'What is Wellbeing, Anyway?' An Epistemological View of Wellbeing from COGITO's Christopher Willard-Kyle

I am a part of a research team—COGITO—at the University of Glasgow partnering with Therme to think about the concept of wellbeing. But why philosophers? What do philosophers talk about when they talk about wellbeing?

Here’s a slogan some philosophers like: You are well off in the way that matters for wellbeing when your life is going well for you. Not every way your life can go well is a way it can go well for you. Imagine that I am a moral saint who spends all my time and energy helping impoverished children. I rarely spend any time or resources on myself because I’m so devoted to my moral cause. There’s a sense in which I’m living a very good life. Certainly, I’m living a very ethical life. But is this enough to make my life one that is good for me? Not obviously. Philosophers who study wellbeing want to know what makes a life good—not just good ethically or good as a story—but what makes a life good for the person living it. (For more, see Guy Fletcher’s wonderfully accessible introduction here). 

Philosophers disagree about the right answer to this question. (It’s ok—we like disagreeing with each other!) But there are three main views: Hedonism, Desire-Satisfaction Theories, and Objective List Theories. 

Hedonism is one of the oldest theories of wellbeing. What is good for us? Pleasure! What is bad for us? Pain! End of story! So, what’s the hedonist recommendation for living a good life? That we should pursue good food, good wine, and avoid breaking any bones? Perhaps so! But historically, hedonists have generally thought that a life of moderation will tend to lead to the best balance of pleasure against pain overall. 

Others think hedonism is too narrowly focused on pleasure ‘We care,’ Nozick (1989: 104) says, ‘about things in addition to how our lives feel to us from the inside’. That has led some philosophers to prefer desire-satisfaction theories. What makes life go well for you? When your desires are satisfied. What makes life go badly for you? When your desires are frustrated. In slogan form: living a good life is getting what you want. 

One advantage of desire-satisfaction theories is that they are pluralistic. It’s not clear that a good life for me looks like a good life for you. We’re different people with different values after all. Desire-satisfaction views nicely accommodate this pluralist thought. What’s good for me and what’s good for you are different because our desires are different.

The hardest problem for desire-satisfaction theories is bad desires. Sometimes, we want things that, intuitively, aren’t good for us. Sometimes this manifests as addiction. Other times, we just want bad stuff. Maybe we want to hurt someone else (because we’re angry) or to feel pain ourselves (because we think we deserve it). 

And so a third view is Aristotelianism or an objective list view. What’s distinctive about Aristotelianism is that what’s good for you is an objective matter. The things that are good for us might tend to lead to a pleasurable life or to satisfy our best desires, but being pleasurable or desired isn’t what makes things good for us.

So what goes on the objective list of things that are good for you? Not everyone who thinks of themselves as an Aristotelian agrees, but here are some common examples:

1. Friendships

2. Knowledge

3. Health (physical and emotional)

4. Being virtuous

5. Significant achievements

Who is living a good life? Look for the people who have good friends, are knowledgeable, are in good health, and are ethically virtuous. They are the people living good lives.

As often happens in philosophy, none of these theories has emerged as the clear winner. Even so, we can make progress by attending to the distinctions upon which the debates turn and looking for overlapping insights. We at Cogito are excited to continue thinking together with Therme about how we can blend insights from the philosophy of wellbeing, environmental psychology, and architecture to inform the way Therme can have a positive and practicable impact on the wellbeing of its guests and the populations of the cities it inhabits. The clearer our notion of what wellbeing is, the more effective our strategies to promote it can be.