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Happiness, Flourishing and the Good Life: A Transformative Vision for Human
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Happiness, Flourishing and the
Good Life
Well-being studies is an exciting and relatively new multi-disciplinary field, with data
being gathered from different domains in order to improve social policies. In its reliance on
a truncated account of well-being based implicitly on neoclassical economic assumptions,
however, the field is deeply flawed. Departing from reductive accounts of well-being
that exclude the normative or evaluative aspect of the concept and so impoverish the
attendant conception of human life, this book offers a new perspective on what counts
normatively as being well. In reconceptualising well-being holistically, it presents a fresh
vista on how we can consider the meanings of human life in a manner that also serves
as a source of constructive social critique. The book thus undertakes to invert the usual
approach to the social sciences, in which the research is required to be objective in terms
of methodology and subjective with regard to evaluative claims. Instead, the authors are
deliberately objective about values in order to be more open to the subjectivities of human
life. Happiness, Flourishing and the Good Life thus seeks to move away from economic
considerations’ domination of all social spaces in order to understand the possibilities of
well-being beyond instrumentalisation or commodification. A radical new approach to
the human well-being, this book will appeal to philosophers, social theorists and political
scientists and all who are interested in human happiness.
Garrett Thomson is Chief Executive Officer of the Guerrand-Hermès Foundation for

Peace (GHFP) and Professor at the College of Wooster where he holds the Compton Chair
of Philosophy. He is the author or co-author of 20 books, including On the Meaning of Life,
Needs and Bacon to Kant. He co-edited the six-volumes of the Longman Standard History
of Philosophy and is the co-author of Rethinking Secondary Education: A Human-Centred
Approach and Understanding Peace Holistically.
Scherto Gill is Senior Fellow at the Guerrand-Hermès Foundation for Peace (GHFP)
Research Institute, Brighton, UK, Visiting Fellow at the University of Sussex, and Fellow of
the Royal Society of the Arts. She is also Board Member of Rising Global Peace Forum and
Trustee of the Spirit of Humanity Forum. Scherto writes about peace, dialogue, education,
and narrative research. Her most recent publications include Understanding Peace
Holistically, Peacefulness: Being Peace and Making Peace, Education as Humanisation
and Narrative Pedagogy.
Ivor Goodson has worked in universities in England, Canada, and the USA, and has
held visiting positions in many countries. He is now Research Associate at the Guerrand-
Hermès Foundation for Peace (GHFP). Ivor has contributed over 50 books and 600 articles
to the fields of education and social change. His most recent publications include The
Routledge International Handbook on Narrative and Life History, Curriculum, Personal
Narrative and the Social Future and Developing Narrative Theory: Life Histories and
Personal Representation.
Classical and Contemporary Social Theory
Series Editor: Stjepan G. Mestrovic
Texas A&M University, USA
Classical and Contemporary Social Theory publishes rigorous scholarly work that
re-discovers the relevance of social theory for contemporary times, demonstrat-
ing the enduring importance of theory for modern social issues. The series cov-
ers social theory in a broad sense, inviting contributions on both ‘classical’ and
modern theory, thus encompassing sociology, without being confined to a single
discipline. As such, work from across the social sciences is welcome, provided
that volumes address the social context of particular issues, subjects, or figures
and offer new understandings of social reality and the contribution of a theorist or
school to our understanding of it.
The series considers significant new appraisals of established thinkers or schools,
comparative works or contributions that discuss a particular social issue or phe-
nomenon in relation to the work of specific theorists or theoretical approaches.
Contributions are welcome that assess broad strands of thought within certain
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contributing to contemporary understandings of social issues and contexts.
Titles in this series:

Making the Familiar Strange
Sociology Contra Reification
Ryan Gunderson
Happiness, Flourishing and the Good Life

A Transformative Vision for Human Well-Being
Garrett Thomson, Scherto Gill and Ivor Goodson
Towards a General Theory of Boredom

A Case Study of Anglo and Russian Society
Elina Tochilnikova
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/

sociology/series/ASHSER1383
Happiness, Flourishing
and the Good Life
A Transformative Vision for Human
Well-Being
Garrett Thomson, Scherto Gill

and Ivor Goodson
First published 2021
by Routledge
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© 2021 Garrett Thomson, Scherto Gill and Ivor Goodson
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Names: Thomson, Garrett, author. | Gill, Scherto, author. | Goodson,
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Title: Happiness, flourishing and the good life : a transformative vision
for human well-being / Garrett Thomson and Scherto Gill, with Ivor
Goodson.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. |
Series: Classical and contemporary social theory | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020017035 (print) | LCCN 2020017036 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781138613881 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429464317 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Quality of life. | Well-being. | Happiness.
Classification: LCC HN25 .T46 2020 (print) | LCC HN25 (ebook) |
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Contents
Acknowledgments vi
Preface vii
1 Preliminaries for a framework 1
2 Beyond instrumentalisation 21
3 Activities and desires 45
4 Awareness 72
5 Relationships 95
6 Evaluative self-awareness 117
7 Towards a definition of well-being 138
8 Towards social critique 169
Bibliography 186
Index 194
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank from the bottom of our hearts the Trustees of the Guerrand-
Hermès Foundation for Peace (GHFP), who have supported and shaped the work
of this book in very many ways: Sharif Horthy, Isni Astuti Horthy, Alexandra
Asseily, Patrice Brodeur, Mohammed Ridwan and Simon Xavier Guerrand-
Hermès. Thank you.
For this book, the GHFP’s research team interviewed 50 people from all walks
of life, collecting their perceptions and experiences of well-being. We would like
to extend a very warm thank-you to every single participant whose lived experi-
ences and life narratives formed a very important part of this work. Equally, we
would like to thank the staff members of the GHFP, especially Alice Sommerville,
Laura Hobson and former colleague Heather Stoner, for their hard work to sup-
port this research.
We are grateful that Frances Thomson and Mark Wells read through the chap-
ters of the book and gave extensive comments, which were very helpful.
We would like to express our appreciation to the Center for Bhutan Studies,
Prof. Juan Martin Lopez Calva and the team from UPAEP Puebla, Anders Moller
and Scarlett Chen, for offering insights into the study of well-being and happiness.
We would also like to thank those whose support and friendship continued
to encourage our work, including Dr. Philip Turetzky, Prof. Jaime Ramos, Prof.
Peter Baumann, Prof. Adrian Moore, Prof. Evan Riley, Prof. Kenneth Gergen,
Prof. Diana Hoyos and Prof. Pablo Arrango. Likewise, we express our gratitude
to many people who supported our work either in conversation or through their
writings, such as Susan Wolf, Daniel Haybron, Sabina Alkire and Richard Kraut.
A special thank-you goes to Daniel Kprof, Jean Gordon and Linda O’Toole
of the Learning for Well-Being initiative in the EU, and whose ongoing work on
well-being is exemplary.
Garrett would like to acknowledge from among his teachers: Mary Midgely,
Derek Parfit, James Griffin, David Wiggins and Richard Hare.
Finally, a deep thank-you to our respective families: Helena, Andrew, Frances,
Verena, Susana, Robert, Tony and Toto.
Preface
We would like to start with three common-sense platitudes about human life. We
regret if this seems to rehearse the obvious, but these commonplaces are impor-
tant for understanding well-being.
First, we are temporal beings. This has profound consequences for our study.
‘Well-being’ appears to be a static term, but this appearance needs to be quickly
dispelled and remedied. We change in many ways. Our activities are infused with
beginnings, continuations and endings. Small-scale activities are usually embed-
ded within larger ones, and these nestings are temporal. For instance, we take
the bus to visit a friend to plan a holiday or to discuss a new venture. These are
temporal relationships: one action comes before the ones that it is a means to,
or one is embedded in the other as a part. Furthermore, our relationships to each
other change, not only because people alter, but also because their knowledge of
each other and feelings towards each other change. Additionally, our awareness
and self-awareness change. For example, one thought that one was still young,
and one discovers that one is actually older. One’s idea of oneself is constantly
subject to revision.
The term ‘flourishing’ has temporal connotations, as does the notion of self-
development. However, the point isn’t simply the fact that we continually change.
As we shall see, the issue is that what constitutes well-being alters. What counts
as greater well-being for a person as a child and for the same person as a young
adult will differ in many regards from what constitutes her well-being as an older
person. The same point would apply to ‘flourishing’. Indeed, a full theory of well-
being would be at the same time an account of some aspects of human develop-
ment. So, this sets us an important task: to explain how well-being is composed
differently through time.
This quest contains an important presupposition that runs contrary to much of
the current literature on well-being and happiness. The contrarian assumption that
we make is that there needs to be systematic empirical investigation regarding
the nature of well-being that doesn’t consist simply in studying what causes or
promotes well-being or in making well-being comparisons across different societ-
ies. The vast majority of the empirical studies concerning well-being (and happi-
ness) are either directed towards what causes, facilitates or damages well-being or
towards comparisons between the levels of well-being of different social groups.
What else is there to investigate, if not the causes, conditions and comparisons?
viii Preface
As a quick reply, we need empirical work directed towards the nature of well-
being, and how it changes through time. This is a topic of this volume.
The second platitude is that we are animals. This means that our lives have the
general characteristics of those of animals. We are bodies. We breathe, drink, eat,
sleep and perform other bodily functions. We get hot and cold. Like all other ani-
mals, we have a natural history, an evolutionary genealogy. We have parents, and
people typically have children. We move around, perceive and want things. These
general features of life define (inter alia) the contours of well-being.
This second platitude sets us another task, which is to answer the question:
what kind of animals are we? To specify this, it is tempting to place a single
adjective or phrase before the word ‘animal’ when describing ourselves. It is often
claimed that we are rational animals, but there are many other adjectives we could
employ to complete the sentence ‘we are . . . animals.’ These include: wise (sapi-
ens), self-conscious, willing, linguistic, social, relational, humorous, ironic, cre-
ative, political, self-defining, productive (of the means of production), narratival
and spiritual. The difficulty is that, by themselves, each of these single predicates
fails to capture what we are. Yet when taken together as a list, they seem to miss
the point: what unifies the things on the list? What is this supposed to be a list of,
or how did things get on the list? When is it complete? In other words, the answer
to this difficult question won’t be a single adjective, however encompassing it
is, and nor a list without a connecting explanation. This means that the question
needs to be transformed, as we shall see.
The third platitude is that we inhabit a world that is experienced and shared
with other persons and that our actions have meanings only in relation to other
human beings.1 Even the monastic action of removing oneself from society to
meditate and contemplate in solitude has meaning in relation to a religious path
trod by others. Even in the apparently solitary of walking alone in the wilderness
one is accompanied by the social concepts that allow this action to be meaningful
as communion with nature. So, even when our actions are performed alone, their
meanings are composed of relations to other people, and even if they were not,
those meanings consist in content that requires social concepts. The meaning of
our actions and their relevance for our own well-being is thoroughly social and
relational. So, to put the point slightly paradoxically, even in our deepest self-
interest the meaning of our actions is in relation to others.
This third platitude about human life sets us another challenge. It is an abstract
one, but it involves conflicts of principles that need to be settled by any frame-
work for well-being: are we autonomous individuals, or are we essentially relational
beings? In this preliminary form, the question is too crude, although the issues that it
raises are not. Traditional modern western philosophy, political theory and econom-
ics tend to regard the individual as an isolated or autonomous being who cooperates
with others only insofar as it benefits him or her.2 This conception needs to be chal-
lenged and revised because a vital part of our lives is our relationships with others.
These three common-sense platitudes define the framework of our study at its
most general. We shall investigate the question: ‘What is the value of a person’s
life from his or her point of view, as the person living the life?’ When we ask, ‘Is
Preface ix
my life going well?’, or rather when we ask, ‘What should I do to make my life go
better?’, what is the relevant sense of ‘better’ or ‘well’? We need to understand what
matters in the living of human life and why. The concept of well-being is supposed
to capture an important part of the answer to these questions, though not necessar-
ily all. Notice we are not asking whether a person’s life is moral or important or
aesthetically attractive. We are asking about its value to the person who is living it.
We ask this question in the following context. Well-being studies is an excit-
ing and relatively new multi-disciplinary field. Social scientists from around the
world are gathering measurements of well-being in different contexts so that
the resulting data can improve social policies (Kruger 2009: 11; Diener, Lucas,
Schimmmack and Helliwell 2009; Huppert and Cooper 2014; Alexandra 2017).
This kind of project suggests that socio-political institutions should serve human
well-being, albeit in different ways, and that policies should be sensitive to empir-
ical evidence. This is full of promise!
Nevertheless, the field is also flawed. It often relies on a truncated account of
the concept of well-being, based implicitly on neoclassical economic assumptions
in two ways. First, the evaluative model is often minimalistic; it tends to exclude
or emaciate the normative or evaluative aspect of the concept of well-being, and
thereby deprive it of its potentially radical and transformative force. Second, the
discipline tends to be reductive in the sense of reducing human well-being to a
set of central concepts such as happiness, desire satisfaction or rankings. These
reductive theories do not allow for the varied subjectivities of experience, and the
resulting conception of human life is impoverished.
For these reasons, the field of well-being studies makes a set of promises that
it does not usually deliver. It promises deep critical evaluations of social institu-
tions based on empirical evidence, but it doesn’t deliver on this promise because
the emaciated conception of well-being tends to merely reflect existing pleasures,
preferences and subjective rankings. It is evaluatively minimalistic, and tends to
be a pallid reflection of a society’s accepted assumptions rather than a potential
basis for radical social critique.
What is the antidote to this impasse? We need to be clearer and more explicit
about what counts normatively as being well. Well-being is a prime value. Given
that the centrality of such an idea, it deserves a deeper exploration without neo-
classical fetters. We need a new trajectory that reflects the wealth and variety of
human experience, and that embraces the normative. With a reconceptualisation
of well-being, the field provides the opportunity to rethink the meanings of human
life in fresher ways that can be a source of constructive social critique.
There is an interesting inversion here. In the standard positivistic view, the social
sciences tend to be objective in their methodology and subjectivist with regard to
evaluative claims. We are arguing the inverse: that a study of well-being needs
to be more objective about the relevant values, and more open to explorations of
the subjectivities of human life. Progressive thought needs this inversion; it needs
to be evaluatively robust and subjectively rich. As social spaces become increas-
ingly dominated by purely economic considerations, we need to understand the
possibilities of human well-being without playing into the instrumentalisation or
x Preface
commodifying of life in the ways that the value-free and objective social sciences
tend to do. We regard this arena as a key political battleground: the construction
of understandings of human well-being from which Enlightenment and neoliberal
conceptions of progress can be challenged.
In this book, we attempt to provide a new direction with an account of well-
being that is not limited by neoclassical economic assumptions and value-free
quantitative methodologies. An account that is faithful to the richness and variety
of human life requires a multi-dimensional analysis that explains what it is to be
well with regard to different aspects of human life. Specifically, these include:
our activities and experiences, our everyday awareness, our relationships and our
self-consciousness. In other words, we will explain well-being in a way that is
both normatively strong and holistic in the sense that it can include all aspects of
being well as a human.
As students of this field, we find that many books on well-being and happiness
are lacking in their basic theoretical framework. For instance, among other things,
many books confuse means and ends and instrumental and non-instrumental
value, and often confuse these with measures and indicators. These are profoundly
important points that have much more than academic relevance. Parts of western
culture are laden with deeply entrenched and systematic misunderstandings about
values and their nature. The study of well-being offers an opportunity to redress
these misunderstandings, and our project is partly motivated by the idea that a
normatively powerful and holistic framework to reconceptualise well-being might
help overcome these systematic errors and enable us to view well-being afresh, and
understand well-being from a new and better perspective, as this time of impend-
ing global crises merits.
A theory of well-being ineluctably must involve an account of human life and
what it is about, while at the same time respecting and accounting for sometimes
huge social, cultural and individual differences between people. In other words,
we need a theory that can do justice to the complexity, richness and diversity of
human lives and of our ways of being. The idea ‘what human life is about’ or even
‘what my life is about’ seems deceptively simple and naïve. In fact, there are so
many aspects and parts to a person’s life and the relations between them are so
complex that the task is almost overwhelming.
The challenge this project confronts is not just a lack of empirical information.
In effect, not only do we lack the required detailed knowledge about human well-
being, but we also need the conceptual frameworks within which to carry out
such empirical research. As already mentioned, empirical studies of well-being
tend predominantly to be directed towards causes of well-being rather than its
constitution. As we shall see, clarifying those conceptual frameworks is para-
mount as apart from everything else, it will also permit us to pose better empirical
questions.
Notes
1 ‘Meanings’ here means roughly mental contents that have evaluative implications.
2 See, for instance, Hobbes’ Leviathan (2017).
1 Preliminaries for a framework
This first chapter is a bit like setting the table for the dinner to come: a necessary
preparation for the meal that is on the stove. But it isn’t the same as eating. Never-
theless, the chapter is immensely important in defining the framework, agenda and
direction of our later discussions. We wish that our readers might glance it over
again after having completed the whole book because its agenda-setting nature is
most apparent at the end. This chapter may be the most important in the book. It is
like a backroom strategic planning discussion prior to the board meeting.
The fundamental tension that drives this chapter concerns evaluative claims.
On the one hand, as we shall see, evaluative claims can be true or false, and they
are so in virtue of some criteria that are empirically specifiable. On the other
hand, we will reject theories that reduce well-being to empirical concepts such as
preference, pleasure and self-reported happiness. Such reductive accounts fail to
capture the multi-dimensionality and richness that well-being has as an evaluative
concept. The tension between these views needs resolution.
Some misconceptions
This tension is set in the following context. While the idea of basing social poli-
cies on well-being and happiness is very welcome, currently, the new field of
well-being studies thwarts a golden opportunity to transcend the severe limita-
tions of society’s understanding of value. We can break out of current misap-
prehensions of value that plague our lives and society, which we will document
in this book. It is a pity to repeat those misunderstandings within the study of
well-being. Here is why.
It is important for the critique and re-envisaging of society. Increasingly, gov-
ernments determine social policies using well-being and happiness indicators;
increasingly, social progress and development are being defined in such terms.
Such changes make sense. Well-being indicators are more responsive to what
matters than purely economic ones. They pick out more directly what matters
more directly. If money and economic factors are valuable only as a means to
well-being, then our policies and interventions should track changes in well-
being. This more direct approach is especially welcome given two factors. First,
there is increasing awareness of the importance of the diminishing marginal utility
of income. As we grow richer, after a point, money matters less (Easterlin 1974;
Easterlin, McVey, Switek, Sawangfa and Zweig 2010). Second, because environ-
mental concerns are pressing, there is a cry to be more efficient in the ‘production
of well-being’; that is, to not squander precious natural resources for little or no
gain in well-being, and not to ruin our natural environment for minimal gains in
utility. Thus, the shift towards economies of well-being is exciting and promising
on several counts.
Nevertheless, there is also a danger lurking here. The shift from policies based
on neoclassical economics towards those founded on well-being could be a truly
liberating transformation. However, the opportunity for radical social improve-
ment might be lost, depending on how we understand ‘well-being’. The more we
employ implicitly economic ideas to understand the core of human well-being,
the more we squander the opportunity for radical transformation. Our understand-
ing of well-being will merely echo the values accepted by society rather than
being a way to critique them. This is not only a missed opportunity, but also a pro-
found misapprehension. Whilst economic thought is vitally necessary to evaluate
the means to well-being, for instance, to assess efficiency and to weigh costs and
benefits, standard economic concepts are inadequate to articulate the core nature
of human well-being. Well-being itself is not an economic notion even though the
means to well-being includes those that are economic. The more we understand
well-being in human and evaluative terms, the more liberating the shift towards
well-being based policies will be. The book will make these ideas clear and vivid.
To begin, we will argue that there are four erroneous tendencies concerning the
study of well-being.
1) Empirical and evaluative

