend is ‘anotherself’, so that what benefits my friend benefits me. But thisshould be taken either as a metaphorical expression of the dependenceclaim, or as an identity claim which does not threaten the notion ofwell-being: if you really are the same person as I am, then of coursewhat is good for you will be what is good for me, since there is nolonger any metaphysically significant distinction between you andme.

Well-being is a kind of value, sometimes called ‘prudentialvalue’, to be distinguished from, for example, aesthetic valueor moral value. What marks it out is the notion of ‘goodfor’. The serenity of a Vermeer painting, for instance, is akind of goodness, but it is not ‘good for’ the painting.It may be good for us to contemplate such serenity, but contemplatingserenity is not the same as the serenity itself. Likewise, my givingmoney to a development charity may have moral value, that is, bemorally good. And the effects of my donation may be good for others.But it remains an open question whether my being morally good is goodfor me; and, if it is, its being good for me is still conceptuallydistinct from its being morally good. A great deal of attentionhas been paid in philosophy to the issue of moral‘normativity’, less so to that of prudential normativity(recent exceptions are Dorsey 2021; Fletcher 2021).

The most common view of well-being is ‘invariabilism’,according to which there is a single account of well-being for allindividuals for whom life can go well or badly (Lin 2018). Some haveargued, however, that we should develop a variabilist view, accordingto which, for example, there might be one theory of well-being foradults and another for children (see Skelton 2015). According toBenatar (2006), existence for any individual with well-being is alwaysof overall negative value. On well-being and death, see Bradley(2006).

2. Moore’s Challenge

There is something mysterious about the notion of ‘goodfor’. Consider a possible world that contains only a singleitem: a stunning Vermeer painting. Leave aside any doubts you mighthave about whether paintings can be good in a world without viewers,and accept for the sake of argument that this painting has aestheticvalue in that world. It seems intuitively plausible to claim that thevalue of this world is constituted solely by the aesthetic value ofthe painting. But now consider a world which contains one individualliving a life that is good for them. How are we to describe therelationship between the value of this world, and the value of thelife lived in it for the individual? Are we to say that the world hasa value at all? How can it, if the only value it contains is‘good for’ as opposed to just ‘good’? And yetwe surely do want to say that this world is better (‘moregood’) than some other empty world. Well, should we say that theworld is good, and is so because of the good it contains‘for’ the individual? This fails to capture the idea thatthere is in fact nothing of value in this world except what is goodfor the individual.

Thoughts such as these led G.E. Moore to object to the very idea of‘good for’ (Moore 1903, pp. 98–9). Moore argued thatthe idea of ‘my own good’, which he saw as equivalent towhat is ‘good for me’, makes no sense. When I speak of,say, pleasure as what is good for me, he claimed, I can mean onlyeither that the pleasure I get is good, or that my getting it is good.Nothing is added by saying that the pleasure constitutes my good, oris good for me.

But the distinctions we drew between different categories of valueabove show that Moore’s analysis of the claim that my own goodconsists in pleasure is too narrow. Indeed Moore’s argumentrests on the very assumption that it seeks to prove: that only thenotion of ‘good’ is necessary to make all the evaluativejudgements we might wish to make. The claim that it is good that I getpleasure is, logically speaking, equivalent to the claim that theworld containing the single Vermeer is good. It is, so to speak,‘impersonal’, and leaves out of account the specialfeature of the value of well-being: that it is good forindividuals.

One way to respond both to Moore’s challenge, and to the puzzlesabove, is to try, when appropriate, to do without the notion of‘good’ (see Kraut 2011) and make do with ‘goodfor’, alongside the separate and non-evaluative notion ofreasons for action. Thus, the world containing the single individualwith a life worth living, might be said to contain nothing goodper se, but a life that is good for that individual. And thisfact may give us a reason to bring about such a world, given theopportunity.

3. Scanlon’s Challenge

Moore’s book was published in Cambridge, England, at thebeginning of the twentieth century. At the end of the same century, abook was published in Cambridge, Mass., which also posed some seriouschallenges to the notion of well-being:What Do We Owe to EachOther?, by T.M. Scanlon.

