Well-Being

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.

Conclusions

This concluding chapter gives a brief summary of the conclusions of each chapter, and an indication of what the reader should take away from this book.

Meaning in Life

When philosophers these days write of meaning in life, they usually refer to the value or importance of a life, not meaning in any ordinary sense. Older philosophers wrote of the meaning of life as the way our lives fit into God’s plan. For those who have lost faith in such a plan, there is no such meaning. But there is a related sense in which events have meaning in our lives when they fit into intelligible narratives, similar to the way in which words and sentences acquire meaning via their places in broader linguistic entities. It is this way in which events in our lives have meaning that is fully explicated in this chapter.

Introduction

This introductory chapter sets out the topics to be discussed throughout the book. It gives a brief indication of the nature of pleasure, happiness, well-being, and meaning in life. The complex relations between these four categories will be a major topic of this book: the chapters to follow will relate each of these states to motivation and personal value. Well-being is the all-inclusive category of personal value. It consists in the satisfaction of deep rational desires. None of the other states is to be equated with it, although they are both partial causes and effects of well-being (and in the case of happiness, in part a judgment of it).

Happiness

Accounts of happiness in the philosophical literature see it as either a judgment of satisfaction with one’s life or as a balance of positive over negative feelings or emotional states. There are sound objections to both types of account, although each captures part of what happiness is. Seeing it as an emotion allows us to incorporate both features of the accounts thought to be incompatible. Emotions are analyzed as multi-component states including judgments, feelings, physical symptoms, and behavioral dispositions. It is shown that prototypical happiness contains all these components, and each is explicated. Happiness is similar to other emotions in many respects, including the phenomenon of adaptation, the “paradox of happiness,” and the existence of both paradigm and borderline instances. In secondary senses happiness can be a mood or temperament, higher level dispositions. Happiness is both a judgment of and a component of well-being, but not the whole of it.

Pleasure

Three irreducible kinds of pleasure are distinguished: sensory, intentional (taking pleasure in an object), and pure feeling. Each has its distinct opposite in pain or distress. None is the typical end of desire or motivation, although pleasant thoughts are components of desires. Sensory pleasure is of value to subjects, but only a very partial component of a good life. Intentional pleasure is a byproduct of activities and objects we aim at, and again only a partial measure of well-being. The pure feeling of pleasure is the rare warm glow we feel when we are lucky enough to receive very good news. Thus pleasure of any kind, sought directly only in such areas as food and sex, may be necessary for a good life, but, unless we are Don Juan, never sufficient.