In the social sciences, writers tend not to distinguish well between empirical and
evaluative claims. Put simply, empirical statements describe what is, and evalua-
tions tell us what ought to happen and what is better or worse. The social sciences
are concerned exclusively with empirical facts about social groups, and often only
with measurable ones. Evaluative questions about what is good or bad do not fit
into such a framework (Hollis 2015).1 Because of this, scientists tend to reduce
claims about what is valuable to assertions about what someone considers valu-
able or what someone values. This is because the latter are empirical facts about
a person or group, which in principle can be measured.2 Supposedly, in contrast,
what is valuable seemingly isn’t an empirical fact, at least in a straightforward
way. Therefore, according to the empirical social sciences, it must be understood
in terms of what someone values.
Although this reductive error is understandable, it remains a mistake. What is
important for a person’s life cannot be reduced to what she thinks is so. Nor can
it be reduced to what she values.3 The fact that someone values something or
has a positive attitude towards it doesn’t ipso facto render it valuable. Nor is it
necessary.
The question of what is valuable might be outside the proper province of the
social sciences, but this does not mean that such evaluative questions can be
Preliminaries for a framework 3
avoided. We cannot ignore the evaluative nature of the concept of well-being
because that is what the concept is for: a multifaceted kind of evaluation. ‘Well-
being’ is roughly equivalent to ‘being and living well’ and ‘well’ is equivalent to
‘in a good way’. ‘Well-being’ requires ‘goodness’; it is an ineluctably normative
concept.
We have found that there is resistance to and misunderstanding of this point.
Many define happiness in terms of what a person values.4 This ties a person’s hap-
piness conceptually to the values that she accepts or ‘has’.5 In opposition to this,
there is the possibility that a person might have values that are not at all conducive
to her happiness or which don’t constitute it. The person may value the wrong
kinds of things (Badhwar 2014: 222). What a person values doesn’t necessarily
track what is valuable as part of her well-being. In this regard, we are fallible; we
can make mistakes and be ignorant. This implies that we cannot define well-being
in terms of what a person values.6 This is a result of fundamental importance.
Traditionally, well-being has been understood either in terms of feelings of
happiness or the satisfaction of desires. These perspectives accord with popular
understandings and with common sense. This means that they are most likely
not entirely wrong, and that they contain important insights, which we shall need
to unearth. Nevertheless, we shall also argue that these two views are mistaken.
Some contemporary psychological studies of well-being rely on these ideas,
and we shall argue that this comprises a significant limitation of those empirical
studies.
One aim of the book is to show why these reductive or thin accounts fail. We
can already discern the evaluative nature of the quest from the question ‘How
should one evaluate one’s life?’ We aren’t asking ‘How do people evaluate their
lives?’ but rather how they ought to. The enterprise is essentially evaluative. It
concerns how we ought to live or be, albeit that the ‘ought’ is non-moral. This
facet of the question already indicates that the answer is normative.7
Consequently, our study is already meant to exclude thin as opposed to thick
or value-rich conceptions of well-being. Thin conceptions try to avoid evaluative
concepts, whereas, in contrast, rich conceptions employ value concepts. In short,
well-being is not simply a question of happiness or of getting more of what one
wants or having more pleasure. It cannot be reduced to evaluatively thin concepts
such as happiness, desire and pleasure.
Claims made with thick evaluative concepts face the challenge of how they
relate to empirical facts. This challenge is especially acute for the notion of well-
being: if someone’s well-being has improved, this must be in virtue of some other
facts about her life. We require some empirical criteria for what constitutes well-
being. If the concept of well-being is evaluatively rich, then how can we deter-
mine empirically what well-being is? Furthermore, how can we make such an
evaluative concept operational and quantitatively measurable? How can we make
such a concept useful for social policy? Many social scientists ignore or evade the
normative dimensions of the concept of well-being in part because they assume
that such questions cannot be answered adequately within the framework of a rich
theory. Nevertheless, in this book, we embrace these questions. The systematic
study of human well-being requires that empirical investigations are directed
towards the composition of well-being, as opposed to merely its causes and con-
ditions. This requires a conceptual framework for understanding this composition.
In this work, we will show how this requirement can be satisfied without embrac-
ing the standard happiness, desire and pleasure theories of well-being.
2) Instrumental and non-instrumental