Moore’s ultimate aim in criticizing the idea of ‘goodnessfor’ was to attack egoism. Likewise, Scanlon has an ulteriormotive in objecting to the notion of well-being—to attackso-called ‘teleological’ or end-based theories of ethics,in particular, utilitarianism, which in its standard form requires usto maximize well-being. But in both cases the critiques standindependently.

One immediately odd aspect of Scanlon’s position that‘well-being’ is an otiose notion in ethics is that hehimself seems to have a view on what well-being is. It involves, hebelieves, among other things, success in one’s rational aims,and personal relations. But Scanlon claims that his view is not a‘theory of well-being’, since a theory must explain whatunifies these different elements, and how they are to be compared.And, he adds, no such theory is ever likely to be available, sincesuch matters depend so much on context.

Scanlon does, however, implicitly make a claim about what unites thesevalues: they are all constituents of well-being, as opposed to otherkinds of value, such as aesthetic or moral. Nor is it clear whyScanlon’s view of well-being could not be developed so as toassist in making real-life choices between different values inone’s own life.

Scanlon suggests that we often make claims about what is good in ourlives without referring to the notion of well-being, and indeed thatit would often be odd to do so. For example, I might say, ‘Ilisten to Alison Krauss’s music because I enjoy it’, andthat will be sufficient. I do not need to go on to say, ‘Andenjoyment adds to my well-being’.

But this latter claim sounds peculiar only because we alreadyknow that enjoyment makes a person’s life better forthem. And in some circumstances such a claim would anyway not be odd:consider an argument with someone who claims that aesthetic experienceis worthless, or with an ascetic. Further, people do use the notion ofwell-being in practical thinking. For example, if I am given theopportunity to achieve something significant, which will involveconsiderable discomfort over several years, I may consider whether,from the point of view of my own well-being, the project is worthpursuing.

Scanlon argues also that the notion of well-being, if it is to bephilosophically acceptable, ought to provide a ‘sphere ofcompensation’—a context in which it makes sense to say,for example, that I am losing one good in my life for the sake of gainover my life as a whole. And, he claims, there is no such sphere. ForScanlon, giving up present comfort for the sake of future health‘feels like a sacrifice’.

But this does not chime with my own experience. When I donate blood,this feels to me like a sacrifice, albeit a minor one. But when Ivisit the dentist, it feels to me just as if I am weighing presentpains against potential future pains. And we can weigh differentcomponents of well-being against one another. Consider a case in whichyou are offered a job which is highly paid but many miles away fromyour friends and family.

Scanlon denies that we need an account of well-being to understandbenevolence, since we do not have a general duty of benevolence, butmerely duties to benefit others in specific ways, such as to relievetheir pain. But, from the philosophical perspective, it may be quiteuseful to use the heading of ‘benevolence’ in order togroup such duties. And, again, comparisons may be important: if I haveseveralpro tanto duties of benevolence, not all of which canbe fulfilled, I shall have to weigh the various benefits I can provideagainst one another. And here the notion of well-being will again comeinto play.

Further, if morality includes so-called ‘imperfect’ dutiesto benefit others, that is, duties that allow the agent somediscretion as to when and how to assist, the lack of any overarchingconception of well-being is likely to make the fulfillment of suchduties problematic.

4. Theories of Well-being

4.1 Hedonism

On one view, human beings always act in pursuit of what they thinkwill give them the greatest balance of pleasure over pain. This is‘psychological hedonism’, and will not be my concern here.Rather, we intend to discuss ‘evaluative hedonism’ or‘prudential hedonism’, according to which well-beingconsists in the greatest balance of pleasure over pain.

This view was first, and perhaps most famously, expressed by Socratesand Protagoras in the Platonic dialogue,Protagoras (Plato1976 [C4 BCE], 351b–c). Jeremy Bentham, one of the mostwell-known of the more recent hedonists, begins hisIntroductionto the Principles of Morals and Legislation thus: ‘Naturehas placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters,pain andpleasure. It is for them alone to point outwhat we ought to do’.

