CHAPTER 28
Justin Ivory and Valerie Tiberius
Abstract
This chapter aims to provide the reader with an understanding of philosophical research on well-being in the Western analytic tradition. For the last several decades, philosophical theories of well-being have been divided into “the big three”: hedonism, desire satisfactionism, and objective list theories (Parfit 1984). This tripartite classificatory system now seems limited, however, and some recent research suggests dividing philosophical theories of well-being into two types: enumerative and explanatory. The authors follow this line of thought here. Under the heading of enumerative theories, they discuss the most popular monistic theory on offer, hedonism, as well as pluralistic theories. They conclude from their review of enumerative theories that explanatory theories (theories that explain why pleasure or the other potential items on the list of goods do indeed contribute to well-being) also have an important role to play. Under the heading of explanatory theories, they discuss perfectionism, desire satisfactionism, and value fulfillment.
Key Words: Aristotle, desire satisfactionism, eudaimonia, hedonism, human nature, objective list theories, perfectionism, philosophy, value, well-being
Introduction
Philosophers have been thinking about well-being or something like it ever since there have been philosophers, which is a very long time indeed. In Ancient Greece, the birthplace of Western philosophy, philosophers advocated different paths as the best ways of life for human beings. The Stoics taught equanimity, the Epicureans pushed pleasure, the Cynics counseled simplicity, and Aristotle advised a life of virtue. This long history of reflection and debate has not resulted in consensus about the nature of a good human life, but it has produced nuanced understandings of the pros and cons of various ways of thinking about the subject. We hope in this chapter to convey some of this nuance in a way that will benefit the growing field of positive psychology. Given the diversity and multidisciplinarity of research on well-being, we take our main contribution to be a critical exploration of options, rather than an argument for a specific theory. Some philosophical theories that do not currently have much uptake by social scientists may serve as inspiration for future work, while some of the objections raised to popular theories of well-being stand as a warning against focusing too much on a single aspect of well-being.
Before we begin, being analytic philosophers, we cannot resist a point about terminology. Various terms are used for the main topic in the arena of positive psychology: well-being, happiness, flourishing, eudaimonia, and “the good life.” These do not all mean the same thing, and some philosophers take themselves to be theorizing about one of these concepts, but not the others. Many philosophers these days understand “happiness” to be a psychological state, such as pleasure or positive emotion, while “well-being” refers to what is good for a person in a broader sense that may include (but is not necessarily limited to) happiness (Haybron, 2008). Philosophers who specialize in the Ancient tradition tend to reject this terminology and to take “happiness” to be equivalent to “flourishing” and, therefore, a good translation for the Ancient Greek word eudaimonia (Annas, 1993). Terminological difficulties are intensified by the fact that psychologists and philosophers use words (such as “eudaimonia”) in quite different ways. Because we will be discussing a variety of authors who do not agree about terminology, our strategy here will be to use the word “well-being” for the broadest sense of the good for a person (as opposed to the moral good, or the aesthetic good) when we are speaking in our own voice, and to acknowledge when we are following someone else in using a different term.
Classifying Theories
According to the recent tradition (dating back to Parfit, 1984), philosophical theories of well-being fall into three types: hedonism, desire satisfactionism, and objective list theory. Hedonism takes well-being to consist in pleasure and the absence of pain. Desire satisfactionism takes well-being to consist in the satisfaction of desires, or those desires one would have under certain conditions (such as being fully informed). Objective list theories take well-being to consist in the possession of goods such as friendship, achievement, knowledge, and pleasure. These three theories have long traditions of their own, and we’ll say more about each in what follows.
But first, we want to point out that this traditional taxonomy is problematic in at least two ways. First, the taxonomy leaves out several important theories. L. W. Sumner’s (1996) life satisfaction theory, according to which well-being consists in an authentic (informed and autonomous) affective and cognitive appraisal of one’s life overall, is not represented. Perfectionism, the modern inheritor of Aristotle’s theory, according to which well-being consists in the excellent exercise of your human capacities, is also not captured by Parfit’s list. Second, as Roger Crisp and others have pointed out, different theories of well-being may be trying to answer different questions, and this taxonomy obscures this point (Crisp, 2006; Fletcher, 2013; Woodard, 2013). Crisp draws our attention to the
distinction between two questions one might ask about well-being, and hence two levels of theory providing answers to those questions. The first—and prior—question is something like: “Which things make someone’s life go better for them?” … [The answers we receive to this question] we might call enumerative theories of well-being. The second question is: “But what is it about these things that make them good for people?” … And all the answers to the second question we might call explanatory theories. (2006, pp. 102–103)
Objective list theories, in Parfit’s taxonomy, seem primarily concerned with enumerating the things that are good for people, while desire satisfactionism seems primarily concerned with offering an explanation for why things on a list are good things for a particular person (that is, they are good for that person because he or she desires them).