The second systematic engrained error about the nature of value concerns the dis-
tinction between instrumental and non-instrumental values. Society abounds with
mundane examples of the failure to draw this distinction because people tend to
explain the value of anything in purely instrumental terms, even when this con-
tains a patent absurdity. For example, consider the claim that happiness is good
because happy people are more productive. True: it makes us so. True: this adds
to the value of happiness. Nevertheless, it is a grossly misleading claim insofar
as it ignores the point that ultimately productivity is only valuable instrumentally
as a means to happiness. The original claim suggests that happiness is valuable
because it makes us productive, and in this way, it puts the cart before the horse.
For the moment, suffice it to say that inappropriate instrumentalisation is a sys-
tematic evaluative error in society. The basic distinction between instrumental and
non-instrumental values is important for our theory in several ways. However, we
will save the deeper significance of the distinction for Chapter 2. That is some-
thing to look forward to!
First, in conversation, people typically switch from talking about well-being
to what causes a sense of or feelings of well-being. This shift is in danger of
confusing happiness and well-being, which we need to separate. It also threatens
to conflate well-being with a person’s perception of it, which again are distinct.
More important, though, we need to separate two types of questions. ‘What typi-
cally causes or contributes to X?’ is distinct from ‘What does X consist in?’ For
example, asking what kinds of things causally contribute to good health is dif-
ferent from seeking the definition of good health itself. Similarly, ‘What causes
harm?’ is different from ‘What does harm consist in?’ We are concerned with the
question ‘What does well-being consist in?’ which is different from and prior to
‘What sort of things causally contribute to well-being?’ There is a systematic ten-
dency to ignore the former question by replacing it with the second. For example,
‘What role does friendship play in well-being?’ becomes wholly assimilated by
the question ‘How does friendship contribute to our sense of well-being?’ (Gra-
ham 2011: 122). The constitutive question has been ignored, in lieu of the causal
one. Both kinds of question are important, that is, both empirical causal studies
and a better understanding of what constitutes well-being.
Second, we need to distinguish instrumental and non-instrumental values in our
thinking about self-interest. It is obviously in our individual self-interest to earn
more money, all other things being equal. Ceteris paribus, it is to our benefit and
in our self-interest to acquire means of purely instrumental value, and harmful to
lose and waste them. However, the idea of obtaining such benefits does not take
us beyond instrumental value, which is purely derivative, and because of this an
explanation of well-being cannot be couched entirely in such terms. Thus, the idea
that well-being consists in acquiring more benefits is mistaken. It is erroneous
even if it were true that such benefits always contribute to well-being. It is flawed
as an account of well-being because such a theory must specify the kinds of non-
instrumental values that constitute well-being.
To underline the point, notice that the above conditions may not hold. Benefits
don’t always contribute towards well-being. For instance, a very depressed per-
son, who acquires many instrumental benefits or goods, which she cannot use or
appreciate, may not actually live a better life. Possessing or owning is a material
relationship that does not suffice for the appreciation of value, which may require
a change in the person. Merely having a benefit needn’t be sufficient for the living
of a valuable process.
This important point may become lost easily by the already-mentioned failure
to draw a simple distinction. The acquiring of such benefits may lead to a better
life, but it does not constitute such a life. Likewise, losing wealth may cause us
harm, but it does not constitute harm. In other words, we must distinguish what
leads to or facilitates well-being and what this consists in. This point also applies
to allied concepts such as happiness, welfare and quality of life; in each case,
constitution and cause are distinct. To understand well-being, it is necessary to
first elucidate what it is, which is in part a conceptual or philosophical exercise,
rather than to start by trying to discover what causes or facilitates it, which is an
empirical investigation. If we are not clear what it is, then we cannot determine
what causes it.
What constitutes well-being is only partly a conceptual question. The relevant
concepts will provide the framework, the types of distinctions and classifications
that we need to investigate human well-being empirically. So, we need a con-
ceptual framework for an account of well-being. But such a framework needs to
be filled by empirical studies that show us what well-being consists in. In other
words, empirical research shouldn’t be solely directed towards the causes of well-
being. They should also help us understand its nature.
We can have a preliminary taste of the importance of the distinction between
instrumental and non-instrumental values by considering the value of work. It is
a well-known limit of purely economic analyses of work that they treat it purely
instrumentally as a means of production and of personal income (Elster 1989;
Ventegodt and Merrick 2009; White 1998). Given this, we might widen our con-
ception of the value of work by looking at other non-financial utilities. One might
ask: ‘What other measurable benefits does work bring us?’ The point is that even
this improved conception of the value of work doesn’t frame all the issues in the
right way. It still makes work only a production or only instrumentally valuable.
And while work is a production, it is also much more than that. It is also a lived
experience and a self-conception. In other words, work has non-instrumental
value. But what does its being valuable non-instrumentally consist in? Such val-
ues cannot be reduced to what people like or enjoy or value in their work.8 This
is because we can make mistakes and be ignorant. There may be aspects of work
that we enjoy that are inherently contrary to our well-being, and there may be
aspects of work that we fail to properly appreciate. In other words, we have an
interesting theoretical problem of significance: how should we identify or specify
the relevant non-instrumentally valuable aspects of work?
We need to answer the above question to be able to combine the productive and
human aspects of work into one overall vision of well-being. This task is less easy
than it might seem. It won’t do to say that the instrumental and non-instrumental
must be in balance. It requires framing the issues in a way that places the eco-
nomic and human aspects in an appropriate relationship. For instance, on the side
of economic rationalism, it is right and important to systematically and rationally
weigh expected costs and benefits. However, on the side of the more human, there
is something elusively right to the sense that not all decisions are a question of
only cost-benefit analysis. We need different ideas for different contexts. But it
is not immediately clear how to combine both. A theory of well-being ought to
provide the insights that will allow us to do that.9
3) Value and measurement

There is an endemic failure to separate what is valuable from the measurement of
that value. Clearly, the indicators of X are distinct from X itself. A rise in tempera-
ture isn’t the same as its measurement with a thermometer. We could have the one
without the other. Likewise, performing better on an IQ test does not constitute an
increase in intelligence. Even though the first is usually a reliable indicator of the
second, we can imagine situations in which it isn’t. In practice, we disregard this
difference at our peril. We do so, for instance, when we define our goals in terms
of performance outcomes that are supposed to be measures (Gill and Thomson
2013).
The distinction is crucial for comprehending rational choice theory and utility.
Sometimes, ‘utility’ stands for what is desirable; sometimes it refers to a measure
of value. This difference is important for understanding the claim that traditional
aggregative utility theory omits aspects of what counts as an improved quality of
life (see Chapter 3). Does ‘utility’ measure what is valuable or constitute it? The
difference is also crucial for the evaluation of the idea that desirable aspects of
life can be ranked in a quantitative manner (see Chapter 7). In short, the claim
that utility is a measure of well-being isn’t the same as the theory that utility is
well-being.
The point that we are making is a simple one: how one measures well-being
doesn’t define what it is. The two are distinct. This implies that the process of
trying to understand what well-being is, and the process of figuring out how to
measure it, are separate. The concept needs to be explained insofar as possible in
its full richness without the muddling constraint that it should be simplified for
the sake of making it measurable. It is a distinct process to work out how the well-
being of people should be measured. Thus, we shall explain what well-being is
without the constraining requirement that it should be measurable or quantifiable.
This doesn’t mean that well-being isn’t measurable. Nor does it mean that well-
being shouldn’t be measured. It means that understanding well-being is a distinct
enterprise from measuring it. We shall discuss these issues later in the book (see
Chapter 7).
Sometimes, the three mentioned errors are innocuous fallacies. However, they
can constitute grave mistakes that lead us to misidentify what really matters in
practically significant ways. They can damage our understanding of well-being.
As we shall see, to avoid this requires a dogged determination to separate means
and ends, and instrumental and non-instrumental values (Chapter 2), and a con-
stant keen eye to distinguish the measurement of value from the value consider-
ations themselves (see Chapter 7).
Let us affirm the three points positively. We are advocating a strategy for well-
being studies that conforms to the following principles:
1 We shouldn’t try to simplify our conception of well-being in order to measure

