Well-being

What is a theory of well-being?

A theory of well-being is a theory of what makes a life go well for the subject. Something is a constituent of a person's well-being if that thing non-instrumentally makes the person's life go better. This is foundational to ethics because well-being provides the primary value that moral theories seek to promote and distribute.

A theory of well-being is substantive if according to it, some things are constitutive of well-being, and a theory of well-being is explanatory if it offers the grounds for thinking these things are constitutive of well-being.

What is hedonism?

Hedonism is a theory of well-being which holds that nothing besides the balance of pleasure and pain non-instrumentally makes a life go better for the person whose life it is.

Rather than presenting a chain of logic, most hedonists simply argue that the goodness of pleasure is self-evident.

What is a common objection to hedonism?

A common objection to hedonism alleges that it is the philosophy of swine since it holds that pleasure non-instrumentally makes a life go better for the person whose life it is entirely in virtue of its pleasantness. Hence, elevated pleasures (like studying philosophy) and base pleasures (like sex) make exactly the same sort of contribution to a person's life.

What best illustrates the swine objection?

This objection is best illustrated by Rawls's Haydn and the Oyster thought experiment. Suppose you are a soul in heaven waiting to be allocated a life on earth, and are offered a choice between the composer Joseph Haydn and an oyster. Haydn will enjoy the greatest human pleasures - success, honour, artistic brilliance, excitement and cheerfulness - but will live an ordinarily finite life. The oyster can only experience mild sensual pleasures, but will live eternally. Since hedonism treats elevated and base pleasures as commensurable, the hedonist seems committed to the view that a sufficiently long oyster life is prudentially better than Haydn's. Intuitively, however, most people would not accept this conclusion and few, if any, would actually make such a decision.

How do qualitative hedonists respond to the swine objection? What are issues with Mill’s response?

For this reason, qualitative hedonists, such as John Stuart Mill, argue that the nature of the pleasure matters as much as the intensity or duration. Mill distinguishes between higher pleasures (those which employ our rational faculties) and lower pleasures (mere sensual pleasures), holding that the nature or quality of a higher pleasure creates a discontinuity when compared to lower ones - meaning no quantity of lower pleasure could outweigh it. We can see this, Mill suggests, by consulting competent judges: those who have experienced both invariably prefer the higher pleasures of the intellect.

Now, there are certainly many aspects of Mill’s thesis that could be pushed back on. For example, it’s not clear that pleasures employing our intellectual faculties are always decidedly preferred. Nor does it seem likely that anyone actually meets the requirement to be a competent judge in real life. Further, the necessary discontinuity in the pleasantness of elevated and base pleasures is not particularly intuitive (which after all, is the primary appeal of hedonism).

What is the biggest criticism of qualitative hedonism?

However, the biggest criticism of qualitative hedonism is that it no can no longer be described as explanatory hedonism. If higher pleasures are higher because of their nature, that aspect of their nature cannot be pleasantness, since that could be determined by duration and intensity alone. Higher pleasures must be superior because of some non-hedonic property, which takes us from hedonism to some version of objective list theory.

While qualitive hedonists like Mill have nobly attempted to reconcile their theory with explanatory hedonism, none have succeeded in providing a compelling defence. They always seem, at a crucial point in the argument, to appeal to properties that are not reducible to their felt pleasantness – such as connection to our rational capacities, or a relation to dignity.

What is the attitudinal account?

Feldman moves away from the sensory account of pleasure towards an attitudinal account. On this view, pleasure is not a uniform sensation, but a mental state of taking pleasure in or being glad that some state of affairs obtains.

What is the phenomenological objection to sensory hedonism? What is the response?

The biggest phenomenological objection to sensory hedonism is that there is no single pleasure sensation. The feeling of eating a bar of chocolate, winning a marathon, or reading a witty poem have no common sensory thread. If hedonism claims that what makes life go well is the presence of pleasure, understood as a distinctive feeling, then these diverse experiences cannot all be “pleasure.”

However, by defining pleasure as a propositional attitude, the hedonist bypasses the need for a common sensation. This allows the hedonist to group wildly different experiences under one evaluative umbrella.

What is the masochism objection to hedonism? What is the response?

Sensory hedonism struggles with complex states where the sensation is technically pain, but the subject enjoys it. Masochism is the typical example, but one could also point to the burn of intense exercise or spicy food. If the sensation of pain is always bad, then these cannot contribute to wellbeing.

However, because the value is in the attitude, if the subject is glad that they are experiencing that specific sensation, it counts as a credit to their well-being.

What is one good thing about attitudinal hedonism?

Attitudinal hedonism allows the hedonist to respect the subjective resonance requirement: the idea that what is good for a person must in some way be endorsed by their own attitudes or perspective.

