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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Key Concepts in Philosophy
- Sprache: Englisch
The concept of well-being plays a central role in moral and political theory. Policies and actions are justified or criticized on the grounds that they make people better or worse off. But is there really such a thing as well-being, and if so, what is it? Is it pleasure, desire-satisfaction, knowledge, virtue, achievement, some combination of these, or something else entirely? How can we measure well-being, amongst individuals and society? And how can we use it to make moral judgements about people, policies and institutions? In this entertaining and accessible new book, Ben Bradley guides readers through the various philosophical theories of well-being, such as hedonism, perfectionism and pluralism, showing the benefits and drawbacks of each theory. He explores the role of well-being in moral and political theory, and the limitations of welfare-based approaches to ethics such as utilitarianism and welfare egalitarianism. Finally, he introduces puzzles about well-being that arise in moral and prudential deliberations about procreation and death. Well-Being is an ideal introduction to these topics for those with no philosophical background, or for philosophers looking for an overview of current thinking about the subject.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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Table of Contents
Key Concepts in Philosophy
Title page
Copyright page
Preface
1: The Concept of Well-Being
1.1 Identifying the Concept
1.2 Well-Being and Happiness
1.3 Well-Being and Goodness
1.4 Well-Being and Caring
1.5 The Subjects of Well-Being
1.6 Intrinsic and Instrumental Value
1.7 Further Reading
Notes
2: Hedonism
2.1 What Pleasure Is
2.2 Simple Hedonism
2.3 Base Pleasures and Quality of Pleasure
2.4 False Pleasures
2.5 The Intrinsic Values of Non-Pleasures
2.6 Life Satisfaction
2.7 Further Reading
Notes
3: Desires
3.1 What Desires Are
3.2 The Desire Fulfillment View
3.3 Defective Desires
3.4 Sophisticated Desire Views
3.5 Past Desires, Unknown Fulfillments, and Posthumous Harms
3.6 Further Reading
Notes
4: Capabilities and Human Nature
4.1 Perfectionism
4.2 Human Nature, Function, and Distinctiveness
4.3 The Essence of Humanity
4.4 The Character of Humanity
4.5 Capabilities and Dignity
4.6 Further Reading
Notes
5: Pluralism
5.1 Two Tests
5.2 Knowledge
5.3 Virtue
5.4 Friendship
5.5 Freedom
5.6 Meaningfulness
5.7 A Problem with Lists
5.8 Further Reading
Notes
6: Aggregating and Measuring Well-Being
6.1 Aggregating Different Kinds of Goods
6.2 Aggregating Well-Being Within a Life
6.3 Aggregating Well-Being Across Lives
6.4 Measuring Well-Being
6.5 The Causes of Well-Being
6.6 Further Reading
Notes
7: Well-Being and Normative Theory
7.1 Utilitarianism
7.2 Well-Being, Harm, and Deontological Ethics
7.3 Welfare Egalitarianism
7.4 Asymmetries
7.5 Well-Being and Death
7.6 Further Reading
Notes
8: Conclusion
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Start Reading
CHAPTER 1
Index
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Key Concepts in Philosophy
Guy Axtell,
Objectivity
Heather Battaly,
Virtue
Lisa Bortolotti,
Irrationality
Joseph Keim Campbell,
Free Will
Roy T. Cook,
Paradoxes
Douglas Edwards,
Properties
Ian Evans and Nicholas D. Smith,
Knowledge
Bryan Frances,
Disagreement
Amy Kind,
Persons and Personal Identity
Douglas Kutach,
Causation
Carolyn Price,
Emotion
Daniel Speak,
The Problem of Evil
Matthew Talbert,
Moral Responsibility
Deborah Perron Tollefsen,
Groups as Agents
Joshua Weisberg,
Consciousness
Chase Wrenn,
Truth
Copyright page
Copyright © Ben Bradley 2015
The right of Ben Bradley to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2015 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
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Malden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6272-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6273-2(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bradley, Ben, 1971-
Well-being / Ben Bradley.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7456-6272-5 (hardback : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-7456-6273-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Happiness. 2. Well-being. I. Title.
