## 1. The Concept



Popular use of the term 'well-being' usually relates to
health. A doctor's surgery may run a 'Women's
Well-being Clinic', for example. Philosophical use is broader,
but related, and amounts to the notion of how well a person's
life is going for that person. A person's well-being is what is
'good for' them. Health, then, might be said to be a
constituent of my well-being, but it is not plausibly taken to be all
that matters for my well-being. One correlate term worth noting here
is 'self-interest': my self-interest is what is in the
interest 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 for
them. So we may speak of the well-being of someone who is, and will
remain in, the most terrible agony: their well-being is negative, and
such that their life is worse for them than no life at all. The same
is true of closely allied terms, such as 'welfare', which
covers how a person is faring as a whole, whether well or badly, or
'happiness', which can be understood--as it sometimes
was by the classical utilitarians from Jeremy Bentham onwards, for
example--to be the balance between good and bad things in a
person's life. But note that philosophers also use such terms in
the more standard 'positive' way, speaking of
'ill-being', 'ill-faring', or, of course,
'unhappiness' to capture the negative aspects of
individuals' lives. Most philosophical discussion has been of
'goods' rather than 'bads', but recently more
interest has been shown in the latter (e.g. Kagan 2015; Bradford
2021).



'Happiness' is often used, in ordinary life, to refer to a
short-lived state of a person, frequently a feeling of contentment:
'You look happy today'; 'I'm very happy for
you'. Philosophically, its scope is more often wider,
encompassing a whole life. And in philosophy it is possible to speak
of the happiness of a person's life, or of their happy life,
even if that person was in fact usually pretty miserable. The point is
that some good things in their life made it a happy one, even though
they lacked contentment. But this usage is uncommon, and may cause
confusion.



Over the last few decades, so-called 'positive psychology'
has hugely increased the attention paid by psychologists and other
scientists to the notion of 'happiness'. Such happiness is
usually understood in terms of contentment or
'life-satisfaction', and is measured by means such as
self-reports or daily questionnaires. Is positive psychology about
well-being? As yet, conceptual distinctions are not sufficiently clear
within the discipline. But it is probably fair to say that many of
those involved, as researchers or as subjects, are assuming that
one's life goes well to the extent that one is contented with
it--that is, that some kind of hedonistic account of well-being
is correct. Some positive psychologists, however, explicitly reject
hedonistic theories in preference to Aristotelian or
'eudaimonist' accounts of well-being, which are a version
of the 'objective list' theory of well-being discussed
below. A leader in the field, Martin Seligman, for example, has
suggested that, rather than happiness, positive psychology should
concern itself with positive emotion, engagement, relationships,
meaning and accomplishment ('Perma') (Seligman 2011).



When discussing the notion of what makes life good for the individual
living that life, it is preferable to use the term
'well-being' instead of 'happiness'. For we
want at least to allow conceptual space for the possibility that, for
example, the life of a plant may be 'good for' that plant.
And speaking of the happiness of a plant would be stretching language
too far. (An alternative here might be 'flourishing',
though this might be taken to bias the analysis of human well-being in
the direction of some kind of natural teleology.) In that respect, the
Greek word commonly translated 'happiness'
(*eudaimonia*) might be thought to be superior. But, in fact,
*eudaimonia* seems to have been restricted not only to
conscious beings, but to human beings: non-human animals cannot be
*eudaimon*. This is because *eudaimonia* suggests that
the gods, or fortune, have favoured one, and the idea that the gods
could care about non-humans would not have occurred to most
Greeks.



It is occasionally claimed that certain ancient ethical theories, such
as Aristotle's, result in the collapse of the very notion of
well-being. On Aristotle's view, if you are my friend, then my
well-being is closely bound up with yours. It might be tempting, then,
to say that 'your' well-being is 'part' of
mine, in which case the distinction between what is good for me and
what is good for others has broken down. But this temptation should be
resisted. Your well-being concerns how well your life goes for you,
and we can allow that my well-being depends on yours without
introducing the confusing notion that my well-being is constituted by
yours. There are signs in Aristotelian thought of an expansion of the
subject or owner of well-being. A friend is 'another
self', so that what benefits my friend benefits me. But this
should be taken either as a metaphorical expression of the dependence
claim, or as an identity claim which does not threaten the notion of
well-being: if you really are the same person as I am, then of course
what is good for you will be what is good for me, since there is no
longer any metaphysically significant distinction between you and
me.