Crisp (2006) is sure to remind us that the distinction between enumerative theories and explanatory theories is probably not a sharp one, as subsequent discussion of it shows (Lin, 2017). Often, theories of well-being are trying to answer both questions, or they don’t distinguish the questions in this way. That said, we think it is useful to distinguish theories by which question they are primarily trying to answer: the enumerative or the explanatory. One advantage of this in the current context is that many of the characterizations of well-being used by psychologists are not explanatory theories, but rather enumerations of lists of goods. Consider Ed Diener’s highly influential view that subjective well-being consists in life-satisfaction, domain satisfaction, and positive affect balance (Diener et al., 1984). Diener does not advance this as a complete theory of well-being; rather, it is advanced as a set of measurable items that are at least extremely important to well-being in the broadest sense. Ryan and Deci take the satisfaction of basic needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness to foster well-being, which is itself defined as “healthy, congruent, and vital functioning” (Ryan & Deci, 2001, p. 147). In their case, the measurable components of well-being are an enumerated list of well-being components, and the explanation for why these things are good for people is quite thin. When we acknowledge the distinction between the enumerative and the explanatory questions (“which things are good?” and “why are those things good?”), we can see different ways in which psychological theories and philosophical theories might be “friends.” In particular, enumerative theories in psychology might benefit from the resources of explanatory theories in philosophy.
Toward this end, we will organize our review by first considering theories that tend to be concerned mainly with enumeration, and then move to theories that are concerned mainly with explanation. We’ll start with hedonism and objective list theories, then move to perfectionism, and then to desire satisfaction and value fulfillment theories.
Enumerative Theories
Hedonism
Hedonism about well-being is the view that pleasure is the only thing that is intrinsically good for people; anything else that is good for a person would be good instrumentally, as a means to pleasure (or avoidance of pain). Hedonism dates back to Epicurus, but recent work draws inspiration primarily from the English philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Both Bentham and Mill were interested in pleasure because they saw a close relationship between what is good for people and what they ought to do. Bentham (1789 [1996]) famously said, “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure,” and claimed that the right action is the one that produces the most net pleasure. Mill (1863[2001]), in like fashion, claimed that the only reason that people act is either to experience pleasure or to avoid pain, but added that when determining what to do, we must take into account both the quantity and quality of pleasures that might be produced. Pleasures involving the use of our higher faculties carry a special weight for Mill; famously, he thought that it’s better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. For Bentham, on the other hand, pushpin (a simple children’s game) is as good as poetry as far as happiness is concerned.
Mill and Bentham understood pleasure to be a distinctive sensation or feeling. They thought that whether one experiences pleasure as a result of eating a delicious meal, completing a difficult task, or enjoying a work of art, insofar as these are pleasures, they share a phenomenology (i.e., “a way that it is like” to have them).1 This conception of pleasure invites what we might call the heterogeneity objection. The objection is that we don’t actually experience this common phenomenology: the pleasure of eating a delicious meal is very different from the pleasure of appreciating a work of art, which are both very different from the pleasure of a sneeze. In response to this objection, Fred Feldman, a recent defender of hedonism, has suggested that we adopt an alternative conception of pleasure, which he calls attitudinal pleasure. On this view, pleasure consists in having a certain pro-attitude toward an experience or state of affairs: “a person takes attitudinal pleasure in some state of affairs if he enjoys it, is pleased about it, is glad that it is happening, is delighted by it” (Feldman, 2004, p. 56). You experience the pleasure of a delicious meal when you enjoy whatever it tastes like; you experience the pleasure of gazing at a great painting when you are delighted by that visual experience. Thus, Feldman avoids the heterogeneity objection by denying that there is a single sensation or feeling common to all pleasures.
Hedonism has some strengths as a theory of well-being. It is simple, empirically tractable, and intuitive. It is hard to deny that pleasure is good and pain is bad, and often when you ask why something or other is good (chocolate, roses, massages), it is natural to trace its goodness back to pleasure. Whether pleasure is the only good, however, is an open question. The next objection we’ll consider challenges the claim that pleasure is the only intrinsic good.
