Human Flourishing Versus Desire Satisfaction

1999 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard J. Arneson
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Surprising Result ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Prudential Value ◽  
Desire Satisfaction ◽  
Individual Good ◽  
Helping Others ◽  
Good For

What is the good for human persons? If I am trying to lead the best possible life I could lead, not the morally best life, but the life that is best for me, what exactly am I seeking?This phrasing of the question I will be pursuing may sound tendentious, so some explanation is needed. What is good for one person, we ordinarily suppose, can conflict with what is good for other persons and with what is required by morality. A prudent person seeks her own good efficiently; she selects the best available means to her good. If we call the value that a person seeks when she is being prudent “prudential value,” then an alternative rendering of the question to be addressed in this essay is “What is prudential value?” We can also say that an individual flourishes or has a life high in well-being when her life is high in prudential value. Of course, these common-sense appearances that the good for an individual, the good for other persons, and the requirements of morality often are in conflict might be deceiving. For all that I have said here, the correct theory of individual good might yield the result that sacrificing oneself for the sake of other people or for the sake of a morally worthy cause can never occur, because helping others and being moral always maximize one's own good. But this would be the surprising result of a theory, not something we should presuppose at the start of inquiry. When a friend has a baby and I express a conventional wish that the child have a good life, I mean a life that is good for the child, not a life that merely helps others or merely respects the constraints of morality. After all, a life that is altruistic and perfectly moral, we suppose, could be a life that is pure hell for the person who lives it—a succession of horrible headaches marked by no achievements or attainments of anything worthwhile and ending in agonizing death at a young age. So the question remains, what constitutes a life that is good for the person who is living it?

An Analysis of Prudential Value

Utilitas ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 334-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEPHEN M. CAMPBELL
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Prudential Value ◽  
Good For ◽  
The Relationship

This essay introduces and defends a new analysis of prudential value. According to this analysis, what it is for something to be good for you is for that thing to contribute to the appeal or desirability of being in your position. I argue that this proposal fits well with our ways of talking about prudential value and well-being; enables promising analyses of luck, selfishness, self-sacrifice and paternalism; preserves the relationship between prudential value and the attitudes of concern, love, pity and envy; and satisfies various other desiderata. I also highlight two ways in which the analysis is informative and can lead to progress in our substantive theorizing about the good life.

Well-Being

Life's Values ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 71-115
Author(s):  
Alan H. Goldman
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Successful Theory ◽  
Desire Satisfaction ◽  
Personal Value ◽  
Good For ◽  
The Individual

Well-being is what makes life valuable or good for the individual whose life it is. It is the all-inclusive category of personal value. This chapter evaluates the leading accounts: hedonism (pleasure is the measure of well-being), perfectionism (development of human capacities is the measure), objective lists (numerous objective goods make up a good life), and desire satisfaction. Fatal objections are raised to the first three, and an idealized desire satisfaction account is defended against objections typically raised by others to this kind of theory. The successful theory must capture our concept, unify and explain why various things are good for individual persons, and show why we are rationally motivated to pursue well-being.

The Perfectionist Turn

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas J. Den Uyl ◽  
Douglas B. Rasmussen
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Living Things ◽  
Good For

This chapter argues against the claim advanced by Daniel Haybron, Daniel C. Russell, and Mark LeBar that human self-perfection is ultimately based on notions of well-being and human flourishing that we bring to our understanding of human nature and in favor of the idea that it is human nature itself that ultimately grounds our understanding of human well-being or human flourishing. In doing so, the question of whether there is some gap between (a) what it is to be a good human being and (b) what is good for a human being is addressed. It is shown that the arguments on behalf of a such a gap fail and that the version of perfectionism that is advanced—that is, individualistic perfectionism—is ideally suited to not only avoid such a gap but also to display their unity, especially when perfection is understood as a process of living things and not as some cosmic or metaphysical process.

scholarly journals Health, Wealth or Wisdom? Religion and the Paradox of Prosperity

2009 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-23
Author(s):  
Elaine Graham
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
The West ◽  
Contributory Factors ◽  
Vexed Question

AbstractThe so-called 'happiness hypothesis', associated with the work of the economist Richard Layard, has attracted much public debate over recent years. Its main contention is that despite rising levels of material prosperity in the west, incidence of recorded happiness and greater quality of life has not increased accordingly. In considering the major contributory factors to happiness and well-being, however, Layard is not alone in identifying the significance of religious values and participation in religion for positive and enduring levels of happiness. In response, this article critiques some of the evidence correlating religion and well-being, as well as considering the broader and much more vexed question of how far public policy is capable of incorporating questions of belief and value into its indicators of happiness and the good life. Drawing on traditions of virtue ethics as the cultivation of 'the life well-lived', I ask whether specifically Christian accounts of human flourishing and the good life still have any bearing in the wider public domain, and what 'rules of engagement' might need to be articulated in any dialogue between Christian values and the discourse of theology and a pluralist society.

