The Future of Eudaimonic Well-Being: Subjectivism, Objectivism and the Lump Under the Carpet

Abstract

Persistent and heated terminological disputes (such as the one over the concept of eudaimonia) often hide something more fundamental and, when this is the case, agreeing on terms just moves the battle somewhere else: the lump under the carpet is pushed to a different quadrant, but it doesn’t go away. I want to explore one possible interpretation of the real lump under the carpet, namely, a very deep disagreement about the nature of a good human life. This disagreement is between those who think that what justifies our taking something to be good is our subjective attitude toward it (liking it, wanting it and so forth) and those who think that what justifies our taking something to be good is some good-making feature of the thing that is independent of how we feel about it. I consider some obstacles to understanding this disagreement and explore briefly why it matters.