The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Well-Being

Guy Fletcher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138574083
• eBook ISBN: 9781317402640
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The concept of well-being is one of the oldest and most important topics in philosophy and ethics, going back to ancient Greek philosophy. Following the boom in happiness studies in the last few years it has moved to centre stage, grabbing media headlines and the attention of scientists, psychologists and economists. Yet little is actually known about well-being and it is an idea that is often poorly articulated.

The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Well-Being provides a comprehensive, outstanding guide and reference source to the key topics and debates in this exciting subject.

Comprising over 40 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into six parts:

• well-being in the history of philosophy
• current theories of well-being, including hedonism and perfectionism
• examples of well-being and its opposites, including friendship and virtue and pain and death
• theoretical issues, such as well-being and value, harm, identity and well-being and children
• well-being in moral and political philosophy
• well-being and related subjects, including law, economics and medicine.

Essential reading for students and researchers in ethics and political philosophy, it is also an invaluable resource for those in related disciplines such as psychology, politics and sociology.

PART I

Well-being in the history of moral philosophy

1

PLATO ON WELL-BEING

Eric Brown

Plato’s uses of well-being

To speak of well-being, as they frequently do, the characters in Plato’s dialogues use several expressions interchangeably, including the infinitive phrases “to live well” (eu zēn), “to be successful” (eudaimonein), and “to do well” (eu prattein), as well as the related abstract nouns “success” and “doing well” (eudaimonia, eupragia). The concept invoked by these expressions plays two central roles in their discussions, as some characters propose that well-being is, or at least should be, the ultimate goal for both individual human action and political decision making.

The second, political role for well-being prompts disagreement. Socrates (in the Gorgias and Republic, especially), the Eleatic stranger (in the Statesman), and the Athenian (in the Laws) assert that political action—law making, judging, educating, war making, and the rest—should promote the well-being of the political community’s citizens. But other characters, including Callicles (in the Gorgias) and Thrasymachus (in the Republic) maintain that politics should serve the well-being of politicians. The ensuing debates in large part concern competing conceptions of well-being. Socrates and his allies emphasize cooperative goods as opposed to the competitive trophies favored by Callicles, Thrasymachus, and their kind. Team Socrates suggests that if politicians would take the correct view of well-being, they would not see a deep conflict between their own and that of the citizens. Team Callicles and Thrasymachus suggests that if politicians took the Socratic view of well-being they would display weakness and forego some of life’s greatest advantages.

The first, ethical role for well-being, by contrast, prompts no controversy. Plato’s characters agree that everyone wants his or her life to go well and that, on reflection, at least, all our other goals are subordinate to this (Euthd. 278e, Symp. 204e–205a). So, Socrates regularly assumes that one should act for the sake of one’s own well-being, and this “eudaimonist axiom” is readily accepted, even by those interlocutors such as Callicles and Thrasymachus who disagree sharply with Socrates about how we should live.

In contrast to Plato’s characters, modern readers often take the ethical role to be more problematic than the political one. Modern political liberalism wants states to provide the conditions for the individual pursuit of well-being more than well-being itself, but many modern moral philosophers reject the eudaimonist axiom still more thoroughly. They read Socratic ethics as an objectionable egoism, incompatible with the quite reasonable thought that other beings’ ends should matter to us. But these critics are insufficiently attuned to the varieties of well-being in Plato’s dialogues. Unlike many of his interlocutors, and unlike his modern critics, Socrates clings to the platitudinous identification of well-being and doing well, and he insists that doing well is the same as acting virtuously (Charm. 171e–172a, Cr. 48b, Euthd. 278e–282d, Gorg. 507c, Rep. 353e–354a). But if well-being is simply virtuous activity, then acting for the sake of one’s own well-being is simply acting so as to act virtuously, which is not objectionably egoistic at all.

This is the Socratic view of well-being that Plato favors, and the dialogues advance this view in part by rejecting several other views, sometimes because they conflict with ordinary thoughts about what makes a human life go well, sometimes because they lead to civil strife as political ends, and often because they cannot play the role that the eudaimonist axiom sets for them, to be the ultimate end that explains and justifies human action.

Naïve conceptions

In the Euthydemus, after they agree that everyone obviously wants to do well (eu prattein), Socrates and Cleinias take it to be even more obvious that we do well by possessing many things that are good for us (278e–279a). They then list the goods that apparently cause our lives to go well: material goods (riches), goods of the body (health, good looks, bodily needs), social goods (noble birth, power, honor), goods of character (temperance, justice, bravery), and goods of intellect (wisdom) (279a–c).

Socrates and Cleinias do not explicitly say what well-being is. They say only what role it plays for us—everyone wants to get it—and what causes it—possessing the things that are good for us. One might produce a sophisticated account of what well-being is, to explain how the things that are good for us cause our well-being. But Socrates and Cleinias do not. Still, their naïve account can suggest that well-being is simply a state caused by, and perhaps constituted by, the possession of things that are good for us. So understood, Socrates and Cleinias offer something like an “objective list” conception of well-being.¹ But their particular list leaves important questions unanswered. Is it really comprehensive? Where are pleasure and friendship? Is each of the listed goods necessary for well-being? And do they all contribute equally to well-being? Could, say, sufficiently massive wealth and power compensate for a deficit of justice? Perhaps, then, it is better to think of this Euthydemus passage as an introduction to a family of views of well-being, a family whose members differ on which goods belong on the list, how the listed goods are ranked, and so on.