The experience machine objection, introduced by Robert Nozick (1974), asks us to consider whether we would want to plug into a machine that could flawlessly provide us with a life replete with pleasure (more net pleasure, say, than we could ever experience in the actual world). We are asked to imagine that others also have the option to plug in (so we don’t need to worry about our obligations to them), that the machine will never break down, and that once attached we would not remember having plugged in. Nozick argued that the fact that many people (perhaps most people) would choose not to plug in shows that there are things we care deeply about other than pleasure. This objection has been taken to support the anti-hedonist claim that there are things other than pleasure that are good for us: actual things in the world (such as knowledge of the world and real relationships with other people) that we could not obtain in the machine (where we merely think we are achieving these things).
Hedonists have responded to the experience machine objection in a variety of ways. Some have argued that we need not posit goods other than pleasure to explain why plugging in does not make for the best life. Feldman (2002), for example, suggests that the hedonist could argue for a truth condition on pleasures, such that a pleasure provides more well-being when it is taken in true states of affairs. Other hedonists bite the bullet, accept that it makes sense to plug in despite initial intuitions to the contrary, and attempt to explain why these intuitions should be ignored. For example, a hedonist could claim that people react negatively to the machine because they discount important features of the example (Bramble, 2016). That is, the hedonist could claim that if we were really to take seriously the stipulations that one would not remember plugging in, and that the machine would work perfectly and never fail, then our intuitions would likely change.
These responses have not satisfied everyone, and many still take the experience machine to be an important challenge to hedonism. Faced with the thought that pleasure is obviously good, but not obviously the only good, we might think that the solution is to add to the list of goods. This is what pluralistic “objective list” theories of well-being do. We’ll turn to these theories in the next section.
Objective List Theories
Objective list theories, in contrast to hedonism, claim that there is more than one thing that is intrinsically good for people. For example, an objective list theorist might list pleasure, knowledge, and friendship as the things that contribute directly to one’s well-being. Aristotle is typically thought to have provided the main historical example of an objective list theory. To live well as a human being, according to Aristotle, one must possess a number of goods, including the virtues (prudence, courage, temperance, justice, and so on), and also all the things necessary to cultivate the virtues, like friends and wealth. He took this enumeration to be widely agreed upon, and so determined the central task of his ethical writings to be to identify the highest good, by reference to which the prudential value of the items on the list could be explained. We will examine the nature of that explanation in the next section, when we move to discuss explanatory theories. For now, we’ll focus on the list part of the theory.
Readers from other fields may wonder what the word objective is doing here. After all, positive psychologists have list theories, too (discussed briefly earlier in the chapter), but they are unlikely to claim that there lists are lists of “objective goods.” What do philosophers mean by this? Essentially, what’s meant is that the goods on the list are good for people independently of the subjective attitudes of the person for whom they are good. To put it another way, the goodness of objective goods does not depend on someone liking, wanting, or approving of them. The attraction of such theories is that people do sometimes like, want, or approve things that seem decidedly bad for us. People sometimes want addictive drugs, like romantic relationships with unsuitable others, and approve of joyless commitment to tradition. An objective theory of well-being allows us to say that people can be simply wrong about what’s good for them, and it gives us clear standards for what would make their lives go better. The price of this advantage is that objective theories must offer some proof that their objective goods really are what they claim to be.
What kinds of arguments can objective list theories provide? Much of the support for objective list theories is intuitive: pleasure, knowledge, friendship, and so on, just seem good for people and a life without these things seems paradigmatically bad. Defenders also support them by defending them against objections. For example, Guy Fletcher, a recent objective list advocate, addresses the charge that objective list theories cannot avoid being problematically arbitrary. Apparent arbitrariness seems to be a direct result of the theory’s focus on enumeration, but Fletcher’s response is to say that the objection, as it is often stated, cannot be avoided by any theory of well-being:
If we ask the hedonist why pleasure (and only pleasure) is good for someone (and why pain and only pain is bad for someone) it is not clear what non-trivial explanation they could give for this. Similarly, if we ask the desire-fulfillment theorist why something is good for us if and only if, and because, we desire it, it’s not clear what non-trivial explanation they could give of this fact. The same is true for nature perfectionism and every other theory of well-being. Whilst more explanatory depth is better, other things being equal, all explanation stops somewhere. For that reason one cannot say that in the absence of a further justification for the things on the list then the theory is troublingly arbitrary, for a similar objection could be mounted against all of the other theories. (2013, p. 218)
Still, the objective list theorist has to provide some justification for why their list contains all and only the correct items. This highlights how important it is for the objective list theorist to develop a non-arbitrary identification procedure. In service of this, Fletcher explains two tasks that such a procedure must accomplish. First, it must be able to identify goods that are not currently on the list. And second, it should be able to test goods on the list in order to determine whether or not they should remain. In both cases, we are to imagine two persons with identical bundles of goods. We add a good to our list if it’s the case that adding that thing to one person’s bundle but not the other’s makes it plausible that the one becomes better off. Similarly, we remove an item from the list if we can take it away from one person’s bundle without their becoming worse off than the other. In addition, we can test items according to whether or not their apparent goodness can be accounted for by other items on the list (to use Fletcher’s example, “knowledge” might be accounted for by items like “achievement,” specifically, one’s epistemic achievements). If so, we strike them.