In answer to the question, ‘What does well-being consistin?’, then, the hedonist will answer, ‘The greatestbalance of pleasure over pain’. We might call thissubstantive hedonism. A complete hedonist position willinvolve alsoexplanatory hedonism, which consists in ananswer to the following question: ‘Whatmakes pleasuregood, and pain bad?’, that answer being, ‘The pleasantnessof pleasure, and the painfulness of pain’. Consider asubstantive hedonist who believed that what makes pleasure good for usis that it fulfills our nature. This theorist is not an explanatoryhedonist.

Hedonism—as is demonstrated by its ancient roots—has longseemed an obviously plausible view. Well-being, what is goodfor me, might be thought to be naturally linked to what seemsgoodto me, and pleasure does, to most people, seem good. Andhow could anything else benefit me except in so far as I enjoyit?

The simplest form of hedonism is Bentham’s, according to whichthe more pleasantness one can pack into one’s life, the betterit will be, and the more painfulness one encounters, the worse it willbe. How do we measure the value of the two experiences? The twocentral aspects of the respective experiences, according to Bentham,are their duration, and their intensity.

Bentham tended to think of pleasure and pain as a kind of sensation,as the notion of intensity might suggest. One problem with this kindof hedonism, it has often been claimed, is that there does not appearto be a single common strand of pleasantness running through all thedifferent experiences people enjoy, such as eating hamburgers, readingShakespeare, or playing water polo. Rather, it seems, there arecertain experiences we want to continue, and we might be prepared tocall these—for philosophical purposes—pleasures (eventhough some of them, such as diving in a very deep and narrow cave,for example, would not normally be described as pleasurable).

Hedonism could survive this objection merely by incorporating whateverview of pleasure was thought to be plausible. A more serious objectionis to the evaluative stance of hedonism itself. Thomas Carlyle, forexample, described the hedonistic component of utilitarianism as the‘philosophy of swine’, the point being that simplehedonism places all pleasures on a par, whether they be the lowestanimal pleasures of sex or the highest of aesthetic appreciation. Onemight make this point with a thought experiment. Imagine that you aregiven the choice of living a very fulfilling human life, or that of abarely sentient oyster, which experiences some very low-levelpleasure. Imagine also that the life of the oyster can be as long asyou like, whereas the human life will be of eighty years only. IfBentham were right, there would have to be a length of oyster lifesuch that you would choose it in preference to the human. And yet manysay that they would choose the human life in preference to an oysterlife of any length.

Now this is not a knockdown argument against simple hedonism. Indeedsome people are ready to accept that at some length or other theoyster life becomes preferable. But there is an alternative to simplehedonism, outlined famously by J.S. Mill, using his distinction(itself influenced by Plato’s discussion of pleasure at the endof hisRepublic (Plato 1992 [C4 BCE], 582d-583a)) between‘higher’ and ‘lower’ pleasures (1863 [1998],ch. 2). Mill added a third property to the two determinants of valueidentified by Bentham, duration and intensity. To distinguish it fromthese two ‘quantitative’ properties, Mill called his thirdproperty ‘quality’. The claim is that some pleasures, bytheir very nature, are more valuable than others. For example, thepleasure of reading Shakespeare, by its very nature, is more valuablethan any amount of basic animal pleasure. And we can see this, Millsuggests, if we note that those who have experienced both types, andare ‘competent judges’, will make their choices on thisbasis.

A long-standing objection to Mill’s move here has been to claimthat his position can no longer be described as hedonism proper (orwhat we have called ‘explanatory hedonism’). If higherpleasures are higher because of their nature, that aspect of theirnature cannot be pleasantness, since that could be determined byduration and intensity alone. And Mill anyway speaks of propertiessuch as ‘nobility’ as adding to the value of a pleasure.Now it has to be admitted that Mill is sailing close to the wind here.But there is logical space for a hedonist position which allowsproperties such as nobility to determine pleasantness, and insiststhat only pleasantness determines value. But one might well wonder hownobility could affect pleasantness, and why Mill did not just come outwith the idea that nobility is itself a good-making property.