Other Platonic characters also appeal to some member of this family, and, like Socrates and Cleinias in the Euthydemus, they insist that they are appealing to an ordinary understanding of well-being. In the Gorgias, Polus insists that even a child would know that someone can be unjust and successful (eudaimōn) by amassing great wealth and power (470c–471d). Thrasymachus makes the same claim in the Republic: everyone would agree that the complete tyrant, whose injustice leads to complete power and great resources, enjoys a successful life (344a–c). When Glaucon and Adeimantus worry that it might be better to be unjust than just, they are relying on what they take to be common-sense thoughts about the importance of competitive goods to well-being (364a), and when Adeimantus objects that the guardians of Socrates’ ideal city would not enjoy good lives, he takes it for granted that wealth is necessary for living well (419a–420a). All these characters assume that wealth and power are necessary for well-being, and they all claim that this assumption is widespread.

But Socrates clearly rejects the assumption. He calls the conception of eudaimonia that drives Adeimantus’ objection to the guardians’ situation “foolish and adolescent” (466b). In fact, Socrates objects not merely to conceptions of well-being according to which wealth and power are necessary. He offers reasons to doubt a broad range of “objective list” views of well-being.

He advances one reason in the Euthydemus. After Socrates and Cleinias complete their list of the goods that are supposed to make life go well, Socrates argues first that the possession of a good would not make one’s life go well unless that good benefited one, and that a good would not benefit one unless it were used (280b–e). He then argues that using a good would not benefit one unless it were used rightly, and that using a good rightly requires using it wisely (280e–281b). A large part of Socrates’ reasoning here is immediately accessible to Cleinias. If we have advantages such as wealth, power, or honor, we have a greater capacity to act than if we lack these things, and it is better for us to have a greater capacity to act only if we act wisely. Wielding great power foolishly does us no good.

But Socrates pushes this reasoning beyond common sense. Because the things ordinarily thought to be good for us seem to depend in large measure on luck, the proponent of the initial “objective list” view can sum up his view by saying that good fortune makes our lives go well. Socrates insists, instead, that wisdom plays the role of good fortune (279d), that it makes our lives go well (281b). His point seems to be that the causal power to benefit, to make a life go well, cannot belong to all the initially listed goods, because most of them sometimes benefit us and sometimes harm us, depending on whether they are used wisely or foolishly (281d–e). On his view, only wisdom possesses that causal power, because only it has the power to cause wise, beneficial use, without ever causing foolish, harmful use.²

Socrates might have insisted that wisdom no more possesses the power to effect well-being than wealth does, because one needs both wisdom to guide the use and another set of goods to be wisely used. But he does not say this. He says that only wisdom causes well-being (281b), and that only wisdom is good for us (281e, 292b). This outstrips common sense, but it is not unintelligible. Socrates might distinguish between necessary conditions and causes (cf. Phdo 99a–b) and identify wealth and the other initially listed assets as mere necessary conditions of wisdom causing well-being. Just as the cobbler makes a shoe but could not do so without leather, so wisdom makes well-being but could not do so without certain advantages being present. This leaves questions about what one needs, beyond wisdom, to live well, but in the Euthydemus, Socrates is content to leave such questions unanswered, so long as he has convinced Cleinias that only wisdom causes well-being.³

So understood, Socrates’ argument turns on some curious and contentious thoughts about causation, but his central point can be expressed in other terms. Of the goods that the “objective list” conception takes to constitute well-being, most are only conditionally good—beneficial in some circumstances (when wisely used) but not in others (when foolishly used)—whereas wisdom is unconditionally good (it never uses itself foolishly). Now, nothing in the very idea of well-being requires that it or its constituents be unconditionally good. But the idea of a goal for the sake of which one should do everything one does is different. This is the idea of an ultimate end that could fully explain and justify action, and a merely conditional good is not up to that task. When one acts with a conditional good as one’s end, we can always ask, “What makes that a good end to pursue here and now?” This open question renders the justification of the action incomplete.

Socrates does not fully develop this line of thought in the Euthydemus, but it returns elsewhere, along with an additional set of reasons to doubt the “objective list” family of conceptions of well-being. These fuller objections are launched not directly against the naïve suggestion that Socrates and Cleinias introduce in the Euthydemus, but against some more sophisticated theories about what well-being is.

The Protagorean conception

One sophisticated way to develop the ordinary thought that a life goes well by the possession of good things vindicates every member of that family of views (and then some). Protagoras says that a human being is the measure of the things that are and are not, and Plato’s Theaetetus construes this as the thought, for instance, that if the wind appears cold to Peter and warm to Paul, then the wind is cold for Peter and it is warm for Paul (151d–160e). (Actually, Socrates seems to imply that Protagoras is committed to thinking that if the wind appears cold to Peter, then the wind-for-Peter is-for-Peter cold-for-Peter,⁴ but I will proceed with a slightly simplified picture in view.)

In the Theaetetus, Socrates addresses more than one Protagoreanism. He sometimes worries about a perfectly general version of the “measure doctrine,” so that whatever kind of appearance we are talking about, if X appears F to A, then X is F for A. On this view, for instance, if the measure doctrine appears false to Socrates, then the measure doctrine is false for Socrates. Socrates sometimes worries about a narrow Protagoreanism that applies not to all appearances but only to sense perceptions. This would exclude the measure doctrine’s appearing false, but include the wind’s appearing chilly. Last, Socrates acknowledges still other ways of restricting Protagoreanism, such as applying it only to certain evaluative appeara...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• PART I Well-being in the history of moral philosophy
• PART II Theories of well-being
• PART III Particular goods and bads
• PART IV Theoretical issues
• PART VI Well-being and other disciplines
• Ind44ex