Well-being is a kind of value, sometimes called 'prudential
value', to be distinguished from, for example, aesthetic value
or moral value. What marks it out is the notion of 'good
for'. The serenity of a Vermeer painting, for instance, is a
kind of goodness, but it is not 'good for' the painting.
It may be good for us to contemplate such serenity, but contemplating
serenity is not the same as the serenity itself. Likewise, my giving
money to a development charity may have moral value, that is, be
morally good. And the effects of my donation may be good for others.
But it remains an open question whether my being morally good is good
for me; and, if it is, its being good for me is still conceptually
distinct from its being morally good. A great deal of attention
has 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 all
individuals for whom life can go well or badly (Lin 2018). Some have
argued, however, that we should develop a variabilist view, according
to which, for example, there might be one theory of well-being for
adults and another for children (see Skelton 2015). According to
Benatar (2006), existence for any individual with well-being is always
of overall negative value. On well-being and death, see Bradley
(2006).


## 2. Moore's Challenge



There is something mysterious about the notion of 'good
for'. Consider a possible world that contains only a single
item: a stunning Vermeer painting. Leave aside any doubts you might
have about whether paintings can be good in a world without viewers,
and accept for the sake of argument that this painting has aesthetic
value in that world. It seems intuitively plausible to claim that the
value of this world is constituted solely by the aesthetic value of
the painting. But now consider a world which contains one individual
living a life that is good for them. How are we to describe the
relationship between the value of this world, and the value of the
life lived in it for the individual? Are we to say that the world has
a value at all? How can it, if the only value it contains is
'good for' as opposed to just 'good'? And yet
we surely do want to say that this world is better ('more
good') than some other empty world. Well, should we say that the
world is good, and is so because of the good it contains
'for' the individual? This fails to capture the idea that
there is in fact nothing of value in this world except what is good
for 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 that
the idea of 'my own good', which he saw as equivalent to
what is 'good for me', makes no sense. When I speak of,
say, pleasure as what is good for me, he claimed, I can mean only
either 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, or
is good for me.



But the distinctions I drew between different categories of value
above show that Moore's analysis of the claim that my own good
consists in pleasure is too narrow. Indeed Moore's argument
rests on the very assumption that it seeks to prove: that only the
notion of 'good' is necessary to make all the evaluative
judgements we might wish to make. The claim that it is good that I get
pleasure is, logically speaking, equivalent to the claim that the
world containing the single Vermeer is good. It is, so to speak,
'impersonal', and leaves out of account the special
feature of the value of well-being: that it is good for
individuals.



One way to respond both to Moore's challenge, and to the puzzles
above, is to try, when appropriate, to do without the notion of
'good' (see Kraut 2011) and make do with 'good
for', alongside the separate and non-evaluative notion of
reasons for action. Thus, the world containing the single individual
with a life worth living, might be said to contain nothing good
*per se*, but a life that is good for that individual. And this
fact may give us a reason to bring about such a world, given the
opportunity.


## 3. Scanlon's Challenge



Moore's book was published in Cambridge, England, at the
beginning of the twentieth century. At the end of the same century, a
book was published in Cambridge, Mass., which also posed some serious
challenges to the notion of well-being: *What Do We Owe to Each
Other?*, by T.M. Scanlon.



Moore's ultimate aim in criticizing the idea of 'goodness
for' was to attack egoism. Likewise, Scanlon has an ulterior
motive in objecting to the notion of well-being--to attack
so-called 'teleological' or end-based theories of ethics,
in particular, utilitarianism, which in its standard form requires us
to maximize well-being. But in both cases the critiques stand
independently.



