There is a large literature in empirical psychology studying what psychologists call 'subjective well-being'. Only limited attention has been given to these results by philosophers who study what we call 'well-being'. In this paper, I assess the relevance of the empirical results to one philosophical theory of well-being, the desire satisfaction theory. According to the desire satisfaction theory, an individual's well-being is enhanced when her desires are satisfied. The empirical results, however, show that many of our desires are disappointed in (...) the sense that the satisfaction of those desires does not make us any happier. So I develop an argument against the desire theory of well-being on the basis of these empirical results. I then provide a defense of the desire theory based on a careful examination of the measures of subjective well-being used by psychologists. I conclude that the empirical results do not threaten the desire theory of well-being. (shrink)

One widespread argument against the efficacy of subjective well-being as a measure of well-being is the adaptation problem as formulated by Sen and Nussbaum: the phenomenon that people may adapt to deprivation and find satisfaction or happiness in objectively bad circumstances. It is not generally noticed that there are two distinct arguments for why the phenomenon of adaptation is a problem for subjective well-being as a measure of well-being. The Axiological Adaptation Argument is a counter-example to theories of well-being that (...) rely on mental states. The Epistemic Adaptation Argument illustrates that levels of happiness or satisfaction cannot be measured well when people have adapted. I argue that the most serious threat to subjective well-being measures is not the Axiological Argument, but the Epistemic Argument. I reflect on the implications the epistemic problem has for the empirical literature in general, and for research on the phenomenon of adaptation in particular. (shrink)

The concept of well-being is increasingly gaining acceptance as an object of science, and many different types of well-being measures have been developed. A debate has emerged about which measures are able to capture well-being successfully. An important underlying problem is that there is no unified conceptual framework about the nature of well-being—a hotly debated topic of philosophical discussion. I argue that while there is little agreement about the nature of well-being in philosophy, there is an important agreement on some (...) important principles relevant for its measurement. I argue that well-being science has good reasons to accommodate these principles, but currently fails to do so. (shrink)

We argue that the prudential benefits of long-distance leisure travel can justify such trips even though there are strong and important reasons against long-distance flying. This is because prudential benefits can render otherwise impermissible actions permissible, and because, according to dominant theories about wellbeing, long-distance leisure travel provides significant prudential benefits. However, this ‘wellbeing argument’ for long-distance leisure travel must be qualified in two ways. First, because travellers are epistemically privileged with respect to knowledge about what is good for them, (...) they must look critically at their own assessment of the prudential benefits of a trip. Second, the wellbeing argument is unlikely to support prudential arguments for long-distance leisure trips made by frequent flyers. (shrink)

We are prone to gross error, even in favorable circumstances of extended reflection, about our own ongoing conscious experience, our current phenomenology. Even in this apparently privileged domain, our self-knowledge is faulty and untrustworthy. We are not simply fallible at the margins but broadly inept. Examples highlighted in this essay include: emotional experience (for example, is it entirely bodily; does joy have a common, distinctive phenomenological core?), peripheral vision (how broad and stable is the region of visual clarity?), and the (...) phenomenology of thought (does it have a distinctive phenomenology, beyond just imagery and feelings?). Cartesian skeptical scenarios undermine knowledge of ongoing conscious experience as well as knowledge of the outside world. Infallible judgments about ongoing mental states are simply banal cases of self-fulfillment. Philosophical foundationalism supposing that we infer an external world from secure knowledge of our own consciousness is almost exactly backward. (shrink)

