What happiness science can learn from John Stuart Mill

Many researchers studying subjective wellbeing (SWB) understand SWB as a concept that is close to Bentham’s notion of happiness. This conception of happiness is philosophically controversial, because it treats pleasure as a homogenous experience. I analyze an important deviation from Bentham in John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism and its relevance for SWB research: qualitative differences in pleasurable experiences. I argue that in cases where lives involving qualitatively different experiences are compared, Mill’s qualitative perspective is incompatible with an important assumption in the SWB literature: that happiness can be meaningfully rated by people on a scale. I illustrate the problem by means of the question of whether becoming a parent makes people happier. I analyze whether the problem can be avoided on alternative views of happiness, but argue that on all plausible accounts of happiness, the problem persists. I conclude that the problem it poses for self-reported happiness is genuine and should be acknowledged by SWB researchers. I end by discussing the ways in which this conclusion can help the study of happiness move forward

The Metaphysical Case against Luck Egalitarianism

Luck egalitarianism is the name of a group of theories of justice that subscribe to the idea that a just society compensates for brute luck, but does not compensate for bad outcomes that fall under the responsibility of the agent himself. The theory has gained much popularity over the past decades. Notable defenders of versions of the theory are Dworkin (2000) and Cohen (1989). Centralizing luck in a theory of justice requires a substantial account of luck, and thereby makes the free will debate very important for distributive justice. Luck egalitarianism has been accused of relying heavily on a indeterminist view on free will. However, Richard Arneson (2004) and Carl Knight (2006) have argued that luck egalitarianism is also a plausible view under compatibilist accounts of free will. In this essay I argue that defenders of this view fail to properly distinguish between what T.M. Scanlon (1998) calls attributive and substantive responsibility. Compatibilist accounts of free will and responsibility provide an understanding of the former but not the latter concept, while the latter is the relevant one for justice. Knight and Arneson acknowledge difficulties, but do not deal with them in a satisfactory manner. A rigorous treatment of the argument in the free will debate, has detrimental consequences for the luck egalitarian position. If the libertarian position on free will is wrong, luck egalitarianism collapses into outcome egalitarianism. I argue that, in Dworkin’s terminology, the distinction between brute luck and option luck will turn out arbitrary, or irrelevant, for justice under Scanlon’s distinction. The only plausible version of luck egalitarianism that is different from outcome egalitarianism relies on indeterminism being true

Can welfare be measured with a preference-satisfaction index?

Welfare in economics is generally conceived of in terms of the satisfaction of preferences, but a general, comparable index measure of welfare is generally not taken to be possible. In recent years, in response to the usage of measures of subjective well-being as indices of welfare in economics, a number of economists have started to develop measures of welfare based on preference-satisfaction. In order to evaluate the success of such measures, I formulate criteria of policy-relevance and theoretical success in the context of preference-satisfaction measures of welfare. I present a detailed case study of the methodological choices put forward in a prominent generalized proposal for measuring welfare through preferences recently published in the American Economic Review. I contrast this with an alternative welfare measure which also uses preferences to weight aspects of welfare: the ICECAP-A measure. I assess the methodology of both approaches in detail and argue that the two goals of a preference measure of welfare can only be satisfied at the expense of making a measure prohibitively costly

Is pleasure all that is good about experience?

Experientialist accounts of wellbeing are those accounts of wellbeing that subscribe to the experience requirement. Typically, these accounts are hedonistic. In this article I present the claim that hedonism is not the most plausible experientialist account of wellbeing. The value of experience should not be understood as being limited to pleasure, and as such, the most plausible experientialist account of wellbeing is pluralistic, not hedonistic. In support of this claim, I argue first that pleasure should not be understood as a broad term to describe valuable experiences generally. I then analyze responses to the main argument against a monistic view on the value of experience: the philosophy of swine objection. I argue that such responses deviate from the central hedonistic view that only pleasure and pain matter for wellbeing. I then argue that the argument can be avoided on a pluralistic account, and formulate a plausible candidate for an account of pluralistic experientialism, in which, besides pleasure, non-hedonic aspects of experience like novelty, compassion, and aesthetic value also contribute to wellbeing

Why Fly? Prudential Value, Climate Change, and the Ethics of Long-distance Leisure Travel

We argue that the prudential benefits of long-distance leisure travel can justify such trips even though there are strong and important reasons against long-distance flying. This is because prudential benefits can render otherwise impermissible actions permissible, and because, according to dominant theories about wellbeing, long-distance leisure travel provides significant prudential benefits. However, this ‘wellbeing argument’ for long-distance leisure travel must be qualified in two ways. First, because travellers are epistemically privileged with respect to knowledge about what is good for them, they must look critically at their own assessment of the prudential benefits of a trip. Second, the wellbeing argument is unlikely to support prudential arguments for long-distance leisure trips made by frequent flyers.</p

What Constitutes Well-being? Five Views Among Adult People from the Netherlands on what is Important for a Good Life

Well-being has gained interest as object of study in the social sciences and as an outcome measure for policy evaluation. However, little agreement exists with respect to the substantive meaning of well-being, the dimensions of well-being that should be considered in a multi-dimensional approach, and the variety of well-being conceptions people have for their own lives. This study explored conceptions of “a good life for you” among 1,477 adult people from the Netherlands by means of Q-methodology, based on a theoretical framework synthesizing the main theories of well-being. We find five distinct views on what people consider to be a good life for themselves: “Health and feeling well”, “Hearth and home”, “Freedom and autonomy”, “Social relations and purpose” and “Individualism and independence”. While there is strong agreement with respect to the importance of feeling both physically and mentally well, the views diverge considerably regarding aspects such as social relations, autonomy, spirituality, and material welfare. Associations between viewpoints and respondent characteristics had face validity. The findings of this study have significant implications for the development of measures of well-being and policies aimed to improve population well-being. Further research is required into the prevalence of these views on well-being in the population, their relation to respondent characteristics and into differences in views over time and between countries with different socio-economic, political and cultural environments.</p

All Animals are Equal, but Some More than Others?

Does the moral badness of pain depend on who feels it? A common, but generally only implicitly stated view, is that it does not. This view, ‘unitarianism’, maintains that the same interests of different beings should count equally in our moral calculus. Shelly Kagan’s project in How to Count Animals, more or less (2019) is to reject this common view, and develop an alternative to it: a hierarchical view of moral status, on which the badness of pain does depend on who feels it. In this review essay, we critically examine Kagan’s argument for status hierarchy. In particular, we reject two of the central premises in his argument: that (1) moral standing is ultimately grounded in agency and (2) that unitarianism is overdemanding. We conclude that moral status may, despite Kagan’s compelling argument to the contrary, not be hierarchical

Is Critical Naturalism Necessary?

The prior issue of Krisis (42:1) published Critical Naturalism: A Manifesto, with the aim to instigate a debate of the issues raised in this manifesto – the necessary re-thinking of the role (and the concept) of nature in critical theory in relation to questions of ecology, health, and inequality. Since Krisis considers itself a place for philosophical debates that take contemporary struggles as starting point, it issued an open call and solicited responses to the manifesto. This is one of the sixteen selected responses, which augment, specify, or question the assumptions and arguments of the manifesto