Objective list theory, on the other hand, fails this requirement. If knowledge, achievement, or friendship etc. are “good” for me even if I find them utterly miserable or boring, the theory becomes alienating. Hedonism avoids this by claiming that the only thing that fundamentally improves a life is an experience the subject actually enjoys.

-            Desire-satisfaction theorists also satisfy the internalist constraint by definition.

Does attitudinal hedonism solve the philosophy of swine objection?

Attitudinal hedonism fails to solve the philosophy of swine objection. The swine who is intensely glad about a mud bath still derives greater welfare than Socrates who is mildly glad about philosophy. Feldman has to introduce desert-adjusted hedonism, where the value of pro-attitudes are multiplied by the worthiness of the object they are directed towards. However, as before, this talk of ‘worthiness’ inevitably turns the theory into a disguised objective list.

What is the primary objection to attitudinal hedonism? What is the response?

A primary objection to attitudinal hedonism is that it hollows out hedonism, making it indistinguishable from desire-satisfaction theory. If pleasure is generated by the pro-attitude, then it is the attitude doing the heavy lifting, not the hedonic feeling.

However, the hedonist can preserve a distinct identity by insisting on the experience requirement, which states that nothing can make your life better or worse unless it affects your conscious experience. This constraint ensures hedonism remains distinct from desire-theory since desire-satisfaction is a state of the world, not a state of the mind.

What example shows the difference between attitudinal hedonism and desire-satisfaction theory?

The difference is best illustrated by Shelly Kagan’s example of the deceived businessman. Imagine a successful businessman who dies happy, thinking his children love him, his wife is faithful, and his business is thriving. However, in reality, none of these hold.

For the desire-theorist, your well-being is tied to the actual state of the world. Hence, the desire-theorist says that this man’s life was terrible since he desired to be loved and successful, and those desires were objectively frustrated.

The hedonist, on the other hand, says this man’s life was excellent. Because of the experience requirement, the only thing that counts toward his well-being is his conscious mental state. Since he felt loved and felt successful, the external facts of the betrayal are irrelevant to his welfare.

Is the hedonist position convincing?

Unfortunately, many find this conclusion utterly repulsive. Critics argue that we don't just want the feeling of being loved; we want to actually be loved. Therefore, hedonism fails to attach adequate weight to the veridicality of pleasure. (Veridicality is the quality of being in accordance with reality).

What suggests we value veridicality?

This objection is best illustrated by Nozick's Experience Machine thought experiment where one is invited to plug into a machine that provides a lifetime of perfectly simulated, pleasurable experiences – such as writing a great novel or winning the world cup. If hedonism is true, and only the felt quality of experience matters, then a life in the machine is maximally good.

However, most people instinctively recoil from the machine, suggesting that we value veridicality (reality) and active agency. Since none of us would choose to enter, pleasantness cannot be the sole constituent of well-being.

What is the hedonists best response to the experience machine?

The hedonist’s best defense is to attack the reliability of our intuitions, and reject that veridical pleasures are better for us than non-veridical pleasures. They would argue that our rejection of the machine is not a discovery of a non-hedonic good, but a result of status quo bias since we do not want to lose our current life and relationships. If you tell a subject they are already in the machine and ask if they want to unplug into a potentially miserable real world, most – they argue - will choose to stay.

Recall that well-being is about how well the life goes for the subject. If the machine feels like real life once inside, the lack of truth-value doesn't actually diminish the quality of the life for the subject. Similarly, the hedonist would reject that the deceived businessman's life is going all that poorly for him. Our intuition is explained by the fact that we know that the businessman is being deceived, and are unable to fully step out of this knowledge and into the perspective of the businessman who is blissfully ignorant.

What is the passivity objection to hedonism?

The deeper criticism is that, if hedonism is true, our role in our own lives is reduced to that of a container for pleasurable mental states. This seems to leave no room for the intuitive importance of achievement and genuinely living one’s life, rather than passively undergoing a sequence of agreeable mental states.

What is the shape of life objection?

Velleman’s shape of life objection compares two lives with the exact same net quantity of pleasure and pain. One begins with intense pleasure which then declines until death, and the other begins painfully but becomes more pleasurable until death. For a strict quantitative hedonist, these lives are prudentially identical. However, we would all intuitively choose the latter which suggests that we value something beyond mere pleasure and pain – such as the narrative arc of a life.

Conclusion paragraph pro-hedonism:

Ultimately, the standing of hedonism depends on how one defines the purpose of a theory of welfare. If the goal is to provide a purely prudential account - answering only how a life feels from the inside to the one living it - then hedonism remains a remarkably resilient, perhaps even tautological, candidate. It is the only theory that avoids the alienation of the subject by insisting that nothing can improve a life unless it resonates with the subject’s own experience. Hedonism succeeds if we define quality of life as a purely internal, psychological appraisal.