If a human subject knows they are being measured, this knowledge may affect their attitudes and behaviour to such an extent that it affects the measurement results as well. This broad range of effects is shared under the term ‘reactivity’. Although reactivity is often seen by methodologists as a problem to overcome, in this paper I argue that some quite extreme reactive changes may be legitimate, as long as we are measuring phenomena that are not simple biological regularities. Legitimate reactivity (...) is reactivity which does not undermine the accuracy of a measure; I show that if such reactivity were corrected for, this would unjustifiably ignore the authority of the research subject. Applying this argument to the measurement of depression, I show that under the most commonly accepted models of depression there is room for legitimate reactivity. In the first part of the paper, I provide an inventory of the different types of reactivity that exist in the literature, as well as the different types of phenomena that one could measure. In the second part, I apply my argument to the measurement of depression with the PHQ-9 survey. I argue that depending on what kind of phenomenon we consider depression to be, we will accept different kinds of reactivity. I show that both under the harmful dysfunction model and the practical kinds model, certain reactive changes in measuring depression are best seen as legitimate recharacterizations of the underlying phenomenon, and define what legitimate means in this context. I conclude that in both models, biological aspects constrain characterization, but the models are not so strict that only one concept is acceptable, leaving room for reactivity. (shrink)

Ordinarily when someone tells us something about her beliefs, desires or intentions, we presume she is right. According to standard views, this deferential trust is justified on the basis of certain epistemic properties of her assertion. In this paper, I offer a non-epistemic account of deference. I first motivate the account by noting two asymmetries between the kind of deference we show psychological self-ascriptions and the kind we grant to epistemic experts more generally. I then propose a novel agency-based account (...) of deference. Drawing on recent work on self-knowledge, I argue that a person normally has a distinctive type of cognitive agency; specifically she is able to constitute her psychological attitudes by making judgments about what they ought to be. I then argue that a speaker expresses this agentive authority when she self-ascribes a psychological attitude and this is what justifies deferentially trusting what she says. Because the notion of expression plays a central role in this account, I contrast it with recent neo-expressivist theories. (shrink)

The attribution of beliefs and other propositional attitudes is best understood as a form of measurement, however counter-intuitive this may seem. Measurement theory does not require that the thing measured should be a magnitude, or that the calibration of the measuring instrument should be numerical. It only requires a homomorphism between the represented domain and the representing domain. On this basis, maps measure parts of the world, usually geographical locations, and 'belief' statements measure other parts of the world, namely people's (...) aptitudes. Having outlined an argument for this view, I deal with an obvious objection to it: that self-attribution of belief cannot be an exercise in measurement, because we are all aware, from introspection, that our beliefs have an intrinsically semantic form. Subsequently, I turn to the philosophical and methodological ramifications of the measurement theoretic view. I argue, first, that it undermines at least one version of constructivism and, second, that it provides an effective alternative to the residually Cartesian philosophy that underpins much qualitative research. Like other anti-Cartesian strategies, belief-attribution-as-measurement implies that the objective world is far more knowable than the subjective one, and that reality is ontologically prior to meaning. I regard this result as both plausible and welcome. (shrink)

This article will argue that a decentering process occurs in the intersubjective connections between individuals, and that through the acknowledgement of this process researchers can better understand the potential for distortions to occur in the development of self-understanding. The concept of decentered intersubjectivity discussed in this article is the result of prior research on happiness and contentment, yet a range of emotions such as trust, guilt, shame, and disappointment could also be considered. In each case, the concept of a decentered (...) intersubjectivity can connect the personal and emotional experiences of the individual, with a shared social experience that is deeply sociological in nature. (shrink)

Despite the enormous growth in happiness research in recent decades, there remains a lack of consistency in the use of the terms happiness, satisfaction, contentment and well-being. In this article I argue for a sociologically grounded distinction between happiness and contentment that defines the former as positive affect and the latter as positive reflection. Contentment is therefore understood as a fulfilling relationship with the self and society and happiness involves pleasurable experiences. There is a history of similar distinctions in philosophy (...) and psychoanalysis, but much of the contemporary discourse fails to distinguish between individual and collective definitions of happiness. This article will argue that happiness and contentment ought not to be treated as competing approaches to the good life, but as complimentary forms of emotional experience. Further, I argue that the current interest in happiness can be linked to larger culture shifts involving neoliberalism and individualism. (shrink)

