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Do Fitting Emotions Tell Us Anything About Well-Being?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2019

James Fanciullo Open the ORCID record for James Fanciullo [Opens in a new window]
James Fanciullo*
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Arizona State University
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*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

In a recent article in this journal, Tobias Fuchs has offered a ‘working test’ for well-being. According to this test, if it is fitting to feel compassion for a subject because they have some property, then the subject is badly off because they have that property. Since subjects of deception seem a fitting target for compassion, this test is said to imply that a number of important views, including hedonism, are false. I argue that this line of reasoning is mistaken: seems fitting does not imply is badly off. I suggest that Fuchs's test can tell us little about well-being that we do not already know; and ultimately, tests of the sort he proposes can yield little insight into the nature of well-being.

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Utilitas , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , March 2020 , pp. 118 - 125
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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References

1 For contemporary defences of hedonism, see Crisp, R., Reasons and the Good (Oxford, 2006), ch. 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Feldman, F., Pleasure and the Good Life (Oxford, 2004), ch. 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Here I follow Crisp in formulating hedonism in terms of enjoyment, rather than pleasure, for reasons he notes. I also use ‘unpleasant’ rather than ‘painful’, for parallel reasons. An alternative experiential theory, ‘experientialism’, has also recently been defended by Kraut, Richard, The Quality of Life: Aristotle Revised (Oxford, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 See e.g. Plato, Philebus (Indianapolis, 1993); Moore, G. E., Principia Ethica (Cambridge, 1903), ch. 3Google Scholar; Ross, W. D., The Right and the Good (Oxford, 1930), ch. 5Google Scholar.

3 Most recently, see e.g. Fuchs, T., ‘A Working Test for Well-Being’, Utilitas 30 (2018), pp. 129–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lin, E., ‘Pluralism about Well-Being’, Philosophical Perspectives 28 (2014), pp. 127–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lin, E., ‘How to Use the Experience Machine’, Utilitas 28 (2016), pp. 314–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stevenson, C., ‘Experience Machines, Conflicting Intuitions and the Bipartite Characterization of Well-being’, Utilitas 30 (2018), pp. 383–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar. These arguments are of course inspired by Nozick, R., Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York, 1974), pp. 42–5Google Scholar. For ‘just a sample’ of people who endorse Nozick's discussion as a refutation of hedonism – a sample listing twenty-eight examples – see Weijers, D., ‘Nozick's Experience Machine Is Dead, Long Live the Experience Machine!’, Philosophical Psychology 27 (2014), pp. 513–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 530.

4 Fuchs, ‘Working Test’, p. 139.

5 Nonetheless, some have appealed to experimental data in an attempt to show that our intuitions of this sort – and specifically those relating to Nozick's experience machine – tell us little about the truth or falsity of hedonism. See e.g. De Brigard, F., ‘If You Like It, Does It Matter If It's Real?’, Philosophical Psychology 23 (2010), pp. 43–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Weijers, ‘Nozick's Experience Machine’.

6 See Deonna, J. A. and Teroni, F., The Emotions: A Philosophical Introduction (New York, 2012), p. 41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fuchs, ‘Working Test’, p. 135.

7 See D'Arms, J. and Jacobson, D., ‘The Moralistic Fallacy: On the “Appropriateness” of the Emotions’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61 (2000), pp. 65–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Deonna and Teroni, Emotions.

8 Fuchs, ‘Working Test’, p. 137.

9 Fuchs, ‘Working Test’, p. 137.

10 Fuchs, ‘Working Test’, p. 139.

11 It's worth mentioning, however briefly, that I think the most plausible version of this explanation will appeal to a proposed gap between the basic constituents of our well-being, on the one hand, and our intuitions about changes in well-being, on the other. Such a gap would make room for claiming that while well-being consists in (e.g.) enjoyable experience, our intuitions about changes in well-being track present and future such experience. In that case, the fact that a subject like Ingrid seems worse off may not entail that their well-being has diminished – at least, not yet.

12 Many thanks to Richard Kraut, Doug Portmore and two anonymous reviewers for extremely helpful comments and discussions.