Pluralism About Well-Being: Pluralism About Well-Being

Abstract

This paper presents a novel argument for pluralism about well-being, the view that there are at least two basic goods or bads. The argument begins by establishing a datum that any theory of well-being must accommodate: whenever a person feels a pleasure, she experiences a pro tanto increase in basic goodness at exactly the times when she feels the pleasure. The paper then argues that we can accommodate this datum only if there is a basic good whose tokens can be basically good for a person only at times when she is feeling pleasure. The paper then argues that there must be at least two basic goods: one that can be basically good only when someone is feeling pleasure and another that can be basically good for someone even at times when she is not feeling pleasure. The paper goes on to discuss how these claims show that some recent attempts to defend hedonism by developing ‘adjusted’ hedonistic theories that are compatible with the Experience Machine are ultimately unsuccessful. – AI-generated abstract