it. We should make our account rich and complex, and also work out how this
conception can be measured. This requires separating clearly exposition of
the concept and measurement of well-being.
2 We mustn’t confuse the causes of well-being with its constituents. We need
to have a good understanding of what it is that the causal connections are
between. This requires empirical studies concerning the nature of well-being
in a synergetic relation to conceptual work. Empirical investigation shouldn’t
be directed exclusively to what causes or facilitates well-being.
3 The conceptual work that a framework for well-being requires should be
directed towards (among other things) showing how an evaluatively rich con-
ception of well-being can be given empirical determinations.
Objective/subjective
Earlier we mentioned four errors, but so far we have discussed only three. Let us
add the tendency to ignore the subjectivity of experience as the fourth. Contem-
porary science has difficulties acknowledging the subjectivity of experience on its
own terms; as we shall see in Chapter 4, it tends to be acknowledged in objective
terms. This means that it isn’t being comprehended adequately as subjectivity.
One cannot conceive of subjectivity adequately from an objective point of view.
Although this claim needs careful qualifications, subjectivity is a vital aspect of
well-being; how one experiences the living of one’s life from the first-person
point of view is a necessary and important part of one’s being, and hence of one’s
well-being. This subjectivity, vital to well-being, cannot be understood as such in
purely objective terms.
This topic is potentially confusing because the key words ‘objective’ and ‘subjec-
tive’ are employed in many different ways. What matters in a person’s well-being
seems to have both subjective and objective aspects.10 Therefore, as a preliminary,
we might distinguish four distinct uses of the terms ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’.
a) Meta-ethics
In meta-ethical theory, subjectivism is roughly the view that evaluative claims
cannot be true or false.11 This is usually taken to be equivalent to the claim that
they are subjective because they are merely a matter of opinion or an expression
of a positive attitude (Thomson 2002b).
(Technical aside: The view that claims of the form ‘X is desirable’ or ‘X is
good’ can be reduced to assertions about what someone values is closely related
to meta-ethical subjectivism. They are not the same but it is plausible to argue that
the first entails the second. This is reasonable because if a person A claims ‘X is
desirable’ then this claim should be understood as an expression of A’s valuing X
and not as an assertion that can be true or false. This last alternative is not plau-
sible: ‘A values X’ doesn’t entail the assertion ‘X is desirable’ because the former
is about A and the latter is about X. In summary, the view that claims about what
is valuable are reducible to claims about what a person values can be taken as
equivalent to meta-ethical subjectivism.)
In this book, we shall assume that evaluative claims can be true or false. They
are assertions and not merely a matter of opinion, and in this sense, they are not
subjective. This assumption is important because it determines the shape of the
project to be completed. It means that we are fallible about evaluative claims and
that we can be ignorant about them (McDowell 1998). It also means that we need
to discover the relevant criteria. Let us go through these points one by one.
If evaluative claims can be true or false, then it is possible for a person to make
mistakes in her judgment about what is good or bad. For instance, a person might
judge that her well-being is best served by forming a life-plan and trying to fulfil
her ambition. But this whole approach might be an error. The specific life-plan
might be quite unsuited to her character, and tempt her into making sacrifices that
would not be psychologically healthy. Furthermore, having a life-plan might be a
formula for disappointment and a recipe for self-instrumentalising. In short, she
might be making a mistake.
Not only are mistakes possible, but also, so is ignorance. One might be igno-
rant of alternative ways of life that would be more fitting to one’s well-being. In
such a case, it may be that one isn’t making mistaken judgments about those life-
styles; it may be rather than one isn’t even making judgments about them at all.
One’s horizons can be restricted, and because of this, one’s practical conception
of well-being. The space of value possibilities of human life is largely unexplored
(May 2005). Consider the different ways that people live around the planet now.
Consider the different ways of living that we have tried throughout our human
collective history. Despite this variety, there well may be ways of life and social
arrangements that we humans have not imagined that are much more conducive
to well-being.
A value theory that permits both errors and ignorance in our judgments about
well-being requires criteria. Our project of understanding well-being in a non-
reductive way will be a search for the relevant constitutive criteria. In accordance
with what criteria, is the judgment that my well-being is best served, for instance,
by having many friends? What are the pertinent criteria constitutive of well-being?
Objective accounts of well-being require the discovery of criteria. This is one of
the main quests of this book, to seek evaluative criteria that are empirically speci-
fiable without being thin or reductive.
b) Pertaining to subjects
There is second kind of subjectivity. Something is subjective if it pertains to the
subject as such. In this sense, pain is subjective and physical mass is not. The first
depends on the subject of experience as such, and the second does not. Well-being
is clearly subjective in this second sense. Well-being requires that there is a sub-
ject who is well.
c) Intentionality
We can extend this second use. Often when theoreticians discuss the subjectivity
of experience, they refer to its intentional and/or its self-conscious nature. The
idea that experience is intentional is important for this study, and we explain it
in detail later (in Chapter 4). We can explicate it provisionally as follows: many
mental phenomena have the characteristic of having content or being about some-
thing. For example, when we think, our thinking has a content, which is usually
expressed with a sentence, and our thinking is about something, such as tonight’s
dinner. Furthermore, mental states are intentional in a way that embodies a point
of view on the world.
d) Methodology
The assertion that the natural sciences have an objective methodology means
roughly that experiments in the natural sciences shouldn’t depend on the psycho-
logical state of the experimenter. Experimental results should be reproducible by
any experimenter in the same conditions, and this requires that the experiment be
conducted with controls. The natural sciences are objective in the sense that their
methodology is repeatable and not dependent on the state of the experimenter. It
is impersonal and supposedly neutral.
We might contrast the natural sciences in this regard with interpretation. How
a text should be interpreted may depend on the state of the interpreter. Because of
this, interpreting a text is often regarded a process of dialogue between the reader
and the text. Notice that even if interpretation is subjective in this third sense, this
doesn’t mean that it is subjective in sense a). Even though interpretation is not
impersonally repeatable, nevertheless there can be better and worse interpreta-
tions. Even if there isn’t one true interpretation of a text, there can be more true or
more false ones (Gadamer 1989).
We have identified four senses of the objective/subjective contrast. First, sub-
jective claims are merely a matter of opinion if that they don’t have a truth-value.
Second, claims are subjective when they are about a subject as such, and third,
they describe the intentional content of a person’s experience or psychological
states. Fourth, a methodology is subjective if it isn’t suitably impersonal and
repeatable.12
These senses of ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ are independent of each other. To
see this, consider the following: we can have objectively true claims about the
subjectivity of a person’s experience, which are investigated with objective meth-
odology. For example, consider the sentence ‘John believes that there are beings
living on the moon.’ This judgment is objective in the sense of being true or false;
there is some fact of the matter: subjective psychological claims are objective
because it is not merely a matter of opinion what John’s opinions are. Addition-
ally, we can gain evidence about those opinions through objective methodology.
We can have behavioural evidence for or against the assertion regarding John’s
belief. So, in this case, ‘John believes that there are beings living on the moon’
is objective in senses a) and d) but it is subjective in sense b) and c). In short,
we can have objective claims about subjective experience that are investigated
objectively.
Returning now to the main point, a framework for well-being must include
the subjectivity of experience. There is a difference between one’s inner life as
constituted by one’s awareness and shifts in one’s attention, and one’s outer life
as others might observe it.13 One’s inner life is something that one experiences
for oneself, and this phenomenology of consciousness will need to be part of the
framework of well-being. This requires the third sense of subjectivity, namely
intentionality: how one experiences the world. This point will be elaborated in
Chapter 4.
Perhaps due to their positivist lineage and to their proclivity for numerical
results, some approaches in the social sciences exclude the subjectivity of experi-
ence (in sense c) from accounts of well-being. There are epistemological reasons
for this. There are notorious difficulties in knowing the inner life of others (and of
oneself). There are also indeterminacies in our psychological lives. For example,
in certain circumstances it will be indeterminate whether a person is experiencing
the same taste that he previously liked and now dislikes or whether he is experi-
encing a different taste altogether (Dennett 1992, 1998). We should not take our
experiences from the first-person view to be given or transparent or determinate.
Nevertheless, despite these and other difficulties, the way in which one experi-
ences or is aware of one’s life from the first-person point of view is a necessary
facet of well-being.
Readers might protest that contemporary psychology does not ignore the sub-
jective aspects of well-being. Indeed, current psychological literature on well-
being is often focused on so-called subjective theories of well-being. There is a
vast literature on subjective well-being.
However, such theories use the term ‘subjective’ in a way that needs clarifica-
tion and, once clarified, we will see that ‘subjective theories of well-being’ tend
not to take subjectivity seriously in the sense that we mean. This is because, in
such theories, the subjective element is usually conceived either as a feeling of
pleasure or in terms of so-called subjective life-satisfaction. Accordingly, to judge
a person’s subjective well-being is to discover either how often and how much the
person reports experiences of feelings of pleasure, or second, how a person would
rate her life: how satisfied the person is with her life overall.14
Neither of these two theories allow us to understand how and why the phe-
nomenology of experience partly constitutes well-being. They tend not to be not
concerned with the content of how the person experiences her life except insofar
as this provides a set of external measures. In the first instance, subjective well-
being is understood as a function of individual moments of pleasure or happiness
(Kahneman, Diener and Schwarz, 1999; Kahneman, Daniel and Krueger, Alan,
2006). However, as we shall argue in Chapter 4, this kind of account treats plea-
sure as a mental occurrence that doesn’t have a content beyond being pleasurable.
It overlooks the intentionality of such experiences, which is to say that it ignores
what it is like for the subject to have the experience in question. It gets radically
wrong what pleasurable experience is. We can have a preliminary glimpse of the
importance of this point by considering the variety of kinds of pleasures that a
good life might contain. How can one account for this variety within a purely
quantitative frame consisting of units of pleasure?
In the second case, subjective well-being is understood in terms of self-reported
life-satisfaction, as answers to questions such as ‘How satisfied are you with your
life?’ Again, this approach is limited to providing a set of measures but without
specifying how lived experience constitutes well-being. This is because such self-
reported life-satisfaction claims don’t have any criteria determining their truth-
value beyond the person’s avowal. Given this, they count merely as an expression
of feeling rather than a true or false claim about the person’s life. They are expres-
sions of a feeling (rather like ‘Yes!’ ‘Great!’) rather than statements with a truth-
value about the person’s life. The person is expressing a positive attitude towards
her life rather than making an assertion about the positives in her life. Without
relevant criteria that could make such a claim false, nothing could constitute an
error (see Chapter 4).
Following the initial clarification, we can see that contemporary subjective theo-
ries of well-being tend to not be concerned with how the subjective experiences of a
person constitute inter alia her well-being. Rather, their interest is with self-reports
insofar as these yield a measure of well-being. This amounts to a huge difference
that has several implications. First, subjective theories of well-being do not answer
our earlier complaint that contemporary accounts tend to ignore the subjectivity of
experience. How one lives one’s life from the first-person point of view is a neces-
sary constituent of well-being. We need to understand how consciousness defines
well-being: what is most basically relevant and why? For example, how is depres-
sion relevant? How is a person’s insecurities and self-image pertinent? Subjective
measures presuppose that what is to be measured is already defined.
Second, methodologically, the theoretical need for greater understanding of a
person’s subjectivity isn’t satisfied by self-reported measures or by compiling
scores. It needs a fresh approach. Partly for this reason, we undertook life-narrative
interviews with 50 persons regarding their well-being. The idea wasn’t to try to
confirm or disconfirm the theoretical framework offered in this book empirically.
It was rather mainly to illustrate it with real-life examples. The aim was also to set
up an interrogative dialogue between the empirical study and the development of
a conceptual framework.
Third, the goal was to help escape the positivist lineage that suggests that
the only way to study well-being is through quantitative correlations. Thus, we
wanted to show that life-narrative interviews might provide a fruitful complemen-
tary method. This is a thread that we pick up in Chapter 7 when we discuss mea-
surement. Also, in the appendix of that chapter, we elaborate how life-narrative
interviews can provide an alternative and complementary methodology. Finally,
throughout the book, we employ examples from our case studies to illuminate the
theoretical framework we develop.
In conclusion, we have tried to draw attention to three important high-level
theoretical errors in studies of well-being. To these we added a contentious fourth:
insufficient attention to the subjectivity of experience. We have noted some issues
and confusions regarding this point and have indicated that this will be a major
theme of Chapter 4. We suggested that life-narrative interviews can provide an
alternative to the statistical correlations that tend to dominate the field.
Evaluative claims
Well-being is an evaluative concept. Earlier, we affirmed that this study would
be driven in part by a tension between two claims about evaluations. On the one
hand, because evaluative claims can be true or false, there are criteria for such
evaluations. We need to specify the empirical criteria that make evaluative judg-
ments regarding well-being or the good life true or false. No doubt such criteria
will depend on cultural and psychological facts about humans, as we shall see
later. On the other hand, evaluative claims (about what we have reason or ought to
do) are not reducible to value-free empirical ones. We should shun thin accounts
of well-being that reduce the concept to a simple empirical criterion such as a
feeling of happiness or ranked preferences (without excluding the possibility that
such concepts are important for understanding well-being). These two claims
seem to conflict with each other: the one side asserts the need for empirical crite-
ria that the other side denies are possible.
This conflict is alleviated, but not resolved, by the claim that there is no one
single value criterion for well-being. If well-being is, crudely speaking, in the
living of certain values, and if these values are multifarious, then they cannot be
reduced to a single common factor such as pleasure, happiness, desire or prefer-
ence. For a full resolution of the antinomy, we require a non-reductive account of
what is non-instrumentally valuable given in empirical terms, with the now-added
idea that the criteria will be plural.
This resolution will require empirical research. Well-being is not the same for a
human and a monkey. It is not the same for a child and an old person. It will vary
between cultures and temperaments. In short, this means that judgments about
well-being must specify for whom: X is better for A’s well-being than Y. This
doesn’t make judgments about well-being subjective (in the first sense noted ear-
lier); we can still make mistakes. It doesn’t mean that one can decide for oneself
what will constitute one’s well-being; there are criteria at play.15 However, the
empirical content of these criteria may vary between people, societies and spe-
cies. This means that there will be something about the nature of the being in
question that makes the difference. Here the word ‘nature’ should be taken as a
promissory note to be redeemed in Chapters 3 and 7. Simply, there must be some
varying facts about people in virtue of which their well-being is differently con-
stituted. We need conceptual work to uncover the framework, and empirical study
to discover the variations.
We also need empirical investigation directed to understanding the field of
human possibilities. There may be modes of life or ways of living and being that
are far better in terms of human well-being than the restricted ways in which
most of us live today within western society. However, we have limited knowl-
edge of those alternatives. Studies of traditional tribal societies might suggest that
people in contemporary western society tend to pay a heavy toil in terms of (for
instance) anxiety. However, traditional societies tend to be limited in other ways.
Can we have the best of both worlds? We don’t know how well humans might
live. This means that well-being studies must try to imaginatively envisage pos-
sibilities of how well we could be, but based on empirically sound understanding
and evidence.
This point is significant. Evaluative judgments are implicitly comparative: one
thing is better or worse than another. Even when we say that X is good or bad,
there is an implicit comparison at work. A good hammer is good not only rela-
tive to its function, but the judgment also is implicitly comparative: the hammer
is at least as good as most other hammers. Likewise, when we judge a person’s
well-being, there is an implied comparison (as well as a set of criteria). If we
claim that a person has well-being, then we are making a tacit contrast with some
group. This implies that claims about a person’s well-being will depend on what
implicit comparison is being made. A person may feel better than she did yes-
terday and report her well-being positively based on that comparison. The same
person could have made a judgment based on how happy, healthy and wealthy
some other people feel, and reported her own well-being as negative based on
this other comparison. There is no contradiction here so long as one makes the
comparison explicit.
Comparison is important when we employ the concept of well-being in social
critique. For example, one might claim that contemporary western society in gen-
eral emphasises consumerism to the detriment of the quality of work or personal
relationships. Such a claim would be comparative. But what is the relevant com-
parison? To test such claims empirically, we would need empirical research of the
alternatives so that the comparison class is specifiable. We need research directed
towards mapping the field of human possibilities.
This is closely allied to a slightly different point. Evaluations presuppose an
implicit scope that is defined by what one takes for granted. For example, one
might ask, ‘How can I improve my well-being concerning my work?’, assuming
one will stay in one’s current employment. The scope is narrow. We could ask for
a wider evaluation – ‘What sort of work should I seek?’ – but assuming implicitly
the limitations of one’s current qualifications, and employment possibilities in the
region. One could make the scope of the question even wider and more ideal by
removing these limitations and asking, ‘What sort of work would be ideally suited
to my abilities, talents and temperament?’ One could widen the scope of evalua-
tion even more by asking about how the institution of work might be redesigned
for the sake of human well-being. In each case, the evaluative question (and its
answer) takes something for granted or as a given. A wider question submits one
or more of these assumed elements to interrogation; it no longer takes it as a
given. In this way, the scope of the question is broadened.
In our everyday lives, we usually take socially accepted views of well-being
for granted and tend to only ask causal questions about how to improve that well-
being as and when they arise practically. When we are ill, we want to know how
to get better. When we are poor, we want to know how to earn more. When we
are insulted, we want to recover our dignity. When we are bereaved, we want to
know how we can carry on. We want our children to do well and worry about
them when there are problems. We want things to go smoothly at work and worry
about it only when things are awry. This indicates the narrow scope of our every-
day evaluations about well-being. At the most practical level, one might want to
evaluate one’s personal well-being within the confines of one’s circumstances and
culture or social conditions. Thus, one would ask: ‘In this kind of society, given
my basic character and this context, what would constitute an improvement in my
well-being and what can I do to achieve that?’
In such cases, the considered field of possibilities is circumscribed. Thus, so
are the implicit comparisons in our judgments about well-being. For example,
we tend to not worry about how we can improve our character for the sake of a
better life: ‘This is a long-term issue for another day.’ We usually don’t concern
ourselves with the kind of society and civilization that are conducive to human
well-being. We take a lot for granted in our everyday judgments about well-being.
Perhaps too much . . .
At a broader level, we can abstract from our culture and from the institutions
that define our society. We don’t have to take our current desires or character traits
as given. We don’t have to take for granted the institutional frameworks that we
inhabit. Human beings have a plastic nature, and there are many ways in which
we can live; some of these would be better than the currently available social
options. In this manner, we can employ the concept of well-being to critically
assess society and ways of life from a broad perspective, as Freud did in his work
Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud 2010). From the perspective that Freud
adopts in his work, life in contemporary western society is marred by tendencies
towards psychological illnesses. From this vantage point, Freud might claim that
none of us have well-being. Such a judgment would suggest that human life could
be wonderful in ways that are difficult to experience in our civilization. It would
also imply that humans could have the self-understanding and capacity to build
for themselves lives and institutions that fit their needs far better than we do now.
However, even if we could be clear about them conceptually, such claims are dif-
ficult to test empirically; nevertheless, to understand them, we must step outside
the delineated scope of our everyday judgments and their limited range of pos-
sibilities and comparisons.
The interplay between questions with a narrower and wider scope will be an
underlying theme of this book. In general terms, it is better to be aware of the
presuppositions of one’s questions. In particular, we need to be wary of compar-
ing apples and pears by forgetting the implicit scope and comparative nature of
judgments about well-being. This is important for the operationalisation of the
concept. For example, if we want to compare the well-being of children in urban
and rural schools within a country, then we would make some cultural assump-
tions about the nature of well-being that we wouldn’t want to presume if we were
critically assessing the institution of schooling within the same country using the
concept of well-being. For these two cases, the concept needs to be conceived
differently. For instance, the institution of schooling shapes the nature of adoles-
cence. In the second study, the question ‘For the sake of the well-being of young
people, should adolescence be shaped in the way that it currently is?’ is pertinent.
And therefore, for that investigation, the nature of adolescence within that cul-
ture can’t be taken as a given. This last point has a theoretical significance, as
we shall see in Chapters 3 and 7. In general, the concept of well-being should be
robust enough that it can be used for social critique, and as we have argued in this
chapter, this requires a framework that allows for empirical research about what
constitutes well-being.
The concept of well-being