One immediately odd aspect of Scanlon's position that
'well-being' is an otiose notion in ethics is that he
himself seems to have a view on what well-being is. It involves, he
believes, 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 what
unifies these different elements, and how they are to be compared.
And, he adds, no such theory is ever likely to be available, since
such matters depend so much on context.



Scanlon does, however, implicitly make a claim about what unites these
values: they are all constituents of well-being, as opposed to other
kinds of value, such as aesthetic or moral. Nor is it clear why
Scanlon's view of well-being could not be developed so as to
assist in making real-life choices between different values in
one's own life.



Scanlon suggests that we often make claims about what is good in our
lives without referring to the notion of well-being, and indeed that
it would often be odd to do so. For example, I might say, 'I
listen to Alison Krauss's music because I enjoy it', and
that will be sufficient. I do not need to go on to say, 'And
enjoyment adds to my well-being'.



But this latter claim sounds peculiar only because we already
*know* that enjoyment makes a person's life better for
them. And in some circumstances such a claim would anyway not be odd:
consider an argument with someone who claims that aesthetic experience
is worthless, or with an ascetic. Further, people do use the notion of
well-being in practical thinking. For example, if I am given the
opportunity to achieve something significant, which will involve
considerable discomfort over several years, I may consider whether,
from the point of view of my own well-being, the project is worth
pursuing.



Scanlon argues also that the notion of well-being, if it is to be
philosophically acceptable, ought to provide a 'sphere of
compensation'--a context in which it makes sense to say,
for example, that I am losing one good in my life for the sake of gain
over my life as a whole. And, he claims, there is no such sphere. For
Scanlon, 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 I
visit the dentist, it feels to me just as if I am weighing present
pains against potential future pains. And we can weigh different
components of well-being against one another. Consider a case in which
you are offered a job which is highly paid but many miles away from
your friends and family.



Scanlon denies that we need an account of well-being to understand
benevolence, since we do not have a general duty of benevolence, but
merely duties to benefit others in specific ways, such as to relieve
their pain. But, from the philosophical perspective, it may be quite
useful to use the heading of 'benevolence' in order to
group such duties. And, again, comparisons may be important: if I have
several *pro tanto* duties of benevolence, not all of which can
be fulfilled, I shall have to weigh the various benefits I can provide
against one another. And here the notion of well-being will again come
into play.



Further, if morality includes so-called 'imperfect' duties
to benefit others, that is, duties that allow the agent some
discretion as to when and how to assist, the lack of any overarching
conception of well-being is likely to make the fulfillment of such
duties problematic.


## 4. Theories of Well-being


### 4.1 Hedonism



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



This view was first, and perhaps most famously, expressed by Socrates
and Protagoras in the Platonic dialogue, *Protagoras* (Plato
1976 [C4 BCE], 351b-c). Jeremy Bentham, one of the most
well-known of the more recent hedonists, begins his *Introduction
to the Principles of Morals and Legislation* thus: 'Nature
has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters,
*pain* and *pleasure*. It is for them alone to point out
what we ought to do'.



In answer to the question, 'What does well-being consist
in?', then, the hedonist will answer, 'The greatest
balance of pleasure over pain'. We might call this
*substantive hedonism*. A complete hedonist position will
involve also *explanatory hedonism*, which consists in an
answer to the following question: 'What *makes* pleasure
good, and pain bad?', that answer being, 'The pleasantness
of pleasure, and the painfulness of pain'. Consider a
substantive hedonist who believed that what makes pleasure good for us
is that it fulfills our nature. This theorist is not an explanatory
hedonist.



Hedonism--as is demonstrated by its ancient roots--has long
seemed an obviously plausible view. Well-being, what is good
*for* me, might be thought to be naturally linked to what seems
good *to* me, and pleasure does, to most people, seem good. And
how could anything else benefit me except in so far as I enjoy
it? 