Conclusion paragraph anti-hedonism:

However, hedonism falters if we demand that a theory of welfare capture our deepest intuitions about human flourishing and agency.

Consider a woman who derives great pleasure from the taste of babies, and thus spends her life getting pregnant and then eating her children. The hedonist would argue that the horror we feel at the baby-eater is a moral judgement, not a prudential one. The life is evil, but for her, it is good.

In this sense, hedonism may succeed as a theory of happiness, but it fails as a theory of well-being if we believe – as this example or Nozick’s experience machine shows we do – that other, non-internal, factors are intrinsic to a life going well. This may, however, simply be our mistaken intuitions.

What is desire-theory?

Desire-theory is a theory of welfare that holds that nothing besides the satisfaction of desires non-instrumentally makes a life go better for the person whose life it is.

What are two strong motivations for the adoption of desire-theory?

The experience machine critique, and the value we intuitively attach to veridicality, is one of the strongest motivations for the adoption of a desire-theory. When you are plugged into the experience machine many of your central desires will remain unfulfilled. What you desire, they argue, is to write a great novel, or win the world cup, not the mere feeling of writing a great novel, or mere feeling of winning the world cup.

The primary attraction of desire theory is that it seems to be uniquely attitude-sensitive. Nothing can be good for me unless I desire it, which is to have certain pro-attitudes towards it. Hedonism and objective list theory both fail the attitude-sensitivity test because they identify the good based on a pre-defined property which applies to you regardless of whether you actually hold a prior desire for it.

How could desire-theory be seen as engulfing hedonism?

Hedonism can be repositioned as a subset of desire-satisfaction theory. Introspection makes it clear that there is no common sensory thread linking all of the things we find pleasurable. Even attitudinal hedonists concede that what all pleasures share is not a feeling, but the fact that they are objects of a positive attitude. DST theorists argue this leads naturally to the conclusion that pleasure is simply the experience of having a desire satisfied.

What is present-desire theory?

The simplest version is present desire theory, according to which someone is made better off to the extent that their actual, current desires are fulfilled. However, this has few serious defenders, since humans can and frequently do desire things that are bad for us e.g. momentary impulses or ill-informed decisions.

Can desire-satisfaction be bad for us?

Suppose an agent desires to quench their thirst, and satisfies this desire by drinking from a lake they believe is clean, but is actually polluted. This seems to show satisfying certain desires can be inherently bad for us. However, Heathwood defends the theory by isolating the satisfaction of the desire from its consequences. If we imagine that the subject were secretly immune to the pollution and never discovered the error, our intuition that the act was “bad” for them vanishes. Hence, our negative intuition wasn’t tracking any intrinsic badness of the desire-satisfaction itself. The act is ceteris paribus good. The desire-satisfaction is only all-things-considered bad because it violates the agent's higher-priority desire for health and their second-order desire to avoid regret which are qualitatively more durable and intense than the fleeting desire to quench thirst.

What is a summative desire theory?

According to comprehensive desire theory, what matters to a person’s well-being is the overall level of desire-satisfaction in their life as a whole.

A summative version of comprehensive desire theory holds that how well a person's life goes is in direct proportion to the number of their desires that are fulfilled relative to those that are frustrated, weighted by the intensity of each desire.

However, Parfit argues this leads to an absurd conclusion regarding addiction. Suppose you are offered a highly addictive drug that causes a very strong daily desire to take the drug which you then satisfy each morning. If the intensity of these satisfied cravings outweighs the initial desire not to become an addict, the summative theory must conclude that your life goes better if you become addicted.

How can we avoid the drug addict conclusion? What is the issue?

To avoid these unintuitive consequences, many theorists pivot to global desire theory which gives priority to higher-order preferences about the overall shape and content of one’s life. If you have a global desire to be a healthy, autonomous person, this outweighs the local, first-order cravings for a drug, explaining why it is better for me not to take Parfit’s drug.

However, global desire theory is vulnerable to the problem of limited horizons. Consider an orphan raised in a strict cult from birth. When offered a choice between staying or leaving, he chooses to stay because he has no conception of the outside world. If we rely strictly on the child’s global desires, we must conclude that staying in the cult is what is "best" for him. However, it surely might be possible that his life would be better for him were he to live outside. This suggests that global desires are only a reliable metric of well-being if they are formed under conditions of autonomy and full information.

What theory are we are at now? What is the issue?

We have now moved to an informed desire theory, according to which the best life is the one I would desire if I were fully informed about all the relevant, non-evaluative facts. This filters out defective desires based on ignorance, while still ensuring that well-being resonates with the subject's own (potential) attitudes.

However, consider Rawl’s famous case of the grass-counter: a brilliant Harvard mathematician, fully informed about the options available to her, who develops an overriding desire to count the blades of grass on the lawns of Harvard.