Notice that this identification procedure brings us back to the intuitive method mentioned at the start of this section. We are asked to compare different lives containing different bundles of goods and to consult our intuitive judgments about which life is better. Notice also that this procedure is itself rather intuitive and perhaps even hard to avoid. But what do we do when intuitions clash? In this case, it would be more satisfying to have a theory that provides a compelling explanation to which to appeal. Fortunately, there are several explanatory theories that are far from disappointing in this regard. We consider these theories next.
Explanatory Theories
Human Nature Theories
Explanatory theories aim primarily at explaining why the things that are good for people are indeed good for people, rather than at enumerating which things are good. Aristotle did enumerate a list of goods, but his biggest contribution was his explanatory theory, so let’s start there. At their core, Aristotelian theories take human nature and what it is to flourish as a human being as the explanatory starting point. For something to flourish, as Aristotelian philosophers understand it, is for it to perform well as the kind of thing that it is.2 So, for example, an apple tree flourishes when it grows strong enough to produce fruit, a worker bee flourishes when it contributes to feeding the queen, and a dog flourishes when it excels at catching squirrels (or begging for treats, as the case may be). For Aristotle, to flourish as a human being is to use our characteristically human capacities, our rational capacities, in an excellent way. According to Aristotle, then, to flourish as a human being is to use our reason in accordance with virtue. This means using reason both intellectually and practically to ensure that our character disposes us to undertake certain kinds of actions (e.g., acts of courage, justice, temperance, and so on), and that we regularly act in those ways. Flourishing, for Aristotle, was the highest good for human beings, and so the good which explained why other things (i.e., the virtues and the things required to cultivate them) were good.
Aristotle had a teleological conception of the world: everything has a natural function, and to do well is to achieve the function given by nature. Most contemporary philosophers eschew this teleological view, which means that they must find other ways to explain how it could be, in this diverse world, that the same things are good for every person.
Martha Nussbaum (1993), in an effort to address this question, takes for granted the general idea that flourishing consists in excellent activity, and focuses her attention on defending a conception of the virtues that applies to all human beings. Her defense is inspired by her interpretation of Aristotle, according to which he provides a two-step procedure for defining the virtues. The first step is to identify spheres of experience within which every human being inevitably must act. It then follows that within each sphere, there are better and worse ways in which to act, and to act as well as one can within a sphere is to act virtuously. This amounts to a minimal, formal definition of a given virtue, something of the form “having virtue x means to act well within sphere y.” Once these spheres have been identified, then, and only then, can excellent activity in those spheres be fully defined. So, for example, one sphere of life identified by Aristotle was the sphere pertaining to management of one’s personal property, where others are concerned, and the corresponding virtue was generosity. The full specification of generosity (or any other virtue), Nussbaum notes, can be up for debate:
People will of course disagree about what the appropriate ways of acting and reacting [within a given sphere] in fact are. But in that case, as Aristotle has set things up, they are arguing about the same thing, and advancing competing specifications of the same virtue. The reference of the virtue term in each case is fixed by the sphere of experience. (1993, p. 707)
We may disagree about the full definition of a virtue, but there is a shared core, grounded in experiences that are characteristically human. For example, different groups of people may disagree about whether generosity requires giving wrapped gifts, money, or cattle, but we share the idea that there is virtue in giving freely to others. On this view, then, the value of the virtues (defined broadly) transcends particular cultures and individual differences. This is the objective core of what makes human lives go well.
