Ethics is the study of two subjects: living rightly and living well.  Well-being concerns the latter; to live well is to have a life that’s high in well-being.  A life that’s high in well-being is good for the person living it.  Well-being goes by many names, such as: flourishing; quality of life; prudential value; happiness; the good life; self-interest; and fulfillment.  The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Well-Being is the first anthology or handbook on the philosophy of well-being to date.  The 529 pages that is the Handbookcontain 41 chapters, each of which is written by a separate author.  The Handbook is divided into six parts: (1) well-being in the history of philosophy; (2) theories of well-being; (3) particular goods and bads; (4) theoretical issues; (5) well-being in moral and political philosophy; and (6) well-being in other disciplines. 

The breath of this book is astounding.  One might expect an anthology on well-being to merely consist of the various theories of well-being, discussing the strengths and weaknesses of each, as contemporary philosophical scholarship does.  By making the theories of well-being one section amongst six this handbook is not merely a review of existing theories; rather, it fits the philosophy of well-being within the context of other branches of philosophy and even within the contexts of other disciplines.  The variety of the sections makes this book not only valuable for philosophers; this book is valuable for psychologists, economists, medical practitioners, the layman, indeed, anyone interested in learning about the good life. 

Instead of discussing the Handbook in chronological order, I shall start this review with section (2), theories of well-being.  Alex Gregory discusses hedonism, the theory that you are well off to the extent that you experience pleasure.  Accordingly, something benefits you to the extent that it brings you pleasure.  Say two people, Anna and Samantha, see Star Wars: The Force Awakens.  For whatever reasons, Anna loves the film, Samantha hates it.  According to hedonism, watching Star Wars is good for Anna, since the experience is pleasant for her, but bad for Samantha, since the experience is unpleasant for her.  Gregory discusses several objections to hedonism, of which I’ll discuss only two. 

Imagine the life of Genghis Khan, with all of its power, harems, and riches galore.  His life is full of pleasure; thus, according to hedonism, Khan’s life is good for him.  But, the objection goes, Khan’s life cannot be good for him: his pleasure is had at the cost of the suffering of others.  It’s an immoral life; and, surely, the immoral life is not the good life.  As Gregory notes, however, this objection conflates moral value with prudential value (117): while Khan’s life may seem bad for his subjects or at least bad for the millions he’s conquered, his life does seem good for Khan.  Here’s another way of saying it: Khan’s life seems high prudential value, low in moral value.  A more convincing objection that Gregory discusses is Robert Nozick’s famous experience machine.  Once hooked up to this machine you will experience maximal pleasure.  The actual world remains the same; the machine just makes you experience whatever maximizes your pleasure.  Of course you don’t realize that you’re hooked up to the machine.  Hedonism deems the life hooked up to the experience machine as maximally good for you: you, after all, experience maximal pleasure.  But this life, the objection goes, is not maximally good for you.  As Gregory contends, the best strategy for a hedonist may be to modify hedonism such that while all pleasures are good for you, pleasures based on truth are even better for you (120).  While this truth-adjusted hedonism implies that the pleasure you get from the experience machine is good for you, you would be even better off if that pleasure was based in reality, that you were actually doing the things you were getting pleasure from. 

Objections like the experience machine leave many dissatisfied with hedonism.  Hedonism, it’s argued, goes wrong when it makes well-being entirely dependent upon one’smental states.  The desire-satisfaction theory of well-being attempts to remedy this.  According to this view, your life is good for you to the extent that your desires are satisfied.  If this is right, watching Star Wars would still be good for Anna, so long as she wanted to watch it; but it would benefit Anna in virtue of it satisfying one of her desires, not in virtue of it being pleasurable.  It might be best to conceive of satisfaction as requiring awareness of the satisfied desire.  Otherwise, as Chris Heathwood notes, remote desires seem to benefit you (141).  Suppose you’re on a subway train and meet a stranger with a fatal disease.  You strongly desire for this person to be cured.  Suppose, further, weeks later, unbeknownst to you, the stranger is healed.  It’s hard to imagine how your life is made better by this stranger being cured.  Although you desired her to heal, you are not aware of her healing.  If we understand satisfaction to require awareness, however, the fulfillment of your desire for the person on the subway to get better does not benefit you, since you’re not aware of the person getting better (141).

Philosophers often perform this metaphysical analysis.  We theorize about what a given phenomenon is.  And we measure the plausibility of a theory, at least in part, by the extent to which that theory accords with our commonsense intuitions.  Gregory’s truth-adjusted hedonism and Heathwood’s awareness constraint are modifications to hedonism and desire-satisfaction, respectively, to make them better accord with our intuitions.  But some are not satisfied with either hedonism or desire-satisfaction no matter how such theories are modified.  For some, these theories are just too narrow; they’re monistic in that they claim there’s just one prudential good.  Objective-list theories, on the other hand, are pluralistic, maintaining that there’s more than one prudential good.  One of the strongest arguments in favor of objective-list theories is that they tend to accord with our commonsense intuitions of a good life, as Owen Fletcher states: “if you ask people what they ultimately want for themselves and for their loved ones they will typically give you a list of items–health, pleasure, friendship, knowledge, achievement–without thinking that these can all be reduced to one value and without thinking that the list is determined by what their loved ones in fact desire” (152).  An objective list deems each item on its list as good for you independent of anything else, even the other items on the list.  If the aforementioned list is correct, health is good for even if being healthy brings you no pleasure or even you do not desire it.

