Podcast Symposium: Sam Wren-Lewis - Towards a Normative Framework for the Study of Subjective Well-Being

I enjoyed reading and thinking about this paper and it raises a number of interesting questions. I’ll start off with some small comments and then move on to more general points about Sam’s views and his discussion.

(1) Clarification: Is a normative framework for the study of subjective well-being a view of the relationship between subjective well-being (SWB) and well-being generally (WB)? I think that this is what Sam suggests but I wasn’t completely sure at first.

(2) On page 1, Sam distinguishes three different ways of measuring SWB. The third of these he characterises thus:

“positive functioning i.e. a subject’s sense of autonomy, mastery, purpose, connectedness to people, etc.”

He characterises this as partly objective because “it consists of an individual’s attitudes towards certain aspects of his or her life that are considered by researchers to be important in terms of people’s well-being (such as one’s relationships, competence, autonomy etc).”

My main question is how exactly this kind of view is to be interpreted in the case of people who have false beliefs. The person who is highly non-autonomous but mistakenly believes themselves to be autonomous presumably reports having a strong “sense of autonomy”. What would the positive functioning view say in this case? And, in comparison, what of the person who is autonomous, connected to people, full of purpose, but who doesn’t have a strong sense of having these things (if this is possible)?

(3) Sam claims (page 2) that:

“For some, SWB research is considered to be of upmost importance…For others, however, SWB research is considered to be more trivial, and for that reason can be fairly readily dismissed. Note that the disagreement here is not between those who think that SWB findings are valid and those that do not. Rather, the issue here is the extent to which supposedly valid SWB findings are normatively relevant to well-being and thereby public policy. This concerns people’s views about the relationship between SWB and well-being simpliciter. On the one hand, proponents of (valid) SWB findings claim that such findings are of considerable relevance to well-being; on the other hand, opponents of (valid) SWB findings claim that such findings are of relatively little relevance to well-being.”

I thought that this might be too quick. Couldn’t someone agree that SWB is highly important to WB but nonetheless think that findings from SWB should have little or no effect on public policy? Why might they think that? Well, one rationale could be that governments should only attend to differences between citizens with respect to some aspects of well-being but not others. This could be on the grounds of privacy (that investigating SWB would be too intrusive) for example.

(4) In Sam’s nice discussion of views that posit a necessary connection between SWB and Well-Being generally he distinguishes the views thus:

“The first broad kind of accounts consist in the view that certain mental states are in themselves intrinsically prudentially valuable, and thereby either wholly or partially constitutive of well- being. The second broad kind of accounts consist in the view that certain appropriate mental states (i.e., certain mental states caused by the attainment of objective goods) are intrinsically prudentially valuable, and thereby either wholly or partially constitutive of well-being.”

I can see two different ways of interpreting the second kind of view. I’ll use the following convention of enclosing the thing that contributes to Well-Being in < >.

Sam’s first class of views we can thus represent:

1. <Mental State>

The second class of views could be interpreted as either:

2a. <Mental State> But only if suitably related to Objective Goods
2b. <Mental State suitably related to Objective Goods>

Sam might be treating the difference between 2a and 2b as irrelevant for his purposes but the difference between them might have important consequences elsewhere. It bears on how we interpret Sam’s use of “intrinsically” in talking about something’s being “intrinsically prudentially valuable”. Sam might be merely referring to the relation of being non-instrumentally prudentially valuable, or he might be referring to a stronger view, namely that prudential value supervenes only on the intrinsic properties of its bearers (for discussion of these issues see e.g. Dale Dorsey’s “Intrinsic Value and the Supervenience Principle”, Phil Studies 2010).

(5) Sam introduces the view that pleasure always contributes to WB. He thinks that problems for such a view come from the fact if it were committed to saying that all pleasures contribute to WB, regardless of their source (including whether they are false, malicious or base). Thus Sam thinks that we cannot use this claim about the connection between SWB and WB - that pleasure, an aspect of SWB, always contributes to WB - because there is too much disagreement.

I wonder whether Sam is too pessimistic here. For one thing it’s not obvious that the view that not all pleasures are prudentially valuable is widespread so it’s not clear that this is an entrenched widespread disagreement. Furthermore, remember that Sam describes his aim as that of providing a normative framework that “most people can agree on” (p.1). This presents (at least) three possibilities that Sam overlooks:

(i) That pleasure does in fact always contribute to WB, regardless of its source
(ii) That even if pleasure doesn’t always contribute to WB regardless of its source there might be widespread agreement about broad classes of pleasures and we could use this as a normative framework for interpreting findings from SWB.
(iii) That even if pleasure doesn’t always contribute to well-being regardless of its source, this might be sufficiently close to the truth (and sufficiently widely held) that we could use this as a normative framework for interpreting findings from SWB.

(6) I wondered what Sam would think of the following suggestion (one that I’m at least initially attracted to so I’d be glad to hear if it’s wrong-headed): perhaps there are these problems with interpreting SWB. But what about negative subjective well-being (Subjective Ill-Being)? It seems much less plausible to think that pains based on false beliefs are any less prudentially disvaluable. And the same seems initially plausible for all of the classes where in the case of pleasure there is room for doubt about prudential value (base and malicious cases). Could we then focus on Subjective Ill-Being as an area where there is likely to be more agreement? At first glance it seems that we have generally more agreement about the bad things in life than the good things so perhaps we should focus there.

(7) Sam’s positive proposal for developing a framework takes the form of three contingent relationships. First, that people tend to care about SWB. Second, that positive SWB tends to include positive valuations of one’s life (and its prudential value). Third, that SWB has motivational and cognitive benefits.

I wanted first of all to check that I’ve glossed these accurately. But I also thought it might also be worth expanding upon the third of them. For there seems to be a pleasing nexus between a number of different theories of well-being that arises here thus:

Positive well-being is strongly correlated with people’s ability and motivation to pursue goals. By pursuing their goals people will tend to satisfy their desires. People’s desires tend to include the satisfaction of their basic needs. By acting people will also tend to develop talents and abilities and form relationships.

All of these have “tend to” qualifiers but they do suggest that there is a way to secure broad agreement between different theories of well-being about why SWB is important.

(8) Finally, Sam says:

“With this more sophisticated level of understanding in place, we can begin to interpret SWB findings, such as the Easterlin Pradox, in a clear and uncontroversial manner. Only with such a normative framework in hand, can SWB findings begin to justifiably receive the interest and importance that they deserve.”

I’d like to hear more about how the framework will assist here as it wasn’t clear (to me at least) why the interpretation of the Easterlin paradox required a normative framework for SWB.

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Many thanks to the BPPA for inviting me to be a commentator on Sam’s paper, which I’ve greatly enjoyed thinking about, and look forward to discussing further.

Guy Fletcher, University of Edinburgh