Well-Being: Part 1

Christopher L. Holland

christopher.holland@slu.edu

Saint Louis University

April 15, 2025

Well-Being

What is noninstrumentally good for a person

Well-Being

Theories of well-being attempt to tell us what makes a person’s life better or worse for them.

Synonyms and terms closely associated with well-being include:

• welfare
• personal-interest
• self-interest
• quality of life

• eudaimonia
• happiness
• flourishing

Glaucon: Three kinds of Good/Value

Plato’s Republic 357b-d

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Mere Final Value: Good for its own sake but not for its consequences

harmless pleasures and enjoyments
 

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Final and Instrumental: Good for its own sake and its consequences.

knowledge, sight, and health
 

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Mere Instrumental Value: Good for its consequences, but not for its own sake.¹

exercising, receiving medical treatment, and working
 

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1. Glaucon says that goods in this category are “disagreeable.” However, something can merely instrumentally valuable (only good for its consequences) without being disagreeable. For example, I might take a pain killer to relieve my headache. Taking a pain killer is only valuable because of it effect, but I don’t find taking the pain killer disagreeable.

Well-being and Value

Instrumental Value

Something is instrumentally valuable if and only if it is valuable as a means to some other valuable thing.

It is good because of it’s consequences.

Final Value (non-instrumental value)

Something is finally valuable if and only if it is valuable as an end.

It is good “for its own sake.”

Prudential/Personal Value

Something is prudentially valuable for someone if and only if it benefits that person.

Heathwood’s Minimal Pairs Test for Final Prudential Value

From Chris Heathwood (2021).

Coma

Giles is in a terrible accident and falls into a coma. Although his brain is damaged, the rest of his body is a specimen of perfect health. Two days later, Giles dies.

Coma Minus Health

Giles is in a terrible accident and falls into a coma. Although his brain is damaged, the rest of his body is a specimen of near-perfect health. His only health defect is a minor renal contusion, caused by the accident, which makes one of Giles’s kidneys function slightly less well. Two days later, Giles dies.

Coma

Giles is in a terrible accident and falls into a coma. Although his brain is damaged, the rest of his body is a specimen of perfect health. Two days later, Giles dies.

Coma Plus Life

Giles is in a terrible accident and falls into a coma. Although his brain is damaged, the rest of his body is a specimen of perfect health. Three days later, Giles dies.

Coma

Giles is in a terrible accident and falls into a coma. Although his brain is damaged, the rest of his body is a specimen of perfect health. Two days later, Giles dies.

Coma Plus Flicker

Giles is in a terrible accident and falls into a coma. Although his brain is damaged, the rest of his body is a specimen of perfect health. Two days later, Giles dies. One evening while in the coma, he experiences a dim flicker of consciousness—a low-volume auditory hum. The sound does not cause him to have any thoughts: It doesn’t frighten him or make him wonder where he is; it is neither pleasant nor unpleasant.

Theories of Well-being

We can divide theories of well-being into four major types:¹

• hedonism
• desire satisfactionism
• eudaimonism
• objective list theories

Each theory offers a different account of final prudential value.

1. This taxonomy is based on Appendix I of Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons ([1984] 1987). Parfit did not include eudaimonism.

Hedonism

Pleasure is finally valuable, and pain is finally disvaluable. A person is doing well to the extent that their life is pleasant and poorly to the extent that their life is unpleasant.

Desire Satisfactionism

It is finally good for a person to have their desires satisfied, and it is finally bad for a person to have their desires frustrated. A person is doing well to the extent that their desires are satisfied, and a person is doing poorly to the extent that they are frustrated.

Eudaimonism

Also called nature-fulfillment theory and perfectionism. It is finally good for a person to fulfill (or perfect) their nature. Here, nature fulfillment is sometimes understood in functional terms. A person is doing well to the extent that they are functioning well, and poorly when they are not.

List Theories

These theories begin with a list of intuitively plausible final goods. Lists vary from theory to theory but often include achievement, friendship, happiness, pleasure, and virtue.

Subjective Theories of
Well-Being

Subjectivist (or mental-state) theorists tend to endorse one or both the experience requirement and the resonance constraint.

The Experience Requirement

Something can benefit or harm a being only if it affects her experiences in some way—specifically, their phenomenology (or ‘what it is like’ to be having them).

   – Ben Bramble (2016, 88)

The Resonance Constraint

What is intrinsically valuable for a person must have a connection with what he would find in some degree compelling or attractive, at least if he were rational and aware. It would be an intolerably alienated conception of someone’s good to imagine that it might fail in any such way to engage him.

   – Peter Railton (1986, 9)

Hedonism

Hedonism

Intense, long, certain, speedy, fruitful, pure—
Such marks in pleasures and in pains endure.
Such pleasures seek if private be thy end:
If it be public, wide let them extend.
Such pains avoid, whichever be thy view:
If pains must come, let them extend to few.

   —Jeremy Bentham ([1789] 1996, 38)

Hedonism

• Often associated with the consequentialist moral theories of Jeremy Bentham and J. S. Mill, but hedonic theories have ancient roots (e.g., Plato’s Philebus and Epicurus.)
• Something is finally good (non-instrumentally good) for a person if and only if it is a pleasant/pleasurable mental experience.
• Something is finally bad (non-instrumentally bad) for a person if and only if it is an unpleasant/painful mental experience.