The simplest form of hedonism is Bentham's, according to which
the more pleasantness one can pack into one's life, the better
it will be, and the more painfulness one encounters, the worse it will
be. How do we measure the value of the two experiences? The two
central 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 kind
of hedonism, it has often been claimed, is that there does not appear
to be a single common strand of pleasantness running through all the
different experiences people enjoy, such as eating hamburgers, reading
Shakespeare, or playing water polo. Rather, it seems, there are
certain experiences we want to continue, and we might be prepared to
call these--for philosophical purposes--pleasures (even
though 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 whatever
view of pleasure was thought to be plausible. A more serious objection
is to the evaluative stance of hedonism itself. Thomas Carlyle, for
example, described the hedonistic component of utilitarianism as the
'philosophy of swine', the point being that simple
hedonism places all pleasures on a par, whether they be the lowest
animal pleasures of sex or the highest of aesthetic appreciation. One
might make this point with a thought experiment. Imagine that you are
given the choice of living a very fulfilling human life, or that of a
barely sentient oyster, which experiences some very low-level
pleasure. Imagine also that the life of the oyster can be as long as
you like, whereas the human life will be of eighty years only. If
Bentham were right, there would have to be a length of oyster life
such that you would choose it in preference to the human. And yet many
say that they would choose the human life in preference to an oyster
life of any length.



Now this is not a knockdown argument against simple hedonism. Indeed
some people are ready to accept that at some length or other the
oyster life becomes preferable. But there is an alternative to simple
hedonism, outlined famously by J.S. Mill, using his distinction
(itself influenced by Plato's discussion of pleasure at the end
of his *Republic* (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 value
identified by Bentham, duration and intensity. To distinguish it from
these two 'quantitative' properties, Mill called his third
property 'quality'. The claim is that some pleasures, by
their very nature, are more valuable than others. For example, the
pleasure of reading Shakespeare, by its very nature, is more valuable
than any amount of basic animal pleasure. And we can see this, Mill
suggests, if we note that those who have experienced both types, and
are 'competent judges', will make their choices on this
basis.



A long-standing objection to Mill's move here has been to claim
that his position can no longer be described as hedonism proper (or
what I have called '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. And Mill anyway speaks of properties
such 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 allows
properties such as nobility to determine pleasantness, and insists
that only pleasantness determines value. But one might well wonder how
nobility could affect pleasantness, and why Mill did not just come out
with the idea that nobility is itself a good-making property.



Above I noted the plausibility of the claim that nothing can benefit
me if I don't enjoy it. Some non-hedonists have denied this,
while accepting the so-called 'experience requirement' on
well-being. They suggest that what matters is valuable
consciousness, and consciousness can be valuable for non-hedonic
reasons (see Kraut 2018; Kriegel 2019). But there is a yet more weighty
objection both to hedonism and to the view that well-being
consists only in conscious states: the so-called 'experience
machine'. Imagine that I have a machine that I could plug you
into for the rest of your life. This machine would give you
experiences of whatever kind you thought most valuable or
enjoyable--writing a great novel, bringing about world peace,
attending an early Rolling Stones' gig. You would not know you
were on the machine, and there is no worry about its breaking down or
whatever. Would you plug in? Would it be wise, from the point of your
own well-being, to do so? Robert Nozick thinks it would be a big
mistake to plug in: 'We want to do certain things ... we
want to be a certain way ... plugging into an experience machine
limits us to a man-made reality' (Nozick 1974, p. 43).



One can make the machine sound more palatable, by allowing that
genuine choices can be made on it, that those plugged in have access
to a common 'virtual world' shared by other machine-users,
a world in which 'ordinary' communication is possible, and
so on. But this will not be enough for many anti-hedonists. A further
line of response begins from so-called 'externalism' in
the philosophy of mind, according to which the content of mental
states is determined by facts external to the experiencer of those
states. Thus, the experience of *really* writing a great novel
is quite different from that of *apparently* writing a great
novel, even though 'from the inside' they may be
indistinguishable. But this is once again sailing close to the wind.
If the world can affect the very content of my experience without my
being in a position to be aware of it, why should it not directly
affect the value of my experience?