This book aims to provide a framework for theories of well-being. It doesn’t pres-
ent a full theory, because this would include specifications that require empiri-
cal investigation. For instance, the well-being of a child will be different from
that of an older person; the differences are empirical. This work aims to provide
a framework for a theory by constructing and explaining the relevant concepts.
We have already glimpsed at some of the errors to avoid in our account of the
concept of well-being. The framework needs to be consistent with the evaluative
nature of the concept without being reductive. It needs to explain the relevant non-
instrumental values. It should avoid the error of being driven by measurement.
However, before we can embark on providing a framework, we need to identify
the concept that we are providing this frame for (Metz 2013; Campbell 2016).
Before we articulate and argue about conceptions of well-being, we need to
characterise the concept that will be the centre of our investigation. The idea of
well-being is the concept of our being well in the most fundamental, inclusive or
complete way. This means that we are living well or in non-instrumentally good
ways in all aspects of our lives, where ‘non-instrumentally good’ is qualified in
what we might call for the moment provisionally ‘a prudential manner’.
A person’s well-being provides her and others with reasons for action. To iden-
tify the concept, we need to specify the kind of reasons in question. We can start
with some preliminary points. The reason in question will be defeasible; that is,
it can be overridden by other kinds of consideration. Because of the public nature
of concepts, the reason in question will be interpersonal, as Darwall’s account
implies. Nevertheless, the reason will be primarily first personal in its content;
it is a reason for the person with regard to her own life. It is because of this that
others have a reason to rationally care for one (Darwall 2002).16
When we specify the kind of reason in question, it is usual to claim that well-
being concerns ‘what is good or bad for a person’ and that it is ‘an evaluation of
the person’s life’. However, these phrases are still too broad; we need to narrow
them down. We can do this in three steps. First, the reasons in question will be
non-instrumental. This implies that the concept of well-being should be distin-
guished from that of self-interest. This is because self-interest includes cultivation
and gathering of the merely instrumentally valuable. So, for example, wealth,
fame, reputation and power will usually be in a person’s self-interest, but we can-
not conclude from that they will be constituents of her well-being. They might
typically cause well-being, but that is a different point. Neither can we automati-
cally assume that it is only rational to pursue wealth, fame, reputation and power
insofar as they bring or cause well-being.
Second, well-being–defining reasons will be concerned with the quality of the
person’s life but not qua some role or social position. Therefore, they are different
from the judgment that a person’s life is going well as an artist, or as a designer
or as a mother. A person’s life can go well qua these regards without it going well
as a life per se. Indeed, they might involve a sacrifice of well-being (as well as of
self-interest). Thus, one’s life going well in these regards doesn’t constitute well-
being. Of course, again, one’s life going well qua some role or social position
might typically cause one’s well-being, but that is a different point. In a similar
vein, one might evaluate a person’s life with regard to its success. However, for
similar reasons, this won’t be a constituent of well-being either. These points also
mean that concepts such as ‘enviable’ and ‘admirable’ won’t necessarily track
well-being because they might be tracking some other kinds of desirable features
that a life might have.
A more delicate point: we might evaluate a person’s life in terms of her achieve-
ments; that is, whether she is achieving her important goals. And arguably this is
a component of well-being.
Third, in summary, well-being concerns how well my life is going for me, as
the person whose life it is and not qua or with respect to criteria of evaluation
outside my living it as such. This implies that the concept of well-being isn’t
about specific events in my life. For example, if I trip over or get embroiled in an
ugly dispute or get confused in an argument, then such events might cause me ill-
being but they won’t constitute it per se. To constitute ill-being, they would have
to be part of a pattern such that they form part or an aspect of my way of being.
The concept of well-being concerns the quality of my life as lived concerning my
being well. In reply to the question, ‘What does it mean for me to be well?’, we
need to answer ‘What does it mean for me to be?’ This is an important clue as to
how to proceed with a substantive analysis.17
From this set of claims, we can derive some implications that will guide
our investigation. Foremost, the account ought to specify the relevant kinds of
non-instrumental value. This imposes an important constraint that we will exam-
ine in Chapter 2, which is that we shouldn’t instrumentalise ourselves. It also
entails that the components of well-being themselves shouldn’t themselves be
harmful, as we shall see in Chapter 7.
Furthermore, the framework ought to include all the relevant value-making fac-
ets or aspects of human life. Our being well should include our being well physi-
cally, emotionally, cognitively, relationally, identity-wise and spiritually. This
means that there shouldn’t be some aspect of human life that is omitted from the
account. The resulting framework ought to be complete, with nothing significant
missing.
Because we are investigating what constitutes being well, the account should
reflect the holistic nature of human life. For this reason, we have used the word
‘aspects’ rather than ‘components’ or ‘parts’ when discussing well-being. Usually
a component can exist on its own, like an atom. Aspects can’t exist in this way;
they are abstractions from a totality. The different facets of well-being described
in this treatise aren’t separable except in account. For example, self-consciousness
isn’t like a layer that sits on top of awareness or consciousness. Rather, it perme-
ates and modulates it. Likewise, appreciative awareness isn’t something separate
from one’s activities and experiences. In short, the facets of well-being aren’t
separable components; they are aspects.18
In this work, we will focus on four, perhaps five, aspects of human life, which
we shall argue capture the required entirety in the desired way. Let us start with
the first four.
First, our lives comprise various experiences, activities and processes that partly
constitute a human life. By ‘experiences’, we mean, for instance, the experience
of going to a fair or that of taking an exam. These are things that happen to a per-
son. By ‘activities’ we include actions, but also the complex nesting of actions.
For instance, digging the soil is an action, but it is part of the larger activity of
looking after a garden. The activity of reading a book is contained in that of under-
standing a subject matter, which is itself incorporated in the broader activity of
studying for a degree. By ‘processes’ we mean even broader sets of activities and
experiences. For example, one of the processes of human life is to fall in love (and
out of it!). Another process of human life is to grow older.
Let us call this overall aspect of well-being ‘the level of activities’. Part of what
well-being is about must be characterised at this level. A description of well-being
must concern what a person’s life consists of with regards to what the person
experiences and does. For example, if a person is seriously ill and cannot go out
of the house, then this is relevant to her well-being at this first level. Likewise,
a person of limited material resources would likely be deprived at this first level
(this is the topic of Chapter 3).
Second, we are aware of those constituents of a life in ways that can be more
or less appreciative of the valuable nature of those experiences, activities or pro-
cesses. As we undergo an experience or process or undertake an activity, we are
conscious of our actions and what they are directed towards. Let us call this ‘the
level of awareness’. Part of the specification of well-being must be at this level. A
description of well-being must include how a person is aware of her experiences,
activities and processes, and their objects. A person’s awareness can be of lower
or higher quality. For example, if I am attentive to and absorbed in what is good
about the activity that I am engaged in, then ceteris paribus, my well-being will
be greater than that of a person who isn’t. At this level, well-being is about how
we are aware of the world around us, including our activities. Put simply, such
awareness should be appropriately appreciative. Such appreciation will involve
one’s emotions and moods, including happiness. From the phenomenological
point of view, the quality of one’s life depends on what one pays attention to and
under what descriptions. By appreciating appropriately the value of one’s activi-
ties etc., one can construct a phenomenological world that constitutes one’s being
well. This is the subject matter of Chapter 4. Any account of well-being must be
concerned with this level of human life: the quality of awareness with which the
person attends to the activities of her life. For instance, a person who is seriously
ill may be very anxious about her health and, as a result, unable to appreciate the
limited activities that she can engage in.
Third, the activities (etc.) that partly constitute a life are essentially relational
in nature. In our experiential and active life, we are always interacting with things
and persons beyond ourselves. The meanings of our everyday actions concern
especially other persons. This implies that to describe the well-being of a person,
we must characterise her relations with the world around her, and especially with
other persons. In a sense that has yet to be explained, other people can become
part of our lives. Any account of well-being must include this aspect of human
life. Without it, a characterization of well-being would be essentially incomplete.
Fourth, in these experiences, activities and processes, we are aware of our-
selves; we are self-conscious. As we shall see, self-consciousness is not a single
phenomenon. However, in terms of well-being, this dimension may be regarded
as one’s relationship to oneself. This is another ineluctable aspect of human life
that needs to be included in any account of well-being.
So far we have presented four aspects of human life that any account of well-
being must include. These four aspects are structurally constitutive features of any
human life that are evaluative necessary in the requisite sense. They are structural
features of living that are potentially good-making in the relevant way. They are
something like the a priori forms of well-being.
To characterise human well-being, in each case, we need to describe a set
of non-instrumentally valuable states of being and specify the relevant criteria.
Additionally, the four features require irreducibly different criteria of evaluation,
and therefore they are genuinely independent from each other, even if they caus-
ally feed into each other in synergetic ways. Thus, when we specify the relevant
criteria for each of the four aspects of being human, we will be close to grasping
the required framework. Furthermore, if there are no other necessary and struc-
turally constitutive features of a human life that are genuinely independent (i.e.
that can’t be reasonably subsumed under one of these four), then we have all the
elements for a complete framework. Have we left out something essential and
structurally constitutive? If the answer is ‘no’, then we have all the elements for
a complete framework.
Please remember that these features are supposed to be four general aspects of
human life. They are separable only abstractly or in thought. As I eat my food in a
restaurant with my friends, my actions constitute the first level. Thank goodness, I
am conscious of the food I eat, and of the activity of the eating. That is the second
level: my awareness can be of better or worse quality. In eating, I am in relations
to the other people around me, and to the food. The quality of these relations
constitutes the third level. While I am eating, and being with my friends, I am
conscious of myself in many ways, including as someone doing those things. Self-
awareness constitutes the fourth level of well-being. These four aspects or levels
are intertwined with each other in everyday life. We distinguish them because in
each case the criteria relevant for well-being are different.
We put forward four, but is there a fifth? This question is difficult to answer
now because we haven’t even been through the first four criteria, and therefore
we cannot assess whether putative candidates for a fifth structurally constitutive
aspect of human life are already included within the four or not. We need to under-
stand the four before we can assess whether there is a fifth.
The next chapter will propose what might appear to be a distinct fifth candidate.
This is the general idea that we shouldn’t instrumentalise ourselves. A person’s
well-being is diminished when she instrumentalises herself or parts of her life.
For instance, life’s activities typically involve having purposes, and well-being
will depend on whether one instrumentalises one’s activities to those purposes or
goals. This suggestion needs some explanation and work. Hence, we shall dedi-
cate a whole chapter to it.
Notes
1 Mackie (1991) assumes that for claims about something to be valuable or good to be
true there must exist values as Platonic entities. In other words, objective claims about
