2013 Carnegie-Uehiro-Oxford Ethics Conference: Happiness and Well-Being

Oxford University•www.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk

Many people and countries are now beginning to evaluate the success of their lives or society not purely in terms of money or gross domestic product. The currency of traditional economics - preference satisfaction - has fallen into question as an ethical value. The global financial crisis is seen by many as a failure of capitalism. Some countries have proposed a Gross Happiness Index to replace GDP as the measure of the productivity of a country. What is of intrinsic value in human lives? How should we measure how good a human being's life is? What is happiness and what constitutes well-being? What can we learn from religion, philosophy, economics and the cognitive sciences about happiness and well-being? Are happiness and well-being relative to culture? What roles do pleasure and happiness play in ethics? Should we aim to maximise happiness and pleasure? How should the views of people with disability be incorporated into an ethics of well-being? Jointly organised by The Uehiro Foundation on Ethics and Education (Tokyo), The Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs (New York) and Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics (University of Oxford) this conference will seek to understand the nature and value of happiness and well-being in practical ethics.

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Episodes

Well-being in a Flux

Standard forms of desire-based theories of well-being claim that what is better for you is what you prefer. But how shall we decide whether one life is better for you than another when your preferences change across these lives? Standard forms of desire-based theories of well-being claim that what is better for you is what you prefer. But how shall we decide whether one life is better for you than another when your preferences change across these lives? Perhaps you will prefer a life as a parent...

Jul 25, 2013•29 min

Well-Being for Autists: Some Conceptual and Methodological Issues

The aim of this paper is to provide some concrete guidelines for understanding and measuring the well-being of individuals affected by autism. I discuss the use of psychometric tests to understand and measure the well-being of autists. There is an astounding lack of both empirical and philosophical research on well-being for individuals with autism. Certainly, the heterogeneity of this population makes it difficult to say something univocal. This, however, is not enough of a reason not to try to...

Jul 08, 2013•35 min

Benefitting Friends and Idealized Theories of Well-Being

In this paper I give an overview of the kind of idealized theory I endorse and describe the conditions under which a person can appropriately discount, ignore or override a friend's own conception of what's good for him or her. Idealized theories of well-being take what is good for a person to depend in some way on that person's ideal self (her ideal values or preferences, for example) rather than her actual self. There are good reasons to favor theories of well-being that include idealization i...

Jul 08, 2013•33 min

Past Desires and Well-being

Some desires are conditional on their persistence and some are not. I aim to show that desire fulfilment theorists should reject the view that fulfilment of some of a person's past desires for the present contribute to her well-being. Some desires are conditional on their persistence and some are not. Call the former 'Pconditional desires' and the latter 'P-unconditional desires.' There are desires that a person had in the past but has already lost. Call these desires 'past desires'. There are p...

Jul 08, 2013•27 min

Well-being and Desire

I address the question of what constitutes an addition to well-being. Perhaps under specifiable conditions what someone desires is pivotal to what should be done, even if fulfilment of the desires does not add to that person's well-being. My paper will start by addressing the question of what constitutes an addition to well-being. Like Joseph Raz and many others, I am persuaded by various examples that the fulfilment of a person's desires, as such, does not constitute an addition to well-being. ...

Jul 08, 2013•31 min

The Certain Intrinsic Desirability of Pleasure

I argue that intrinsically desiring to feel pleasure makes it certain that pleasure is intrinsically desirable for you, which it could not do if there is a non-natural, irreducible reason to desire pleasure for its own sake. In his Utilitarianism J. S. Mill (in)famously argues that 'the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable is that people do actually desire it'. Following G. E. Moore, many have thought that Mill here commits a 'naturalistic fallacy'. I shall rather s...

Jul 08, 2013•25 min

Should one suffer at all?

The standard utilitarian view of happiness seems to be 'pleasure and the absence of pain'. But is the happiest life one in which there are no suffering at all? Or does one's life as a whole go better if there are some sufferings in it? The standard utilitarian view of happiness seems to be 'pleasure and the absence of pain' (J.S. Mill). Whether the good is understood in terms of pleasure or preference satisfaction, a happy life is one in which there are more good and less suffering in it. But is...

Jul 08, 2013•21 min

Plural Goods

Economists have tended to assess choices by their contribution to a single good, often pleasure or preference-satisfaction. I discuss how some values can be relevant to social and political choices, ie education, the free market, etc. Economists have tended to assess choices by their contribution to a single good, often pleasure or preference-satisfaction. I will briefly defend a more pluralistic view of an individual's good, valuing in particular pleasure, knowledge, achievement, and moral virt...

Jul 08, 2013•34 min

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