BJ1481.B68 2015
170–dc23
2014049453
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Printed and bound in the UK by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CRO4YY
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Preface
Well-being has always been a central notion in moral and political philosophy. It plays a role in determining the rightness of actions. Utilitarians claim that morality is entirely based on well-being – that what we ought to do is make people as well-off as possible. Deontologists claim that we have a strict duty not to cause harm; harming someone seems to involve making that person worse off. Well-being also plays an important role in theories of justice; when a hero lives a miserable life, or a villain prospers, we find this unjust. And prudence seems primarily concerned with well-being too; to be prudent is just to do what makes one better off. Well-being is also important outside philosophy. It is what some “welfare economists” are talking about when they declare that governments should be promoting well-being rather than GDP; it is what family courts are talking about when they make a decision that is alleged to be in the “best interests” of a child.
The central questions of the book are the following: is there such a thing as well-being, and if so, what is it? What constitutes well-being – pleasure, desire satisfaction, knowledge, virtue, achievement, some combination of these, or something else? What is the importance of well-being for moral theory, political theory, and public policy? The main point of this book is not to advocate for a particular answer to any of these questions, but to give each view a fair shake and give the reader a feel for the dialectical situation and what is important. After reading this book, one should be prepared to delve more deeply into current academic debates on well-being and should have better perspective on public policy discussions where well-being is an issue.
I have discussed the issues in this book with many people on many occasions. Here are just a few of the folks with whom I have had helpful conversations, or from whom I have received useful comments: Matt Adler, Anna Alexandrova, Gustaf Arrhenius, Krister Bykvist, Steve Campbell, Jeremy Dickinson, Dale Dorsey, Julia Driver, Kirsten Egerstrom, Fred Feldman, Dan Haybron, Chris Heathwood, Hallie Liberto, Eden Lin, Richard Lucas, Amy Massoud, Dale Miller, Dave Sobel, Roy Sorensen (who informed me about Angelman's Syndrome, see ch. 2), Valerie Tiberius, and Travis Timmerman. Special thanks to my research assistant Amy Massoud, who supplied me with detailed reports on recent empirical studies of well-being; to David Sobel and Jeremy Dickinson who commented on drafts of the entire manuscript; to two anonymous referees for very helpful suggestions; and to Pascal Porcheron and Emma Hutchinson at Polity for their patience, encouragement, and guidance.
Section 5.7 (“A Problem with Lists”) on pp. 67–9 is extracted with minimal changes from: Ben Bradley, “Objective Theories of Well-Being,” in Ben Eggleston and Dale Miller (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Utilitarianism (Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 199–215 © Cambridge University Press, 2014. Reproduced with permission.
1The Concept of Well-Being
1.1 Identifying the Concept
If you go into a bookstore and look at some books in the self-improvement section, you will find some advice about how to make yourself better-off. You'll probably be advised to have some good friends, find some activities or hobbies that you enjoy, eat healthy food, get some regular exercise, reduce the amount of stress in your life, and perhaps join a church or synagogue. For example, in a recent bestselling book, Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements, Tom Rath and James Harter claim that there are five components to well-being: Career Wellbeing, Social Wellbeing, Financial Wellbeing, Physical Wellbeing, and Community Wellbeing (Rath and Harter 2010). This all seems very commonsensical. If someone is healthy and rich, has lots of friends and a good job, and is respected in her community, we will probably regard her as well-off.
But suppose our rich, healthy, popular person is also miserable. She doesn't like her friends and finds her job meaningless. Would we still regard her as well-off? Perhaps not. This should lead us to ask why we care about things like money, health, friends, and a job. What is so good about these things? We want these things only because having them seems to lead to being better-off. What a philosopher wants to understand is not just what leads to being better-off, but what it is to be better-off. Just what is it that being rich, healthy, employed, and popular allegedly leads to?
