Abstract
This chapter discusses the philosophical ideals animating eudaimonic psychology, arguing that eudaimonic measures of well-being reflect a reasonably coherent and defensible family of philosophical views centering on the notion of nature-fulfillment. Aristotelian theories are the best-known examples, but “eudaimonistic” views of well-being can take many forms, including the very different approach of John Stuart Mill. One goal of this chapter is to clarify the main theoretical options in this area, concerning the role of virtue in well-being; whether nature-fufillment is a matter of capacity-fulfillment or goal-fulfillment; and whether well-being is grounded entirely in the particulars of the individual’s makeup or in something else, such as species norms. A second goal is to defend eudaimonic measures, which are worth seeking regardless of our philosophical theories of well-being. The final part of the chapter sketches a “core schema for flourishing scales,” outlining the types of measures that will likely be most important to include in eudaimonic instruments, but leaving considerable room for variation. We can usefully think of the core eudaimonic insight in terms of this rough formula: happiness in a meaningful life that is rich in relationships and the free exercise of one’s capacities.
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Notes
- 1.
That is, eudaimonism about well-being. As noted below, this is simply a view of well-being and is distinct from, e.g., ethical eudaimonism, which takes all of ethics to be grounded in eudaimonia. Ancient eudaimonists tended to hold both views, but one could be a eudaimonist about well-being while rejecting the ancients’ effort to ground morality in the individual’s own well-being. Mill is arguably a good example of a welfare eudaimonist, though he was certainly not an ethical eudaimonist.
- 2.
Perhaps the best survey of ancient eudaimonism is (Annas, 1993). Since ‘eudaimonia’ just was the ancient Greek term for well-being, rather than a term for a certain view of well-being, it is slightly odd to talk about “eudaimonistic” or “eudaimonic” theories of well-being, since one might just as well call them eudaimonistic theories of eudaimonia! I use it here to denote theories of well-being that exhibit characteristic features from the ancient tradition.
- 3.
Epicureans indeed went to great lengths to argue for a strong link between well-being and virtue, but this was an (extremely bold and likely false) empirical claim. Today’s Benthamite hedonists can make it as well, if they wish, but it is no part of their philosophical theory about the nature of well-being, as it is for Aristotelians and the like.
- 4.
- 5.
This is not to say that they don’t tacitly rely on substantial views of human nature or even eudaimonistic ideals. The point is just that they can and typically do defend their position without harnessing it to claims about what is essential to, characteristic of…human beings. For instance, you can simply point to the pleasantness of pleasant experience and say, that is what matters; and the reason it matters is simply because of its phenomenal quality. The claim that prudential value is grounded in the quality of experience is completely independent of any views about human nature, since it isn’t a claim about human beings at all. It certainly doesn’t rest on any interesting claims about human nature, the way Aristotelian theories do.
- 6.
The notion of self-fulfillment seems to figure at least tacitly in many if not most modern nature-fulfillment views, for instance those of the existentialists, humanistic psychologists, and Mill. The use of this notion is made explicit in, e.g., (Haybron, 2008a, 2008b; Yelle, 2014). Complicating matters is that many authors use ‘self-fulfillment’ and similar terms loosely, as roughly equivalent to nature-fulfillment, without clearly linking them to the notion of the self. As I use the terms here, it is quite possible to hold a nature-fulfillment theory that, say, bases well-being on species norms without coupling this view in some way to an account of the self, or even thinking that there need be any such coupling. This would not be a self-fulfillment view, as understood here.
- 7.
This paragraph is adapted from “Eudaimonism, Ancient, and Modern” (ms).
- 8.
- 9.
Resourcefulness, for instance, is a virtue to which admiration would typically be a fitting response, other things equal. When put in the service of immoral aims, however, admiration might not be called for.
- 10.
I am partly following Alan Gewirth here, but substituting ‘goal-fulfillment’ for ‘aspiration-fulfillment’, which has an overly narrow meaning (Gewirth, 1998), and further distinguishing perfection from the other two ideals.
- 11.
There’s no consensus on exactly how to characterize the distinction between moral and nonmoral virtues. Roughly, when talking about character assessment (as opposed say to intellectual virtues), moral virtues concern at least our other-regarding obligations of, e.g., beneficence and justice, and arguably relate to how good or bad a person one is. Nonmoral virtues include, e.g. wit, resourcefulness, persistence, fortitude, grit, and concern norms that we don’t ordinarily regard as moral norms (and might indeed be expressed in immoral projects). Aristotelians are keen to emphasize that well-being for them is not simply a matter of moral virtue, but centers also on nonmoral virtues.
- 12.
See especially Martha Nussbaum’s work (Nussbaum, 2000).
- 13.
As noted above regarding hedonism, the question here isn’t whether a theory of human well-being could be truly independent of any view of human nature; perhaps it cannot, and indeed I suspect that hedonists and desire theorists profit from a covert reliance on eudaimonistic ideals. But we are talking about the theories as they are, not as they should be; and as they are, subjectivist accounts are typically not grounded in any appeal to selves or human nature, and so are not eudaimonistic in their structure. They lack the teleological structure of eudaimonism.
- 14.
Recent defenses of value-fulfillment ideals of well-being—though not explicitly employing a eudaimonistic framework—include (Hall & Tiberius, 2015; Raibley, 2010, 2013; Tiberius, 2008, 2014). Benjamin Yelle defends an explicitly eudaimonistic value-fulfillment theory (Yelle, 2014). Accounts of the self centering on values include, e.g., (Doris, 2015; Frankfurt, 1971; Sripada, 2015; Watson, 1975; Wolf, 1993).
- 15.
- 16.
- 17.
My other discussions of life satisfaction cited here explore these issues in much greater depth, but as some readers will likely want to push back on these claims, let me note, first, that some hedonists understand pleasure as something more like a judgment and hence akin to life satisfaction in that respect (Feldman, 2004). A standard complaint about such views is precisely that they miss their target: what they call “pleasure” is about something other than the pleasantness of one’s experience, and is not what hedonists have traditionally cared about. But even these views would have the result that Wittgenstein’s life was hedonically bad. A second objection is that suffering might preclude life satisfaction insofar as one has to feel good to truly be satisfied. The short answer is, that’s a possible view, but it isn’t what current measures, which assess judgments, are tracking; and at any rate it seems poorly motivated: feeling good is one thing, judging that you’ve achieved the things you care about, even if you don’t feel good, is quite another. Life satisfaction loses its distinctive attractions as a metric if we build very much in the way of pleasant feelings into it.
- 18.
See also (Ponocny, Weismayer, Stross, & Dressler, 2015). It may be that life satisfaction reports are heavily driven by affective processes, but that is different from the question of what’s being asked of participants, and what they are doing when answering: they are being asked for a judgment about their life, and that’s what they seem to be giving. Whether the judgment is caused by rational deliberation, induced by mood, or whatever, is a different question.
- 19.
- 20.
I explore this suggestion in (Haybron, n.d.-a). A difficulty with the “Millian” label is that Mill’s better-known discussion of well-being in Utilitarianism distinguishes pleasures by a metric of “quality,” and it is not clear that this view is really subject-dependent. But his discussion of individuality in On Liberty is arguably one of the finest articulations of a subject-dependent ideal of well-being.
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Haybron, D.M. (2016). The Philosophical Basis of Eudaimonic Psychology. In: Vittersø, J. (eds) Handbook of Eudaimonic Well-Being. International Handbooks of Quality-of-Life. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42445-3_2
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