Richard Kraut (2007) proposes another contemporary Aristotelian account that focuses on characteristically human capacities or powers, which he calls developmentalism. For Kraut, human flourishing consists in the possession, development, and enjoyment of our physical, cognitive, affective, sensory, and social powers (2007, p. 137). The rather large number of ways in which one might exercise these powers, then, explains the apparent diversity of goods in the world. A human being is flourishing when it is enjoying the exercise of its various powers, which it has developed or trained over the course of its life. Think about reading a good novel, or about running a marathon. Your enjoyment of the former involves a complex utilization of your psychological powers, while your enjoyment of the latter involves the thorough employment of your physical powers (along with the psychological resilience required to push through!). Further, the enjoyment of both activities requires that you have developed your psychological and/or physical powers to a sufficient extent. Finally, Kraut claims, like Aristotle, that one needs to regularly exercise one’s powers in these kinds of ways in order to be well off. To cease to act is to cease to flourish.
There remains the question of why one’s nature, which is determined by one’s species membership, should have any bearing on what is good for them. Nussbaum and Kraut explain why the virtues are good by reference to group membership, but do they say anything to justify this move? Kraut defends the approach by appeal to a philosophical methodology that gives significant weight to common sense and inference to the best explanation. In explaining his reliance on human nature, he says that his view begins with what common sense tells us are good things. Then, we are to look at the features common to those good things, and determine what best explains those features. The explanation, he claims, is that all good things have features that involve the development and enjoyment of the various powers that we possess, powers which nature has provided human beings.
While human nature may explain much common sense about well-being, theories that rely on human nature may struggle to respect individual differences. If a person doesn’t have the rational capacity to learn about philosophy, or the physical capacity to run, or the social capacity to make lasting friendships, why are these things good for that person? The next explanatory theories we will consider have an easier time with individual differences.
Desire Satisfactionism
Desire satisfaction theories of well-being claim that what is good for a person is to get what they want or would want under certain conditions. Desire satisfactionism is primarily explanatory: desire is offered as that which explains why the various objects of our intrinsic desires (whatever we want for its own sake) are intrinsically good for us. Desire satisfactionism is also a subjective theory, because it makes what is good for us depend on our having some positive attitude (namely a desire) toward it. One of the major attractions of desire satisfactionism is that it makes good sense of a strong intuition that many have about well-being, which is that whatever happens to be good for us, it ought to engage us in some way. The idea here—sometimes called “the resonance constraint” (Brink, 2008) or the “non-alienation condition” (Railton, 2003)—is that it would be a mistake for a theory of well-being to say that there are things that are good for us that we don’t care about in any way. Since desire satisfactionism explains the goodness of things with reference to our desires, it follows straightforwardly that we will be interested or engaged by the things that are good for us according to this theory.
The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes is probably the earliest proponent of a desire satisfaction theory of the good in the Western tradition. In Leviathan (1651[1994]), Hobbes’s central goal is to defend a system of government on the basis of a certain conception of human nature. In short, Hobbes thought that the actions of every person were directed at their own self-interest, such that something was good for a person if and only if it was an object of one of their desires. This view of human nature, coupled with how he reasoned that humans would interact with one another outside of a state, led him to conclude that living under an absolute monarchy was in our best interest. But despite Hobbes’s place in history, desire satisfactionism need neither be committed to a view about human nature, nor be employed in defending a system of government. It need only say that a person is better off to the extent that they get what they want. There are a few ways that this might be understood, the simplest of which says that a person becomes better off when one or more of their desires are satisfied, all else being equal. This simple view says, for instance, that if you have a desire for a slice of raspberry cheesecake, and you get a slice of raspberry cheesecake, then you have become better off. This view, however, leads to some pressing problems.
For example, we tend to think that there are plenty of desires that, if satisfied, would not make a person better off. One might have the trivial desire of wanting to do nothing but count blades of grass, or the immoral desire to take another’s life, or the ignorant desire to take a drink from a water bottle, not knowing that the water had recently been replaced with gasoline. These are examples of defective desires, and in order to account for them, philosophers like Peter Railton (1986) have suggested that instead of understanding well-being with reference to the actual desires of persons, we understand it with reference to idealized desires. Specifically, he suggests that the things that are good for us are those things that a fully informed version of ourselves would want us to want.
