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Philosophy Notes Ethics Essays

Well Being Not Es Notes

Updated Well Being Not Es Notes

Ethics Essays

Ethics Essays

Approximately 35 pages

A collection of Cambridge Undergraduate essays, on Ethics, addressing the following topics;

1. Emotive Theories of Ethics.

2. Freedom, Voluntariness, and Responsibility

3. Killing and Letting Die (incl. a discussion of the Doctrine of Double Effect)

4. Relativism

5. Theories of Rights

6. Universalisability

7. Utilitarianism

8. This package also contains a collection of detailed notes, summarising the debate over the philosophical concept of 'Well-being'. It contains contri...

The following is a more accessible plain text extract of the PDF sample above, taken from our Ethics Essays. Due to the challenges of extracting text from PDFs, it will have odd formatting:

What makes a life go best?

I will argue that what makes one’s life go best is a combination of things, ranging from the attainment of knowledge, and engagement in rational activity, to awareness of aesthetic merit, the experience of mutual love, and involvement in pleasurable activity.

What is important, I will claim, is that one is involved in these kinds of things while strongly wanting to be involved in them.

3 broad theories of well-being known as ‘self-interest’ theories;

  1. Hedonism

  2. Desire-satisfaction

  3. Objective-list

HEDONISM

  1. Narrow hedonism - what determines one’s well-being life is the attainment of pain rather than pleasure.

PROBLEM - takes pleasure and pain as completely distinct kinds of experience. WRONG. Loads of different kinds of pain. Nothing intrinsically common. Even less in pains and pleasures.

Reject narrow hedonism

  1. Preference Hedonism. Instead compares pain and pleasure in terms of their common relation to our desires. Pain is experienced unwanted; pleasure is experienced wanted. Parfit; “one of two experiences is more pleasant if it is preferred”.

MORE PLAUSIBLE.

PROBLEM. James Griffin – one can prefer to be in pain and rational, rather than euphoric and dim-witted. (Freud example)

SOLUTION? Perhaps Freud’s life went better just if it went as he’d prefer it to go. Desire-satisfaction?

DESIRE-SATISFACTION

  1. ‘Unrestricted theory’. What’s best is that which best satisfies all desires across one’s life.

PROBLEM. Suppose that I am on my way to be supervised and I notice a bus shelter that has been smashed in. I develop a desire that the bus shelter be repaired at some point. However, I never walk that route ever again, and so, as it happens, never come to find out whether or not that bus shelter was ever repaired. As it happens, it does get repaired. According to the unrestricted theory, my life after the point of the bus shelter’s repair is better than it was beforehand. But this seems implausible.

  1. Success theory. What’s best is that which best satisfies all of our desires about our own lives. For example, suppose I hate being lied to, and you and I are having a conversation. For a preference hedonist it’s best for me to think that what you are telling me is true, regardless of whether or not it in fact is. For success theorist my well-being is reduced if you are lying. What’s bad is that my desire is itself unfulfilled.

However;- apply success theory to desires about one’s whole life – what does it now include? Suppose I desire that all of my desires in life be fulfilled. We’re back to unrestricted theory. However, according to the success theorist this desire isn’t really about my own life at all.

Analogy to the distinction between ‘real change’ and what is called ‘Cambridge Change’. A Cambridge change only requires that the T-values of some statement about the case changes. For instance, punching a wall changes Mel as she now lives in a world where I have broken hand. Similarly, when I want a bus shelter to be repaired, it’s not really a desire about me. This is because if the bus shelter were broken forever it would not actually affect my life. However, success theory does let some similar desires in...

Suppose I try to put on a musical. Just before first show, I die. As it turns out, it’s rubbish, because I was rubbish. By success theory, this does detract from my well-being, as my life has failed in a way in which I had wanted it to succeed.

Returning to preference hedonist, this is not the case, as the fact is not introspectively discernable.

For the success theorist, even death is no barrier.

For the preference hedonist, death is safety, in terms of well-being.

Paraphrasing Parfit to fit my example, we might say that if you asked me, before my death, “even were you to die, would you still want the show to go well”, I would (let’s assume) say “yes”.

BEST SO FAR? Preference hedonism, and success theory.

A Distinction:- When we talk about success theory, are we considering only actual desires or also those which go unactualised?

Suppose I have two options: see Mel or do exam. Suppose I know how much fun each would be, and do exam, without ever regretting it. Hence, it might seem, doing my essay is better. However, maybe if I’d gone to the play I wouldn’t have regretted that either. Hence, the play is better than the essay and yet the essay better than the play. Something needs revising!1

Let’s consider preferences I would have, given certain considerations. Now I can simply work out how good of a time I would have had in each case and, in so doing, coherently claim that some other life would have been better.

DISCTINCITON; summative theories and global theories.

  1. SUMMATIVE. Consider...

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