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.

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.

A Critique of Raz’s Liberal Perfectionism: Morality and Politics

1996 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-364
Author(s):  
Bi‐Hwan Kim
Keyword(s):  
Political Institutions ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Objective Knowledge ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Joseph Raz ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Liberal Perfectionism

Joseph Raz Has Long Been Well Known as a Legal philosopher and theorist of practical reason. But it is only in the last decade that he has come to be widely identified as the most prominent defender of a distinctive interpretation of the liberal tradition. Raz wholeheartedly endorses the communitarian view that the individual is a social being, who needs society to establish his/her self-identity and to gain objective knowledge of the good, rather than a self-contained subject abstracted from any specific social experience. Unlike neutralist liberals, such as Rawls and Dworkin, he rejects ‘the priority of right over the good’, stressing the interdependent relationship between right and the good. Yet he remains very much a liberal in his commitment to the value of autonomy (or freedom) and argues powerfully for the desirability (or necessity) of incommensurable plural conceptions of the good life for the well-being of people, as well as for the liberal virtue of toleration, and for their attendant liberal democratic political institutions.

Positive Psychology: Past, Present, and Future

2009 ◽  
pp. 6-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ed Diener
Keyword(s):  
Positive Psychology ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Human Functioning ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual

This chapter briefly reviews the history of positive psychology, and the endeavor by scientists to answer the classic question posed by philosophers: What is the good life? One piece of evidence for the growth of positive psychology is the proliferation of measures to assess concepts such as happiness, well-being, and virtue. The chapter briefly reviews the importance of C. R. Snyder to the field of positive psychology. Several critiques of positive psychology are discussed. One valid critique is that there is too much emphasis within positive psychology on the individual, and too little focus on positive societies, institutions, and situations. We can profit from considering the various critiques because they will help us to improve the field. Positive psychology has important strengths, such as the number of young scholars and practitioners who are entering the field. The Handbook of Positive Psychology is an outstanding resource for all those who are working in this discipline, and also for others outside of the area, to gain broad knowledge of the important developments that are occurring in our understanding of positive human functioning.

WRITING COLLABORATIVE HAPPINESS

2022 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-29
Author(s):  
Catherine Kingfisher
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Sustainability ◽  
Collaborative Research ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Joint Production ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Research Project ◽  
The Individual

Abstract In this article, I discuss a collaborative research project with two urban cohousing communities: Kankanmori, in Tokyo, and Quayside Village, in North Vancouver. The project focused on the joint production of the good life in the two communities, both of which situate well-being as simultaneously social and subjective, thus expanding beyond mainstream approaches to happiness narrowly focused on the individual. In what follows, I describe the particular forms that collaboration took over the course of the six-year project and then provide a brief overview of the positive contributions cohousing can make to social and environmental sustainability.

God, the Good Life, and Pastoral Practice

2021 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
pp. 440-459
Author(s):  
Thomas (Tae Sung) Shin
Keyword(s):  
Practical Theology ◽  
Pastoral Theology ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Spiritual Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Living Well ◽  
Triune God ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Pastoral Practice

In this study, I emphasize that pastoral practice revitalizes the significance of spiritual life as an alternative way to negotiate the science of well-being. This article is written from the perspective of practical theology, which is framed as a way of “living well” in which it is doubtful for both the individual and community to fulfill the good life without spirituality. Such an approach entails a degree of a transformative and transcendent life created by new senses, attentions, knowledge, ontological understanding, and disciplines out of the experience of the triune God. This study responds to the vocation of practical theology according to Ruard Ganzevoort and Johan Roeland, who assert that, “In its focus on praxis, practical theology has evolved out of three historical different styles of theology with differing concepts of and methodological approaches toward praxis: pastoral theology, empirical theology, and public theology.” They suggest that pastoral practice should be something that contributes to the culture of well-being and that the roles of spiritual life in the formation and reformation of the good life should be clarified.

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.

scholarly journals Getting Personal — The Intuition of Neutrality Re-interpreted

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wlodek Rabinowicz
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Repugnant Conclusion ◽  
Personal Value ◽  
The World ◽  
Related Point ◽  
Intuition Of Neutrality ◽  
Good For ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
Good Lives

According to the Intuition of Neutrality, there is a range of wellbeing levels such that adding people with lives at these levels doesn’t make the world either better or worse. As lives in the neutral range can be good for those who live them, this intuition is in conflict with one of the main tenets of welfarism; it creates a disparity between what is good for a person and what is impersonally good. Adding a person with a good life needn’t make the world better. In “Broome and the Intuition of Neutrality” (2009) I suggested, but did not elaborate, a re-interpretation of the neutral range that would remove the problematic disparity. On this re-interpretation, a life at a level within the neutral range is not merely impersonally neutral; it is also neutral in its personal value: neither better nor worse for its owner than non-existence. Nevertheless, among such personally neutral lives, some might still be personally better or worse than others, provided that they are incommensurable in their personal value with non-existence. In this paper, I explore some of the implications of this ‘personalization’ of the Intuition of neutrality. In particular, I discuss its worrisome implications for neutral-range utilitarianism (NRU). While NRU was originally proposed as a way to avoid the Repugnant Conclusion, it turns out this conclusion is re-instated on the new interpretation and, contrary to what was suggested in my 2009-paper, it remains repugnant. A related point is that it no longer holds that all personally good lives must be better for a person than personally neutral lives. Nor that all personally bad lives must be worse than personally neutral lives. While this might seem strange, it should be accepted. As for the worrisome implications of NRU, these implications do not undermine the personalized Neutrality Intuition itself. The latter might well be retained even if NRU is given up.

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.

Well-Being, Autonomy, and the Horizon Problem

Utilitas ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
JENNIFER S. HAWKINS
Keyword(s):  
Well Being ◽  
Social Origins ◽  
Individual Subject ◽  
Horizon Problem ◽  
Know How ◽  
Desire Satisfaction ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual

Desire satisfaction theorists and attitudinal-happiness theorists of well-being are committed to correcting the psychological attitudes upon which their theories are built. However, it is not often recognized that some of the attitudes in need of correction areevaluativeattitudes. Moreover, it is hard to know how to correct for poor evaluative attitudes in ways that respect the traditional commitment to the authority of the individual subject's evaluative perspective. L. W. Sumner has proposed an autonomy-as-authenticity requirement to perform this task, but this article argues that it cannot do the job. Sumner's proposal focuses on the social origins of our values and overlooks the deep psychological roots of other evaluative attitudes that are just as problematic for welfare. If subjective theories of welfare are to be at all plausible they may need to abandon or modify their traditional commitment to the authority of the individual subject.

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