Above we noted the plausibility of the claim that nothing can benefitme if I don’t enjoy it. Some non-hedonists have denied this,while accepting the so-called ‘experience requirement’ onwell-being. They suggest that what matters is valuableconsciousness, and consciousness can be valuable for non-hedonicreasons (see Kraut 2018; Kriegel 2019). But there is a yet more weightyobjection both to hedonism and to the view that well-beingconsists only in conscious states: the so-called ‘experiencemachine’. Imagine that I have a machine that I could plug youinto for the rest of your life. This machine would give youexperiences of whatever kind you thought most valuable orenjoyable—writing a great novel, bringing about world peace,attending an early Rolling Stones’ gig. You would not know youwere on the machine, and there is no worry about its breaking down orwhatever. Would you plug in? Would it be wise, from the point of yourown well-being, to do so? Robert Nozick thinks it would be a bigmistake to plug in: ‘We want to do certain things … wewant to be a certain way … plugging into an experience machinelimits us to a man-made reality’ (Nozick 1974, p. 43).

One can make the machine sound more palatable, by allowing thatgenuine choices can be made on it, that those plugged in have accessto a common ‘virtual world’ shared by other machine-users,a world in which ‘ordinary’ communication is possible, andso on. But this will not be enough for many anti-hedonists. A furtherline of response begins from so-called ‘externalism’ inthe philosophy of mind, according to which the content of mentalstates is determined by facts external to the experiencer of thosestates. Thus, the experience ofreally writing a great novelis quite different from that ofapparently writing a greatnovel, even though ‘from the inside’ they may beindistinguishable. But this is once again sailing close to the wind.If the world can affect the very content of my experience without mybeing in a position to be aware of it, why should it not directlyaffect the value of my experience?

The strongest tack for hedonists to take is to accept the apparentforce of the experience machine objection, but to insist that it restson ‘common sense’ intuitions, the place in our lives ofwhich may itself be justified by hedonism. This is to adopt a strategysimilar to that developed by ‘two-level utilitarians’ inresponse to alleged counter-examples based on common-sense morality.The hedonist will point out the so-called ‘paradox ofhedonism’, that pleasure is most effectively pursued indirectly.If I consciously try to maximize my own pleasure, I will be unable toimmerse myself in those activities, such as reading or playing games,which do give pleasure. And if we believe that those activities arevaluable independently of the pleasure we gain from engaging in them,then we shall probably gain more pleasure overall.

These kinds of stand-off in moral philosophy are unfortunate, butshould not be brushed aside (for a balanced discussion of theexperience machine, see Lin 2016). They raise questions concerning theepistemology of ethics, and the source and epistemic status of ourdeepest ethical beliefs, which we are further from answering than manywould like to think. Certainly the current trend of quickly dismissinghedonism on the basis of a quick run-through of the experience machineobjection is not methodologically sound.

4.2 Desire Theories

The experience machine is one motivation for the adoption of a desiretheory (for a good introduction to the view, see Heathwood 2016;2019). When you are on the machine, many of your central desires arelikely to remain unfilled. Take your desire to write a great novel.You may believe that this is what you are doing, but in fact it isjust a hallucination. And what you want, the argument goes, is towrite a great novel, not the experience of writing a great novel.

Historically, however, the reason for the current dominance of desiretheories lies in the emergence of welfare economics. Pleasure and painare inside people’s heads, and also hard tomeasure—especially when we have to start weighing differentpeople’s experiences against one another. So economists began tosee people’s well-being as consisting in the satisfaction ofpreferences or desires, the content of which could be revealed by thechoices of their possessors. This made possible the ranking ofpreferences, the development of ‘utility functions’ forindividuals, and methods for assessing the value ofpreference-satisfaction (using, for example, money as a standard).