Recent work in the psychology of happiness has led some to conclude that we are unreliable assessors of our lives and that skepticism about whether we are happy is a genuine possibility worth taking very seriously. I argue that such claims, if true, have worrisome implications for procreation. In particular, they show that skepticism about whether many if not most people are well positioned to create persons is a genuine possibility worth taking very seriously. This skeptical worry should not be (...) confused with a related but much stronger version of the argument, which says that all human lives are very bad and not worth starting. I criticize the latter stance, but take seriously the former stance and hope it can be answered in future work. (shrink)

Human beings are subject to a range of cognitive and affective limitations which interfere with our ability to pursue our individual and social goals. I argue that shaping our environment to avoid triggering these limitations or to constrain the harms they cause is likely to be more effective than genetic or pharmaceutical modifications of our capacities because our limitations are often the flip side of beneficial dispositions and because available enhancements seem to impose significant costs. I argue that carefully selected (...) environmental interventions respect agents’ autonomy and are consistent with democratic decision making. (shrink)

Precise measurements of well-being would be of profound societal importance. Yet, the sceptical worry that we cannot use social science instruments and tests to measure well-being is widely discussed by philosophers and scientists. A recent and interesting philosophical argument has pointed to the psychometric procedures of construct validation to address this sceptical worry. The argument has proposed that these procedures could warrant confidence in our ability to measure well-being. The present paper evaluates whether this type of argument succeeds. The answer (...) is that it depends on which methodological background assumptions are motivating the sceptical worry to begin with. We show this by doing two things. First, we clarify (a) the different types of well-being theories involved in the science of well-being, and (b) the general methodological dimensions of well-being theorising. Second, we apply these distinctions and argue that construct validation is an unsuccessful response to measurement scepticism if this scepticism is motivated by a form of methodological non-naturalism. In the light of this, the overall point of the paper is that philosophers and scientists, when discussing measurement of well-being, should explicate their deeper methodological commitments. We further suggest that making such explicit commitments might present philosophers with a dilemma. (shrink)

There are many more philosophical discussions of emotions than of moods. One key reason for this is that emotions are said to have a robust connection to beliefs while moods are said to lack that connection. I argue that this view, though prevalent, is incorrect. It is motivated by examples that are not representative of how moods typically change. Indeed, once we examine the notion of belief-responsiveness and look at a wider range of examples, we can see that moods are (...) belief-responsive and can be evaluated for appropriateness along a number of dimensions. Moreover, for all cases in which moods seem to be disconnected from beliefs, I argue that there are analogous cases for emotions. In other words, the connection between moods and beliefs on the one hand and the connection between emotions and beliefs on the other are, in fact, very similar. This means that not only should we take belief-responsiveness to be a core feature of moods but also potentially pursue a unified theory for why moods and emotions would have this connection to belief. (shrink)

Measures of happiness are increasingly being used throughout the social sciences. While these measures have attracted numerous types of criticisms, a crucial aspect of these measures has been left largely unexplored—their calibration. Using Eran Tal’s recently developed notion of calibration we argue first that the prospect of continued calibration of happiness measures is crucial for the science of happiness, and second, that continued calibration of happiness measures faces a particular problem—The Two Unknowns Problem. The Two Unknowns Problem relies on the (...) claim that individuals are necessarily a part of the measurement apparatus in first person measures of happiness, and the claim that we have no reason to believe that the evaluation standards people employ are invariant across individuals and time. We argue that calibrating happiness measures therefore involves solving an equation with two unknowns—an individual’s degree of happiness, and their evaluation standards—which is, generally, not possible. Third, we consider two possible escape routes from this problem and we suggest that the most promising route requires yet unexplored empirical and theoretical work on linking happiness to behavioral or neural evidence. (shrink)