To illustrate this, Railton asks us to consider Lonnie, a homesick and dehydrated traveler in a foreign country. Due to his homesickness and dehydration, Lonnie finds himself with a strong desire to drink a cold, comforting glass of milk. However, if Lonnie were to satisfy his desire, he would only exacerbate the discomfort he feels due to his dehydration, and this would in turn make him long for the comfort of home even more. Instead, Railton says, Lonnie should want to drink clear liquids. Specifically, Lonnie should want to drink clear liquids because that is what Lonnie-Plus, the idealized version of Lonnie, would want Lonnie to want. And, Lonnie-Plus has these desires because he has full knowledge of Lonnie’s physical and psychological constitution, and of the circumstances in which Lonnie finds himself.
Moving to the “ideal advisor” model, as Railton does, helps solve the problem with uninformed and irrational desires, but it’s not clear that the advisor model helps much with trivial or immoral desires. This is because it seems possible that someone could be constituted in such a way that they really would want, even if fully informed, to count grass or murder other people. But perhaps this is something about which desire theorists shouldn’t be too concerned. Recall the attractions of desire satisfactionism: its ability to explain the resonance between a person and their well-being, and the effect of individual differences on well-being. Maybe such theories should just say that strange people can achieve well-being in strange ways; after all, this doesn’t imply that these lives are morally good or admirable.
Still, it would be nice if a desire theory had something to say about our intuitions concerning trivial and immoral desires. Chris Heathwood (2006) offers a solution to this problem on behalf of his Subjective Desire Satisfactionism. According to Heathwood:
An instance of “subjective desire satisfaction” is a state of affairs in which a subject (i) has an intrinsic desire at some time for some state of affairs and (ii) believes at the time that the state of affairs obtains. An instance of “subjective desire frustration” occurs when (i) above holds but the subject believes that the desired state of affairs does not obtain. The value for the subject of (or the amount of welfare in) a subjective desire satisfaction is equal to the intensity of the desire satisfied. Likewise for frustration, except that the number is negative. The theory is summative so that the total amount of welfare in a life is equal to the sum of the values of all the subjective desire satisfactions and frustrations in that life. (2006, p. 548)
To unpack this a bit, an intrinsic desire has as its object something that is desired for itself, not as a means to something else. I might desire a knife, but only in order to cut and serve the cheesecake, the thing I really want. Now, it is the fact that the theory is summative that allows Heathwood to satisfy our intuitions about trivial and immoral desires. This is because it makes room for a distinction between something being intrinsically good for someone and something being all things considered good for someone (Heathwood, 2006, p. 546). Something is intrinsically good for someone just in case it is an object of one of their intrinsic desires, while something is all things considered good for someone if it would lead to a better life for that person were it to obtain (i.e., it would lead to greater net subjective desire satisfaction). So, when it comes to counting blades of grass or committing murders, these things could very well be intrinsically good for someone, but not all things considered good (and, for many people, this is probably the case). That said, the theory does not rule out the possibility that these things might also be all things considered good for some people.
To be sure, the summative feature of Heathwood’s theory also allows him to make good sense of intuitions about irrational desires. For instance, drinking milk would be intrinsically good for Lonnie if he wants milk for its own sake, but not all things considered good. Heathwood’s view has many strengths, but those who are persuaded by the experience machine objection to hedonism might worry that the objection applies here, too, since belief that one’s desire has been satisfied (as opposed to the actual achievement of the desired object) is all that’s required.
Although there is no analogue to desire satisfactionism in positive psychology, psychologists might appreciate this theory as an explanation for the goodness of items on their lists. Indeed, Martin Seligman (2012, p. 16) lists the fact that people pursue something for its own sake as a necessary condition for counting it as an element of well-being. After all, desire satisfactionism does not posit objective values and it is highly sensitive to individual differences, and these features will be attractive to psychologists. Nevertheless, one might worry that desire is the wrong psychological state to focus on, because desire seems both too broad and too narrow: too broad, because we can desire things that don’t seem connected to our own well-being (world peace, that Pluto be a planet); too narrow, because other psychological states such as emotions seem highly relevant to our well-being. The next theory we’ll consider, value fulfillment theory, is structurally similar to desire satisfactionism, but it puts different psychological states at the center of the theory.
Value Fulfillment Theory
Value fulfillment theories draw their inspiration from desire theories. Specifically, value theorists think that it’s a good idea to look to agents’ attitudes in explaining why things are good for them, but in addition suggest that psychological states other than desire are relevant to well-being. As we’ll see, the relevance of these additional states leads to a specification of what it means for someone to value something, as opposed to merely desiring it.