Issue: Nozick’s Experience Machine thought experiment

Nozick’s Experience Machine Thought Experiment

Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life’s experiences? . . . [S]uppose that business enterprises have researched thoroughly the lives of many others. You can pick and choose from their large library or smorgasbord of such experiences. . . . After two years… you will have [time] out of the tank, to select the experiences of your next two years. Of course, while in the tank . . . you’ll think it’s all actually happening. Others can also plug in to have the experiences they want, so there’s no need to stay unplugged [for] them. . . . Would you plug in? What else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside? (Nozick [1974] 2013, 42–43)

Some philosophers think that a revised version of the thought experiment comparing two experientially identical whole lives—one lived inside the machine and one outside of it—gives a better result (Crisp 2006; Lin 2016).

Nozick’s argument:

Inside the machine you cannot

1. Do anything (the machine does everything for you by manipulating your brain)
2. Be a certain kind of person (your character is essentially replaced by the character of the life you choose)
   ISSUE: Does the machine basically kill by replacing you with someone else?
3. Have contact with reality

Reality Machines (VR)

VR is different from the original thought experiment.

Inside the machine you cannot

1. Do anything (the machine does everything for you by manipulating your brain)
2. Be a certain kind of person (your character is essentially replaced by the character of the life you choose)
   ISSUE: Does the machine basically kill by replacing you with someone else?
3. Have contact with reality

Is 3 a problem for the future of VR?

David Chalmers (Chalmers 2022, 2017, 2019) has argued that virtual reality is a sort of genuine reality and that virtual worlds (under the right conditions) can have the same sort of value that non-virtual worlds have.

Desire Satisfactionism

Desire Satisfaction Theories

• Also called preference theories or desire fulfillment theories.
• A person’s life goes better for them to the extent that their intrinsic desires are satisfied/fulfilled and worse for them to the extent that their desires are frustrated/unfulfilled.

Intrinsic Desire: Similar to “final value,” you desire something intrinsically when you desire it “for itself” and not something else.

Types of Desire Satisfaction

Subjective Desire Satisfactionism

You are benefited when you intrinsically desire that something is true and you believe that it is true.

 

Objective Desire Satisfactionism

You are benefited when you intrinsically desire that something is true and it is true.

 

Informed Desire Satisfactionism

You are benefited whenever the desires of a hypothetical fully and vividly informed version of yourself are satisfied.

Issues for Desire Satisfactionism

• What about base and trivial desires?
• The problem of adaptive preferences (e.g., aim low so you will not be disappointed)

Grass Counter Objection

Rawls “grass counter” is often cited as an objection to the desire-fulfillment view of well-being

Thus imagine someone whose only pleasure is to count blades of grass in various geometrically shaped areas such as park squares and well-trimmed lawns. He is otherwise intelligent and actually possesses unusual skills, since he manages to survive by solving difficult mathematical problems for a fee. The definition of the good [think final prudential good as desire-fulfillment* forces us to admit that the good for this man is indeed counting blades of grass, or more accurately, his good is determined by a plan that gives an especially prominent place to this activity. Naturally we would be surprised that such a person should exist. (Rawls [1971] 2005, 432)

Sources

Bentham, Jeremy. (1789) 1996. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Edited by J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart. The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Bramble, Ben. 2016. “A New Defense of Hedonism about Well-Being.” Ergo, an Open Access Journal of Philosophy 3 (4). https://doi.org/10.3998/ergo.12405314.0003.004.

Chalmers, David J. 2017. “The Virtual and the Real.” Disputatio 9 (46): 309–52. https://doi.org/10.1515/disp-2017-0009.

———. 2019. “The Virtual as the Digital.” Disputatio 11 (55): 453–86. https://doi.org/10.2478/disp-2019-0022.

———. 2022. Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy. Kindle. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Crisp, Roger. 2006. “Hedonism Reconsidered.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (3): 619–45. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1933-1592.2006.tb00551.x.

———. 2021. “Well-Being.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Winter 2021. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/well-being/.

Haybron, Daniel M. 2008. The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Heathwood, Chris. 2021. Happiness and Well-Being. Cambridge Elements. Elements in Ethics. Cambridge University Press.

Kneer, Markus, and Daniel Haybron. 2023. “The Folk Concept of the Good Life: Neither Happiness nor Well-Being.” https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.33569.89445.

Lin, Eden. 2016. “How to Use the Experience Machine.” Utilitas 28 (3): 314–32. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0953820815000424.

Nozick, Robert. (1974) 2013. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Kindle. New York: Basic Books.

Parfit, Derek. (1984) 1987. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Plato. 2017. Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo. Edited and translated by Christopher Emlyn-Jones and William Preddy. Loeb Classical Library 36. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. https://www.loebclassics.com/view/LCL036/2017/volume.xml.

Railton, Peter. 1986. “Facts and Values.” Philosophical Topics 14 (2): 5–31. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43153978.

Rawls, John. (1971) 2005. A Theory of Justice. Original. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvjf9z6v.