Evaluative Diversity and the (Ir)Relevance of Well-Being

2020 ◽  
pp. 173-192
Author(s):  
Sean Aas
Keyword(s):  
Public Reason ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Disability Rights ◽  
Wide Range

This chapter is based on a concern that recent philosophical discussions about disability—more and more focused on the relevance of disability to individual well-being—risk losing sight of the original, political concerns motivating the disability rights movements and its academic interpreters. I develop this by explicating some reasons why pro-disability philosophers can and should reject welfarist arguments across a wide range of cases. Taking debates around causing disability in procreative ethics as an illustrative example, I argue that the best versions of pro-disability arguments in this area powerfully buttress long-standing liberal objections to utilitarianism and welfarism more generally—particularly concerns that policies should not be publicly justified in terms of reasonably controversial conceptions of the good life. Public reason precludes these sorts of judgments regarding well-being, I argue, whether they are positive or negative about the welfare value of disability.

Public Reason and Prostitution

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christie Hartley
Keyword(s):  
Sex Work ◽  
State Policy ◽  
Public Reason ◽  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Conception Of The Good

This chapter critically engages with the “sex work” approach to prostitution and argues that treating “sex work” like any other form of work is neither possible nor compatible with valuing the freedom and equality of women as citizens. Liberals often claim, erroneously, that liberalism’s commitment to a kind of neutrality among competing conceptions of the good life and its commitment to antipaternalism requires either decriminalization or legalization of prostitution. While arguments that rest on a particular conception of the “good” of sex or of the role of sex in a broader conception of the good are illegitimate grounds for state policy, it is argued that there are, nonetheless, good public reason arguments against decriminalization or legalization of prostitution. A defense of the Nordic model is offered.

scholarly journals Neural correlates of the ‘good life’: eudaimonic well-being is associated with insular cortex volume

2013 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 615-618 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary J. Lewis ◽  
Ryota Kanai ◽  
Geraint Rees ◽  
Timothy C. Bates
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Insular Cortex ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Neural Correlates ◽  
The Good Life

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.

Toward the Pursuit of What People Value

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-73
Author(s):  
Mendiola Teng-Calleja ◽  
Jose Antonio R. Clemente ◽  
Ma. Ligaya Menguito ◽  
Donald Jay Bertulfo
Keyword(s):  
Low Income ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Living Wage ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Initial Attempt ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Research And Policy ◽  
The Capability Approach

Abstract. This study sought to initiate conversations on the utility of the capability approach and a psychological lens in approximating a living wage. We put forth the concept of capability gap – defined as the difference between what one values and what one perceives as attainable. We used a set of valued domains of a good life that were identified based on well-being indicators in determining capability gaps. Five hundred workers (all breadwinners) belonging to households selected through stratified random sampling from purposively chosen middle- and low-income communities in the Philippines participated in the survey. From the data, we constructed a weighted capability measure that determines the capability gap, weighted by the perceived importance of each of the good life domains. We likewise derived an estimate of a living wage that yields a weighted capability that represents individuals' capabilities to achieve and pursue valued outcomes, freedoms, and entitlements. This initial attempt at estimating a living wage based on individuals' capability to achieve and pursue a good life is presented as the main contribution of the research. The limitations of the study as well as its implications to living wage research and policy are discussed.

Living the Good Life?

Waste ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 193-208
Author(s):  
Eiko Maruko Siniawer
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Economic Power ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Financial Wealth ◽  
The Past ◽  
Affluent Society

With the ever increasing sense in the 1980s that Japan had arrived as an economic power, attention was newly focused on what beyond financial wealth and material abundance constituted an affluent life, on what constituted “true affluence” or an “affluence of the heart.” Affluence—and waste along with it—came to be conceived in more psychological, spiritual, and emotional terms than in the past, with an attention to a well-being and self-fulfillment which extended beyond the purely financial. What was often being sought was yutori, or leisure, relaxation, space, and unconstricted time. Financial and material prosperity made possible self-reflection about what a good life could and should be in an affluent society.

Part I

Good Lives ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 3-124
Author(s):  
Samuel Clark
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Ethical Reasoning ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Self Knowledge

Part I investigates a wide range of autobiographies, alongside work on the history and literary criticism of autobiography, on narrative, and on the philosophies of the self and of the good life. It works from the point of view of the autobiographer, and considers what she does, what she aims at, and how she achieves her effects, to answer three questions: what is an autobiography? How can we learn about ourselves from reading one? About what subjects does autobiography teach? This part of the book develops, first, an account of autobiography as paradigmatically a narrative artefact in a genre defined by its form: particular diachronic compositional self-reflection. Second, an account of narrative as paradigmatically a generic telling of a connected temporal sequence of particular actions taken by, and particular events which happen to, agents. It defends rationalism about autobiography: autobiography is in itself a distinctive and valuable form of ethical reasoning, and not merely involved in reasoning of other, more familiar kinds. It distinguishes two purposes of autobiography, self-investigation and self-presentation. It identifies five kinds of self-knowledge at which autobiographical self-investigation typically aims—explanation, justification, self-enjoyment, selfhood, and good life—and argues that meaning is not a distinct sixth kind. It then focusses on the book’s two main concerns, selfhood and good life: it sets out the wide range of existing accounts, taxonomies, and tasks for each, and gives an initial characterisation of the self-realization account of the self and its good which is defended in Part II.

“The secret to happiness may be unhappiness”

Propelled ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Andreas Elpidorou
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Positive Emotions ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Philosophical Literature ◽  
Negative Experiences ◽  
Emotional Adaptation ◽  
Positive Experiences ◽  
Conception Of The Good

The chapter explores the nature of the good life, articulates the role that happiness, pleasure, and positive emotions play in such a life, and considers the effects of emotional adaptation and emotional diversity on our well-being. By drawing upon both philosophical literature and research in social psychology and cognitive neuroscience, it argues for a broad conception of the good life, one that does not identify the good life simply with the presence of positive experiences and the absence of negative ones. The chapter shows not only that negative experiences aren’t detrimental to our well-being, but that they are often necessary to achieve it.

Ecocritique and Anecdote

2020 ◽  
pp. 11-48
Author(s):  
Sean Cubitt
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
Living Well ◽  
The World ◽  
Central Notion

Section 1 starts by considering the central notion of this book: a “ecocritique”. The ecocritique recognises that the good life for all includes the well-being of the world we are involved in at every level from the cellular to the cosmic. It is all encompassing. Section 1 then considers how the term “anecdote” relates to ecocritique. Anecdotes provide a peculiarly powerful tool for finding out the meaning of living well, as well as the answering the oft-asked question: who is this “we”? The beauty of anecdotes is that they operate in a non-contemporaneous time. They operate equally well in the past, present, and future. A primary political and ecocritical task of anecdotal method, therefore, is to recognise this hybrid temporality, and to free and maintain its capacity to generate new futures and new pasts.

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