What, if anything, do we owe others as a basic minimum? Sufficiency theorists claim that we must provide everyone with enough – but, to date, few well-worked-out accounts of the sufficiency threshold exist, so it is difficult to evaluate this proposition. Previous theories do not provide plausible, independent accounts of resources, capabilities, or welfare that might play the requisite role. Moreover, I believe existing accounts do not provide nearly enough guidance for policymakers. So, this article sketches a mechanism for arriving (...) at an account of the minimally good life that can help locate the sufficiency threshold. (shrink)

Suppose you want to live a happy life. Who should you turn to for advice? We normally think that we know best about our own happiness. But recent work in psychology and neuroscience suggests that we are often mistaken about our own natures, and that sometimes scientists know us better than we know ourselves. Does this mean that to live a happy life we should ask scientists for advice rather than relying on our introspection? In what follows, we highlight ways (...) in which the science of happiness could help us live happy lives, but we also argue that, in other ways, our navel gazing will remain indispensable. (shrink)

The principle of beneficence directs healthcare practitioners to promote patients’ well-being, ensuring that the patients’ best interests guide treatment decisions. Because there are a number of distinct theories of well-being that could lead to different conclusions about the patient’s good, a careful consideration of which account is best suited for use in the medical context is needed. While there has been some discussion of the differences between subjective and objective theories of well-being within the bioethics literature, less attention has been (...) given to the questions of what work a theory of well-being needs to do in bioethics and which standards of success ought to be used in selecting a theory of well-being for use in medicine. In this article, I argue that traditional theories of well-being developed in philosophy are not well suited to meet the needs of the medical context. For the principle of beneficence to be most useful, the underlying account of well-being should satisfy two conditions: first, it needs to lead to a concrete, action-guiding determination of the patient’s good; and, second, any recommendations it offers need to be justifiable to patients. Standard accounts of well-being have difficulty satisfying both conditions. Exploring the limitations of these theories when applied to treatment dilemmas helps point the way toward the development of an account of well-being better suited to healthcare. (shrink)

Résumé La croyance que l'on est (ou pas) dans un état de douleur est singulière en ceci qu'elle semble pouvoir être qualifiée d'infaillibilité ou d'incorrigibilité logique, de même que le cogito. Mais comment se peut-il que l'existence d'une croyance (vraie) et l'existence du fait qui est l'objet de cette croyance puisssent constituer la même existence? Je propose ici une réponse à cette question. Parfois, une croyance peut être un désir.

In recent years, several authors have called to ground descriptive and normative decision theory on neuro-psychological measures of utility. In this paper, I combine insights from the best available neuro-psychological findings, leading philosophical conceptions of welfare and contemporary decision theory to rebut these prominent calls. I argue for two claims of general interest to philosophers, choice modellers and policy makers. First, severe conceptual, epistemic and evidential problems plague ongoing attempts to develop accurate and reliable neuro-psychological measures of utility. And second, (...) even if these problems are solved, neuro-psychological measures of utility lack the potential to inform welfare analyses and policy evaluations. (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)

Essentially everyone agrees that the outlawing of slavery, or the beginning of women’s suffrage, or the defeat of Nazism constitute paradigmatic examples of moral progress in human history. But this consensus belies a deep division about the nature of moral progress more generally, a consequence of the foundational differences among and within normative traditions regarding the nature and scope of the ‘moral’ in moral progress. This essay proposes that philosophers might nonetheless converge on a working definition of moral progress by (...) identifying a proxy property that reliably tracks moral progress, but which does not purport to be coextensive with the philosophically-relevant property. The aim of this essay is to identify this proxy property with emerging empirical measures of population welfare, and to show why this indicator of moral progress can garner overlapping consensus from a variety of normative traditions. (shrink)

