Abstract
Academic research on well-being is pursued in multiple disciplines and currently exploding. Governments are also interested in the topic, as witnessed by their recent efforts to develop statistical measures of progress that include well-being indicators. Combined, this interest opens the door to the fruitful application of well-being research to society. Research on well-being, however, is not always well integrated across the disciplines that purport to study it. In particular, there is insufficient communication between the empirical study of well-being, and its normative/conceptual study as pursued in philosophy. This state of affairs is lamentable, as it robs science and public policy of the expertise of philosophers, a desirable tool when evaluating empirical claims about well-being promotion. In this article, I examine the reasons for this lack of communication. In particular, I reject the view according to which it originates in the idea that philosophers take well-being to be a single and general concept, and argue instead that it is likely to be the result of the different theoretical constraints under which philosophy and empirical science respectively operate. Finally, I show that communication can be strengthened by developing the empirical articulations of philosophical theories of well-being, and sketch how to do just that.
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Notes
- 1.
Notable examples are Alexandrova (2005, 2008, 2012a, b), Angner (2008, 2011, 2012), Feldman (2010), Haybron (2008), Sen (1985, 1987, 1992, 1993), Tiberius (2008), Tiberius and Plakias (2010). On the more purely empirical side of well-being research, scholars such as Diener, Frey, Kahneman, and Seligman have made consistent efforts at integrating work in psychology with economics and public policy (cf. Diener and Seligman (2004), Frey and Stutzer (2002), Kahneman (2000), Kahneman and Krueger (2006), Kesabir and Diener (2008), Stiglitz et al. (2010).
- 2.
Note also that while I claim that these two types of questions are distinct, I also believe that they are in principle connected and should be answered by a unitary theory.
- 3.
Though, what type of normativity, whether, that is, it is agent-relative or agent-neutral, has recently been disputed. See Darwall (2002) for a challenge to the default view that it is agent-relative rather than agent-neutral. See Rosati (2008) for a defence of the idea that well-being is agent-neutral as well as agent-relative.
- 4.
Under this heading, we may regroup a number of theories that are, in fact, distinct in many ways. Some of them, for example, reduce the normative notion of well-being to the non-normative notion of rational desire understood conditionally as what an agent would desire, (a) on reflection; or (b) under idealized conditions; or (c) if she were fully informed; or again as (d) what a fully informed version of herself would want for herself as she actually is. Others, however, want to avoid this reduction and characterize well-being in terms that are themselves normative as what there is reason for an agent to desire. See Sidgwick (1907, 100–112), Brandt (1972, 686), Rawls (1972, 408), Railton (1986), Griffin (1986) and Skorupski (1999). I do not include in this class Desire Satisfactionism theories of well-being such as Heathwood (2011, 24–25) insofar as they explicitly deny that rational desires determine the prudential goodness of lives.
- 5.
Hurka (1993), 3.
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- 7.
I am assuming that there are cogent interpretations of Aristotle that do not make his theory straightforwardly perfectionist in the sense described above. Russell (2012, 44–64), for example, argues that Aristotle understands eudaimonia as an agent-relative good, and understands the virtues as benefiting their possessor in an agent-relative way.
- 8.
What the latter consisted in is unfortunately a matter of exegetical dispute with important repercussions on the alleged objective nature of Aristotle’s view. According to most interpreters, the ergon at issue here makes a reference to Aristotelian ideas about the metaphysical/biological essence of human nature. According to another interpretation (Adkins 1984), however, the ergon at issue here is rather that which common practice in society assigns to each individual.
- 9.
Sumner (1996, 156–171) actually claims that well-being is identical to authentic happiness. This is an important point within his theory, which, however, may harmlessly be ignored here.
- 10.
Sumner (1996), pp 146–147.
- 11.
This is true of all questions, except Question 32, which asks the patient to rate her overall quality of life compared with 10 years ago. If this question is asked before and after the intervention, this is of course another way of validating the impact of the intervention on the person’s current well-being.
- 12.
- 13.
Fore relevant references see footnote 4.
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Rodogno, R. (2015). Well-Being, Science, and Philosophy. In: Søraker, J., Van der Rijt, JW., de Boer, J., Wong, PH., Brey, P. (eds) Well-Being in Contemporary Society. Happiness Studies Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06459-8_3
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