Joseph Van Weelden

Subjectivism about well-being contends that welfare goods are determined by agents’ psychological pro-attitudes. Its principal attraction is that it is well-equipped to abide by the resonance constraint, the highly intuitive stipulation that a welfare good must not alienate the agent and thus must resonate with them. Cognitive subjectivists are committed to the Judgment Sufficiency Thesis (JST): having the cognitive attitude of belief/judgment that an object is non-instrumentally good for you suffices to make the object a non-instrumental welfare good. I argue that given the truth of the resonance constraint, this sufficiency thesis is false and that the concept of resonance relevant to well-being is not guaranteed to be established by cognitive attitudes alone. My argument rests on cases in which agents believe something is good for them while at the same time being alienated by it. Since the subjectivist program considers alien welfare goods impossible, subjectivists must reject the JST. I look at plausible idealization conditions a subjectivist might employ and I show that they are unable to rescue the JST. I also examine the idea of a distinctly cognitive species of resonance recently discussed in the well-being literature and conclude that it too is unable to help the subjectivist maintain the JST.

According to internalism about prudential value, the token states of affairs that are basically good for you must be suitably connected, under the proper conditions, to your positive attitudes. It is commonly thought that any theory of welfare that implies internalism is guaranteed to respect the alienation constraint, the doctrine that you cannot be alienated from that which is basically good for you. In this paper, I show that extant formulations of internalism do not have this desirable feature. The central defect of traditional formulations is that they do not respect an important but overlooked truth about alienation: namely, that even if a state of affairs is suitably connected to your positive attitudes, your negative attitudes can nonetheless render you alienated from it. By taking into account the relevance of the negative attitudes, I propose the new internalism—the view that x is basically good for you only if you have a net positive attitude towards it—as a way to advance our thinking about what is required to avoid alienating theories of welfare.

In this paper, I argue for Fit, a prudential version of the claim that attitudes must fit their objects, the claim that there is an extra benefit when one's reactions fit their objects. I argue that Fit has surprising and powerful consequences for theories of well-being. Classic versions of the objective list theory, hedonism, desire views, and loving-the-good theories do not accommodate Fit. Suitable modifications change some of the views substantially. Modified views give reactions a robust role as sources of well-being, and they accept that objects call for some attitudes but not others. I argue that objective list theories and loving-the-good theories require the most minimal changes to accommodate Fit, so we have a pro tanto reason to favor these views over alternatives.

According to subjectivism about ill-being, the token states of affairs that are basically bad for you must be suitably connected, under the proper conditions, to your negative attitudes. This article explores the prospects for this family of theories and addresses some of its challenges. This article (i) shows that subjectivism about ill-being can be derived from a more general doctrine that requires a negatively valenced relationship between any welfare subject and the token states that are of basic harm to that subject and (ii) responds to some objections, including the objection that subjectivists about ill-being cannot plausibly explain the badness of pain.

Judgment subjectivism is the view that x is good for S if and only if, because, and to the extent that S believes, under the proper conditions, that x is good for S. In this paper, I offer three related arguments against the theory. The arguments are about what judgment subjectivism implies about the well-being of welfare nihilists, people who believe there are no welfare properties, or at least that none are instantiated. I maintain that welfare nihilists can be benefited and harmed. Judgment subjectivism is implausible because it implies otherwise.