The strongest tack for hedonists to take is to accept the apparent
force of the experience machine objection, but to insist that it rests
on 'common sense' intuitions, the place in our lives of
which may itself be justified by hedonism. This is to adopt a strategy
similar to that developed by 'two-level utilitarians' in
response to alleged counter-examples based on common-sense morality.
The hedonist will point out the so-called 'paradox of
hedonism', that pleasure is most effectively pursued indirectly.
If I consciously try to maximize my own pleasure, I will be unable to
immerse myself in those activities, such as reading or playing games,
which do give pleasure. And if we believe that those activities are
valuable 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, but
should not be brushed aside (for a balanced discussion of the
experience machine, see Lin 2016). They raise questions concerning the
epistemology of ethics, and the source and epistemic status of our
deepest ethical beliefs, which we are further from answering than many
would like to think. Certainly the current trend of quickly dismissing
hedonism on the basis of a quick run-through of the experience machine
objection is not methodologically sound.


### 4.2 Desire Theories



The experience machine is one motivation for the adoption of a desire
theory (for a good introduction to the view, see Heathwood 2016;
2019). When you are on the machine, many of your central desires are
likely 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 is
just a hallucination. And what you want, the argument goes, is to
write a great novel, not the experience of writing a great novel.



Historically, however, the reason for the current dominance of desire
theories lies in the emergence of welfare economics. Pleasure and pain
are inside people's heads, and also hard to
measure--especially when we have to start weighing different
people's experiences against one another. So economists began to
see people's well-being as consisting in the satisfaction of
preferences or desires, the content of which could be revealed by the
choices of their possessors. This made possible the ranking of
preferences, the development of 'utility functions' for
individuals, and methods for assessing the value of
preference-satisfaction (using, for example, money as a standard).



The simplest version of a desire theory one might call the *present
desire* theory, according to which someone is made better off to
the extent that their current desires are fulfilled. This theory does
succeed in avoiding the experience machine objection. But it has
serious problems of its own. Consider the case of the *angry
adolescent*. This boy's mother tells him he cannot attend a
certain nightclub, so the boy holds a gun to his own head, wanting to
pull the trigger and retaliate against his mother. Recall that the
scope of theories of well-being should be the whole of a life. It is
implausible that the boy will make his life go as well as possible by
pulling the trigger. We might perhaps interpret the simple desire
theory as a theory of well-being-at-at-a-particular-time. But even
then it seems unsatisfactory. From whatever perspective, the boy would
be better off if he put the gun down.



We should move, then, to a *comprehensive desire* theory,
according to which 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 this theory suggests, straightforwardly
enough, that the more desire-fulfilment in a life the better. But it
runs into Derek Parfit's case of *addiction* (1984, p.
497). Imagine that you can start taking a highly addictive drug, which
will cause a very strong desire in you for the drug every morning.
Taking the drug will give you no pleasure; but not taking it will
cause you quite severe suffering. There will be no problem with the
availability of the drug, and it will cost you nothing. But what
reason do you have to take it?



A *global* version of the comprehensive theory ranks desires,
so that desires about the shape and content of one's life as a
whole are given some priority. So, if I prefer not to become a drug
addict, that will explain why it is better for me not to take
Parfit's drug. But now consider the case of the *orphan
monk*. This young man began training to be a monk at the earliest
age, and has lived a very sheltered life. He is now offered three
choices: he can remain as a monk, or become either a cook or a
gardener outside the monastery, at a grange. He has no conception of
the latter alternatives, so chooses to remain a monk. But surely it
might be possible that his life would be better for him were he to
live outside?



So we now have to move to an *informed desire* version of the
comprehensive theory (Sobel 1994). According to the informed desire
account, the best life is the one I would desire if I were fully
informed about all the (non-evaluative) facts. But now consider a case
made famous by John Rawls (1971: 432; see Stace 1944: 238):
the *grass-counter*. Imagine 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. Like the experience machine, this case is another example of
philosophical 'bedrock'. Some will believe that, if she
really is informed, and not suffering from some neurosis, then the
life of grass-counting will be the best for her.