what is valuable must be absolute and cannot be relational. This tendency to confuse
absolute with objective and subjective with relational is criticised by McDowell (1998).
In other words, there can be objectively true claims about what is valuable that aren’t
absolute. Objective claims don’t need to be absolute. See Thomson (2002a, 2002b) and
also Le Bar (2013).
2 ‘Theory tells us that well-being components or dimensions will assume different priori-
ties in different countries, depending on their levels of achieved wellbeing, different
cultural priorities and so on’ (McGillivray and Noorbakhsh 2004: 15). That different
cultures in fact value differently doesn’t imply difference in what is valuable.
3 Tiberius and Plakias (2010) seem to confuse subjective theories in this sense with hedo-
nist and desire satisfaction–based theories. We need to separate a) what counts for well-
being is dependent on the subject’s positive attitudes or what she values from b) that
pleasure and pain and/or that desire satisfaction might matter non-instrumentally for
well-being. The first is akin to a meta-ethical subjectivist claim, which we will examine
shortly. The second is a substantive normative claim about well-being which can be
made within an objectivist framework.
4 This includes whether a person feels satisfied with aspects of her life.
5 Seligman (2012: 29) says positive psychology is about what we choose for its own
sake. Notice that this is descriptive and not normative.
6 Even if we can so measure it.
7 For the purposes of this discussion, we are not distinguishing ‘evaluative’ and ‘norma-
tive’: both affirm reasons for action.
8 By ‘those values’, we mean the non-instrumentally valuable aspects of work.
9 As a technical but important aside, one should distinguish between the intrinsic and the
non-instrumental value of an activity. ‘Non-instrumental’ indicates that the activity is
valuable for its own sake; ‘intrinsic’ indicates that the valuable features of the activity
are non-relational. By distinguishing them we allow that the non-instrumental value of
an activity need not be intrinsic; it could be relational.
10 This isn’t the idea that we should examine a mix of both objective and subjective indi-
cators of well-being. Indicators pertain to how to measure rather than what is measured.
11 Academically, this position is called ‘non-cognitivism’.
12 For present purposes, we can collapse the second and third senses. However, it is
important to keep them separate because of the prevalence of understandings of subjec-
tivity that ignore intentionality. This point will be important for Chapters 3, 4 and 6.
13 This doesn’t imply a Cartesian view of the inner.
14 In contrast, the objective measures of well-being are those which are not subjectively
self-reported, such as income levels, health and family life conditions. Of course, these
objective markers aren’t definitional of well-being even if they are reliable indicators.
15 Evaluations are relative to some criterion or set of criteria. In other words, we should
not say ‘X is better than Y’ simpliciter because there must be some criterion with
respect to which this is true. It may be false with respect to other criteria. In effect, this
means that ‘better’ and ‘worse’ judgments are description-relative.
16 One has reason to rationally care for things apart from the well-being (such as things of
aesthetic value or truth). However, if one cares for a person then there is a defeasible
presupposition that ipso facto one cares for her well-being (Darwall 2002).
17 Like the concept of good health, we would expect the concept of well-being to be
multi-dimensional, pluralistic and vague.
18 This point belongs to Kant and Marx.
References
1 We employ the term ‘intrinsic values’ without implying that they are non-relational.
The term ‘intrinsic’ indicates that something is valuable non-instrumentally, because of
what it is and not because of what it promotes or causes. This does not rule out the idea
that things that are intrinsically valuable are so because of their relations to other things.
2 The argument for premise 1 is:
i All goal-directed actions as such are means.
ii If the claims of the instrumental conception of rationality were true, then if X is a
means, then X has only instrumental value as such.
1 Thus, if the claims of the instrumental conception of rationality were true then all
of one’s goal-directed actions as such would have only instrumental value.
3 When Aristotle defines the good as what all things aim at, he commits the fallacy. See
N. Ethics 1094a1–3 (Aristotle 2000). Making the activity itself the goal doesn’t solve
the difficulty: one is still defining the good as a goal. Thus, for Aristotle, what makes
an intrinsically valuable activity valuable is that it is a goal.
4 Robert Nozick has a similar idea (Nozick 1974).
5 We need to distinguish comparative and absolute uses of the test.
6 This point needs to be refined because it makes sense to imagine that a person might
have led a different life and, therefore, a person is not strictly identical to his or her life
but rather is composed of a series of experiences and processes that constitute a life.
7 The hedonist reply would accept this conclusion by claiming that only pleasure and the
absence of pain are intrinsic goods. For a reply, see Chapter 4.
8 The word ‘part’ is very important here. We shouldn’t assume that values are exhausted
by reasons for action. Appreciation is also vital to the understanding of ‘X is valuable’.
See Chapter 4.
9 This doesn’t mean that the existence of persons always has overriding importance on
any occasion.
10 From an anecdote from Tarzie Varindra Vittachi.
11 To see this point at work in education, please refer to Gill and Thomson (2013, 2017).
12 Since we are investigation living the good life for humans, we concentrate on persons.
13 For example, G. E. Moore argued that the fact that some things are beautiful is valuable
quite independently of whether that beauty is appreciated by any person (Moore 1903).
14 To repeat: in this book to say that something has intrinsic value is to claim that its value
is non-instrumental and non-derivative. It is not to claim that the value is non-relational.
15 The idea that the value of something is relational doesn’t affect this point, although it
complicates it.
16 Here we ignore the fact that Kant doesn’t separate the distinction between means and
ends from that between instrumental and non-instrumental values.
17 An objector might urge that, in the Groundwork, Kant portrays such self-regarding
actions as immoral specifically because one is contravening moral duties to oneself. It
is a question of morality and not well-being. However, in reply, the word ‘moral’ is up
for grabs and we need to contrast two meanings of the term. The first might be Kant’s.
When he claims that it is irrational, this does not exclude that it might also be part of
one’s ill-being. What Kant might call ‘moral duties to oneself’ could be part of what
we call ‘well-being’: if one contravenes what Kant calls ‘moral duties to oneself’, then
this might constitute a form of ill-being. In contrast, the second sense embodies a more
popular view according to which it is immoral to treat other persons as a mere means
for the sake of one’s own self-interested goals. In this second case, the term ‘immoral’
is exclusively concerned with how one treats others, and thus it excludes the idea that
the action is a constituent of a person’s ill-being. In sum, we shouldn’t mix up the two
senses when we claim that Kant’s conception of instrumentalisation is a moral notion.
If we mean it in the second sense, then calling it ‘immoral’ excludes its being ‘a com-
ponent of ill-being’. If we mean it in the original Kantian sense, it doesn’t.
18 That doesn’t mean that Kant would say that.
19 Or worse, that they are intentional.
1 We will abbreviate ‘experiences, activities and processes’ as ‘activities’.
2 In the context of this current discussion, the term ‘objective’ is a variant of the three
discussed in Chapter 1. According to Sumner, it means roughly the following: a theory
is subjective if it is a necessary condition of a thing being valuable (in the well-being
relevant way) that the person has a favourable attitude to it. An objective theory denies
this (Sumner 1996). This is a variant of the second sense of ‘subjective’, as discussed
in Chapter 1. There is also a defeasible presupposition that it will be non-cognitive or
subjective in the first sense.
3 Dorsey (2011) contrasts life-structuring goals or global projects with desire satisfac-
tion and argues that both objective and subjective theories might be compatible with
the importance of life projects. However, subjectivist versions would be subject to the
critique outlined here.
4 The assumptions are that the preferences of any person are complete and transitive.
They are complete if, for all X and Y, the person either prefers X to Y, or Y to X, or is
indifferent between them. In other words, one cannot have indeterminate preferences.
Preferences are transitive if, when A prefers X to Y and Y to Z, then she will prefer X
to Z, for all alternatives X, Y and Z (Hausman 1992).
5 We wouldn’t assume that the preferences are identified as revealed by choice.
6 The theory holds that Y has a greater value than X for a person A is constituted by per-
son A’s having an informed preference for Y rather than X.
7 Edward Bernays understood this.
8 Different versions of this type of theory include: Annas (1993), Darwall (2002), Kraut
(2007), Badhwar (2014), Fletcher (2013, 2016a).
9 Sen (1993) defines capabilities in terms of functionings. These seem to include achieve-
ments that have instrumental value such as gathering food, but it isn’t clear how the
non-instrumental valuable nature of such functionings is to be defined.
10 In claiming this, we are affirming that even an objective list theory would need to
have an explanatory aspect, and shouldn’t be only enumerative (cf. Rice 2013; Fletcher
2013).
11 In the long term, even if an action or experience does meet a person’s interests, this
may not mean it is of given primary value. This is because it might be the case that the
subject ought to have different interests. To meet this doubt, ultimately we must appeal
to the person’s inescapable interests, as we shall see in Chapter 7.
12 Note that this point concerns primary prudential non-instrumental values, and that it
is quite compatible with this point to maintain some other statements about what is
desirable and undesirable are analytic. For instance, harm is necessarily bad, and this
is because it consists of the deprivation of primary goods, even though these primary
goods are contingently valuable. Statements such as ‘harm is bad’ are analytic, but they
do not give us any substantive information about what has primary prudential value for
individuals or groups of individuals. Therefore, we should distinguish between primary
values on the one hand, e.g. privacy, friendship, beauty, fun, and humour, and second-
ary values, on the other, e.g. health, well-being, happiness. The claim that we are mak-
ing now concerns primary value statements.
13 This section is based on Thomson (1987: Chapters 4 and 5).
14 Please see Appendix II to this chapter.
15 The object of desire is not ontologically restricted to objects; it can include states of
affairs and actions. It indicates what the desire is directed towards.
16 The object of desire will be specified with an extensional or referentially transparent
relational sentence of the form aRb such as ‘John wants the cake’. The content of the
desire is the way in which John wants that cake and that is specified with a non-
extensional or referentially opaque sentence such as ‘John wants that p’.
17 For more or the content/object distinction, see Chapter 4.
18 As directed towards activities, experiences and processes. Things wanted non-
instrumentally are desired for their own sake. Usually, our desires have both instru-
mental and non-instrumental aspects.
19 Contrary to Hamilton (2003).
20 It is probably better to not employ the term ‘need’ instead of deslogo interest in this
context. Whereas needs are inescapable necessary conditions for avoiding serious
harm, the concept of deslogo interests specifies an ingredient of harm. To use the term
‘need’ as equivalent to ‘deslogo interest’ is to confuse cause and constituent, which was
a major complaint of Chapter 1.
21 This is not the claim that what a person thinks is desirable for him might be different
from what another thinks is desirable for her; it is the assertion that what actually is
desirable for one person might not be for another.
22 To be clear, the claim is that various disparate general desires may have the same des-
logo interests at root and that in each case these desires generate a host of more specific
desires.
23 We shouldn’t assume that English, for example, has developed all the vocabulary nec-
essary to characterise our interests. In this regard consider that Aristotle has several
unnamed virtues (see Thomson 2016).
24 We are here using the term ‘need’ as a stand-in for deslogo interest.
25 Of course, in the relevant way; there are many kinds of value, and we are only discuss-
ing that relevant to well-being.
26 Unless there are some a priori differences and unless there is some indeterminacy at
this point (see Ruth Chan 1997).
27 Of course, the term ‘sex’ in a Freudian context does not merely refer to the reproductive
act.
28 See Chapter 7.
29 The object of my desire is an activity that is directed towards an apple. In Chapter 5, we
shall explore the claim that all activities are relational.
30 This statement 2 is given on pages 28 and 33.
31 In this sense one might claim that desires are expressions of need (when the term ‘need’
is used to refer to deslogo interests).
32 We could affirm that the first is about what is valuable and the second about what is
desirable.
33 Crudely speaking. More accurate and refined statements of the theory can be found