Consider a desire you might have to be part of a particular friendship. A value fulfillment theory will say that besides this desire, there are other psychological states that need to be considered when determining whether or not that friendship is good for you. The theory could say, for example, that if you have a desire to be part of a certain friendship, but the satisfaction of this desire fails to harmonize with your emotional dispositions, then the friendship is not as good for you as it might be. Maybe it’s the case that your friend is a good running partner but also a prolific gossiper, so that despite the bond formed through running together, you find yourself feeling like you can’t share thoughts that you would otherwise share with a good friend. If this lack of trust prevents you from being disposed to enjoy the company of your friend, a value theory could say that the friendship is not as good for you as it could be. That is, though you wanted the friendship, the theory would entail that it would be better for you if the friendship satisfied your desire and you were disposed to enjoy it.
Valerie Tiberius (2018) is one value fulfillment theorist who thinks that the things that are best for us are those things that are suited to both our desires and emotions. In addition, she thinks that the things that are best for us are reflectively endorsed. A good is reflectively endorsed when we judge it to provide us with reasons to act in certain ways, or in other words, when we view it as something worthy of consideration as we reason about how to live our lives. For example, a person who fully values friendship is to have judged that the friendship gives her reasons to support her friend, to spend time with her friend, and so on. For Tiberius, then, to value something is to have a relatively well integrated pattern of motivational and emotional states with respect to it, and to endorse it as relevant to planning and life evaluation.
Further, Tiberius says, well-being is not just a matter of fulfilling one’s values, but of living a life rich in the fulfillment of appropriate values. Appropriate values are both psychologically integrated and capable of being fulfilled together over time, according to the standards of success that the person has for those values. We sometimes have values that are in conflict, or values that we hold to standards of success that make them conflict with each other. For example, consider a person who values his career as a lawyer and thinks he must work seventy hours a week to do a good job, and who also values being a hands-on parent who bakes cupcakes from scratch for every bake sale. These values, understood in this demanding way, will be hard to fulfill together. Tiberius argues that
[a]ppropriateness comes in degrees and much of what we are doing when we think about how to improve our lives is trying to inch our values toward greater appropriateness. Completely inappropriate values would be projects, relationships, and ideals that do not motivate us, that leave us emotionally cold, and that we could not successfully pursue over time even if we tried. Completely inappropriate values, then, are not going to get onto our radar. Mostly what we’ve got, and what we will think about when we’re thinking about our well-being, are values that are at varying degrees of appropriateness, and our task is to think about how to make that system of values better for us. This may involve jettisoning values that are on the “less appropriate” end of the spectrum, but there is no bright line between values that are appropriate enough and values that are too inappropriate to keep even in a modified form. (2018, p. 67)
To be sure, each of the preceding conditions has bearing on the degree of appropriateness of any given value. We can more or less desire something, more or less feel disposed to enjoy something, more or less judge something to give us reasons, and more or less be able to pursue something over time. This provides the theory with the flexibility to handle the kinds of objections posed to desire theorists. Consider again the problem of defective desires. While value theorists have to concede the possibility that some immoral or trivial desires might be best for some people, they have a lot to say about how exceptional these sorts of people have to be. That is, for these desires to be part of a maximally appropriate set of values, the people who pursue them not only have to get what they want, but also feel disposed to enjoy what they get, judge it to be reasoning giving, and this has to continue to be true over time. While it’s not too hard to imagine someone appropriately valuing these kinds of things to a degree, it’s very difficult to imagine many people for whom counting grass or committing murders would be best.3 For most, these kinds of values will be too inappropriate to be worthy of consideration, and so would add very little to their well-being if fulfilled.
Jason Raibley (2012) is another value fulfillment theorist who argues that while the preceding account is an improvement over desire satisfactionism, it hasn’t gone far enough. This is because he thinks that other value theories fail to adequately assess the well-being of folks who experience abrupt changes to their value systems. He asks us to consider Michael, a Catholic who has lived a life fulfilling a coherent system of values, the most important of which is his relationship with god. He values this relationship so strongly that he structures the rest of his values around it, decides to become a priest, but realizes upon completing seminary that he no longer believes in god. This prompts a crisis of faith, resulting in a breakdown of his value system and so an erosion of his motivation to live a godly life. Raibley says that it should be obvious that despite regularly fulfilling his values up until his completion of seminary, Michael’s life has not gone very well. But value theorists, it seems, are forced to say that since his life has been replete with value fulfillment, he is doing quite well despite his loss of faith.