The simplest version of a desire theory one might call thepresentdesire theory, according to which someone is made better off tothe extent that their current desires are fulfilled. This theory doessucceed in avoiding the experience machine objection. But it hasserious problems of its own. Consider the case of theangryadolescent. This boy’s mother tells him he cannot attend acertain nightclub, so the boy holds a gun to his own head, wanting topull the trigger and retaliate against his mother. Recall that thescope of theories of well-being should be the whole of a life. It isimplausible that the boy will make his life go as well as possible bypulling the trigger. We might perhaps interpret the simple desiretheory as a theory of well-being-at-at-a-particular-time. But eventhen it seems unsatisfactory. From whatever perspective, the boy wouldbe better off if he put the gun down.

We should move, then, to acomprehensive desire theory,according to which what matters to a person’s well-being is theoverall level of desire-satisfaction in their life as a whole. Asummative version of this theory suggests, straightforwardlyenough, that the more desire-fulfilment in a life the better. But itruns into Derek Parfit’s case ofaddiction (1984, p.497). Imagine that you can start taking a highly addictive drug, whichwill cause a very strong desire in you for the drug every morning.Taking the drug will give you no pleasure; but not taking it willcause you quite severe suffering. There will be no problem with theavailability of the drug, and it will cost you nothing. But whatreason do you have to take it?

Aglobal version of the comprehensive theory ranks desires,so that desires about the shape and content of one’s life as awhole are given some priority. So, if I prefer not to become a drugaddict, that will explain why it is better for me not to takeParfit’s drug. But now consider the case of theorphanmonk. This young man began training to be a monk at the earliestage, and has lived a very sheltered life. He is now offered threechoices: he can remain as a monk, or become either a cook or agardener outside the monastery, at a grange. He has no conception ofthe latter alternatives, so chooses to remain a monk. But surely itmight be possible that his life would be better for him were he tolive outside?

So we now have to move to aninformed desire version of thecomprehensive theory (Sobel 1994). According to the informed desireaccount, the best life is the one I would desire if I were fullyinformed about all the (non-evaluative) facts. But now consider a casemade famous by John Rawls (1971: 432; see Stace 1944: 238):thegrass-counter. Imagine a brilliant Harvard mathematician,fully informed about the options available to her, who develops anoverriding desire to count the blades of grass on the lawns ofHarvard. Like the experience machine, this case is another example ofphilosophical ‘bedrock’. Some will believe that, if shereally is informed, and not suffering from some neurosis, then thelife of grass-counting will be the best for her.

Note that on the informed desire view the subject must actually havethe desires in question for well-being to accrue to her. If it weretrue of me that, were I fully informed I would desire some objectwhich at present I have no desire for, giving me that object now wouldnot benefit me. Any theory which claimed that it would amounts to anobjective list theory with a desire-based epistemology.

All these problem cases for desire theories appear to be symptoms of amore general difficulty. Recall again the distinction betweensubstantive and formal theories of well-being. The former state theconstituents of well-being (such as pleasure), while the latter statewhat makes these things good for people (pleasantness, for example).Substantively, a desire theorist and a hedonist may agree on whatmakes life good for people: pleasurable experiences. But formally theywill differ: the hedonist will refer to pleasantness as thegood-maker, while the desire theorist must refer todesire-satisfaction. (It is worth pointing out here that if onecharacterizes pleasure as an experience the subject wants to continue,the distinction between hedonism and desire theories becomes quitehard to pin down.)

The idea that desire-satisfaction is a ‘good-makingproperty’ is somewhat odd. As Aristotle says(Metaphysics, 1072a, tr. Ross): ‘desire is consequenton opinion rather than opinion on desire’. In other words, wedesire things, such as writing a great novel, because we think thosethings are independently good; we do not think they are good becausethey will satisfy our desire for them.

4.3 Objective List Theories

The threefold distinction we have been using between different theories ofwell-being has become standard in contemporary ethics (Parfit 1984:app. I). There are problems with it, however, as with manyclassifications, since it can blind one to other ways ofcharacterizing views (see Kagan 1992; Hurka 2019). Objective listtheories are usually understood as theories which list itemsconstituting well-being that consist neither merely in pleasurableexperience nor in desire-satisfaction. Such items might include, forexample, knowledge or friendship. But it is worth remembering, forexample, that hedonism might be seen as one kind of ‘list’theory, and all list theories might then be opposed to desire theoriesas a whole.