Answering this question might be of some practical use. For instance, it might help us determine what to do when different books give us different advice about how to be well-off. Knowing what well-being is might help us to see that one of the books is utilizing a mistaken view about well-being. For example, we might discover that in fact, having lots of money does not lead to well-being at all. But the main purpose of this book is not to evaluate self-help books or to make you better-off. The purpose of this book is to investigate abstract philosophical questions about well-being. Answering these questions might, in the end, not be very useful when it comes to actually being better-off. With luck, though, we will have a better understanding of what it is we are looking for when we try to improve our lives or the lives of others. On some views about well-being, such understanding is itself something that makes us better-off.
There are two main things we want to know. (1) What are we talking about when we talk about well-being? In other words, what do we mean by “well-being”? This is a conceptual question about well-being. (2) What features does a person's life need to have in order for the person to be well-off? That is, what are the ultimate determinants of well-being? This is a substantial question about well-being. It is important to distinguish between these questions.
An example might be helpful here. Johnny is six years old. He has never heard of the idea of a “syllable.” He hears some older students talking about syllables and talking about how many syllables are in various words. He notices that longer words seem to have more syllables. At that point he can often correctly guess how many syllables are in a word; but he does not yet possess the concept of a syllable. He knows some things: that syllables are related to words in some way, and that longer words usually have more than shorter ones. But more than this is required to have the concept of a syllable. Then someone explains to him how to figure out how many syllables are in a word: “ba-na-na: three syllables.” Johnny thus acquires the concept of a syllable. He no longer has to guess how many syllables are in a word; he knows. He might not yet be able to offer a correct definition of the word “syllable,” but this is not required in order to possess the concept. Now that he has the concept, he can understand what people are talking about when they talk about syllables, can ask meaningful questions, and can engage in disagreements about syllables. For example, he might wonder whether all syllables have a vowel. Learning the answer to that question will not alter his grasp of the concept of a syllable; he knows perfectly well what a syllable is, he just doesn't have complete knowledge of how the concept applies. In the case of well-being, we should first be sure that all parties to the discussion mean the same thing when they say “well-being.” Then we can have meaningful disagreements about whether money increases well-being or not, and ask meaningful questions about what the constituents of well-being are.
1.2 Well-Being and Happiness
If you ask someone why they want money, or a job, or to be healthy, they might say it is because those things lead to happiness. Thus we might think that well-being should be identified with happiness. But what is happiness? There are at least two ways we might understand what happiness is.
We might take happiness to be a sort of feeling, mood, or experience one has. Perhaps I am happy when I am feeling pleasure; or perhaps I am happy when I am in a good mood. Suppose happiness is something like this; call it “experiential happiness.” On the proposal in question, well-being is to be identified with experiential happiness. This way of understanding well-being has some nice features. Everyone knows what it is like to feel good; so everyone can understand what well-being is. And feeling good, or being in a good mood, does seem like something that is important to us.
But there is a problem with this way of understanding well-being. Many philosophers deny that experiential happiness is sufficient for well-being. They say that although you might think you are well-off if you are enjoying yourself, genuine well-being requires something else in addition to having certain experiences (as we will see in chapter 2). Perhaps those philosophers are wrong to say such a thing. But it seems overblown to say that they are misidentifying the concept of well-being. If that is so, then we cannot simply identify the concept of well-being with the concept of experiential happiness. While hedonists believe that experiential happiness is necessary and sufficient for being well-off, we do not want to make this a matter of definition. It is a claim that needs to be argued for, not settled by defining terms in a certain way. If we just stipulate that well-being means happiness, then those other philosophers will just say that they are interested in some other thing – call it well-being* – rather than well-being. All that we accomplish by giving a contentious definition of well-being is to change the venue of debate from the question of whether happiness is the sole component of well-being to the question of whether we should care about well-being or well-being*.
