The Good Life: Unifying the Philosophy and Psychology of Well-Being

Abstract

Michael Bishop believes that today's philosophical debate over well-being is at a stalemate: philosophers agree that a theory of well-being is plausible to the extent it accords with philosophers’ pre-theoretical intuitions, but philosophers have diverse and conflicting intuitions that prevent consensus (pp. 29 and 30, 2–4). Positive psychology—the branch of psychology that studies welfare—is also in trouble: positive psychologists can't articulate what their discipline is about beyond giving a hodgepodge list of items without overall unity (pp. 4 and 5). The Good Life offers a path forward for both disciplines: philosophers need more than intuition; they need science. And positive psychologists need the clarity of a theory of well-being to unify their study. Let's discuss an example to see how this unification is supposed to work. Hedonism as a theory of welfare maintains that you’re well off to the extent you have pleasure. Hedonism has much going for it; who doubts that one is better off with more pleasure? But Bishop has us think of Robert Nozick's famous experience machine (pp. 113–7). Imagine there are two people, Anthony and Richard, who share the same hedonic experiences. The only relevant difference between them is that Richard is hooked up to an experience machine, making him believe that whatever maximizes his long-term pleasure obtains, while Anthony isn't hooked up; Anthony's pleasure is based on reality, Richard's off the machine. Bishop is correct: ‘As long as Richard and Anthony are having exactly the same experience and exactly the same mental states, hedonism implies that they have exactly the same levels of well-being’ (p. 114). Many philosophers, however, judge Anthony better off than Richard. Yet some philosophers don't share this intuition, leaving us at a stalemate.