earlier in the chapter.
34 Such capacities may be specified as virtues. See for example: Bloomfield (2014) and
Le Bar (2013). This may be misleading because ‘virtue’ carries a moral or ethical
connotation. Haybron imagines persons, such as Ghenghis Khan and slave owners
who lack moral virtues but who might experience well-being (Haybron 2008: 5). Of
course, if we define ‘virtue’ in terms of human development or flourishing then we
risk a vicious circularity: virtues are necessary for well-being by fiat (Hursthouse 1997).
35 Garrett Thomson (1987: Chapter 2) argues that the content of inherited traits cannot be
specified expect in relation to ranges of environmental conditions.
36 See, for example, Hamilton (2003), who argues that there is a sense of ‘need’ that isn’t
instrumental. However, he appeals to a notion of human functioning to ground this
notion.
1 In this context ‘objectivity’ means ‘described with non-intensional or extensional
sentences’.
2 Phenomenology needn’t be inconsistent with a functionalist or causal theory of mental
contents so long as we don’t require that such a functionalist theory be extensional.
3 In this context, ‘object’ doesn’t necessarily denote an object such as a chair. It might
refer to an event or a state of affairs (or fact).
4 To avoid reifying the content of a mental state, and thus to avoid treating the content
as the object, one might think of this content adverbially. The content of perception is
simply the way in which one sees the object. This essentially Fregeian idea avoids the
fatal Lockeian assumption that the object of perception must be an idea. In short, Locke
confuses the content of perception (the idea) with the object of perception (the object
such as a chair).
5 Sentences that characterise the content of mental states as such are intensional and
those that specify the object as such are extensional.
6 We are not asserting that all intentional content is phenomenological, nor that all phe-
nomenological content is intentional. However, we are not denying these claims either.
Please see Horgan and Tienson (2002).
7 The early utilitarian thinkers, Bentham and Mill, were the first to explicitly articulate
this theory. Some contemporary economists, who identify utility with pleasure, also
implicitly accept the theory.
8 Typically, the standard conception claims that pleasures vary only quantitatively: for
example, in their duration, intensity and in the degree to which they are pleasurable.
9 This relates to the discussion of subjective and objective in Chapter 1.
10 There are other reasons for thinking that mental states shouldn’t be conceived as
objects in a mind. For instance, such a view dichotomises the inner and the outer. See,
for example, Dennett (1992). A more elementary presentation is Thomson (2002b).
11 The adverbial form accentuates the point that the pleasure isn’t a thing; it is the way in
which one performs an activity. In this way, it is philosophically illuminating despite
being grammatically clumsy.
12 Like Nozick himself, Kaez asks ‘should one plug into the machine?’ (Kazez 2007: 52).
The relevant question for refuting hedonism is rather: ‘Does one lose anything of non-
instrumental value by doing so?’ One could answer ‘yes’ to both questions.
13 This provides a different lesson from the one that Nozick himself draws in Nozick
(1974).
14 Or the aspectual or description-relative nature of enjoying.
15 We haven’t specified in what ways enjoying an activity is a form of appreciating its
desirable features. Therefore, we haven’t given an analysis of enjoying.
16 Activities are relational, and because of this, we usually describe the object of the activ-
ity with the relevant set of desirability characteristics: e.g. the apple was delicious.
17 What is appreciation? Clearly we are using the word as a term of art that has certain
features. It is a cognitive state that is evaluative; it is cognition of the desirable features
of an activity. Additionally, it must also be experiential. It cannot be just a belief that
the activity one is engaging in has desirable features. It is a direct experience of the
activity as such. Thus, the description of appreciation as an evaluative cognitive state
doesn’t exclude the idea that appreciation can be emotional. To properly appreciate an
activity can be to feel. For instance, when one sees one’s family for the first time after a
long forced separation, it is emotional. The appreciation of being reunited isn’t distinct
from the emotions. For example, sometimes people express the experience of seeing
the sunrise in a beautiful spot as a joyful recognition of being alive in the cosmos. In
such a case, part of the appreciation is the exquisite feeling. Appreciation is an inten-
tional conscious state. This means that when we appreciate, for instance, a work of art
we do so under certain descriptions of that work and not under others. Appreciation
is partial and aspectual. Likewise, our appreciation of our friends is intentional, too.
As we mentioned, this implies that there might be more to appreciate, and it suggests
that appreciation is inexhaustible. There is always more that we could appreciate. The
intentionality of appreciation also implies that appreciation is not all or nothing. It
comes in degrees. This also suggests that I can appreciate any aspect of my life more
than I do now. Appreciation can be more or less intense. This feature of appreciation
(its intensity) depends on the state of one’s consciousness.
18 In ‘appropriate appreciation’ the term ‘appropriate’ can be defined initially as the con-
tent of cognition of the activity is characterised by the same desirability predicates as
the activity itself.
19 This kind of view has two key philosophical assumptions: cognitivism and realism. In
this context, cognitivism is the claim that we can have cognitive states regarding (the
subject matter of) evaluative claims. It is the claim that evaluative cognition is possible.
The idea that we can perceive meaning and values may sound strange at first. In fact,
such phenomena are part of our everyday life. When one listens to someone speak, one
hears him or her saying something (semantically) meaningful. One perceives mean-
ing. Likewise, one perceives people and their actions under a wide range of evaluative
predicates, such as ‘joyful,’ ‘lonely,’ ‘patient,’ and ‘cruel’. These adjectives describe the
subjective content of the experience itself; they characterise one’s perception, or how
one saw the action or person. Similarly, one’s self-perception is often evaluative. The
idea of appropriate appreciation can also be affective, as well as cognitive. The other
assumption is realism. This is the further claim that when the perception is accurate
or truthful, then what one perceived is real (or the description of the content of the
perception is true of the world). For example, one sees a person’s action as cruel, and
when one’s perception is accurate, then the person’s action was cruel. This may sound
like common sense, and it is, but, nevertheless, it is also a piece of common sense that
requires a philosophical defense (which we cannot give now). The cognitivist position
more accurately reflects the phenomenology of everyday experience in which we can
see things as beautiful or just plain, feel them to be meaningful or hollow, and perceive
our actions as worthwhile or trivial. These examples illustrate that the perception of
values is nothing exotic or mysterious. We will assume that both cognitivism and real-
ism can be adequately defended against objections. We shall also assume that there are
strong and compelling arguments for both. In addition, there are many variants of both
views, which we shall blissfully ignore to keep on track. The combination of these two
views contains insights relevant to well-being. First, the cognitivist and realist way of
understanding our interaction with things of value is especially illuminating when it
comes to the appreciation of other people. In everyday experience, we perceive other
people as courageous or timid, creative or highly-strung. For example, there is a person
whom I admire for her incredible combination of persistence and flexibility. The realist
position allows me to affirm that she does have these (value-laden) qualities, and the
cognitivist view permits the assertion that I admire her because I perceive that she has
these qualities. It also allows the idea that my perception might be mistaken or errone-
ous. Someone who knows my friend better might disagree with me, and have a more
accurate perception of her qualities. Second, the cognitivist and realist way also allows
for the idea that someone might be ignorant of these qualities that she has. Realism per-
mits the possibility of ignorance. There are evaluative facts (or facts described in evalu-
ative terms) concerning which I am ignorant. For example, there is beautiful music that
I have never learned to appreciate. There are people around me whom I could love and
become friends with, whom in fact I have hardly met. This is a super important point,
because it means that we live in a world of untapped value-possibilities. It implies that
the world that we live in is richer in meaning than our experience of it. The importance
of this point is that one can be aware and appreciative of the fact that there are untapped
value-possibilities, and this can affect one’s feelings and one’s sense of the meaningful-
ness of one’s life. In other words, one can appreciate the second-order fact that there are
things of value (or first-order evaluative facts) that one does not appreciate either for
lack of opportunity or lack of aptitude. Appreciating this second-order fact can make
a substantial difference to how one feels about one’s life and surroundings. We can
feel that the world is richer than we can ever know and that we could never exhaust its
meaning.
20 This second kind of harm to well-being is often ignored. It is ignored by utility-based
preference theories and desire theories that (implicitly) evaluate a person’s well-being
solely in terms of the goods that a person has. In opposition to such theories, we might
affirm that merely ‘having’ a good isn’t sufficient for appreciating it. The mere fact that
the preferences of a person are formally satisfied does not imply that the person was
able to, or in fact did, appreciate the obtaining of those states of affairs. Of course, one
could specify by fiat that the relevant appreciation is already built into the description
of the preference. For example, rather than saying that a person wants to ride on the
roundabout soon, we might specify as part of his want that he experience this ride in an
appreciative way.
21 To pursue this point properly would require a discussion of levels of consciousness,
which would take us into Chapter 6 on self-awareness, and which in any case is beyond
the purview of this book.
22 The two parts are independent because a person might be attentive but dull, or might
have a vivid awareness that is directed elsewhere, away from the valuable features of
her living processes.
23 See Chapter 3, page 52.
24 We employed the term ‘appreciation’ because it is a cognitive or perceptual word,
which, at the same time, has evaluative and aesthetic implications. As we have seen,
appreciation is a form of perception, and as such it is a cognitive state that can represent
truly or falsely the world. To appreciate X is to perceive appropriately the valuable
aspects of X. We added the word ‘appropriately’ because appreciation requires the esti-
mation of the true value of something. This implies that one can make mistakes and one
can be ignorant in one’s appreciation.
25 Diener and Biswas-Diener (2008) argue that happy people function better and that it
pays to be happy. Even if they are true, such empirical claims don’t help us understand
the non-instrumentally valuable nature of happiness and tend towards the instrumental
theory of rationality criticised in Chapter 2.
1 This puzzle has been noted by other writers such as Shelly Kagan (1998) and Thaddeus
Metz (2001).
2 This problem is discussed in Martin (2012: 114) who notes: ‘the mere appeal to the
happiness of givers is unsatisfying, or at least incomplete, as moral justification. It
misses the primary moral point of helping others.’
3 We assume that meaning is a kind of non-instrumental value.
4 ‘Intrinsic’ here means non-instrumental, not non-relational.
5 We say ‘usually’ because there are activities that are valuable as means for which the
relevant end is entirely self-regarding. I might enjoy cooking for myself or having a
bath. (Note: some self-regarding goal-defined actions might be activities that are also
instrumentally valuable as means and others, such as playing, might be intrinsically
valuable but without being intrinsically valuable as means.)
6 As well as our own income, but the same point applies.
7 Notice that the problem and its solution arise at the level of the constituents of well-
being and not at the level of its causes. As we explained from the outset, the questions,
‘What constitutes well-being?’ and ‘What causes well-being?’ are fundamentally dif-
ferent. In this work, we concentrate on the first to avoid an impoverished conception of
well-being.
8 Or more clearly, part of the self-regarding non-instrumental valuable nature of the
activity, experience or process in part consists in connecting appropriately to something
of non-instrumental value that is other-regarding.
9 The intrinsic valuable nature (pertinent to well-being) of one’s experiences, activities
and life’s processes is partly constituted by their being performed or undergone with
other people.
10 Not reducible but dependent. Typically, human motivation is such that we have des-
logo interests pertaining to the ‘need’ for certain relationships. Also, appreciation or
awareness is an important aspect of one’s relationships. The value of relationships isn’t
reducible to these two factors but it is dependent on them.