Note that on the informed desire view the subject must actually have
the desires in question for well-being to accrue to her. If it were
true of me that, were I fully informed I would desire some object
which at present I have no desire for, giving me that object now would
not benefit me. Any theory which claimed that it would amounts to an
objective list theory with a desire-based epistemology.



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



The idea that desire-satisfaction is a 'good-making
property' is somewhat odd. As Aristotle says
(*Metaphysics*, 1072a, tr. Ross): 'desire is consequent
on opinion rather than opinion on desire'. In other words, we
desire things, such as writing a great novel, because we think those
things are independently good; we do not think they are good because
they will satisfy our desire for them.


### 4.3 Objective List Theories



The threefold distinction I am using between different theories of
well-being has become standard in contemporary ethics (Parfit 1984:
app. I). There are problems with it, however, as with many
classifications, since it can blind one to other ways of
characterizing views (see Kagan 1992; Hurka 2019). Objective list
theories are usually understood as theories which list items
constituting well-being that consist neither merely in pleasurable
experience nor in desire-satisfaction. Such items might include, for
example, knowledge or friendship. But it is worth remembering, for
example, that hedonism might be seen as one kind of 'list'
theory, and all list theories might then be opposed to desire theories
as a whole.



What should go on the list (Moore 2000)? It is important that every
good should be included. As Aristotle put it: 'We take what is
self-sufficient to be that which on its own makes life worthy of
choice and lacking in nothing. We think happiness to be such, and
indeed the thing most of all worth choosing, not counted as just one
thing among others' (*Nicomachean Ethics*, 1097b, tr.
Crisp). In other words, if you claim that well-being consists only in
friendship and pleasure, I can show your list to be unsatisfactory if
I can demonstrate that knowledge is also something that makes people
better off.



What is the 'good-maker', according to objective list
theorists? This depends on the theory. One, influenced by Aristotle
and recently developed by Thomas Hurka (1993; see Bradford 2017), is
*perfectionism*, according to which what makes things
constituents of well-being is their perfecting human nature. (On the
history of modern perfectionism, see Brink 2019.) If it is part
of human nature to acquire knowledge, for example, then a
perfectionist should claim that knowledge is a constituent of
well-being. But there is nothing to prevent an objective list
theorist's claiming that all that the items on her list have in
common 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 the
deliverance of reflective judgement--intuition, if you like. But
one should not conclude from this that objective list theorists are,
because they are intuitionist, less satisfactory than the other two
theories. For those theories too can be based only on reflective
judgement. Nor should one think that intuitionism rules out argument.
Argument is one way to bring people to see the truth. Further, we
should remember that intuitions can be mistaken. Indeed, as suggested
above, this is the strongest line of defence available to hedonists:
to attempt to undermine the evidential weight of many of our natural
beliefs about what is good for people.



One common objection to objective list theories is that they are
elitist, since they appear to be claiming that certain things
are good for people, even if those people will not enjoy them, and do
not even want them. One strategy here might be to adopt a
'hybrid' account, according to which certain goods do
benefit people independently of pleasure and desire-satisfaction, but
only when they do in fact bring pleasure and/or satisfy desires.
Another would be to bite the bullet, and point out that a theory could
be both elitist and true.



It is also worth pointing out that objective list theories need not
involve 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 own
life for oneself itself constitutes a good. Second, and perhaps more
significantly, one might note that any theory of well-being in itself
has no direct moral implications. There is nothing logically to
prevent one's holding a highly elitist conception of
well-being alongside a strict liberal view that forbade paternalistic
interference of any kind with a person's own life (indeed, on
some interpretations, J.S. Mill's position is close to
this).