We might understand happiness in a broader sense. We could agree that someone could have good experiences and not be well-off, but also say that such a person would not truly be happy. Happiness, on this view, is more than having certain experiences; to be happy is to flourish. (See chapter 4 for more on “flourishing” views of well-being.) Unfortunately, to identify the concept of well-being with the concept of flourishing does not help us much in getting a grasp on the concept of well-being. All we are doing is giving another name, “flourishing,” to the thing we are trying to get a grip on.
The trick in identifying the concept of well-being is to do two things at once. (1) Say something so general about well-being that everyone can agree, “yes, that's what I mean when I'm talking about well-being!” (2) Say something informative enough to help us pick out well-being and distinguish it from other concepts. Identifying the concept of well-being with the concept of experiential happiness fails (1). Identifying it with the concept of flourishing fails (2).1
1.3 Well-Being and Goodness
It is important to distinguish between well-being, which is a notion of goodness “for” an individual, and intrinsic goodness, which people sometimes call “just plain” goodness or goodness “simpliciter.” When we say that something is intrinsically good, we are saying that it is good in itself – it makes the world a better place just by being what it is (rather than by causing some other good things to happen). We are not saying that it is good for anyone or anything (though it might be that also) – it is just good.
Here is a way to distinguish well-being from just-plain-goodness. Imagine a universe that has no people in it. It contains beautiful sunsets, landscapes, rock formations and such, but not a single conscious being. You might think that such a world would be good – better than no universe at all, and better than an ugly universe (Moore 1903: 83–4). But it wouldn't be good for anyone, because there would be no conscious beings there. There would be no well-being at all. This is controversial, of course; you might think a beautiful world would be good only if there were people there to enjoy the beauty. But it is not conceptually confused to say that a beautiful world with nobody in it would be a good world. It makes sense to say this, and we understand what is being said when someone says it. So our concept of intrinsic goodness is not the same as our concept of well-being.
Another example that illustrates the difference between goodness and well-being involves what Derek Parfit called the “Non-Identity Problem” (Parfit 1984: ch. 16). Suppose someone is trying to decide whether to conceive a child. She knows if she conceives now, the child who develops will have a genetic condition that will cause him significant pain; his life will still be good for him and well worth living, but it will have this pain in it too. If she waits three months to conceive, the child who develops will have a very similar life but will not have that painful condition. Suppose she conceives now despite all this knowledge. That seems like it makes things worse than if she had waited. But it is not worse for any actual person. If she had waited to conceive, the child who developed would be a different child. Her actual child would not have existed at all, so he would not have been better-off if she had waited. The child she would have had if she had waited does not exist, so he is not worse off either. Thus one situation can be worse than another without being worse for anyone. This shows that the “just plain goodness” of an outcome is not the same as its goodness for someone.
Given that we have two distinct concepts, intrinsic goodness and well-being, we might want to define one in terms of the other. We might say that for some fact to be good for me is just for it to be (i) intrinsically good and (ii) about me (Moore 1903: 98–9). Suppose I experience some happiness. My experiencing happiness is intrinsically good; a world with me experiencing happiness is, other things equal, a better world than a world without me experiencing happiness. The fact that I am happy is about me; it essentially involves me; I am part of that fact. Thus, according to the proposed definition, my experiencing happiness is good for me.
A nice feature of this definition is that it connects two important value concepts, well-being and intrinsic goodness, by definition. When we have two concepts that are closely related, it is nice to be able to define one in terms of the other rather than having completely distinct concepts. Having such a definitional connection between well-being and goodness would explain why well-being is good: part of what it means to say that something is good for someone is to say that it is good. But the proposed definition faces serious problems, because it seems possible for there to be facts that are intrinsically good, and about a person, without being good for that person. Suppose justice is intrinsically good, so that it is intrinsically good when someone gets what she deserves. And suppose Joan deserves some pain in virtue of her wicked deeds. Joan's getting pain would be intrinsically good – it would make the world better, other things equal – but it would still not be good for Joan. In fact, from the standpoint of justice, the whole point of her suffering the pain, the reason it is better that she suffers, is that it would be bad for her. Again, it is controversial whether justice so understood is intrinsically good. But as in the case of beauty, it at least seems conceptually coherent to say that justice is intrinsically good, whether it in fact is good or not. There is no conceptual incoherence in saying that it is intrinsically good when someone gets what she deserves. Since we are investigating conceptual relations between well-being and other concepts, this is sufficient to show that the proposed definition of well-being in terms of goodness cannot be true.