While objective-list theories may better accord with our commonsense intuitions, they may seem to be just a hodgepodge of items with no unifying principle (154-156).  Why do all and only these items belong on the list?  Perfectionism, Gwen Bradford suggests, remedies this problem (124).  Rather than just provide a list of goods, perfectionism grounds the good for humans in human nature.  On this view, one is well off to the extent that she exercises (though not necessarily perfects) her characteristically human capacities.  Refer back to the objective list mentioned above.  Suppose that a perfectionist has an account of human nature such that physical health, affection (capacity for pleasure or pain), friendship, rationality, and achievement are the only characteristically human capacities.  Thus understood, well-being consists of health, pleasure, friendship, knowledge, and achievement, just as the object list maintained.  In answer to the question–why these goods are on the list?–the perfectionist answers: these goods are the fulfillment of characteristically human capacities.  Perfectionism, however, is susceptible to several criticisms.  I’ll discuss one.  Perfectionists need to clarify what makes something a characteristic human capacity.  Many conceptions of characteristic human capacities seem unrelated to well-being (130).  Suppose it’s characteristic of us to lay waste to the planet (130).  According to perfectionism, then, laying waste to the planet, itself, is good for us.  Obviously, this seems wrong.  This ends my discussion of part (2) of theHandbook; I shall now move on to other parts.

 Well-being is closely related to several other goods.  Part (3) of the Handbook–particular goods and bads–addresses these goods.  Meaningfulness and well-being often go hand in hand. According to Antti Kauppinen, meaning is a “central aspect of a life worth living” (281).  Both well-being and meaning seem desirable for their own sakes (282).  Meaning, for Kauppinen, concerns the achievement of something valuable.  Well-being, remember, concerns that which is good for a person.  Although they’re similar, the two are distinct.  Kauppinen has us consider one of the most meaningful lives imaginable: the life of Mahatma Gandhi (287).  Suppose that instead of being fulfilled by his life Gandhi was bored by it.  Although such a life would still be tremendously meaningful, Gandhi may have been better off doing something more fulfilling, something that benefitted him, not necessarily something that benefitted others. 

Before the last few decades philosophers mostly used the terms ‘happiness’ and ‘well-being’ interchangeably.  As more philosophers became interested in well-being, however, this changed.  Today, as Neera Badhwar suggests, we distinguish between the psychological state typified by smiles, cheerful feelings, enjoyment, and such, from theevaluative state of well-being (307).  While you may be happy it does not follow (by the meaning of the terms alone) that that happiness is good for you.  Perhaps nothing in the world at this particular moment will make you happier than taking a dose of heroin.  Although taking the heroin may maximize your happiness this moment, it does not follow that you are best off taking the heroin; perhaps you would be better off pursuing something that gives you less happiness but is less destructive.

Philosophers disagree about what happiness is.  Some, like Wayne Davis, believe that happiness “consists of the strength of your intrinsic desires […] multiplied by the strength of your beliefs that your desires are being satisfied” (310).  As Badwhar argues, however, this seems way off.  We have “tons of intrinsic desires that we believe are being satisfied without any effect on our mental state: that the sun rose this morning and predicted again to shun till 8 p.m., that we are not in the middle of an earthquake or other natural disaster” (310).  Others, like Fred Feldman, believe that happiness consists of pleasure.  Badwhar ends up endorsing Daniel Haybron’s idea that happiness consists of positive emotions and moods (310-311).  There are several objections to Haybron’s view that Badwhar doesn’t discuss.  I shall discuss only one.  What differentiates emotions and moods that contribute to happiness from those that don’t?  The obvious explanation is pleasure: pleasant emotions and moods contribute to happiness, unpleasant ones to unhappiness.  But this seems to reduce emotions and moods to pleasure, at least where happiness is concerned. 

Not only is well-being closely related with other goods, well-being has a rich history in moral philosophy, as part (1) of the Handbook –well-being in the history of philosophy–suggests.  Aristotle, according to Richard Kraut, is a perfectionist who maintains that well-being consists of “virtuous activity of the rational soul” (26).  Consequentially, you are well off to the extent that you reason well.  The Confucian sage Mencius (Mengzi), Richard Kim suggests, disagrees: for Mencius the characteristic human activity is morality, not rationality (42).  If Mencius is right, we are “endowed with an innate capacity for certain moral feelings that can be cultivated into full-blown virtues” (43).  In contrast, Xunzi contends, according to Kim, that “human nature is a messy unstructured amalgam of generally selfish tendencies that, left on their own, would lead to self-destruction” (46).  According to both Confucians, well-being consists of sagehood, a life full of “unforced, natural behavior–adorned with emotional fulfillment and joy” (47).

This Handbook gathers some of the best work to date on the philosophy of well-being.  It collects not only different theories of well-being; it also relates well-being to the different branches of philosophy and even relates well-being to other disciplines.  As such, this book is an invaluable tool for anyone interested in researching the good life.

© 2016 Sean Meseroll

Sean Meseroll, Ph.D., smeseroll@gmail.com, The University of Kansas, Department of Philosophy