I offer the first sustained defence of the claim that ugliness is constituted by the disposition to disgust. I advance three main lines of argument in support of this thesis. First, ugliness and disgustingness tend to lie in the same kinds of things and properties (the argument from ostensions). Second, the thesis is better placed than all existing accounts to accommodate the following facts: ugliness is narrowly and systematically distributed in a heterogenous set of things, ugliness is sometimes enjoyed, and (...) ugliness sits opposed to beauty across a neutral midpoint (the argument from proposed intensions). And third, ugliness and disgustingness function in the same way in both giving rise to representations of contamination (the argument from the law of contagion). In making these arguments, I show why prominent objections to the thesis do not succeed, cast light on some of the artistic functions of ugliness, and, in addition, demonstrate why a dispositional account of disgustingness is correct, and present a novel problem for warrant-based accounts of disgustingness (the ‘too many reasons’ problem). (shrink)

A moral theory T is esoteric if and only if T is true but there are some individuals who, by the lights of T itself, ought not to embrace T, where to embrace T is to believe T and rely upon it in practical deliberation. Some philosophers hold that esotericism is a strong, perhaps even decisive, reason to reject a moral theory. However, proponents of this objection have often supposed its force is obvious and have said little to articulate it. (...) I defend a version of this objection—namely, that, in light of the strongly first-personal epistemology of benefit and burden, esoteric theories fail to justify the allocation of benefits and burdens to which moral agents would be subject under such theories. Because of the holistic nature of moral-theory justification, this conclusion in turn implies that the entirety of a moral theory must be open to public scrutiny in order for the theory to be justified. I conclude by answering several objections to my account of the esotericism objection. (shrink)

A vexing problem in contemporary epistemology—one with origins in Plato’s Meno—concerns the value of knowledge, and in particular, whether and how the value of knowledge exceeds the value of mere true opinion. The recent literature is deeply divided on the matter of how best to address the problem. One point, however, remains unquestioned: that if a solution is to be found, it will be at the personal level, the level at which states of subjects or agents, as such, appear. We (...) take exception to this orthodoxy, or at least to its unquestioned status. We argue that subpersonal states play a significant—arguably, primary—role in much epistemically relevant cognition and thus constitute a domain in which we might reasonably expect to locate the “missing source” of epistemic value, beyond the value attached to mere true belief. (shrink)

The heterogeneity problem, which stems from the alleged difficulty of finding out what all pleasant experiences have in common, is largely considered as a substantial issue in the philosophy of pleasure, one that is usually taken as the starting point for theorizing about the essence of pleasure. The goal of this paper is to move the focus away from the heterogeneity problem and toward an alternative approach to pleasure. To do this, I first show that, although the approach stemming from (...) the heterogeneity problem has led to an interesting discussion about the essence of pleasure, it has usually endorsed an introspectionist methodology and other problematic assumptions that have led to doubtful results. I thus propose a natural-kind approach to pleasure, which seeks to determine what, if any, the natural kind of pleasure would consist in. This approach broadens the investigation of pleasure by enabling the use of a larger range of methodological tools, thus opening new promising directions for research. (shrink)

According to welfarism about value, something is good simpliciter just in case it is good for some being or beings. In her recent Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association, “Good-For-Nothings”, Susan Wolf argues against welfarism by appeal to great works of art, literature, music, and philosophy. Wolf provides three main arguments against this view, which I call The Superfluity Argument, The Explanation of Benefit Argument, and The Welfarist’s Mistake. In this paper, I reconstruct these arguments and explain where, in (...) my view, each goes wrong. (shrink)

Viewed from a certain perspective, nothing can seem more secure than introspection. Consider an ordinary conscious episode—say, your current visual experience of the colour of this page. You can judge, when reflecting on this experience, that you have a visual experience as of something white with black marks before you. Does it seem reasonable to doubt this introspective judgement? Surely not—such doubt would seem utterly fanciful. The trustworthiness of introspection is not only assumed by commonsense, it is also taken for (...) granted by many of theorists about the mind. Within both philosophy and the science of consciousness it is widely held that introspection is generally reliable, at least with respect to the question of one’s current (or immediately prior) conscious states. Without this assumption, we could not make sense of theorists’ widespread use of introspection, both in support of their own position and to undermine that of their opponents. (shrink)

