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“Leading a Life of One's Own: On Well-Being and Narrative Autonomy”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 April 2017
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We all want things. And although we might disagree on just how significant our wants, desires, or preferences are for the matter of how well we fare in life, we would probably all agree on some of them having some significance. So any reasonable theory about the human good should in some way acknowledge this. The theory that most clearly meets this demand is of course preferentialism, but even pluralist theories can do so. However, then they will at the same time bring aboard a classical problem for preferentialism, namely that of discriminating among preferences. Not all preferences would seem to make contributions to our well-being and there should be some set of criteria which at least makes it intelligible why there is such a difference and that perhaps can even be used in order to evaluate hard cases.
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References
1 I have tried to provide some arguments in ‘Good Lives: Parts and Wholes’, American Philosophical Quarterly 38 (04 2001): 221–31Google Scholar, and ‘Leading Lives: On Happiness and Narrative Meaning’, Philosophical Papers 32 (11 2003): 321–43.Google Scholar
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4 The latter is the line taken by Chappell, Timothy in Understanding Human Goods: A Theory of Ethics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998).Google Scholar
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9 Since the meaning of events in my life can be affected by things lying outside my life, my strivings can to a certain extent be made more valuable by posthumous success. Such contributions to how well my life went are however probably not best understood in terms of preference fulfillment and, additionally, are only minor ones (as already Aristotle noted, albeit for quite different reasons). In this case the achievement would still not be a part of my life, but the strivings that are will acquire a different resonance
10 A classic piece in which this idea is formulated is Frankfurt, Harry's ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’ in The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
11 Richard Brandt's rational desire theory is an example of this approach, see A Theory of the Good and the Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).Google Scholar
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14 I am grateful to Mozaffar Qizilbash for stressing the importance of this type of problem to me
15 A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 245–50.Google Scholar
16 For a similar approach, although framed in terms of identities instead, see Fraser, Nancy, ‘From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Postsocialist’ Age’, New Left Review, no. 212 (07/08 1995): 68–93Google Scholar