In light of this, Raibley puts forward another kind of value fulfillment theory, according to which one is well off to the extent that their life resembles a paradigm case of faring well. Such a life is one where an agent (i) has values, (ii) acts in ways that realize those values, and (iii) maintains “physical and psychological systems that make values-realisation possible and likely—i.e., [maintains] the causal basis for a disposition to succeed” (Raibley, 2012, p. 259). Further, an agent’s well-being needs to be understood with reference to time, such that an agent does well over a segment of time to the extent that they resemble the paradigm case over that segment of time (2012, p. 259). So, on Raibley’s view, Michael’s loss of a central value, and the resulting damage that it does to his motivational system, causes his life to lose much of the resemblance that it had with the paradigm case. That is, a paradigm case of faring well over time does not include sudden losses of value or breakdowns of the dispositions to succeed in realizing one’s values.
Whether or not Raibley’s account improves upon standard fulfillment theories, the core of the standard view is still present. That is, what is centrally important for well-being is getting what we value, where valuing is understood to involve a complex array of attitudes, not merely desires. Value fulfillment theories may be attractive to positive psychologists because they offer an explanatory framework for investigating many of the things psychologists measure: subjective happiness, feelings of meaning, relationships, mental health, autonomy, mastery. These are, after all, things that most people value. Value fulfillment theory recommends measuring both how well people are doing at achieving these widely shared values and also how much people value the things on this list, how they understand success, and how well they are doing at fulfilling their more idiosyncratic values. This makes measurement very complicated, of course. Value fulfillment theory does not make well-being easily measurable, because it makes well-being a multifaceted, diachronic quality.4
Conclusion
We have tried to provide an overview of the most prominent theories of well-being in the Western philosophical literature.5 We hope that the distinction between primarily enumerative theories and primarily explanatory theories has helped to make clear their advantages and shortcomings. Hedonism has the virtues of being simple and empirically tractable, but it has to deal with the widespread conviction that pleasure is not the only good. Objective list theories have the virtue of making sense of this conviction but are saddled with the task of convincing us that their lists are not arbitrary. Human nature theories, desire satisfaction theories, and value fulfillment theories are prepared to explain why goods on a list are indeed good, but these theories also have their problems. In addition to the problems we have discussed, we might wonder whether such theories can give us enough direction about what should make it onto a list of goods. Perhaps both enumerative theories and explanatory theories are necessary and perhaps they should be developed in tandem. If nothing else, their co-development can help us to better discern the relationship between our intuitions about what is good, and potential explanations for goodness. If it turns out that our best explanations and intuitions harmonize, all the better for the joint effort. If they diverge, then theorists being in close conversation with one another can only help to reconcile differences. Indeed, given the long history of philosophical thinking about well-being and the complexity of the subject matter, cooperative effort seems essential, not just across a single discipline like philosophy, but also across different disciplines. We hope that this chapter will be useful in supporting this cooperative effort.
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1Bentham certainly held the view that pleasure was a distinctive sensation, as did Mill, but with one caveat, which was that our experience of the sensation was not only augmented by its intensity and duration, but also by the quality of the pleasure (Crisp, 2006; Macleod, 2018).
2Perhaps because of this, Aristotelian theories are often called “Perfectionism.” No one seems to like this label, not even those who defend the theory, so we will avoid it here. It is also misleading, because perfectionists do not say that we should aim at perfection.
3The same goes for folks with irrational desires. Lonnie’s desire for milk clearly clashes with his value of being in good health, and perhaps also with his value of becoming a well-traveled person (unpleasant experiences in foreign places are apt to make one more reluctant to leave home in the future!).
4We should not think that it is impossible to measure value fulfillment in its complexity, however. New methods may be developed and old methods may be recruited for the purpose. For example, Bedford-Peterson et al. (2019) use Personal Projects Analysis (Little, 2006, 2015) to examine correlations between value fulfillment and subjective well-being. Personal Projects Analysis elicits participants’ important personal projects and then asks them to rate those projects on various standard dimensions such as stage of completion, place in a hierarchy of project, and emotional salience.
5To be sure, the realm of possible theories can be conceived to be much broader than what we’ve presented, especially if we take for granted the enumerative/explanatory distinction. For one analysis of how big this space of possibility might be, see Woodard (2013).