Critics contend that a life devoted to a seemingly worthless, repetitive activity is not a life going well, even if the person's strongest desires are met and they are fully informed.

What is the response to the grass-counter?

However, the desire-theorists would simply argue that if the mathematician truly is informed, and not suffering from some neurosis, then the life of grass-counting will be the best for her. We have no non-paternalistic grounds to claim her life is going poorly and to suggest so is to lapse into an alienating, elitist perfectionism.

We intuitively recognise many desires whose satisfaction contributes to well-being – such as playing the piano or stamp collecting – which are “pointless” in the sense that they serve no higher moral purpose or objective excellence. If we accept that these hobbies improve a person's life, we cannot logically reject the Grass Counter's life. From an external or moral perspective, counting grass may be trivial; but from a prudential perspective, if it is what the informed agent authentically wants, it is intrinsically good for her.

What must hold on the informed desire view?

It is important to note that, on the informed desire view, a subject must actually possess the relevant desires in order for well-being to accrue. If it is merely true that, were I fully informed, I would desire some object that I do not presently desire, then providing me with that object now does not benefit me. Since there is no actual desire-satisfaction here, any theory which claimed that it would benefit me effectively abandons desire-satisfaction as the basis of value and collapses into a form of objective list theory with a desire-based epistemology.

What is there to say about base desires?

A further challenge is the existence of intrinsically base desires, whose satisfaction appears intuitively detrimental to a person's life. For example, Moore’s example of the agent whose strongest and most consistent desires are for perpetual indulgence in bestiality. If such an agent can satisfy these desires without frustrating any other long-term goals (such as health or social standing), a strict desire-satisfaction theory must conclude that this life is "best" for him. However, we intuitively judge such a life to be a failure, regardless of the agent's own preferences.

Nevertheless, the desire-theorist would argue that we are confusing prudential value (what is good for the agent) with aesthetic or moral excellence (what is a dignified or virtuous life). A life can be low in terms of dignity while being high in terms of well-being for the subject inhabiting it. We simply struggle to accept that a life we find repulsive can be good for the person living it.

What is an alternative?

Rather than defending defective desires, the theorist may adopt Ideal Desire Theory. This version holds that well-being consists in satisfying the desires we would have under idealized circumstances - if we were fully informed, perfectly rational, and possessed a vivid appreciation of all possible life paths. By shifting the evaluative standpoint to an idealized self, the theory can dismiss ill-informed or base desires that the actual agent would reject if they knew better.

What is the issue with idealised desire theory?

However, idealised desires seem too distant from the real person whose welfare we are concerned with. To be fully informed in a meaningful sense, the agent needs to possess a vivid appreciation of all possible life paths. This would require the vast expansion of their capacities for reason, memory, and imagination, and the shedding of specific personality traits or cognitive limitations that currently prevent such appreciation. Critics argue that a person so radically transformed can no longer be described as the same person as the actual agent. Then, we could doubt whether the judgements of such an "idealised" person are authoritative. As the Grass Counter might argue: "The ideal version of me might want to study philosophy, but why should his preferences dictate my well-being?"

For Ideal Desire Theory to succeed, it must explain why the ideal version’s judgments are necessarily authoritative. Without a bridge between the actual person’s current motivations and the ideal person’s refined tastes, the theory ceases to be a genuine desire theory. If the idealized desires always happen to align with traditional values like knowledge, achievement, or friendship etc., the theory becomes an Objective List Theory in disguise, merely using the ideal self as a heuristic to justify a pre-determined list of goods.

Why is informed the best version of desire-theory?

Informed desire theory is the most robust version because it filters out defective preferences based on ignorance or irrationality while maintaining the internalist requirement that well-being must resonate with the subject's own potential choices.

How can desire satisfaction even be used as a theory of welfare to build a moral theory?

Even if desire-satisfaction offers a plausible substantive account of individual welfare, it is ill-suited to serve as the foundation of a moral theory.

Firstly, if the satisfaction of desire is treated as the sole good-maker, a desire-based ethics is forced to treat all preferences as equal. Hence, it would have to count the satisfaction of a sadist’s cruelty as a reason counting in favour of the action. Any attempt to avoid this by restricting the relevant set of desires (e.g. only counting “non-harmful" or "social" desires) would mark an abandonment of pure Desire Theory.

Furthermore, any theory based on desire-satisfaction would face insurmountable practical hurdles – particularly consequentialist frameworks. Desires are internal, opaque to others, and subject to fluctuation, making it difficult to measure or aggregate them in any stable or epistemically tenable way. As such, the project of maximizing preference satisfaction would be impossible.

Finally, when (global) desires conflict across individuals, the theory offers no clear, non-arbitrary method for adjudication or ranking.