One not implausible view, if desire theories are indeed mistaken in
their reversal of the relation between desire and what is good, is
that the debate is really between hedonism and objective list
theories. And, as suggested above, what is most at stake here is the
issue of the epistemic adequacy of our beliefs about well-being. The
best way to resolve this matter would consist, in large part at least,
in returning once again to the experience machine objection, and
seeking 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. A
theory which said that it just does not matter would be given no
credence at all. Indeed, it is very tempting to think that well-being,
in some ultimate sense, is all that can matter morally. Consider, for
example, Joseph Raz's 'humanistic principle':
'the explanation and justification of the goodness or badness of
anything derives ultimately from its contribution, actual or possible,
to human life and its quality' (Raz 1986, p. 194). If we expand
this principle to cover non-human well-being, it might be read as
claiming that, ultimately speaking, the justificatory force of any
moral reason rests on well-being. This view is *welfarism*.



Act-utilitarians, who believe that the right action is that which
maximizes well-being overall, may attempt to use the intuitive
plausibility of welfarism to support their position, arguing that any
deviation from the maximization of well-being must be grounded on
something distinct from well-being, such as equality or rights. But
those defending equality may argue that egalitarians are concerned to
give priority to those who are worse off, and that we do see here a
link with concern for well-being. Likewise, those concerned with
rights may note that we have rights to certain goods, such as freedom,
or to the absence of 'bads', such as suffering (in the
case 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 problem
for those who believe that morality can require actions which benefit
no one, and harm some, such as, for example, punishments intended to
give individuals what they deserve.


### 5.2 Well-being and Virtue



Ancient ethics was, in a sense, more concerned with well-being than a
good deal of modern ethics, the central question for many ancient
moral philosophers being, 'Which life is best for one?'.
The rationality of egoism--the view that my strongest reason is
always to advance my own well-being--was largely assumed. This
posed a problem. Morality is naturally thought to concern the
interests of others. So if egoism is correct, what reason do I have to
be moral?



One obvious strategy to adopt in defence of morality is to claim that
a person's well-being is in some sense constituted by their
virtue, or the exercise of virtue, and this strategy was adopted in
subtly different ways by the three greatest ancient philosophers,
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle (for a modern defence of the view, see
Bloomfield (2014)). At one point in his writings, Plato appears to
allow for the rationality of moral self-sacrifice: the philosophers in
his famous 'cave' analogy in the *Republic*
(519-20) are required by morality to desist from contemplation
of the sun outside the cave, and to descend once again into the cave
to govern their fellow citizens. In the voluminous works of Aristotle,
however, there is no recommendation of sacrifice. Aristotle believed
that he could defend the virtuous choice as always being in the
interest of the individual. Note, however, that he need not be
described as an egoist in a strong sense--as someone who believes
that our only reasons for action are grounded in our own well-being.
For him, virtue both tends to advance the good of others, and (at
least when acted on) advances our own good. So Aristotle might well
have allowed that the well-being of others grounds reasons for me to
act. But these reasons will never come into conflict with reasons
grounded in my own individual well-being.



His primary argument is the notorious and perfectionist
'function argument', according to which the good for some
being is to be identified through attention to its
'function' or characteristic activity. The characteristic
activity of human beings is to exercise reason, and the good will lie
in exercising reason well--that is, in accordance with the
virtues. This argument, which is stated by Aristotle very briefly and
relies on assumptions from elsewhere in his philosophy and indeed that
of Plato, appears to conflate the two ideas of what is good for a
person, and what is morally good. I may agree that a
'good' example of humanity will be virtuous, but deny that
this person is doing what is best for them. Rather, I may insist,
reason requires one to advance one's own good, and this good
consists in, for example, pleasure, power, or honour. But much of
Aristotle's *Nicomachean Ethics* is taken up with
portraits of the life of the virtuous and the vicious, which supply
independent support for the claim that well-being is constituted by
virtue. In particular, it is worth noting the emphasis placed by
Aristotle on the value to a person of 'nobility' (*to
kalon*), a quasi-aesthetic value which those sensitive to such
qualities might not implausibly see as a constituent of well-being of
more worth than any other. In this respect, the good of virtue is, in
the Kantian sense, 'unconditional'. Yet, for Aristotle,
virtue or the 'good will' is not only morally good, but
good for the individual.