What should go on the list (Moore 2000)? It is important that everygood should be included. As Aristotle put it: ‘We take what isself-sufficient to be that which on its own makes life worthy ofchoice and lacking in nothing. We think happiness to be such, andindeed the thing most of all worth choosing, not counted as just onething among others’ (Nicomachean Ethics, 1097b, tr.Crisp). In other words, if you claim that well-being consists only infriendship and pleasure, I can show your list to be unsatisfactory ifI can demonstrate that knowledge is also something that makes peoplebetter off.

What is the ‘good-maker’, according to objective listtheorists? This depends on the theory. One, influenced by Aristotleand recently developed by Thomas Hurka (1993; see Bradford 2017), isperfectionism, according to which what makes thingsconstituents of well-being is their perfecting human nature. (On thehistory of modern perfectionism, see Brink 2019.) If it is partof human nature to acquire knowledge, for example, then aperfectionist should claim that knowledge is a constituent ofwell-being. But there is nothing to prevent an objective listtheorist’s claiming that all that the items on her list have incommon is that each, in its own way, advances well-being.

How do we decide what goes on the list? All we can work on is thedeliverance of reflective judgement—intuition, if you like. Butone should not conclude from this that objective list theorists are,because they are intuitionist, less satisfactory than the other twotheories. For those theories too can be based only on reflectivejudgement. Nor should one think that intuitionism rules out argument.Argument is one way to bring people to see the truth. Further, weshould remember that intuitions can be mistaken. Indeed, as suggestedabove, this is the strongest line of defence available to hedonists:to attempt to undermine the evidential weight of many of our naturalbeliefs about what is good for people.

One common objection to objective list theories is that they areélitist, since they appear to be claiming that certain thingsare good for people, even if those people will not enjoy them, and donot even want them. One strategy here might be to adopt a‘hybrid’ account, according to which certain goods dobenefit people independently of pleasure and desire-satisfaction, butonly when they do in fact bring pleasure and/or satisfy desires.Another would be to bite the bullet, and point out that a theory couldbe both élitist and true.

It is also worth pointing out that objective list theories need notinvolve any kind of objectionable authoritarianism or perfectionism.First, one might wish to include autonomy on one’s list,claiming that the informed and reflective living of one’s ownlife for oneself itself constitutes a good. Second, and perhaps moresignificantly, one might note that any theory of well-being in itselfhas no direct moral implications. There is nothing logically toprevent one’s holding a highly élitist conception ofwell-being alongside a strict liberal view that forbade paternalisticinterference of any kind with a person’s own life (indeed, onsome interpretations, J.S. Mill’s position is close tothis).

One not implausible view, if desire theories are indeed mistaken intheir reversal of the relation between desire and what is good, isthat the debate is really between hedonism and objective listtheories. And, as suggested above, what is most at stake here is theissue of the epistemic adequacy of our beliefs about well-being. Thebest way to resolve this matter would consist, in large part at least,in returning once again to the experience machine objection, andseeking to discover whether that objection really stands.

5. Well-being and Morality

5.1 Welfarism

Well-being obviously plays a central role in any moral theory. Atheory which said that it just does not matter would be given nocredence at all. Indeed, it is very tempting to think that well-being,in some ultimate sense, is all that can matter morally. Consider, forexample, Joseph Raz’s ‘humanistic principle’:‘the explanation and justification of the goodness or badness ofanything derives ultimately from its contribution, actual or possible,to human life and its quality’ (Raz 1986, p. 194). If we expandthis principle to cover non-human well-being, it might be read asclaiming that, ultimately speaking, the justificatory force of anymoral reason rests on well-being. This view iswelfarism.