scholarly journals La valeur de la connaissance des émotions

Labyrinth ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 116
Author(s):  
Bertille De Vlieger
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Emotional States ◽  
Prudential Value ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Emotional Knowledge

The Value of the Emotional Knowledge Emotional knowledge is a form of self-knowledge which holds great interest for ordinary individuals. It is not obtained by any obligation but rather because we think it is crucial to obtain (Cassam 2017). In this article it is a matter of demonstrating that emotional knowledge holds an instrumental and a prudential value. By arguing that it can allow a control over our emotions, I shall maintain that emotional knowledge affects individual marginalization or acceptance in society. In addition, this type of knowledge is revealing of our personality by allowing us to identify our affective identities. Finally, I shall defend the idea that emotional knowledge contributes to the conduct of a good life. As such, my hypothesis could be viewed as incompatible with widespread ideas (Montaigne 2019), according to which the knowledge of our own emotions can trigger negative emotional states, e.g. mental rumination, anxiety, that do not contribute to our well-being.  

scholarly journals Education for a good life: tracing how Sumak Kawsay and Sufficiency Economy became ideals for living well

10.33177/6.4 ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 69-90
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Living Well ◽  
Good Living ◽  
Good For ◽  
Sumak Kawsay

Both Sumak Kawsay (SK) in Ecuador and Sufficiency Economy (SE) in Thailand are stories of virtue, identity and progress that bring about an ideal citizen and lifestyle claimed to be good for all, but which are in fact problematic and dangerous for many. These notions arose in political and educational discourses as a promise to “rescue” “indigenous” values; to make possible ways of good-living better suited for each of these countries than “Western” notions of well-being. It is problematic that in trying to make the idea of progress “indigenous” these proposals (re)inscribe particular historically transmitted ideas of who an ideal citizen is, and a lifestyle which makes deviant “kinds” of people who have to be “cured” through education. This paper will argue that SK and SE in education are ways of organizing the behavior of people through stories of virtue. It will also argue that these stories shape and are shaped by their intersection with the traveling and translation of ideas of progress. The paper will look into particular historical events to analyze what categories and notions of progress make SK and SE possible.

Does Fairness Require a Multidimensional Approach?

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard J. Arneson
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Multidimensional Approach ◽  
Significant Component ◽  
Multidimensional Assessment ◽  
The Common ◽  
Good For ◽  
Objective List

What is in itself good for you, according to the argument of this chapter, is getting or achieving things that are objectively worthwhile, these being items on an objective list. Although it would be desirable to have a unified explanation of what belongs on the list, for now we rely on intuition. The chapter surveys and finds inadequate a number of alternative accounts of well-being, mainly on the ground that they conflict with the common-sense claims that enjoyment (feeling good) is a significant component of well-being—an entry on the objective list—and that there are additional intrinsic goods besides enjoyment. Since there are plural goods, we are stuck with multidimensional assessment, and with the difficulties of aggregation that involves.

The Place of Subjectivity

2020 ◽  
Vol 97 (3) ◽  
pp. 353-373
Author(s):  
Christoph Halbig
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Prudential Value ◽  
Good For

Abstract The modern debate on the theory of prudential values is largely structured around the issue of how to accommodate the role of subjectivity: a prudentially good life (unlike, say, a morally good life) seems to be necessarily a life that is good for the person living it. The present article aims at clarifying this crucial role of subjectivity in the ontology of prudential values. It tries to show that this role, rightly understood, can be fully and satisfactorily accounted for by a strong realism in the theory of prudential value. Subjectivist intuitions that prove incompatible with such a realist framework, it is argued, can be convincingly rejected on independent grounds.

Darwall on Rational Care

Utilitas ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 400-414 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOSEPH RAZ
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
List Type ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Good For

Stephen Darwall's understanding of what kind of life is a good life, good for the person whose life it is, belongs in the same family as, among others, Scanlon's and mine. It is a family of views about well-being which descends from Aristotle, and Darwall has much of interest to say about the good life, and particularly about Aristotle's views on the subject. Many of the observations central to his position seem to me cogent, and are shared by other writers. These include three important propositions: that a good life, one which is good for those whose life it is, is not necessarily the same as a life which they think is good for them, nor does it necessarily consist in their desires being satisfied, nor in the satisfaction of any subset of their desires (e.g. their considered desires, or those not based on any false assumptions).that people aim or intend to do what is worth doing, to have relationships worth having, and engage in goals worth pursuing, and so on, and that all of these, and their combination, are distinct from having a good life (and this explains how people can knowingly sacrifice their own good), andthat what makes the well-being of people worth pursuing, to the extent that it is, what provides reasons for those same people and for others to protect or promote it, is that people are valuable in themselves.

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