Abstract

A theory of intrinsic well-being is an account of what makes a life good for the person who leads it. It tells us, that is, not what is morally good, nor what is instrumentally good for a person, but rather what a person's individual well-being consists in. As such it provides an important part of the answer to how one should live one's life. Yet while contemporary philosophers have much to say about how to measure well-being, how to distribute it, and how an individual's pursuit of it should be restricted, they give little attention to what well-being actually consists in. ;Welfare economists often favor the view that one's life goes well in so far as one's net preferences are satisfied. Yet out of ignorance or because of an impoverished upbringing one might most desire things that would in fact make one's life worse. The attempt to "improve" or "inform" preferences with greater information, or by insisting they survive various forms of "cognitive psychotherapy," encounters further difficulties. A different approach to intrinsic well-being is the attempt to base well-being on the quality of phenomenal experience; either by making well-being consist in having pleasurable mental states, or in having some sort of "agreeable feeling" more broadly conceived. These mental-state theories face one or another version of the "replaceability problem": that in principle the typical sources of agreeable feeling could be replaced with other sources such that all that is of value in love, friendship, accomplishment, and self-development could come in a bottle or be fed straight into the brain from a machine. ;I argue for an objective theory of well-being in the tradition of Aristotle, Marx, Nietzsche, Dewey, and Mill. Based on a developmental conception of human nature, such a theory makes well-being consist in cultivating, refining and realizing one's human powers in aesthetic, intellectual, emotional, social, and self-reflective activity. An objective theory can allow for the diverse ways in which human beings achieve good lives. Like any theory of human well-being it must be sensitive to the different contexts in which we inquire about human flourishing. We need something to say both when we give advice which must take the social/political world as given; and when we challenge or defend social/political institutions on the grounds of their effect on human well-being. I argue that, properly developed, an objective account of intrinsic well-being can plausibly meet these demands