"The Folk Theory of Well-Being" 

forthcoming in Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, Volume 5 

John Bronsteen

Loyola University Chicago School of Law 

Brian Leiter

University of Chicago

Jonathan S. Masur

University of Chicago - Law School

Kevin Tobia

Georgetown University Law Center; Georgetown University - Department of Philosophy

Abstract

What constitutes a “good” life—not necessarily a morally good life, but a life that is good for the person who lived it? In response to this question of “well-being," philosophers have offered three significant answers: A good life is one in which a person can satisfy their desires (“Desire-Satisfaction” or “Preferentism”), one that includes certain good features (“Objectivism”), or one in which pleasurable states dominate or outweigh painful ones (“Hedonism”). To adjudicate among these competing theories, moral philosophers traditionally gather data from thought experiments and intuition. In this chapter, we supplement that traditional approach with a pair of experimental studies that examine whether the three theories reflect laypeople’s intuitions about well-being. The empirical studies yield two primary findings. First, they provide evidence for lay "well-being pluralism": laypeople treat desire satisfaction, positive objective conditions, and happiness as all constitutive of well-being. Second, the studies provide evidence of "hedonic dominance": laypeople evaluate an individual’s happiness as more important to an individual’s overall well-being than desire satisfaction or objective conditions.

Introduction... 

We thus set out here to make the first test of whether laypeople view well-being the way that many scholars in economics and philosophy seem to have assumed they do....

III. Experimental Studies...

B. Study 2...  

Jenny teaches ballet in a small studio in a small town. She usually spends her weekends going bowling with her friends.

Jenny is happy. She really enjoys teaching her ballet students, and she also has a lot of fun going bowling with her friends. She feels good when she wakes up in the morning and maintains that happy mood throughout the day until she goes to sleep at night. She often smiles and rarely frowns. She experiences positive emotions like joy and contentment most of the time; and she only rarely experiences negative emotions like sadness, anger, and irritability.

But Jenny doesn’t have what she wants. She always wanted to be a famous ballerina who lives in Paris and spends her weekends going to exclusive parties with other celebrities. That is still the life she would choose if she could choose anything.

Jenny is a famous ballerina who lives in Paris. She usually spends her weekends going to exclusive parties with other celebrities.

Jenny isn’t happy. She feels a lot of pressure to do her job well, and she doesn’t actually enjoy the work. She also feels pressure to impress her celebrity acquaintances so that she keeps getting invited to their parties. This prevents her from really ever enjoying her professional or her personal life. She feels bad when she wakes up in the morning and maintains that unhappy mood throughout the day until she goes to sleep at night. She rarely smiles and often frowns. She experiences negative emotions like sadness, anger, and irritability most of the time; and she only rarely experiences positive emotions like joy and contentment.

Incapable of reading even dime-store novels, let alone "great works of art", the recorded history of the opinions and beliefs of "laypeople" and "folk". But why would they?—since art is about aesthetics and philosophy is about truth. Knobe is credited by "scholars in economics and philosophy" with discovering what the folk and the vast majority of the educated elite would call a truism. 

"My students were all obsessed with sex. Not the idea of sex, or the meaning of sex, but sex!"

"I find this reduction of sexual orientation to genitalia – what’s more, genitalia from birth – puzzling."

"William Blake, I suggest, both embodies that antithesis and proclaims the imperfection of Bentham’s understanding of happiness."  J.H. Burns, first General Editor of the Collected Works of Bentham. 

The Smart and the Folk, and The President and Other Intellectuals, and The Triumph of the Fact 

Knobe and Calllard, autism and sociopathy. The Glimmer Twins were right.

And this goes back to the questions at the beginning of the previous post.

Pedantry is anti-political. Elite liberal opposition to politics ceded politics to the right, and that's why we're where we are.