Epistemic Welfare Bads and Other Failures of Reason

Abstract

There is something important missing in our lives if we are thoroughly ignorant or misled about reality—even if intervention or fantastic luck prevents unhappiness and practical failure. But why? I argue that perfectionism about well-being offers the most promising explanation. My version says, roughly, that we flourish when we exercise our self-defining capacities successfully according to their constitutive aims. One of them is Reason, our capacity for normative self-governance. In its practical use, Reason’s formal constitutive aim is competently realizing self-chosen valuable ends that are in harmony with each other. In its theoretical use, Reason formally aims at competently grasping fundamental enough subject matters, or a kind of understanding. Because success by reason’s own standards requires many things to go right, there are many different ways in which we can fall short. Some of them constitute partial success, but others, like incompetent inquiry that fails to yield understanding of its target, are robust failures that amount to epistemic or agential unflourishing, and thus to a form of ill-being.