This article is a mutual introduction of the science of well-being to philosophy of science and an explanation of how the two disciplines can benefit each other. In the process, I argue that the science of well-being is not helpfully viewed as a social or a natural, but rather as a mixed, science. Hence, its methodology will have to attend to its specific features. I discuss two of its methodological problems: justifying the role of values, and validating measures. I suggest (...) that tackling them calls for developing mid-level rather than high theories of well-being. (shrink)

First-person reports are central to the study of subjective well-being in contemporary psychology, but there is much disagreement about exactly what sort of first-person reports should be used. This paper examines an influential proposal to replace all first-person reports of life satisfaction with introspective reports of affect. I argue against the reasoning behind this proposal, and propose instead a new strategy for deciding what measure is appropriate.

Pleasure, in the inclusive usages most important in moral psychology, ethical theory, and the studies of mind, includes all joy and gladness — all our feeling good, or happy. It is often contrasted with similarly inclusive pain, or suffering, which is similarly thought of as including all our feeling bad. Contemporary psychology similarly distinguishes between positive affect and negative affect.[1..

Disability-positive philosophers often note a troubling tendency to dismiss what disabled people say about their well-being. This chapter seeks to get clearer on why this tendency might be troubling. It argues that recent appeals to lived experience, testimonial injustice, and certain challenges to adaptive-preference reasoning do not fully explain what is wrong with questioning the happiness of disabled people. It then argues that common attempts to debunk the claim that disabled people are happy are worrisome because they threaten everyone’s well-being (...) and are further challenged by an argument from moral risk. (shrink)

It is widely believed that we have immediate, introspective access to the content of our own thoughts. This access is assumed to be privileged in a way that our access to the thought content of others is not. It is also widely believed that, in many cases, thought content is individuated according to properties that are external to the thinker's head. I will refer to these theses as privileged access and content externalism, respectively. Though both are widely held to be (...) true, various arguments have been put forth to the effect that they are incompatible. This charge of incompatibilism has been met with a variety of compatibilist responses, each of which has received its own share of criticism. In this thesis, I will argue that a contrastive account of self-knowledge is a novel compatibilist response that shows significant promise. (shrink)

In this thesis I am going to explore the relationship between happiness and imprisonment. I will discuss three theories of happiness - hedonism, life satisfaction theories and emotional states theories. I will argue that the main problem of these theories is that they take happiness to consist only of psychological states. Because of this, I will turn my attention towards those theories that evaluate happiness in terms of how well life is going for the person who is living it. I (...) will argue that my Aristotelian account is the most plausible way to understand the relationship between happiness and imprisonment. This is because it takes into account both the external circumstances and the psychological and emotional life of pnsoners. Through this thesis, I will show that my account of happiness in prison accomplishes three tasks: i) it solves the problems encountered by the other theories of happiness in the evaluation of prisoners' happiness, ii) it does not suffer from two of the main objections to the other objectivist theories of happiness, and iii) it can help us to investigate the happiness of prisoners empirically more accurately. (shrink)

There is a simple but powerful argument against the human practice of raising and killing animals for food (RKF for short). It goes like this: 1. RKF is extremely bad for animals. 2. RKF is only trivially good for human beings Therefore, 3. RKF should be stopped. While many consider this argument decisive, not everyone is convinced. There have been four main lines of objection to it. In this paper, I provide new responses to these four objections.

Defenders of happiness surveys often claim that individuals are infallible judges of their own happiness. I argue that this claim is untrue. Happiness, like other emotions, has three features that make it vulnerable to introspective error: it is dispositional, it is intentional, and it is publically manifest. Other defenders of the survey method claim, more modestly, that individuals are in general reliable judges of their own happiness. I argue that this is probably true, but that it limits what happiness surveys (...) might tell us, for the very claim that people are reliable judges of their own happiness implies that we already have a measure of how happy they are, independent of self-reports. Happiness surveys may help us extend and refine this prior measure, but they cannot, on pain of unintelligibility, supplant it altogether. (shrink)