1.4 Well-Being and Caring
We might instead attempt to define well-being by appeal to what we want or care about. The “crib test” offers a way to get a handle on the concept of well-being (Feldman 2004: 9–10). To perform this test, you imagine your newborn child in its crib, and imagine what you would want for that child. If you would want your child's life to have certain elements, then you must think those elements promote the child's well-being. If we were to use a test like this as the basis for a definition of well-being, we might say that someone is well-off when she has the kind of life that someone who cared for her would or should want her to have (Darwall 2004).
This definition seems better than happiness-based definitions. It is very general – people might have very different ideas about what promotes well-being, yet agree that the things that promote well-being are things that they want someone's life to have if they care about that person. And it is, to some degree, informative and useful. It posits a connection between well-being and caring. We already know what it is to care about someone, so we can use that knowledge to understand the nature of well-being.
However, sometimes we want people we care about to have a certain kind of life even though we know that life is not best for them. For example, we might want someone we care about to be honest and generous, or to accomplish something meaningful with her life, even though this might sometimes lead her to sacrifice her own welfare. The problem is that well-being is not the only thing we care about when we care about our loved ones. So the caring account makes well-being too expansive.
We might add a clause to the definition to get around this problem. We could say that someone is well-off when she has the kind of life that someone who cared about her would want for her, for her own sake (Darwall 2004). There are certain things we want for our loved ones even though they might not increase their well-being, such as virtue and achievement, but we don't necessarily want those things for our loved ones' sakes. We might want them for our own sake, or for the sake of others, or because it would make the universe better; in these cases, the things we want are not components of the person's well-being. But adding this clause makes our definition uninformative. When we say we want something for someone's sake, we just mean we want it for the sake of her well-being. It is not very helpful to say that well-being is what we want for someone when we care about her well-being.
It does seem true that well-being is among the things we want, or ought to want, for someone we care about. What's more, it is something we want intrinsically for that person – that is, we just want that person to have it, even if it does not lead to any other things we care about for her. In this respect, it is very unlike money or a job; we usually want those we care about to have money or a job, but only in virtue of what having those things leads to. But we might also want that person to be virtuous even if being virtuous fails to lead to any other good things for her; and we might want this even if we don't think being virtuous promotes her well-being. So we cannot simply identify a person's well-being with what a loved one wants for her, but we can perhaps use this as a test: if there is something that we have absolutely no reason to want for someone we care about, then it is not a component of well-being.
Perhaps these attempted definitions of well-being point us in the direction of the concept we are trying to grasp. We need not take the failure to define a concept as reason not to use it; some concepts are basic and undefinable. Well-being may be one of those concepts. It is useful to see its connections to concepts like happiness, goodness, and caring, even if it cannot be defined in terms of them. Well-being is happiness, in the broadest sense of “happiness” – it is flourishing. Well-being is something that, normally, is good in itself and makes the universe better. It is one of the most important things we want for those we care about.
1.5 The Subjects of Well-Being
Philosophical discussions of well-being usually focus on human well-being. This makes sense, since the discussions are carried out by humans, and we humans tend to care most about ourselves and other humans. This book will generally focus on human well-being too, since it attempts to give the reader a sense of the philosophical landscape concerning well-being, which has been human-centered. But it would be a mistake to suppose that only humans have a well-being. It seems clear that at least some non-humans have a welfare. If you own a dog or a cat, you almost certainly believe that your pet can be benefited or harmed. It will be worthwhile to think about how the various theories of well-being can be applied to non-human animals.
