Sumner On Desires and Well-Being

Author:

Bykvist Krister

Abstract

A person's welfare or well-being concerns what is good for him, what makes his life worth living. It therefore depends crucially on facts about the person and his life. As William James once remarked, whether a life is worth living depends on the liver. How this dependency should be spelled out is a controversial question. Desire theorists, or as I shall call them well-being preferentialists, claim that a person's well-being depends on his desires and preferences.

Publisher

Cambridge University Press (CUP)

Subject

Philosophy

Reference23 articles.

1. James, William. 1956.The Will To Believe, Human Immortality and Other Essays on Popular Philosophy32New York: Dover.

2. 1998. To be exact, there are two forms of well-being preferentialism: the object version and the satisfaction version. According to the object version, something is good for me if it is anobjectof one of my desires. According to the satisfaction version, in contrast, something is good for me if it consists in thesatisfactionof one of my desires. This distinction can be brought out by the following example. Suppose that Eric wants to drink pink champagne and in fact drinks pink champagne. The satisfaction preferentialist assigns value to thewholestate of affairs that consists of Eric's preference for pink champagne and his drinking pink champagne, whereas the object preferentialist assigns value only to thepartof the state that consists of his drinking pink champagne. This is an important distinction, but for the purposes of this paper I think it can be safely put aside. For more on this distinction, see Krister Bykvist,Changing Preferences: A Study in Preferentialism(Ph.D. Dissertation, Uppsala University and Wlodek Rabinowicz and Jan Österberg, ‘Value Based on Preferences. On Two Interpretations of Preference Utilitarianism,’Economics and Philosophy12 (1996) 1–27.

3. Parfit, Derek. 1992.Reasons and Persons171Oxford: Clarendon Press.

4. 1998.The Human Good176 Bengt Brülde also points out that Sumner's concept of desire is unusually narrow, in (Ph.D. Dissertation, Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis n.40.

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