11 Some philosophers argue that well-being and meaningfulness are mutually exclu-
sive. In other words, they would deny the claim that one’s well-being is greater if one
engages in activities that are more meaningful. See Metz (2002, 2013).
12 The best explanation of a certain kind.
13 Philosophical aside: to claim that typically one feels very happy or even elated on
becoming a mother or father misidentifies the point. One can see this by considering the
point that the parents feel elated because a new person has become part of their lives.
Therefore, one could recognise the baby as a primary bearer of value and recognise that
this value has become part of one’s own life and not feel elated (because for instance
one is too tired or too anxious). The feeling of happiness isn’t the main point. The cause
of it is. The cause is that this person or valuable being has become part of one’s life.
Perhaps a better alternative explanation is that when parents see their newly born
baby, they are genetically programmed to have a tendency to feel immediate love of
the newborn. This wouldn’t count as an alternative explanation if the concept of loving
includes the idea of making someone part of one’s life in a way that imports the value
of the other into one’s own life. This is indeed what we shall argue. However, we can
already see the insufficiency of the genetic psychological explanation. It explains why
we care for the baby. It doesn’t explain why it is important to care.
14 Because they are intensional verbs, it means that they are referentially opaque.
15 ‘The Big Picture: The Meaning of Life: Philosophers, pundits and plain folk ponder
what it’s all about’, (Answer by Armand Hammer), Life, 1988, December, Page 89,
Column 2, Published by Time, Inc, Chicago, Illinois and New York.
16 In this discussion, we are not referring to the causal impact of relationships on one’s
well-being. Relationships with persons can have a positive or negative instrumental
impact on one’s well-being.
17 This would require some classification of relationships as well as a definition of what
counts as non-instrumentally good in well-being-relevant ways for each type.
18 Given a good quality relationship.
19 This point has its origin in the thought of Socrates and Plato (Thomson 2016).
20 This doesn’t mean that such self-perceptions are immediate and infallible. For more
detailed argument see: Thomson (2002b) and Gill and Thomson (2019: Chapter 3).
21 This bias has deep implications for morality. It means that we are morally obliged to be
careful and generous in the way that we construe others.
22 This is because the four aspects of well-being are melded. This implies also that our
activities, awareness and relations are suffused and structured by self-consciousness,
and so on.
23 Or, perhaps more accurately, what you will find is constructed through a social history.
1 There is no reason to think that the content of our perception should be captured with a
single proposition. Proust teaches us that it may require several pages to describe how
someone sees a tree, let alone the behaviour of a person. Our perceptions are phenom-
enologically rich.
2 This doesn’t mean that other forms of self-awareness are not also prerequisites for it.
3 Ricoeur claims that narratives provide unity to the self.
4 Thus, we need at least a fourfold distinction between narrative-processes, the narratival
content of self-perception, narratives as artefacts and finally the life of a person.
5 This is similar to the Stoic notion of oikeiôsis (see Thomson, 2016, p. 351)
6 Indeed, such a confusion would not make sense because the audience of a story would
itself consist only of films or books. Universalise ‘I am a film’, and the conclusion is
everyone is a film, including the audience.
7 This doesn’t mean that other species are not persons; furthermore, we are ignoring the
claim that the difference between persons and non-persons is one of degree.
8 Of course, this claim is simplistic and problematic because there are many different
interpretations of Kant on these points. There may well be a sophisticated reading of
Kant’s texts that escapes these quick brush problems.
9 We need a term for the opposite error which is to treat something that is only instrumen-
tally valuable as if it were non-instrumentally valuable. These two errors have the same
root, which we explored in Chapter 2.
1 See Chapter 2 page 41.
2 But only for specific types of desiring: those that are non-derivative and directed
towards activities.
3 Lawrence Hamilton (2003) tries to develop a Marxian notion of need based on human
functioning (especially pages 53–54). He claims that such a conception is in part non-
instrumental. In which case, it should be constituted by activities etc. that embody
desirability-patterns.
4 Note that inalterability isn’t absolute but rather relative or conditional: X is inalterable
only given certain conditions.
5 Given, but only in some respects.
6 In a parallel way, we need this concept for the interpretation of desire (see Chapter 3).
When we interpret a group of non-instrumental desires, we look for relevant similarities
and differences (in terms of content) that have explanatory power. However, to have such
power, these interests must be relatively inalterable. To see this, consider the natural sci-
ences: we explain a pattern P1 by citing a more enduring and inescapable pattern P2. In
effect, this condition partly defines what counts as a relevant pattern. The fundamental
laws of nature, by definition, are features of physical reality that a person cannot change.
For example, I can alter the velocity of a light beam by passing it through a medium, but
I cannot change its velocity in a vacuum. That is a physical constant. Likewise, one can
change the kinetic energy of an object but to do one must change its mass or velocity in
accordance with the equation ½ mv2. This is part of what makes the latter a physical law.
In scientific explanation, the explanans should be more inescapable than the explanandum.
This requirement is parallel to those in the natural sciences. Physical laws should have
both explanatory power and also they should be inescapable. This guideline regarding the
nature of explanation directs us towards the relevant deslogo interests cf. Harre 1975.
7 Even hypothetical desires.
8 The evaluation of such changes would be instrumental, but instrumental considerations
depend on non-instrumental evaluative claims. In other words, should we change our
nature with respect to deslogo interests of kind K? The answer that having such a K
interest (or K motivated non-derivative desires) causes us harm assumes a specification
of harm in terms of other interests.
9 One might argue that such a regress is halted conceptually by the fact that an activity
characterised by (say) aesthetic desirability characterisations (such as ‘enchanting’)
will automatically be not subject to further evaluation, that is, by the meaning of the
term itself. But this alternative was already ruled out in Chapter 3. The idea that the
mere fact that a person has a desire might halt the regress was also ruled out.
10 In this discussion, we are making an important simplifying assumption, namely that
translations between cultures are possible (though not necessarily on an individual
word-to-word basis). Different societies will have varying concepts to characterise
their interests and what is valuable. We shouldn’t assume of any culture that it has
developed the appropriate concepts for this purpose.
11 Good or bad as well-being relevant in a non-instrumental sense.
12 This is a simplification.
13 Of course, we can always appeal to purely instrumental considerations in our cross-
societal evaluations, and although these may be practically important and even deci-
sive, they don’t get to the nub of the issue.
14 See Chapter 1 on scope.
15 The answer depends on what the contrast is (i.e. better than what?).
16 In exploring these points, we can separate two claims: one, that aggression morally
needs to be channeled, and second, it needs to be channeled for the sake of an indi-
vidual’s well-being. The concept of well-being isn’t hostage to morality: an organism’s
well-being could in principle conflict with moral demands. For a being that needs to
eat human flesh, moral concerns about cannibalism wouldn’t be directly relevant to the
definition of his well-being.
17 This needs explanation.
18 We are not committed to transitivity of ‘better’ and ‘worse’ all the way down. However,
for purposes of measurement incommensurability would be treated as indifference.
19 See Soren Reader (2005) who attributes this error to Garrett Thomson. But, in reply,
please see Chapter 2 of Thomson (1987), especially page 32.
20 Or as referentially opaque.
21 Yet, despite this, one cannot regard normative concepts as free-floating. We need to
characterise them in clear empirical terms insofar as this is possible. As we saw in
Chapter 1, these two claims produce a tension. The two claims are that the normative
cannot be reduced to the empirical and that we need to provide empirical specifications
of normative concepts.
22 For example, McGillivray and Noorbakhsh (2004: 3) recount that the UNDP has tried
to provide a solid basis for the Human Development Index (HDI) through Sen’s capa-
bilities approach. They note the difficulties in finding universal claims about ‘basic
capabilities required to lead a worthwhile life’. However, they don’t note that this
approach involves a circularity because it fails to specify non-instrumental values.
Defining well-being in terms of capabilities required for a worthwhile life postpones
the question of what constitutes the relevant non-instrumental values.
23 Extensional sentences are referentially transparent. This means that co-extensive or
co-referential terms can be substituted in such sentences without altering the truth-
value of the sentence as a whole. For example, ‘2 + 3 = 5’ is extensional because any
numeral that refers to the number 5 can be substituted after the = sign and the sentence
will remain true. While claims in the natural sciences are extensional, psychological
assertions are not. ‘A believes that p’ and ‘p = q’ doesn’t entail ‘A believes that q’. Such
intensional sentences are referentially opaque. Fundamentally this is because such sen-
tences are about semantic content.
24 This is insofar as it is a non-instrumental valuable aspect of well-being. Of course, self-
consciousness will affect awareness or appreciation. In this regard, it has instrumental
value and thus it is already included in the appreciation variable
25 To measure X, or to give it a numerical representation, requires that it doesn’t matter
how X is described. Therefore, quantitative methods require that the domain and data
points in question are described extensionally. Psychological states are intentional; they
have meaning or content. This implies that they cannot be described as such with exten-
sional sentences.
26 Suppose utility is a measure of substantive preferences (or a subset thereof) (Bermu-
dez 2009: 44–47). We are claiming that such preferences are a measure of the non-
instrumental desirability of activities (or an aspect of well-being), fundamentally
because they don’t constitute well-being. So, utility is the measure of a measure.
This shouldn’t be surprising because constructing preference functions is a way to
de-intentionalise the valuable features of the activities in question, in order to make it
measurable. This is why the interpretation of desires to find the underlying patterns of
desirability (or deslogo interests) as explained in Chapter 3 is a way to avoid this de-
intentionalising in the definition of the valuable features of the activities in question.
The de-intentionalising is necessary for the measurement but not for the definition.
27 Or by watching the Black Mirror episode ‘Nosedive’ Series 3 Episode 1, Oct. 2016.
1 Davies (2015). To answer a challenge implicit in Davies’ critique of the happiness indus-
try, we need to have specified an account of well-being that isn’t neoliberal.
2 Reader (2007: 28–29) ignores structural features of society in her definition of ‘practice’.
3 See Chapter 4, page 82.
4 In this sense, even the hypothetical desires or preferences that we would have if we were
more fully informed about what we want are cognitive amended versions of our actual
desires.
5 In Chapter 4 (page 151), we separated these two points: the general capacity to be aware
and the specific capacity to attend to the desirable features of an activity, experience or
process. We also separated them in Chapter 7 (pages 78–79). Now, for the sake of brev-
ity, we lump them together.
6 It misconceives the relation between exchange value and use value because it makes use
value servant to exchange value, which can be capitalised.
7 Intentional mental states can’t be counted because their identity conditions depend on
how they are described. The question ‘How many beliefs do you have?’ is senseless not
because beliefs are things that can’t be counted but rather because beliefs aren’t things
at all.
8 For instance, an account of seeing that respects its intentionality would treat ‘A sees X’
as an extensional statement of a relation between a person and an object such as a tree.
It would treat ‘A sees that p’ as an intensional (or non-extensional) statement of how (or
the way that) A sees X. As we saw in Chapter 4, this allows us to embed mental states in
the natural and social world but affirm their subjectivity.
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1 Preliminaries for a framework 1

3 Activities and desires 45

6 Evaluative self-awareness 117

7 Towards a definition of well-being 138

8 Towards social critique 169

1) Empirical and evaluative

2) Instrumental and non-instrumental

3) Value and measurement

1 We shouldn’t try to simplify our conception of well-being in order to measure

The concept of well-being

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