This paper argues that happiness and pleasure are distinct states of mind because they stand in a distinct logical relation to belief. Roughly, being happy about a state of affairs s implies that one believes that s satisfies the description ‘s’ and that it is in some way good, whereas taking pleasure in s does not. In particular, Fred Feldman's analysis of happiness in terms of attitudinal pleasure overlooks this distinction.

In The Pursuit of Unhappiness, Daniel Haybron has defended an emotional state theory of happiness, according to which happiness consists in a broadly positive balance of emotions, moods, and mood propensities. In this paper, I argue that Haybron’s theory should be modified in two ways. First, contra Haybron, I argue that sensory pleasures should be regarded as constituents of happiness, alongside emotions and moods. I do this by showing that sensory pleasures are sufficiently similar to emotions for them to be (...) included within the class of happiness-constituting states. Second, I argue that a plausible theory of happiness should not include mood propensities, since their inclusion is either counterintuitive or unnecessary. (shrink)

Theories of well-being purport to identify the features of lives, and of intervals within lives, in virtue of which some people are high in well-being and others are low in well-being. They also purport to identify the properties that make some events or states of affairs good for a person and other events or states of affairs bad for a person. This article surveys some of the main theories of well-being, with an emphasis on work published since the turn of (...) the century. (shrink)

Theories of well-being purport to identify the basic goods and bads whose presence in a person's life determines how well she is faring. Monism is the view that there is only one basic good and one basic bad. Pluralism is the view that there is either more than one basic good or more than one basic bad. In this paper, I give an argument for pluralism that is general in the sense that it does not purport to identify any basic (...) goods or bads. If I am right, then even if you cannot name a single basic good or bad, you can know that pluralism is true. (shrink)

The experience machine was traditionally thought to refute hedonism about welfare. In recent years, however, the tide has turned: many philosophers have argued not merely that the experience machine doesn't rule out hedonism, but that it doesn't count against it at all. I argue for a moderate position between those two extremes: although the experience machine doesn't decisively rule out hedonism, it provides us with some reason to reject it. I also argue for a particular way of using the experience (...) machine to argue against hedonism – one that appeals directly to intuitions about the welfare values of experientially identical lives rather than to claims about what we value or claims about whether we would, or should, plug into the machine. The two issues are connected: the conviction that the experience machine leaves hedonism unscathed is partly due to neglect of the best way to use the experience machine. View HTML Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.How to Use the Experience MachineVolume 28, Issue 3EDEN LIN DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0953820815000424Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. How to Use the Experience MachineVolume 28, Issue 3EDEN LIN DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0953820815000424Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. How to Use the Experience MachineVolume 28, Issue 3EDEN LIN DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0953820815000424Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

In order to make progress in the welfare debate, we need a way to decide whether certain cases depict changes in well-being or not. I argue that an intuitive idea by Nagel has received insufficient attention in the literature and can be developed into a test to that purpose. I discuss a version of such a test proposed by Brad Hooker, and argue that it is unsuccessful. I then present my own test, which relies on the claim that if compassion (...) is fitting towards a person due to her having (or lacking) certain properties, then we know that having (or lacking) those properties affect the person’s well-being. I show how my test yields results in cases of deception, which have implications for central questions in the literature on well-being, such as whether what you do not experience can affect your well-being (the so-called Experience Requirement). (shrink)

The topic of my dissertation is the hedonic calculus. The hedonic calculus presupposes that pleasure and pain come in amounts amenable to addition, subtraction, and aggregation operations. These operations are ones that utilitarianism and related normative ethical theories treat as central to moral phenomena. The first chapter is an introduction to the problem--in it, I explain what the hedonic calculus is, why it is important, and why it has recently come under disfavor. The second chapter explores the nature of hedonic (...) phenomena, arguing that pleasure and pain are propositional attitudes; they are not feelings or feeling-tones, nor are they fundamentally a matter of desire or motivation. The third and fourth chapters concern the nature of quantitative phenomena. I argue that quantities are determinate properties whose determinables enter into greater-than, less-than, or equal-to relationships that are homomorphic with the structure of the real number line. These structures include the presence of a unique order; the possibility of equal intervals; and a natural, non-arbitrary zero point. The fifth chapter is a defense of the thesis that there are exactly three relations of quantitative comparison from a recent attack. I argue that apparent instances of being on a par are in fact instances of vagueness or complexity and do not threaten the truth of the trichotomy thesis. The sixth chapter addresses arguments that pleasure and pain fail to meet these formal conditions. One argument stems from the observation that pleasures and pains are essentially transient and ephemeral. Another argument proceeds from the observation that interpersonal comparisons of pleasure and pain appear to be impossible. A third, closely related to the first two, argues that pleasure and pain are too heterogeneous to be quantitative. A final argument holds that, for a variety of reasons, the various mathematical operations constitutive of quantitativeness are not applicable to pleasure or pain. I argue that each argument suffers from at least one fatal flaw. Some arguments crucially involve a failure to distinguish between the existence of a quantity and our ability to perform reliable measurements of it. Others involve false analogies between hedonic and other sorts of phenomena. The seventh chapter addresses arguments in favor of the legitimacy of the calculus. Many philosophers, such as Bentham, Mill, Ross, and Plato, seem to assume, without any serious argument, that pleasure and pain are quantitative. Others attempt to argue that, for example, two people enjoying something must involve more pleasure than if just one person were enjoying it. A third type of argument rests on the claim that it is sometimes rational to be indifferent between a longer lasting, less intense episode of pleasure and a more intense but shorter episode. This suggests that since duration is clearly quantitative, intensity must be, too, because if it were not, there could be no equivalence between the brief but intense and the lengthy but mellow episodes. Several of these arguments are unsound or question-begging. Finally, I present an argument in favor of the hedonic calculus that I endorse, along with possible objections and my replies. I begin by acknowledging the central point of the "hedonic trade-offs" argument, and then proceed, via reductio, by pointing out the various absurd or unpalatable consequences of the denial of the thesis that pleasure and pain are quantitative. (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)