Act-utilitarians, who believe that the right action is that whichmaximizes well-being overall, may attempt to use the intuitiveplausibility of welfarism to support their position, arguing that anydeviation from the maximization of well-being must be grounded onsomething distinct from well-being, such as equality or rights. Butthose defending equality may argue that egalitarians are concerned togive priority to those who are worse off, and that we do see here alink with concern for well-being. Likewise, those concerned withrights may note that we have rights to certain goods, such as freedom,or to the absence of ‘bads’, such as suffering (in thecase of the right not to be tortured, for example). In other words,the interpretation of welfarism is itself a matter of dispute. But,however it is understood, it does seem that welfarism poses a problemfor those who believe that morality can require actions which benefitno one, and harm some, such as, for example, punishments intended togive individuals what they deserve.

5.2 Well-being and Virtue

Ancient ethics was, in a sense, more concerned with well-being than agood deal of modern ethics, the central question for many ancientmoral philosophers being, ‘Which life is best for one?’.The rationality of egoism—the view that my strongest reason isalways to advance my own well-being—was largely assumed. Thisposed a problem. Morality is naturally thought to concern theinterests of others. So if egoism is correct, what reason do I have tobe moral?

One obvious strategy to adopt in defence of morality is to claim thata person’s well-being is in some sense constituted by theirvirtue, or the exercise of virtue, and this strategy was adopted insubtly different ways by the three greatest ancient philosophers,Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle (for a modern defence of the view, seeBloomfield (2014)). At one point in his writings, Plato appears toallow for the rationality of moral self-sacrifice: the philosophers inhis famous ‘cave’ analogy in theRepublic(519–20) are required by morality to desist from contemplationof the sun outside the cave, and to descend once again into the caveto govern their fellow citizens. In the voluminous works of Aristotle,however, there is no recommendation of sacrifice. Aristotle believedthat he could defend the virtuous choice as always being in theinterest of the individual. Note, however, that he need not bedescribed as an egoist in a strong sense—as someone who believesthat our only reasons for action are grounded in our own well-being.For him, virtue both tends to advance the good of others, and (atleast when acted on) advances our own good. So Aristotle might wellhave allowed that the well-being of others grounds reasons for me toact. But these reasons will never come into conflict with reasonsgrounded in my own individual well-being.

His primary argument is the notorious and perfectionist‘function argument’, according to which the good for somebeing is to be identified through attention to its‘function’ or characteristic activity. The characteristicactivity of human beings is to exercise reason, and the good will liein exercising reason well—that is, in accordance with thevirtues. This argument, which is stated by Aristotle very briefly andrelies on assumptions from elsewhere in his philosophy and indeed thatof Plato, appears to conflate the two ideas of what is good for aperson, and what is morally good. I may agree that a‘good’ example of humanity will be virtuous, but deny thatthis person is doing what is best for them. Rather, I may insist,reason requires one to advance one’s own good, and this goodconsists in, for example, pleasure, power, or honour. But much ofAristotle’sNicomachean Ethics is taken up withportraits of the life of the virtuous and the vicious, which supplyindependent support for the claim that well-being is constituted byvirtue. In particular, it is worth noting the emphasis placed byAristotle on the value to a person of ‘nobility’ (tokalon), a quasi-aesthetic value which those sensitive to suchqualities might not implausibly see as a constituent of well-being ofmore worth than any other. In this respect, the good of virtue is, inthe Kantian sense, ‘unconditional’. Yet, for Aristotle,virtue or the ‘good will’ is not only morally good, butgood for the individual.

Bibliography

Fletcher (2016a) is an excellent introduction to the philosophy ofwell-being; for a very clear overview, see Hooker (2015). Somesignificant recent works are Griffin (1986) and Finnis (2011), whichpresent different objective lists; Goldman (2018), which developsa view of well-being as consisting in the fulfillment of rationaldesire, Sobel 2016, which defends a broadly subjective view ofwell-being; Feldman (2004) and Crisp (2006), which defendhedonism; Sumner (1996), which rejects many current options andadvocates a theory of well-being based on the idea of‘life-satisfaction’; Kraut (2007), which develops abroadly Aristotelian account; and Haybron (2008), Tiberius(2008), and Alexandrova (2017) which address issues that arise incontemporary psychological research on happiness. A collection ofextremely useful essays is Fletcher (2016b). See also Nussbaum and Sen(1993).

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